LEWISTON – Bates College will open its 153rd academic year with a convocation ceremony at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 5, on the Quad near Campus Avenue.

The ceremony will feature history professor John R. Cole of New Gloucester, who has served on the Bates faculty for 40 years. Since 1992, he has held the Thomas Hedley Reynolds Professor of History professorship, named after a past president of the college.

Cole’s talk is titled “Dress Right, Stand Right, Play Right, Ride Right, Write Right . . .”

The subject of the address “is parent-child exhortation at the point of children leaving the parental home on the threshold of independent lives as young adults,” said Cole, himself a father of four. “I pay particular attention to one parent-child set, the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa and her daughter, Marie Antoinette, sent off to France to marry the future Louis XVI.”

Also speaking at the ceremony are Elaine Tuttle Hansen, president of Bates; William Jack, a senior from the town of Bowdoin who is president of the Bates College Student Government; and the Rev. William Blaine-Wallace, multifaith chaplain.

Convocation day at Bates also marks the start of classes. Although the final numbers are subject to change, some 1,660 students are expected on campus this fall and 193 will be attending Bates-sponsored programs off campus. New to Bates are 445 first-year students and 15 transfer students, drawn from a record 4,650 applications.

Seventeen percent of the new arrivals are U.S. students from under-represented minority groups, 6 percent are international students and 4 percent are citizens of both the United States and another country. First-generation-to-college students make up 10 percent of the entering class.

New students have residences in 39 states and 30 foreign countries, from Bangladesh to Zimbabwe. Half of the members of the entering class reside outside New England. Nine percent of the new arrivals and 10 percent of all actively enrolled Bates students are from Maine.