Transcription of Clayton Spencer for the show Life Lessons, #104
Dr. Lisa Today in the studio I have with me the eighth president of Bates College right here in Lewiston, Maine. This is Clayton Spencer, who came to be with us on July 1, 2013 from Harvard University where she had been for 15 years. We’re so glad to have you here in Maine.
Clayton: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.
Dr. Lisa: I know that you have talked about this with various people, but what is it that Maine … what brought you here?
Clayton: I have a typical story in the sense that I’m a person from away who got introduced to Maine through summers. It turns out that the original rusticators in Acadia, there was a big Harvard connection there. When my then husband and I started working at Harvard, there were two alums who had donated houses on Sutton Island, which is off of Northeast Harbor, and donated them for the use of faculty and families.
We started going up to a house on Sutton Island when our kids were babies. That’s all we wanted to do and they wanted to do for any vacation for their whole lives growing up. By about 2003 we decided we’d love to own a place of our own, so we bought a place on Swan’s Island, which is off of Acadia, off of Bass Harbor. It has a ferry, which was important to me so that I could actually get stuff over there without having to drive my own little boat, which I have, but there’s bad weather and there’s other things.
For 25 years we’ve been coming up to the area. All that did was absolutely mesmerize me with Maine, which I find to be probably one of the most beautiful States in the United States from a natural beauty point of view. I love the granite, which suggests substantiality to me. I’m not a kind of sandy, beachy kind of person. I love the fact that you’re dependent on the weather, that people … that there’s a kind of gritty, no nonsense dimension to the people of Maine that just all appeals to me.
When I had the chance to actually live in a Maine zip code and have 207 on my phone and have a Maine license plate, I couldn’t resist.
Dr. Lisa: You like the grittiness of the people. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Lewiston and my family is originally from Biddeford, which some people, it’s very similar Biddeford, Lewiston, the mill town, and there’s a grittiness to that.
Bates is this beautiful oasis in the midst of this very gritty landscape, and yet what you’re trying to do is make the boundaries more porous.
Clayton: Absolutely. We’ve made a lot of progress that predates me. Don Harward, who was the sixth president of Bates, was extremely committed to community-engaged learning. Which means not simply volunteering, which is great in the community, but actually recognizing that the community you live in can be a partner in the academic enterprise.
More than a third of our students actually take courses where there is an active dimension of working in the Lewiston schools or working with Somali refugees or whatever. You might take a sociology class. That’s a kind of living sociology class.
We have what is known as the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, a big dimension of what we offer as a college. It takes Lewiston from being the other, so you suggested Bates is an oasis and Lewiston is a sort of gritty, urban area, all of which is true, but what you want to do is weave the two of them together. We learn as much from our partners in Lewiston as they do from us. This isn’t a sense of noblesse oblige, it’s a sense of genuine partnership. It’s very enriching to the lives of our students.
The other dimension is I’m trying as a person who lives in Lewiston to just be out and get involved. A group of us went to the Franco-American Heritage Gala this fall. I go to the local restaurants, I take walks through there, I go to the farmers market just to suggest, “This is a place you want to be and want to live.” I found Lewiston both fascinating but also fun.
Dr. Lisa: It does seem to be experiencing a renaissance. It has a couple of very nice hospitals, the river has been cleaned up, there are some restaurants that have come into town which are on par with Portland restaurants. There’s something about Lewiston that just you can feel. It’s as if spring has started and things are starting to grow again.
Clayton: Right. I don’t have a frame of reference to compare. I don’t know if there have been renaissances before that have gone back down, but definitely there’s a lot of vitality now, a very actively engaged chamber of commerce, business leaders, community leaders working on the Riverfront Project, a lot of entrepreneurism, as you suggest.
I’m hoping it really will take off. There’s a sense of beauty and history in Lewiston. If you look at the mills, they are to my mind absolutely gorgeous architecture along the river. They evoke a history and a sort of key part of the building of the United States and who we are. To me it’s an inherently attractive place to try to make things happen, and I think that that’s really true.
Dr. Lisa: You’re an individual who has had multiple iterations of lives. You began with a bachelor’s in theology, and then you went into law. Along the way there were various steps. I encourage anybody who hasn’t read Sarah Bronstein’s profile, which is in the April 2013 issue of Maine Magazine, to do so.
You seem to be of multiple minds about things.
Clayton: I guess the way to say this is I live life from the inside out, so I’m always trying to figure out in any given moment what my deeper interests and passions are and how to actualize them in the world.
I think one of the greatest privileges in life is to be able to do work that has meaning to you, and hopefully has meaning as well to others. In the early period, I grew up in an academic family. I figured the only thing you do is pick which academic field you do. All of a sudden I realized that I was more action-oriented and more worldly than being a scholar in religion would have allowed me to be.
Although I still to this day find the questions there intellectually interesting, I went to law school always intending to use the law in some sort of public education-oriented domain. That’s what I ultimately did and still find myself doing, although I’m not practicing law anymore.
If you just take life as each next step, it can lead into pretty interesting places. I feel I’ve had a lot of luck being able to hop from the rock I’m on to the next rock that looks interesting.
Dr. Lisa: In an interview that you did this past spring with the Bates radio station you mentioned the notion of discernment, which is at least a theological notion if not a religious notion, and the importance of discernment when it comes to giving Bates students the tools they need to move out into the greater world.
Clayton: What is that about?
Dr. Lisa: What is that about? Tell me.
Clayton: Let me take a step back and just frame it a little. It used to be that the presidents of liberal arts colleges like me would say a liberal arts education doesn’t train you for a job; it trains you for any job.
That’s all very good and well, but this is a pretty difficult and competitive world to enter these days. I don’t think it’s enough for us to say, “You just take philosophy or economics or whatever, and good luck to you.” It used to be a sort of point of pride that the better the college, the worse the career services.
My sense is if you look at the liberal arts and what we’re doing, the key thing we’re doing is helping individuals figure out who they are and what they’re meant to do, and do that in community. They do it in a residential community while they’re on campus, and then they’re going into a variety of communities in life. They may marry, have children, and the key things in life are work and love. If you can get those right you can get anything right.
What we’re doing is taking the question of purposeful work, “What are you meant to do?” By this, I don’t mean public service work. If you’re meant to work on Wall Street, figure that out. Let’s help you get the tools, let’s help you have the experiences while you’re at college to prepare you for that work. If you’re meant to be a forest ranger, all you want to do is be outside, let’s help you figure that out, get the tools and do that.
We’re taking a very structured approach to this at Bates. From the moment kids get on our campus in orientation, we’re going to start working with them to ask the big questions. Not what color is my parachute, not how am I going to write my resume, but what matters to me in life, what unleashes my creativity? How can I spend the next four years figuring out what will give me satisfaction in life and how I can make a larger contribution?
We’re going to start that on day one and that will be a process of discernment, working with our students in very structured ways over the course of four years. Then we’ll have a series of practical experiences to make sure that they are filling their toolkits with tools they will need when they graduate, so that I hope we will be an example of a very engaged model of the liberal arts: Deeply intellectual and personal in all the ways that that education is supposed to be, but also providing connectivity to what’s important as an adult in life.
Dr. Lisa: I have my own 19-year-old son. I have the sense actually that he seems to have figured out what it is that he is passionate about, but not all 18, 19, 20, 21, 22-year-olds even do. Some people take much longer than others. How is it that you’re able to engage them to the point where they can even be aware?
Clayton: Part of being aware may be being aware that you don’t know what you want to do. Then it’s the question, take the pressure off, “What am I going to be in life if I haven’t figured that out from the inside?” Help kids to reframe the question as, “What should I do next? What might I like to try this summer?” Just work with young people where they are.
To me, any educational process is only effective if you meet the kid where he or she is. The point of being a small, engaged residential liberal arts community is that we have adults who care, whom kids respect and who are trained to help students work in these ways.
I have a son also who’s graduated from college, but on a longer trajectory of figuring out exactly what he wants to do. The point really is to work with kids in a variety of ways and different models work with different students at different stages.
Dr. Lisa: I would imagine that having you as a mother and seeing that what you have done, your son could say, “She started out in theology, she went to law school, she went into education.” That might be somewhat useful.
Clayton: Right. I hope so, but every kid has to figure out his or her own way.
Dr. Lisa: Not in that he needs to go into any of those, but just that people can change over time. That you may not know when you’re over here that you’re going to eventually end up over here, but you just keep dialing back and figuring it out, and it’s okay to do that.
Clayton: Right, and taking life or problems in pieces so that you can actually not have a concern about where you’re going to be when you’re 70 when you’re 24. That’s my big message to any human being, is take a problem where it is. Carve it into tractable pieces that you can get your arms around, and then take a step. If you bring it down to a manageable size and a manageable time horizon, it gets a lot easier to make decisions.
Dr. Lisa: In Maine, we have an interesting … it’s an interesting landscape. Having lived here most of my life, and having been a doctor in Southern Maine and Northern Maine and various other places, the county jail, various places, it seems that sometimes it’s hard for people who are well educated to understand other people who didn’t have an opportunity to be well educated, and know that they are extremely intelligent and learned much through their lives, through the hard work, through whatever … working in a lobster boat or work in the family farm.
I never realized this myself, because I just went through and got my education. Everybody around me, we all got our educations. It wasn’t until I got to the other side and had someone very close to me who didn’t get a college education, it kind of opened my eyes as to how much I didn’t realize other people already knew.
Clayton: Absolutely.
Dr. Lisa: Do you see that that’s an issue ever with Bates kids who come in?
Clayton: Absolutely, I do. I think that’s one of the reasons that the amount of community engaged learning we do is so important. Absolutely, it’s an issue.
There’s some aspects of college life that … some of the partying and other stuff that goes on, and then our custodial staff is picking up the pieces. There are a variety of ways that we’ve actually begun thinking and talking about to say, “How do we actually get the kids in the dorms to sit down with the custodial staff and say, ‘Wait a sec. What would it be to be walking in your shoes on Monday morning?’”
It’s definitely an issue. That’s why my message of authenticity and “live from the inside out” is meant to give voice to the notion that people bring their gifts. They develop their gifts in a variety of ways, and they use them in the world in a variety of ways.
I hope that my own children and I hope Bates students gradually come to realize that anybody who is working with diligence, integrity, skill, all of those things, is deserving of respect is interesting, is someone you can learn from. I think it’s a hugely important message and I think there can be stark moments in a state like Maine, which has the kind of economic climate into us.
Dr. Lisa: I remember, as I said having lived here many years, I remember one particular tragedy that occurred with a Bates student and a non-Bates situation. The sense that I have had is that some hope was born out of that tragedy, that it certainly – this death that occurred was horrific, and it shone the spotlight on Bates in not the best way. It seems as though things have actually … there’s been some hope to come out of that.
Clayton: I think that’s right. That was a member of our lacrosse team. I think the lacrosse coach used that as a very teachable moment with the lacrosse teams over the years. We’ve been working very actively with community leaders in Lewiston, with the police in Lewiston. We make a whole lot of efforts to try to keep our relationships with the city not only peaceful, but productive and genuinely mutual. I think we’re making progress.
Dr. Lisa: Bates alums are a fiercely engaged and collegial and loyal group. I can say this, I went to Bowdoin and Bowdoin alums are similar, but I have seen … It is, there’s a fierceness to it that I don’t think I’ve seen from other college alums. Why is that? Why are they so fiercely loyal?
Clayton: This is something I’m very struck by coming from Harvard to Bates, is just how much people care about each other and care about the college community. There is something. I think what I would say, what I’ve noticed is there’s certain campus cultures where the currency of the realm is individual achievement. It’s what I do in my biology course that makes me slightly better than you are and slightly more likely to get into med school.
At Bates, that is not the currency of the realm. The currency of the realm is that there is a palpable sense that there is common good, a sense of community on campus that is certainly equal to, if not more real than the notion of individual accomplishment. It’s a product of years and years and decades and decades of the Bates culture. Culture is a slow growing mix of things. It’s hard to know what it goes back to.
I’d like to think that it goes back to the very principled egalitarian founding of Bates that is just part of our DNA, but it’s definitely strong on campus and among our alums. I’ve travelled all over the country this year meeting alumni groups. It’s an amazing experience and one I’m very proud of.
I’m very proud that the notion that you owe something to the larger good and not just to your own self-actualization is important. The most fully realized individuals are individuals who are also most in community. You know from the medical world the studies they do, the people who are happiest, healthiest, live the longest are people who have strong social connections and know how to give to others as well as receive for themselves.
Dr. Lisa: I know you’re going to continue to do good work at Bates. Is there one thing that you hope will be your legacy at some point, some day when you eventually leave?
Clayton: I have one managerial thing that needs to happen, and then I’ll talk about a broader legacy. Bates is a very strong experience and strong academically, but we have never had the financial resources that other colleges have whom we compete very successfully with. I want to make sure that when I leave Bates, years from now, that it’s in a strong position financially because the kind of highly engaged education that we and other liberal arts colleges offer is just inherently expensive to feed and house and teach students and community. That’s just something that needs to happen.
In terms of what I’d like for Bates to achieve, I would like Bates to set the standard for the engaged liberal arts in the 21st century. By that, I mean we deliver an excellent personalized education on campus in residence. With all that means knowing that we’re working on the total human project with these students. It’s not just what they’re learning in economics, it’s how are they developing as human beings. That’s doing what we do very well.
The second thing is engaging the forces that are transforming our world in education. Engaging technology, figuring out how we can take advantage of some of the amazing content that’s out there, the amazing technique, the things we’re learning about how kids learn. Then we talked before about taking on the question of preparing our students for lives of purposeful work as a core aspect of our mission, not an afterthought.
All of those things to me will create the model of the liberal arts for the next 50 years, and I want Bates to be at the front end of that.
Dr. Lisa: That is a very laudable goal. I’m privileged that I have been able to spend time with Clayton Spencer, the eighth president of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Thank you for all that you’re doing to educate our children and to connect with the community at large.
Clayton: Thank you so much for the opportunity to share my hopes and dreams with you.