Good morning.

Welcome back. Welcome back to the campus you love, the college you love, and the college you have done so much for.

Last year we tried something new. Rather than a traditional “presidential speech” at Convocation we wanted to see what would happen if, instead, we shared the life of the College during the year. It seemed to go rather well, so here goes “the year in pictures.”

Last Saturday morning, we conferred Bowdoin degrees on the Class of 2017.

It was a fantastic day—as Commencement always is—filled with smiles, hugs, a real sense of community, and of course, an immense sense of pride and accomplishment. Our student speakers were magnificent, we awarded honorary degrees to four highly accomplished and genuinely terrific people, and the weather wasn’t bad either!

Commencement was the culmination of another year that saw impressive achievements in our classrooms and laboratories; exciting competition in athletics; vibrant artistic contributions; and the enduring spirit of friendship and goodwill that defines this community.

Bowdoin students were once again honored with major academic prizes, including a prestigious Marshall Scholarship that funds graduate school in the UK for only forty students nationally, and a $30,000 Watson Fellowship. And there were lots of others.

As many of you know, Bowdoin is consistently ranked among the country’s top producers of Fulbright scholars, but this year topped all others. A total of twenty Fulbrights were awarded—eighteen to Bowdoin seniors and two to recent graduates. And this year, Bowdoin was also named among the Peace Corps’s “top volunteer-producing colleges.”

Our students also traveled far and wide this year, with a dozen students presenting their research at the American Chemical Society national meeting in San Francisco, and three students presenting their independent study research at the Hawaii Ocean Conference in Honolulu. And just this week, twenty Bowdoin students and four members of the faculty left on a ten-day trip to Iceland where they will be doing field work in earth and oceanographic studies in what one faculty member calls “one of the premier locations in the world for studying earth system science.”

This past academic year, 287 Bowdoin students studied off-campus, both internationally and domestically in over 45 countries, comprising 56 percent of the junior class. They immersed themselves in languages, studied economics, architecture and design, learned more about international relations and diplomacy, and developed skills in wildlife management and public health, among other pursuits.

Our students also trekked to Boston and to San Francisco and Silicon Valley to explore career opportunities and to learn how their liberal arts education prepares them well for work as entrepreneurs and in the tech world—resoundingly defying the stereotype of the liberal arts. It has been a robust year for hiring, with more jobs secured throughout the year than we’ve seen in a decade, and Bowdoin alumni are the foundation of recruiting for internships and jobs for our graduating seniors.

The class of 2017 is pursuing a broad range of career interests in a variety of sectors including nonprofit, banking, tech and startups, medicine, and the arts. They are headed to major American companies and organizations including Proctor & Gamble, Mass General Hospital, Intel, the Peace Corps, Sotheby’s, Raytheon, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Prudential, Yelp, the Marine Corps, Teach for America, Toyota, City Year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, The New York Times, Deloitte, the Harlem Academy, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the list goes on and on, with many new companies whose names make no sense to me.

Many of these students will eventually pursue graduate and professional school—and some are doing that right away in the fields of economics, forestry, law, mathematics, medicine, and physics.

At the other end of the pipeline, this year we saw the largest applicant pool in the College’s history, with 7,251 prospective students hoping to fill the 500 spots reserved for the Class of 2021. It is also the most diverse group to date, with students of color making up 34 percent of the incoming class and first-generation college students making up nearly 17 percent. These students come from 406 high schools in 42 states and the District of Columbia, and from 29 countries, and 52 percent of them will receive need-based financial aid from the College.

As you well know, this success starts with our faculty. Attracting and supporting world-class scholars and artists to teach and mentor our students. The Bowdoin faculty lead our students—as they always have—through four years of rigorous inquiry, discovery, and collaboration. They set the standards of excellence that define the academic program, and in the process, they cultivate strong personal connections that are at the center of our great liberal arts education. All the while, these members of our faculty are also conducting research, creating art, and writing books and articles that keep them at the forefront of their individual disciplines.

Bowdoin faculty conduct great research in a number of areas, which this year included work on the restoration Maine’s coastal fisheries, using pollution satellite data to assess China’s economy, the changing nature of political advertising, what coral samples tell us about past climate change, the reemergence of nationalism in eastern Europe, nuclear disarmament, and “why Crickets matter” …to name just some of the work underway.

On the crickets: it’s because they can regenerate damaged body parts and because with population growth, more of us may have to eat them!

Among the many awards collected by Bowdoin faculty this year were fellowships from the American Physical Society, the Mellon Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the National Academy of Sciences; and grants from the National Science Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

And this year, like every year, we hired a few new, great, young teacher/scholars. Bowdoin remains a college where the very best want to come to teach and do their research.

We continue to provide these scholars with the resources and facilities necessary for excellence. We will soon break ground on the new Roux Center for the Environment on the corner of College and Harpswell. When it opens a year from September, the Roux Center will bring faculty from many academic disciplines together to encourage collaboration and creativity in the teaching and scholarship of the environment and further strengthen Bowdoin’s position as the leading liberal arts college in this area of study.

Outside the classroom, life continued to be busy at the College. Bowdoin students started an all-female comedy troupe and a new club to appreciate Russian history and culture. They bonded over curling. They marched for women and for science, and they planted flags to remember those who perished on 9/11 and in the Holocaust. And they put their impressive talents and creativity on display in campus galleries, concert halls, and on the stage.

Our students also took it upon themselves to expand and encourage dialogue, to listen to opposing points of view, and to engage one another in respectful and thoughtful debate on some of the most difficult issues we face as a society. They filled the seats in Pickard Theater and asked thoughtful and probing questions when Nick Kristof of The New York Times and Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal came to discuss political correctness on college campuses, and they joined the two journalists for dessert afterward in Thorne Hall to keep the conversation going.

They heard from Maine senators Susan Collins and Angus King about the election and some of the pressing issues facing our country, with both leaders remarking afterward on the sophistication of student questions.

And students organized their own events with faculty in the College Houses on issues like the presidential election, gun control, immigration, and partisanship in the news media, and they gathered in Jack Magee’s Pub to explore ranked-choice voting and to debate protest and patriotism associated with the national anthem.

These are tough issues, and I am deeply proud of how our students took up the challenge to develop the skills and disposition for thoughtful, open, and vigorous discussion on these and other topics in what is a contentious and polarizing period in America.

In addition to our two US senators and journalists from the Times and Journal, we heard this year from Bowdoin alumni Stan Druckenmiller, Ambassador Christopher Hill, and Cynthia McFadden of NBC News. We also considered views from across the political spectrum with visits by a number of conservative and liberal commentators and activists.

The director of research at Google, Peter Norvig, was on campus in October to talk about the opportunities and challenges associated with artificial intelligence. On any given night, leading scholars from across the country and around the world were here speaking about a wide range of topics, from gravitational waves and black holes to national security and public health, and on and on.

And when we weren’t in our lecture halls, museums, and performance halls, we were cheering on the Polar Bears. Our student-athletes continue to wow us on our playing fields, on the ice, and on our courts.

The men’s and women’s tennis teams just concluded another fantastic campaign, with the women advancing to the quarterfinals and the men reaching the semifinals of the NCAA Championship.

The men’s tennis team set a school record for wins in a season (21) and won the NESCAC Championship for the first time since 2008.

The women’s basketball team reached the twenty-win plateau for the eighth time in the last nine years and qualified for the NCAA Championship for the seventeenth time.

The women’s ice hockey team defeated Connecticut College on January 12th in a game played outdoors at Fenway Park in Boston. In all, thirteen teams represented Bowdoin at national championship tournaments.

We cheered fifteen of our athletes who earned All-American honors, dozens more who were lauded in league and regional honors, and the 250 Bowdoin athletes who garnered NESCAC All-Academic recognition.

We embarked just a couple of weeks ago on a project that will restore the grandeur of the Hubbard Grandstand while also modernizing the field and track out at Whittier. This project will reveal, for the first time in many decades, the original face of the Grandstand, which has been nominated as a National Historic Place and is simply beautiful.

Oh, and we celebrated a big ninety-fifth birthday with Link.

Bowdoin students continue to live the common good and to serve in countless ways, last year providing over ­­­­56,000 hours of direct service. They mentor kids, tutor, work in food pantries, engage with Special Olympics, and they plan and lead Alternative Spring Break trips to work in rural communities and in urban neighborhoods. They do these things here in town, in Maine, around the US, and all over the world.

And, of course, it is not all work and no play. There was no shortage of fun this year, as our students did what students have always done.

Students today are no different—they gather for concerts and festivals, they hold events on the Quad and in the College Houses, they talk through the night in their rooms about all issues great and trivial, they find the most imaginative ways to party together, they bring one another home during breaks, they goof around, and on occasion they clean up really well and dance the night away.

And I am certain this all brings back memories of your time as students, Class of 1967.

As you enjoy the weekend and time together, I hope that these words and pictures provide a vivid sense of the life of our College this year—a life of deep intellectual accomplishment, of engagement in so many endeavors, and of growth, fun, and friendship. And as it was for you, for our students today Bowdoin is the “best four years of your life.”

Thank you for all you do for the College we love.