Safa Zaki, Bowdoin College’s new president, greets students including Mira Karande, a first-year student from Concord, Mass., after speaking at Morrell Lounge last month. Derek Davis / Portland Press Herald
I’m absolutely thrilled that Safa Zaki has taken the reins as Bowdoin College’s 16th president and the first woman president.
Long ties with Bowdoin shape my perceptions. Great-grandfather George B. Kenniston (Class of 1862), grandfather William B. Kenniston (Class of 1892), son Jon (Class of 1990) and two granddaughters Karis (Class of 2023) and Emma Barker (Class of 2025). Moreover, my wife Tina and I have had more than 15 host students over the past 20 years. And I worked in the Bowdoin Admissions Office when the College admitted its first women students in 1971.
President Zaki was born in Egypt and Awa Diaw ’11, the grand marshall, was born in Senegal. She’s currently the president of the Bowdoin Alumni Association. By contrast, when I was a student at all-male Bowdoin in the early 1960s, there were no women on the faculty, no women on the staff (except the college nurse), no full-time international students and fewer than 10 nonwhite students in the entire student body of 800. The times they are, indeed, a changin’ — and all for the better.
Each of the speakers at the inauguration hit the mark with humor and humanity, wit and wisdom. They stressed the capacity of a liberal arts education to foster “generous enthusiasms,” open new worlds and serve the common good.
President Zaki showed real class at the outset by thanking all the people who spoke before her and all the people who staged the entire inauguration weekend. She referred to Bowdoin as an open-hearted community, a long-standing virtue. She spoke of learning alongside students from different places with different perspectives; of how ideas learned in one class infuse other classes. She concluded by referring to a phrase from “Ars Poetica #100” by Elizabeth Alexander: “Are we not of interest to each other?”
I connected with many people who have “been of interest” to me because of Bowdoin. Al Fuchs, my faculty adviser at Bowdoin, pointed out that he and I had been around the College during the tenure of eight of Bowdoin’s 16 presidents. Mamadou Diaw ’20, the brother of Awa Diaw, one of the graduation speakers for his class and one of our terrific host students; Julia Fiori ’24, whose father Michael Fiori ’74 I interviewed when he applied to Bowdoin, sat behind us; I hugged the incredible Bill De La Rosa ’16, who spoke at his Bowdoin graduation and will be president of the United States some day. (I wrote about him when he was a first-year student.) I reminisced with Michael Owens ’73, who I recruited to Bowdoin from Haverhill High School. He went on to serve as a mentor for African-American students and later on Bowdoin’s Board of Trustees and now as the president of the Bowdoin Black Alumni Association. I chatted with Bobby Ives ’69, a good friend and the winner of the Bowdoin Common Good Award for his work with the Carpenter’s Boat Shop. And I caught up with Lisa McElaney ’77, a former trustee and, who along with her husband Abelardo Morell ’71 and Tina and me, has served as a host parent to Alicia Lima (Class of 2019), a native of Cape Verde who is now working on her doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago. Finally, I was proud of my good friend Steve Loebs ’60 who marched for the University of Michigan at the procession and pleased to sit beside another good friend David Humphrey ’61 at the ceremony.
About eight of my Bowdoin classmates were there, including Rob Jarratt ’64, who sang at my wedding at the Bowdoin Chapel in 1989 and John Gibbons ’64, who, along with his wife Lile, funded the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies. I sat with two classmates (Tom Oliver ’64 and Vic Papacosma ’64) at the spirited gathering at Smith Union Saturday afternoon. We were the oldest people in the room, which was rocking with young alumni exhibiting their generous enthusiasm for reconnecting with classmates.
Other highlights of the weekend included an enlightening panel on Friday afternoon (“Beyond Good or Bad: AI in the Context of the Liberal Arts”) and the wonderfully diverse student performances on Friday night, featuring the Middle Eastern Ensemble, Ursus Verses, Obvious, a swing dance group and, my personal favorite, a magnificent poem written and recited by a Bowdoin student, which was dedicated to the new president.
Oh, and here’s another fond memory of the weekend. President Zaki joined the Bowdoin football captains at the middle of the field for the coin toss before the game with Bates College started. Bowdoin won the toss (and the game), and as Safa was walking back to the sidelines I noticed that she was smiling and, yes, she pumped her fist. Now that’s my president. Go, Us Bears!
David Treadwell, a Brunswick writer, welcomes commentary and suggestions for future “Just a Little Old” columns. dtreadw575@aol.com.
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