“I like it when there’s follow-up,” Kimmel said. “I don’t want to just parachute in. Giving a lecture — it’s like a bungee jump. I like it when I’m asked to really engage with students.”

Michael Kimmel is a prominent researcher and author on men and masculinity, and has written or edited more than twenty books. He is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in New York and the editor of Men and Masculinities, an interdisciplinary scholarly journal.

Kimmel’s visit last week coincided with a masculinity conference for male students spearheaded by the Student Activities Office and Allen Delong, director of student life and the Smith Union, with help from Bernie Hershberger, director of Bowdoin’s counseling service and wellness programs, and Jarrett Young, assistant dean, student affairs. The all-male event, called the “Sh*t Guys Say,” was led by a handful of student facilitators and attracted about 70 students and 11 faculty and staff. The conference title references a YouTube phenomenon that’s popular with college students, according to Delong. Participants, including Kimmel, discussed questions such as who had taught them about masculinity, what they liked and disliked about being men, and the difference between their experiences in high school and at Bowdoin.

“We had great conversations, and it was a great chance for guys to sit down and talk about being a guy at Bowdoin,” said Nate Hintze, associate director of student activities.

Before the Guy Summit, Kimmel spoke at a workshop for deans, coaches and other staff who work closely with male students. Kimmel explained to them he had written Guyland to explore a relatively new phase in the development of young people that falls between adolescence and adulthood. “It’s taking people a whole decade to achieve adulthood,” and to pass the classic benchmarks of marriage, house, children and solid career path. “And I set out to map this stage of development.”

Kimmel joked that if you talk to parents of young people, they say both that “10 is the new 30,” as they despair over their child’s precociousness, and also that “30 is the new 20,” as they despair about their unemployed kid living in the basement.

This new developmental phase is one “of remarkable gender insecurity,” Kimmel continued, and consequently, he’s found that young men trying to prove their masculinity may turn to binge drinking, pornography, video games or initiations.

When they come to college, boys are bursting to express themselves and prove they’re men, Kimmel explained — a process that for much of history has been guided by adults. So right at this time when they most need adults, they’re left on their own. While coaches, professors and parents are certainly present, these older mentors also begin withdrawing at this time, turning their backs on the more personal, private sides of young people. “So you have a vacuum when young men need them the most,” Kimmel said.

Following his opening remarks, Kimmel fielded questions from the workshop attendees on how to deal with certain situations, such as how to counsel a male student-athlete who’s too injured to play his sport, the best way for female staff to communicate with male students about gender and sexuality issues, and how to grapple with alcohol and sexual predation.

On this last point, Kimmel said sociological data could help reinforce a different norm, and suggested that Bowdoin conduct a survey of drinking and sexual habits on campus. He said many young men drink to excess because they’re under the impression other men around them are drinking a lot — when in fact, it’s not true. The same goes for hooking up. Students might believe that 80% of other students are sexually active when “the reality is it’s 5% to 6%,” Kimmel said.

“These guys are thinking, ‘Everyone’s getting laid except me, so tonight I’m going to get laid; I don’t care with whom’,” Kimmel said. “But if we find actual data, it’ll be an enormous relief to this imagined ideal.”

Jordan Francke ’13 discovered the Clinton Global Initiative University last semester while perusing the McKeen Center’s weekly Service News email, which updates students on upcoming service and volunteer opportunities. The blurb for CGIU was “just this tiny little paragraph at the bottom,” Francke said, but was enough to spark the neuroscience major’s interest. The application process was competitive, and Francke is the third Bowdoin student to attend the program. CGIU was founded by President Bill Clinton in 2007 to “engage the next generation of leaders on college campuses around the world.”

Following the jump is an edited transcript of the conversation between the Bowdoin Daily Sun and Francke about the upcoming event, from March 30 to April 1, and why he’s so excited to attend.

Listen to Audio

What is the Clinton Global Initiative University?

CGIU was started by Bill Clinton, I think after his presidency, and it’s a nonprofit organization. CGI is a longstanding organization but the CGIU, the university part of it, is fairly recent. And the idea behind it is bringing about 1,000 students from all over the country, and all over the world actually, to various locations. This year it’s in D.C.; the year before it was in California; and I think the year before that it was in Florida or New Orleans. But it’s only been around for a few years. And one of the requirements for attending CGIU is that you formulate some kind of commitment to action. When you get to the conference you meet with other volunteers who are interested in similar commitments to action. And they’re in all kinds of spheres: there’s public health, environmental justice, hunger and homelessness, poverty, all kinds of things.

What’s your Commitment to Action?

It was inspired by a video I saw on Facebook about civil unions in the United Kingdom, about the lack of legal connection of LGBT parents to their kids and how that complicates the hospital system in terms of visitation, both the parents visiting the child and the child visiting the parents. And so I started researching Maine hospitals and healthcare centers. There’s about 50 in the state, and I started looking at them, and I was looking at their patient’s bills of rights and visitation policies, and there weren’t many that had inclusive or explicit LGBT clauses. And so my commitment to action was working with Maine hospitals and health centers to create more LGBT-inclusive patient’s bills of rights and visitation policies.

Are you envisioning that as a future honor’s project or will you be doing that over the summer and getting funding?

It’s kind of tough because when you’re generating a proposal for this commitment of action because you don’t know if it’s going to happen. I’m going to be here probably, if I’m approved, to do research in the neuro department with Prof. [Richard] Thompson this summer, and so I thought it would be a fun side project to work on during the summer when I have free time. Also the fellowship for research is about eight weeks, and it ends mid-summer, and so [my commitment-to-action plan is] something I can work on for the rest of the summer when I have more time.

Do you get a stipend for going down there  ?

I’ve requested some funding through the dean’s office, through the Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity and the McKeen Center to help me pay for the flight; the flight’s the biggest expense I’m worried about. And it looks promising. And there’s not a fee for going to it.

And so 1,000 students were selected out of 4,000 applicants?

Yeah, about that.

Beyond maybe [getting] ideas for implementing your ideas, what else do you hope to get out of it?

I think what’s really awesome about CGIU is just the incredible power of connections that you can make there. And [while LGBTQ rights] is something I’m interested in, it’s not the only thing. And what’s really awesome about [CGIU] is that it brings people who just have this incredibly diverse body of commitments together to talk. I’m excited about making connections with people who are in this field that I’m pursuing and have similar projects, so we can bounce ideas off each other and make connections that could prove to be useful when I start implementing this project. But I’m also really involved in hunger and homeless initiatives. I’m leading an [Alternative Spring Break trip] to D.C. next month to work with the Pilgrimage, a nonprofit in D.C. that works with hunger and homelessness. I led Alternative Winter Break this winter break with hunger and homelessness. I teach at Portland Adult Education, and refugee resettlement issues are really important to me. Over winter break I went to the Dominican Republic and did a medical mission. It’s really cool to bring all these really passionate individuals together for a weekend.

Do they make it fairly easy to make those connections?

Yeah, there are several events where we’re all together. And then the way the weekend is set up is there are speakers who come, and a bunch of workshops we can go to [where] we can integrate and mix and intermingle, and then I think you meet with regional commitment advisers or mentors, and that’s when you meet with or become acquainted with the people who have similar commitments to you.

Do you know who the speakers are?

I know Jon Stewart is one of them. And I think Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton are also going to be speaking at it.

It sounds like you have diverse interests and passions, so what are your longer-term dreams?

They’re still in the process of being solidified. I’m a neuro major and Spanish minor and I’m currently pre-med, so I’m pretty sure that I’m going to go to medical school either one year or two years after Bowdoin. I wanted to take some time off and really figure out what exactly it was that I wanted to do. I could see myself going into public health; or I think anesthesiology is really interesting. The nonprofit sector is super-attractive to me too, though, so I’m conflicted. If there was some way to integrate them all, which I’m sure there is,  that would be the ideal situation.

Will you meet Bill Clinton?

I hope so. [Laughs] I will be competing with 1,000 students for that opportunity. But I will undoubtedly see him and I will try and be aggressive and seek him out to have a conversation.

The Bowdoin Daily Sun will check back with Jordan after he returns from his trip to see whether he met Bill Clinton, and to report on what else he experienced.

Margaret Minister O'Keefe '89

Margaret Minister O’Keefe ’89 is featured in the latest issue of Maine magazine for her legal work protecting and supporting artists.

As an intellectual property attorney at the Portland, Maine law firm Pierce Atwood, O’Keefe represents clients in the music, design, art, software and biotechnology industries.

“I love looking at complicated issues: products with lots of design, borrowed images, copy, music,” says O’Keefe in the January/February 2012 issue of Maine magazine.

“I just love untangling all that to determine whether you have appropriate permissions, whether you’ve protected your original work. That’s the fun part—that untangling. It’s the intersection of art, design and law.”

Graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a major in government from Bowdoin, O’Keefe went on to earn her law degree from Harvard Law School.

Long before Rachel Carson, Greenpeace and Teddy Roosevelt helped define the modern environmental movement, there were people advocating for the protection of nature – even when they didn’t always know it.

Pythagoras (c. 570 BC - c. 495 BC)

To clear his city’s polluted air, Edward I of England, who was crowned in 1272, threatened Londoners who burned coal in their houses with torture or execution. Pythagoras, circa 570 BC, defended animal rights and vegetarianism. A Hungarian priest born in 1800, Ányos Jedlik, invented the first electric motor. And, more recently, Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in 1970 and announced the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

While TreeHugger’s list includes a couple arguable figures (Genghis Khan, an eco-defender for slaughtering countless numbers of people and letting their farmland return to forest?), it’s a good reminder of the diversity of people who’ve fought on the side of the environment over the years.

Knowing what makes music beautiful has helped a mathematician solve the problem of creating the ugliest piece of music possible.

Scott Rickard, a professor at University College Dublin, explains in a recent TEDx talk that music, such as Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” achieves beauty due to its repetition and patterns. On the other hand, music that is “perfectly” devoid of both is so ugly “it’s music that only a mathematician could write,” Rickard says. He introduces the world premier of the first pattern-free piano sonata (at 7:49), imploring the audience to “try and find some repetition. Try and find something that you enjoy. And then revel in the fact that you won’t find it.”

In A Maine Prodigy: The Life and Adventures of Elise Fellows White (available at The Bowdoin Store), Dr. Houghton M. White ’58 recounts the life of his grandmother, Skowhegan, Maine, native and violin prodigy, Mary Elise Fellows White. Dr. White only met his grandmother twice, and the discovery of boxes of diaries, photographs, and a 1938 autobiography, compelled him to tell her story.

Surely someone must find my diaries worth keeping…I have put myself into them, heart and soul.

How do you know when your work is being noticed? Sometimes, it’s when “Saturday Night Live” spoofs it, as in the case of Geoff Canada ’74, CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone. That Canada, an impassioned champion of educational reform, has been recognized in the cultural mainstream with a joke on ‘SNL’ can only mean good things for his cause. His impersonation appears around minute 5:13 of a recurring “What Up With That” skit.

He’s raised my expectations. He’s raised my expectations.

On this President’s Day, we remember Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States and a member of the Bowdoin College Class of 1824. Pierce remains the only president hailing from New Hampshire and, at Bowdoin, formed lasting friendships with writers who would go on to greatness of their own, 1825 classmates Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

John Glenn, Cape Canaveral, February 1962. Photo courtesy of NASA.

On February 20, 1962, astronaut John Glenn became the first American in orbit. On the fifty-year anniversary, Glenn, now 90, reflects on of that historical mission and on the future of the American space program.

Bowdoin’s new steam turbine in the central heating plant is up and running, and initial tests have been positive.

In its first two nights of operating, the turbine produced 300 kilowatts, enough electricity to meet half of the north campus’s demand of 600 kilowatts, according to John Simoneau, Bowdoin’s capital projects manager.

And when the turbine was tested Friday, it produced 600kW, which met approximately 43% of the total electricity demand on the campus. Total demand that morning was 1400kW. With higher steam demand, the turbine can produce up to 630 kilowatts. For more on this story, click here.

The 630-kilowatt turbine generator skid and associated electrical equipment were lowered into the heating plant in late July 2011.

In an age of intense security surrounding politicians and celebrities, some of America’s most influential leaders, justices of the Supreme Court, still walk around largely unnoticed and unguarded. A recent New York Times article quotes University of Chicago Law School professor and Supreme Court historian Dennis J. Hutchinson ’69 P’03, on the public life of today’s justices.

Men’s Squash — The Bowdoin College men’s squash team defeated Hamilton on Sunday, 8-1, to claim a third-place finish in the Summers Cup Division of the College Squash Association Team Championships.

Women’s Swimming & Diving — The Bowdoin College women’s swimming and diving team shattered several school records en route to a program-best sixth place finish at the 2012 New England Small College Athletic Conference Championship meet this weekend at Wesleyan University.

Women’s Basketball — Jill Henrikson scored 22 points and grabbed 12 rebounds to lead the women’s basketball team to a 53-37 victory over Wesleyan in the NESCAC Quarterfinals Saturday afternoon at Morrell Gymnasium.

Men’s Basketball — The Wesleyan University men’s basketball team won its first NESCAC Tournament game since 2003 in a 78-59 win over Bowdoin in the quarterfinals of the conference tournament Saturday afternoon.

Men’s Ice Hockey — The men’s ice hockey team continued its recent scoring spree, defeating Connecticut College 6-4 Saturday afternoon to clinch the second seed for the upcoming NESCAC Tournament.

Women’s Swimming & Diving — The women’s swimming & diving team is at Wesleyan this weekend for the Women’s NESCAC Championship. The competition got underway Friday and continues through Sunday. Results here.

Brunswick High Schoolers from left to right: Wilder Nicholson, Seth Holmblad and Mitchell Black, with Jason Harvie, The College Store supervisor

Every winter, The College Store donates five percent of its retail sales of Brunswick High School merchandise to the high school. This year the donated amount was $184.