Bates College () is a private liberal arts college in Lewiston, Maine, United States. Anchored by the Historic Quad, the campus of Bates totals with a small urban campus. It maintains of nature preserve known as the Bates–Morse Mountain Conservation Area near Campbell Island and a coastal center on Atkins Bay. With an annual enrollment of approximately 1,800 students, it is the smallest college in its athletic conference.
The college was founded in 1855 by abolitionist statesman Oren Burbank Cheney and industrialist Benjamin Bates. It became the first coeducational college in New England and the third-oldest college in Maine, after Bowdoin and Colby. Bates provides undergraduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. The undergraduate program requires a thesis upon graduation. In addition to being a part of the "Maine Big Three", Bates competes in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) with 31 varsity teams and 9 club teams. The Bates Bobcats are a member of NCAA Division III and have produced 12 Olympians.
Bates alumni and affiliates include 86 Fulbright Scholars; 22 Watson Fellows; 5 Rhodes Scholars; 7 Emmy Award winners; 5 Pulitzer Prize winners; as well as 12 members of the U.S. Congress. The college is home to the Stephens Observatory and the Bates College Museum of Art.
History
Origins While attending and leading the Freewill Baptist Parsonsfield Seminary, Bates founder Oren Burbank Cheney worked on various racial and gender equality, religious freedom, and temperance issues. In 1836, Cheney enrolled in Dartmouth College, due to the school's significant support of the abolitionist cause against slavery. The event caused Cheney to advocate for a new seminary in a more central part of Maine. The Maine State Seminary was chartered in 1855 and implemented a liberal arts and theological curriculum, making the first coeducational college in New England. Soon after establishment several donors stepped forward to finance portions of the school, such as Seth Hathorn, who donated the first library and academic building, which was renamed Hathorn Hall. Cobb Divinity School became affiliated with the college in 1866. Four years later in 1870, Bates sponsored a college preparatory school, called the Nichols Latin School. The college was affected by the financial panic of the later 1850s and required additional funding to remain operational. Local industrialist Benjamin Bates gave $100,000 in personal donations and overall contributions valued at $250,000 to the college. The school was renamed Bates College in his honor in 1863 and was chartered to offer a liberal arts curriculum beyond its original theological focus. Two years later the college would graduate the first woman to receive a college degree in New England, Mary Mitchell. The college began instruction with a six-person faculty tasked with the teaching of moral philosophy and the classics. From its inception, Bates served as an alternative to a more traditional and historically conservative Bowdoin College. There is a complex relationship between the two colleges, revolving around socioeconomic class, academic quality, and collegiate athletics. The college, under the direction of Cheney, rejected fraternities and sororities on grounds of unwarranted exclusivity. He asked his close friend and U.S. Senator Charles Sumner to create a collegiate motto for Bates and he suggested the Latin phrase amore ac studio which he translated as "with love for learning" which has been taken as "with ardor and devotion," or "through zeal and study." Prior to the start of the American Civil War, Bates graduated Brevet Major Holman Melcher, who served in the Union Army. He was the first person to charge down Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg. The college's first African-American student, Henry Chandler, graduated in 1874. In 1884, the college graduated the first woman to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, Ella Haskell. In 1894, Stella James Sims became the first African-American woman graduate.
20th century
In 1894, George Colby Chase led Bates to increased national recognition, and the college graduated one of the founding members of the Boston Red Sox, Harry Lord. In 1920, the Outing Club was founded and is one of the oldest collegiate outing clubs in the country. The debate society of Bates, the Brooks Quimby Debate Council, became the first college debate team in the U.S. to compete internationally, and is the oldest collegiate coeducational debate team in the nation. In 1921, the college's debate team participated in the first intercontinental collegiate debate in history against the Oxford Union's debate team at the University of Oxford. Oxford's first debate in the United States was against Bates in Lewiston, in September 1923. In 1943, the V-12 Navy College Training Program was introduced at Bates. During the war, a victory ship was named the SS Bates Victory, after the college. It was during this time future U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy enrolled along with hundreds of other sailor-students. The college began to garner a reputation for predominately educating white students who come from upper-middle-class to affluent backgrounds. The New York Times detailed the atmosphere of the college in the 1960s with the following: "the prestigious Bates College—named for Benjamin E. Bates, whose riverfront mill on Canal Street in Lewiston was once Maine's largest employer—provided an antithesis: a leafy oasis of privilege."During this time the college began to compete athletically with Colby College, and in 1964, with Bowdoin created the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin Consortium. In 1967, President Thomas Hedley Reynolds promoted the idea of teacher-scholars at Bates and secured the construction of numerous academic and recreational buildings. In 1984, Bates became one of the first liberal arts colleges to make the SAT and ACT optional in the admission process. In 1989, Donald West Harward took over the presidency and built 22 new academic, residential and athletic facilities. During the 1990s and mid-2000s, Bates consolidated its reputation of being a "playground for the elite", by educating upper-middle-class to affluent Americans, which led to student protests and reforms to make the college more diverse.
21st century
Academic Elaine Tuttle Hansen was elected as the first female president of Bates and managed its second-largest capital campaign, totaling $120 million, and later led the college through the 2008 financial crisis. In 2012, Bates made national headlines for being named the most expensive college in the U.S., which received media coverage as it highlighted stark socioeconomic inequality among students.
In 2012, Clayton Spencer, a dean of Harvard University, assumed the Bates presidency and created diversity mandates, expanded student and faculty recruitment, and financial aid. While some reforms were successful, minorities at the college, typically classified as non-white and low-income students, still reported financial insecurity and social elitism. According to The New York Times in 2017, 18% of Bates students came from the 1% of the American upper class, with more than half coming from the top 5%. According to the Portland Press Herald, businessman Michael Bonney '80 and his family donated $50 million to Bates, the largest ever donation to a Maine college at the time. This honor was lost with a $150,000,000 anonymous lead donation to the Colby College “Dare Northward” campaign in 2025. As part of their fundraising campaign from 2017 to 2022, Bates raised $345.7 million.
Journalist Ron Lieber of The New York Times noted that need-aware colleges like Bates prioritized students who could pay full tuition in the admission process, writing that, "you can get help if you're admitted, but you might not be admitted if you need help." This impacted tuition affordability at Bates, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.Bauman, Dan. 2023. Wealthy but Wary. Chronicle of Higher Education. Jan. 20, 2023. vol. 69.11. Legal scholar Garry Jenkins was appointed president in 2023, becoming the first black president of Bates.
Academics Bates offers 36 departmental and interdisciplinary program majors and 25 secondary concentrations, and confers a variety of undergraduate degrees. The college enrolls around 1,800 students, 200 of whom study abroad each semester. The academic year is broken up into three terms, primary, secondary, and short term, also known as the 4–4–1 academic calendar. This includes two semesters, plus a "Short Term" consisting of five weeks in the Spring, in which only one class is taken with in-depth coursework.
The largest natural science academic department is biology, followed by mathematics, physics, and geology. The social science academic department with the highest number of majors is its economics department, followed by psychology, political science, and history. The largest humanities academic department is the English department, followed by French and francophone studies, art and visual culture, and rhetoric. Bates also offers a Liberal Arts-Engineering Dual Degree Program with Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering, Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Washington University's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Bates is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education.
Research and faculty
As of 2026, Bates has 9:1 student-faculty ratio and the average class size is about fifteen students. All tenured faculty possess the highest degree in their field. Full-time professors at the college received an average total compensation of $123,066 in 2015, with salaries and benefits varying from field to field and position to position, putting faculty pay in the top 17% of all public and private universities. The college's Harward Center is its main research entity for community-based research and offers fellowships to students. According to a 2001 study, Bates' economics department was the most cited liberal arts department in the United States.
According to the U.S. National Science Foundation, the college received $1.15 million in grants, fellowships, and R&D stipends for research. The college spent $1.58 million in 2014 on research and development. The Bates Student Research Fund was established for students completing independent research or capstones. STEM grants are offered to students in the science, engineering, technology and mathematics fields. Independent research grants from the college can range from $300 to over $200,000 for a three-year research program depending on donor or agency.
Bates has been the site of landmark experiments and academic movements. In chemistry, the college has played an important role in shaping ideas about inorganic chemistry and is considered the birthplace of inorganic photochemistry as its early manifestations were started at the college by 1943 alumnus George Hammond who was later dubbed "the father of the movement". Hammond would go on to invent Hammond's postulate, revolutionizing activation levels in chemical compounds. In physics, 1974 alumnus Steven Girvin credited his time at the college as pivotal in his development of the fractional quantum Hall effect, now a pillar in Hall conductance. arXiv