Bowdoin College

Bowdoin Trivia

• With approximately 1,625 undergraduate students, Bowdoin is the second-smallest school in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. (The smallest, Amherst College, enrolls 1,600; the largest, Tufts University, enrolls 4,800.)
• Bowdoin's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, which was founded in 1825, is the nation's fifth oldest. Among those who have been inducted to the Maine Alpha chapter as undergraduates include Nathaniel Hawthorne (1825), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1825), Robert E. Peary (1877), Owen Brewster (1909), Harold Hitz Burton (1909), Paul Douglas (1913), Alfred Kinsey (1916), Thomas R. Pickering (1953), and Lawrence B. Lindsey (1976).
• Bowdoin graduates have led all three branches of the federal government, including both houses of Congress. Franklin Pierce 1826 was America's fourteenth President; Melville Weston Fuller 1853 served as Chief Justice of the United States; Thomas Brackett Reed 1860 was twice elected Speaker of the House of Representatives; and Wallace H. White, Jr. 1899 and George J. Mitchell 1954 both served as Majority Leader of the United States Senate.
• In the early years of the Republic, students who had received degrees from one institution of higher learning could receive reciprocal degrees from another. In 1806, apparently concerned that they might need further credentials, 13 Harvard College graduates also took Bowdoin degrees.