Bowdoin College history shows ties to state

A SMALL COLLEGE IN MAINE: Two Hundred Years of Bowdoin, by Charles C. Calhoun, published by the college and available at the Moulton Union Bookstore and by mail, 294 pages, $37.95 (hardcover), $21.95 (softcover).

On June 24, 1794, Samuel Adams, patriot, firebrand of the American Revolution and, at the time, governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, affixed his signature to a bill, passed earlier in the day by both houses of the legislature, declaring that there should be “Erected and Established in the Town of Brunswick in the District of Maine, a College for the Purpose of educating Youth, to be called BOWDOIN COLLEGE.” The institution was to promote “Virtue and Piety and the Knowledge … of the Useful and Liberal Arts and Sciences. …”

This past fall the college commenced a yearlong celebration of its bicentennial. One of the more significant events associated with the celebration was the publication of a new history of the college written by Charles C. Calhoun and titled, “A Small College in Maine: Two Hundred Years of Bowdoin.”

Before a potential reader without any particular tie to Bowdoin decides to pass over the volume as another anecdote-ridden, clubby college history, the point should be made that one of the most attractive features of the work is that Calhoun has taken care to place the growth and development of the school squarely in context with the history of the people, communities and culture surrounding it.

Calhoun begins his narrative by observing similarities in the decade of the 1780s, which found the first stirring of interest in having a college in the then District of Maine, and in the 1980s. Both decades were times of growth and concomitant pondering upon how that growth should be managed and in which direction or form it should be fostered.

An increase in population and prosperity during the earlier decade resulted in many of the local elite attempting to recreate around Casco Bay and in the Kennebec Valley the metropolitan culture which could be found at the time in Portsmouth, Salem and cities farther south. Simultaneously, many were disturbed by the apparent lack of concern for their situation by administrators in far-off Boston. They moaned, too, the “melancholy state of religion and learning” in the district and the cost and inconvenience of sending their sons off to Cambridge to be educated. Separatists among them used these complaints in their arguments for local control of government in a new state of Maine. Subsequent to these complaints, two court petitions and several years of legislative wrangling, the charter was issued.

Calhoun draws out in fine detail the financial difficulties of the college in its early years. At the outset of the 19th century, colleges often served to train young men for the ministry and were often associated (in varying degrees of formality) with a particular form of Protestantism. As far removed as it seems from the professed goals of the young liberal arts institution, there was much discussion at the time on which church the college should espouse with most of the debate driven by various opinions on which could be expected to provide the healthiest dose of financial support.

During this same time period the college was closely bound financially to the fledgling state government. The state had granted the college title to several parcels of land in what were then unsettled regions and the college was free to use them to generate revenue. In turn, the state considered that it had the right to influence affairs at the college including setting conditions on the election of its president. It was not until 1833 that a decision was handed down in a United States circuit court stating the Bowdoin was a private, not a public, corporation, thus terminating the influence of the state.

The middle period of the 19th century was a period of growth, change and trauma for the college as it was for the nation, and a large portion of Calhoun’s narrative is devoted to this era.

We are introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote “Uncle’s Tom Cabin” while her husband Calvin taught Natural and Revealed Religion at the college. At the time there was a practice, now vanished, where middle-class women would write for themselves and their friends and family then read these works aloud to gatherings in the parlor. It was at one of these gatherings at the Stowe house that Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the Class of 1852 was exposed to Mrs. Stowe’s classic work as successive chapters were read and discussed prior to the book’s publication.

The Stowes did not remain long in Brunswick. Chamberlain, on the other hand, returned after graduation to teach. After doing his part to defend the union he served four terms as governor and, in 1871, accepted the position as president of the college. His tenure was a trying one. He attempted to expand the curriculum, putting greater emphasis on the sciences, introducing engineering, suggesting the replacement of Greek and Latin with greater emphasis on French and German and even making the bold suggestion of co-education at the college.

The most serious incident to transpire during Chamberlain’s presidency, and indeed in the history of Bowdoin College, was the Great Drill Rebellion of 1874. Recalling how poorly prepared his own generation had been for battle in the Civil War, Chamberlain instituted military drill at the college. After two years the students became increasingly rebellious and all of the freshmen, sophomore and junior classes signed declarations stating that they would have no part of the exercise. At the end of May, Chamberlain sent home all students who would not participate and stipulated that all who did not return by June 8 and reaffirm their pledge to abide by the rules of the college would be permanently expelled — a remarkable feat of brinksmanship in those days before endowments, when most of the school’s revenue was from tuitions and fees.

The pace of Calhoun’s narrative accelerates rapidly as he enters the second century of the college’s history. This is, in fact, the only complaint I have with an otherwise excellent book; a book which is, incidentally, lavishly illustrated throughout. The last complete history of the college, written by Louis Hatch and published in 1927, covered events from the school’s founding until that time in ponderous detail. Initially, I was looking for Calhoun to pick up where Hatch left off. The present text does examine the presidencies of William DeWitt Hyde, a period of tremendous change and growth — physically and academically — and of Kenneth C.M. Sills, probably the college’s most beloved president, but the detail of the tapestry is not so fine as when illustrating the first century of the college’s existence.

On a personal level, I feel that Calhoun’s five-page coda is perhaps the most incisive and significant segment of the whole work. After laying out for us 200 years of a small and, for much of its existence, an isolated institution of higher learning, he leaves us at a fork in the road. Until the mid-1960s we are told, the college’s self-identity rested on “a sense of its apartness, a rejection of the more intrusive demands of modern life (and modern mass market education).” More recently the college has worked hard at presenting itself as a sort of fresh air experience — touting, in essence, its Maineness. For now the college continues to remain closely connected with the land and people of the state, Calhoun continues, but faces three long-term complications. First, the cost of being educated at the college — now around $25,000 a year — is beyond the reach of most Maine families. Second, a large part of “Maineness” seems to be an intense sense of the local and every year seems to make Maine a little less of itself and a little more like the rest of America. Third, what is a liberal arts college? Why do they exist? When the college was founded there were clear guidelines on how one became an educated citizen. This is now, certainly, no longer the case. It is an easy task to translate Calhoun’s concerns regarding the future of the college into more general, and probably more significant, concerns for the future of the state.

“A Small College in Maine” contains an enjoyable, readable and enlightening history of the college, the community around it, and the people which form the intersection of the two.

Peter E. Zelz, a member of the Bowdoin College Class of 1980, lives in Bangor.