Wow! Have times changed for the worse!

Please permit a male, Jewish, sixty-five-year-old Bates College grad to comment briefly on recent student developments at Bates.

No longer a car-owner, I take the Greyhound bus from Portland to campus about five times a year. There, for about six hours, I visit my old haunts, eat in the Commons and I talk to everyone in sight. My conclusion: Bates is different, now, from the way it used to be during my own undergraduate days (1949-1953).

Back then, there were only eight hundred students at Bates. Less than ten of them were black. If there were any homosexual students on campus, we never knew who they were. Bates men lived in their own dorms (Parker, Smith, Roger Bill, J.B.) and ate in the commons. Women lived in Rand, Milliken, Cheney, Wilson and a few other small houses and they ate in the dininghall in Rand. No drinking was permitted on campus. We had no "security." The present security headquarters on College Street was a popular hamburger joint called the Hobby Shop. There were only seven varsity sports teams, then - all men. The night before each home football game, we had a big rally on Garcelon Field. There was a lot of school spirit.

Believe it or not, the entire Bates administration, then, was housed on the first floor of Roger Bill. Three people ran the college: President Charles Phillips, Dean Harry Rowe and the bursar, Norm Ross. And were they tough! There was no appeal.

I could hardly believe what I read in the "Student", last week. It seems that Bates, now, has a Coming Out Weekend in early October. That's when many Bates students "declare" their homosexuality. Evidently, according to the "Student", there is very bad "homophobia" on the Bates campus. Example: One female student actually said, "That's disgusting" when she saw two female students kissing in the student lounge in Rand.

On Friday morning, October 24, about one hundred students assembled on the first floor of Lane Hall (the three-story administration building that has dozens of offices) and from 9 a.m. until quarter of one in the afternoon, drummed on the floor and yelled and chanted at "ear-splitting volume" (sometimes using obscenities). Meanwhile, on the third floor, five deans huddled with nine students and hammered out a "contract." In the contract, the deans "urge strongly" that a committee be formed and the following demands be met: (1) sensitivity training on homosexuality for all Bates students, faculty and staff, (2) provision of funds to bring speakers to campus on Coming Out Weekend, (3) recognition of "queer" students and alumni in alumni and admission reports and (4) the setting up of a gay/lesbian/bi-sexual studies curriculum at Bates.

According to the poll results I obtain on my periodic visits to campus, 80% of Bates students are drinking alcoholic beverages on an average Friday or Saturday night and 40% are drunk. Custodians and dormitory maids tell me that dorm damage, on most weekends, is a regular occurrence. At the end of the semester, parents get the bill.

I can just imagine how President Charles Phillips (now 87-years-old and living in Auburn) or Dean Harry Rowe would have handled the infamous October 24, 1997 Great Student Siege of Lane Hall. They would have thrown all on hundred of those self-indulgent, ill-mannered pipsqueaks out on their ear.

Sincerely,

Bob Kolovson '53