Dispatch From Bates College

I spent last Friday at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, talking about how technology will (and won’t) change liberal arts colleges. The gist: Well-regarded, selective institutions like Bates will be fine as long as they don’t price themselves out of existence, but the future is bound to have a lot more technology-enabled transparency around student outcomes, and small colleges should think seriously about how IT can expand their service and educational reach beyond 1,700 disproportionately well-off undergraduates.
The whole day was enlightening. As the graduate of two well-regarded but large and inevitably depersonalized public universities, I’m always attracted to the greener grass of the liberal-arts college. They seem like civilization in perfect miniature — library, church, theater, meeting place, carefully placed beneath a canopy of trees. Whenever I visit one, I’m struck by the depth and quality of student-faculty interaction (with the caveat that I probably never end up meeting with a representative sample in either case.)
Bates is a particularly good place to make jokes about the oft-predicted demise of “brick-and-mortar” institutions, since, architecturally speaking, it features little else. Lewiston itself is straight out of a Richard Russo novel — square, block-long former textile buildings next to a strong river crossed by steel bridges and only now shaking off the effects of industrial pollution from days gone by. Maine is a relatively poor state that’s suffered through the ups and downs of fishing, shipbuilding, and logging through the years. But the decision to nurture a small collection of superior liberal arts colleges looks better all the time.
Maureen and I decide to make a weekend out of it since neither of us has travelled in Maine before. I’m of the opinion that while some iconic tourist destinations (e.g. Times Square) should be avoided at all costs, others should be embraced. So we head to the gigantic L.L. Bean mothership in Freeport, where I purchase a parka for my two-year-old nephew, a microfiber towel for my dog (What? He gets wet when it rains!), and a pair of titanium camping sporks. Think about it: Titanium is so light and strong that until recently stockpiles were held in strategic reserve by the Defense Department. Now they use it to to make utensils for eating ramen noodles outdoors. This is either the whole point of modern society or a sign of its imminent demise — I’m not sure which.
Maureen, meanwhile, laughingly accuses me of spending $18 just so I can have an excuse to use the words “titanium camping spork” in conversation and/or on blogs. This kind of irrefutable spousal insight is, frankly, disconcerting.
We spend the rest of the weekend driving up and down peninsulas that will apparently be choked with vacation traffic in another few months. The wind and fog alternate with sunshine and I have a greater appreciation for why people buy all those L.L. Bean sweaters. The Irish pub in Bath serves a killer pastrami sandwich, consumed before driving past the hulking Bath Iron Works to the nearby maritime museum, where we learn just how complicated building a ship really is. All non-Mainers are from “away,” we’re told. I sort of like the blunt, all-encompassing nature of that; it speaks to a stubborn — and increasingly rare — American sense of place.