Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College is a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine, United States. It was chartered in 1794.
In addition to its Brunswick campus, Bowdoin owns a coastal studies center on Orr's Island and a scientific field station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy.
The college was a founding member of its athletic conference, the New England Small College Athletic Conference, and the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin Consortium, an athletic conference and inter-library exchange with Bates College and Colby College. Bowdoin has over 30 varsity teams, and the school mascot was selected as a polar bear in 1913 to honor Robert Peary, a Bowdoin alumnus who claimed to have led the first successful expedition to the North Pole.

History

Founding and 19th century

Bowdoin College was chartered in 1794 by the Massachusetts State Legislature and was later redirected under the jurisdiction of the Maine Legislature. It was named for former Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin, whose son James Bowdoin III was an early benefactor.
Bowdoin began to develop in the 1820s, a decade in which Maine became an independent state as a result of the Missouri Compromise. The college graduated future U.S. President Franklin Pierce and two literary figures, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both of whom graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1825. Pierce and Hawthorne began an official militia company called the 'Bowdoin Cadets'. The Phi Beta Kappa Society was active at Bowdoin before the Civil War and featured anti-slavery speakers.
From its founding, Bowdoin was known to educate the sons of the political elite and "catered very largely to the wealthy conservative from the state of Maine". During the first half of the 19th century, Bowdoin required of its students a certificate of "good moral character" as well as knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, geography, algebra, and the major works of Cicero, Xenophon, Virgil and Homer.
Harriet Beecher Stowe started writing her influential anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in Brunswick while her husband was teaching at the college. Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain, a Bowdoin alumnus and professor, was present at the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House in 1865. Chamberlain, a Medal of Honor recipient who later served as governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin, fought at Gettysburg, where he commanded the 20th Maine in defense of Little Round Top. Other notable Civil War-era alumni include Major General Oliver Otis Howard, class of 1850, who led the Freedmen's Bureau and later founded Howard University; Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, class of 1837, who was responsible for forming the 54th Massachusetts; and William P. Fessenden and Hugh McCulloch, both of whom served as Secretary of the Treasury during the Lincoln Administration.
With strained relations over slavery between political parties, President Franklin Pierce appointed Jefferson Davis as his Secretary of War, and the college awarded the future President of the Confederacy an honorary degree. The Jefferson Davis Award was established in 1972 following a donation from the United Daughters of the Confederacy and was given to students excelling in legal studies. The award was discontinued in 2015, with the college president citing it as inappropriate because it honored someone "whose mission was to preserve and institutionalize slavery".

20th century

Although Bowdoin's Medical School of Maine closed in 1921, it produced notable graduates including Augustus Stinchfield, who received his M.D. in 1868 and became one of the co-founders of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. In 1877, the college graduated Charles Morse, the American banker who established a near-monopoly of the ice business in New York, which contributed to the financial Panic of 1907.
The college educated and graduated Arctic explorers Robert E. Peary, class of 1877, and Donald B. MacMillan, class of 1898. Peary named Bowdoin Fjord and Bowdoin Glacier after his alma mater. Peary led what he claimed was the first successful expedition to reach the North Pole in April 1909, and MacMillan, a member of Peary's crew, explored Greenland, Baffin Island, and Labrador in the schooner Bowdoin between 1908 and 1954.
Wallace H. White, Jr., class of 1899, served as Senate Minority Leader from 1944 to 1947 and Senate Majority Leader from 1947 to 1949. George J. Mitchell, class of 1954, served as Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995 before assuming an active role in the Northern Ireland peace process.
In 1970, the college became one of a very limited number of liberal arts colleges to make the SAT optional in the admissions process. In 1971, after nearly 180 years as a men's college, Bowdoin admitted its first class of women. Also in 1971, Bowdoin became a founding member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference and began competing in the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin Consortium with Bates College and Colby College. The consortium became both an athletic rivalry and an academic exchange program. On February 28, 1997, Bowdoin's Board of Trustees approved a plan to phase out fraternities on campus, replacing them with a system of college-owned social houses.

21st century

On January 18, 2008, Bowdoin announced that it would eliminate loans for all students receiving financial aid, replacing those loans with grants beginning with the 2008–2009 academic year. President Barry Mills stated, "Some see a calling in such vital but often low-paying fields such as teaching or social work. With significant debt at graduation, some students will undoubtedly be forced to make career or education choices not based on their talents, interests, and promise in a particular field but rather on their capacity to repay student loans. As an institution devoted to the common good, Bowdoin must consider the fairness of such a result."
In February 2009, following a $10 million donation by Subway co-founder and alumnus Peter Buck, class of 1952, the college completed a $250 million capital campaign. The college also completed major construction projects on campus, including a renovation of the art museum and a new fitness center named after Peter Buck.
On July 1, 2015, Clayton Rose succeeded Mills as president. Eight years later, on July 1, 2023, Safa Zaki succeeded Rose as the first woman to serve as president of the college.
In February 2025, students occupied the Smith Union building to demand that the university divest from arms manufacturers, marking the first pro-Palestinian encampment during the second Trump administration. The encampment followed Trump's comments on occupying Gaza and perceived inaction following an Israel divestment referendum passed by the student body a year prior.

Admissions

The acceptance rate for the class of 2029 was 6.8%. The college received more than 14,000 applications for the class of 2029 – the highest application number in the college's history and a continuation of the rise in applications over the past three years. Applications increased by about 50%, since the class of 2024 and about 100% since the class of 2021.

Class	Applicants	Admits	Selectivity	Matriculants	Yield	SAT scores
2029	14,045	957	6.8%	515	53.8%	TBD
2028	13,265	946	7.1%	507	53.6%	1470–1550
2027	10,930	879	8.0%	504	57.3%	1480–1550
2026	9,376	862	9.2%	508	58.9%	1340–1540
2025	9,325	822	8.8%	517	62.9%	1320–1520

U.S. News & World Report classifies Bowdoin as "most selective". Of enrolling students, 89% are in the top 10% of their high school graduating class. Although Bowdoin does not require the SAT in admissions, all students may submit a score upon application. The middle 50% SAT range for the verbal and math sections of the SAT is 660–750 and 660–750, respectively—numbers of only those submitting scores during the admissions process. The middle 50% ACT range is 30–33.
The April 17, 2008, edition of The Economist noted Bowdoin in an article on university admissions: "So-called 'almost-Ivies' such as Bowdoin and Middlebury also saw record low admission rates this year. It is now as hard to get into Bowdoin, says the college's admissions director, as it was to get into Princeton in the 1970s." Many students apply for financial aid, and around 85% of those who apply to receive aid. Bowdoin is a need-blind and no-loans institution. While a significant portion of the student body hails from New England—including nearly 25% from Massachusetts and 10% from Maine—recent classes have drawn from an increasingly national and international pool. The median family income of Bowdoin students is $195,900, with 57% of students coming from the top 10% of highest-earning families and 17.5% from the bottom 60%. Although Bowdoin once had a reputation for homogeneity, a diversity campaign has increased the percentage of students of color in recent classes to more than 31%. In fact, admission of minorities goes back at least as far as John Brown Russwurm 1826, Bowdoin's first Black college graduate and the third Black graduate of any American college.

Academics

Course distribution requirements were abolished in the 1970s but were reinstated by a faculty majority vote in 1981 due to an initiative by oral communication and film professor Barbara Kaster. She insisted that distribution requirements would ensure students a more well-rounded education in a diversity of fields and therefore present them with more career possibilities. The requirements of at least two courses in each of the categories of Natural Sciences/mathematics, social and behavioral sciences, humanities/Fine Arts, and foreign studies took effect for the class of 1987 and have been gradually amended since then. Current requirements require one course each in natural sciences, quantitative reasoning, visual and performing arts, international perspectives, and difference, power, and inequity. A small writing-intensive course, called a first-year seminar, is also required. The most popular majors, by 2021 graduates, were:
In 1990, the Bowdoin faculty voted to change the four-level grading system to the traditional A, B, C, D, and F system. The previous system, consisting of high honors, honors, pass, and fail, was devised primarily to de-emphasize the importance of grades and to reduce competition. In 2002, the faculty decided to change the grading system to incorporate plus and minus grades. In 2006, Bowdoin was named a "Top Producer of Fulbright Awards for American Students" by the Institute of International Education.
Other notable Bowdoin faculty include : Edville Gerhardt Abbott, Charles Beitz, John Bisbee, Paul Chadbourne, Thomas Cornell, Kristen R. Ghodsee, Eddie Glaude, Joseph E. Johnson, Richard Morgan, Elliott Schwartz, Kenneth Chenault, and Scott Sehon.