| Karen Harris as a student, coach, dean,
parent and Trustee has given 39 years of support to Bates.
Karen came to Bates from Pennsylvania, having grown up in various
parts of the Northeast, and in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Karen
earned her BA in Psychology, with substantial course work in
English, and a Junior Year Abroad at the University of Aberdeen in
Scotland. Coming to Bates in the years when women’s varsity
teams were getting started, she competed in varsity field hockey,
where she was the leading scorer, and on the ski team. She
also was heavily involved in activities that foreshadowed later
commitments, both professional and personal: she took a Short Term
course to East Harlem, where she helped set up a summer day camp
for children, and on campus was the student director of the Big
Sister program and volunteered for the Lewiston-Auburn
Children’s Home. Following graduation, she worked in two
residential settings for emotionally disturbed teenagers, and then
founded and ran a psychiatric half-way house for adults leaving the
state mental hospital — all in her first four years after
Bates. In another foreshadow, Karen finished her psychiatric
service with a well-regarded consultant’s report for the
State’s Child Protective Services Division on the causes of
staff burnout and discontent. As she put it at the time, needing a
change of pace from years of live-in work with psychiatric
patients, she returned to Bates, first as an assistant field hockey
coach, and then as an assistant dean of admissions. The Admissions
office that summer of 1978 hired five new deans—Wylie
Mitchell, Ginny Harrison, Karen Harris, Marcus Bruce, and Bill
Hiss. That was a good summer of hiring: collectively, those five
people have served Bates as deans, professors, vice presidents or
trustees for 128 years. As Mark Twain famously put it in The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “They came to watch and stayed to
paint.” Karen next earned a master’s degree at the Yale
Graduate School of Organization and Management, becoming interested
in “workplace democracy,” worker-owned businesses, an
interest that would have far-reaching later impacts for her. After
some years of consulting to help New York firms create better
working environments for women, she returned to Maine to help found
a worker-owned firm in Maine, Baby Bag, that allowed workers to
develop their talents more flexibly than most corporate
environments. Since then, Karen has served nationally and
internationally as a consultant for developing organizations in a
wide range of formats from corporations to agriculture to
developing societies. As a side benefit of her wide international
travel, she made Bates well known from South Asia to South America.
Karen’s forms of service to Bates cover an extraordinary
range, from volunteer to leader, from overseas interviewer to
President of the Alumni Association. In 1993, Karen was elected to
the Bates Board of Trustees, and in 12 years of service was on
eighteen different trustee committee, led four chairs as chair or
vice-chair and served for nine years on the Executive Committee of
the Board. At a key transition point in Bates history, Karen
co-chaired the Presidential Search Committee that brought President
Elaine Tuttle Hansen to Bates. As a Trustee, perhaps parallel to
her work as a skilled consultant, she frequently asked the pointed
and on-point question that helped other trustees reframe
assumptions. A high point in Karen’s decades of service to
Bates was seeing her daughter Sara Gips ’07 graduate from
Bates, and be inducted into this Society. For her devotion to her
college, and her decades of service and leadership, we are honored
to welcome Karen Harris, Class of 1974, into the membership of the
Bates Scholar-Athlete Society. |
Harris's organizational expertise has been a boon for Bates
|
