COA Déjà Vu

Last month a group of COA faculty and I attended the International Society of Human Ecology (SHE) meetings at the Australian National University in Canberra.  280 people from 28 nations attended the gathering. I decided to focus my talk on College of the Atlantic’s understanding and approach to Human Ecology — not as a body of knowledge, but as a way of knowing and problem solving.  The talk and the event went really well.  SHE’s next gathering will happen on the COA campus in October 2014.

Branding Human Ecology for Higher Ed: A Talk at the Society for Human Ecology Conference

By Darron Collins ’92, PhD, President, College of the Atlantic
February 5, 2013 – Canberra, Australia

Thanks to Rob Dybal and all the conference organizers for putting this spectacular event together. It’s my first SHE conference and I’ve been looking forward to it since I began my new job at College of the Atlantic. Thanks also to ANU for hosting. And, finally, thanks to my colleagues at COA, especially Rich Borden, who’s helped me think through many of these ideas.

Wow, the Pacific Ocean is big–so big, I had the opportunity to fiddle with my title and insert the word branding in my presentation somewhere miles above New Caledonia. I’m aware the word “branding” makes academics queasy. But brands can be powerful things.

My reason for coming to this conference is that I’m concerned about where higher education is going in the US (and here I’d like apologize for my US-centric perspective and also point out that when I say “college” I mean “university”)

I want us to imagine a role for Human Ecology in helping steer toward a new future and I think branding just might help out. Rosie the Riveter changed hearts and minds: Human Ecology can as well.

I’m hoping to play a role in all this from my position as the president of the College of the Atlantic. Just a bit of history to start:

COA wouldn’t be what it is in the context of any other location: we are blessed with beauty and inextricably linked to place. We’re on the coast of Maine, five hours north of Boston, on Mount Desert Island. MDI was once a thriving summer community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The country’s most influential artists, intellectuals, politicians, and entrepreneurs all came up to MDI in the summer among year-round lobstermen, scallop and ground fishermen. The summer community was torn apart by the depression, the Second World War, and a devastating fire in 1947.

In 1968 a local businessman and a very progressive catholic priest conceived the idea of a college. The businessman wanted to revitalize the summer and year-round communities. The priest had said too many funeral masses for boys coming home from Vietnam and was at the same time frustrated by the environmental devastation unfolding in front of his eyes. COA was founded in 1969 to take on these social and environmental challenges.

The first class arrived on MDI in the fall of 1972. They were an amazing group of intrepid explorers: half-a-dozen staff, a half-dozen faculty, and about three dozen students looking to expand the boundaries of higher education. Faculty from that time say there were as many dogs in the class as students—and the dogs were also very attentive.

Ed Kaelber, a former dean at the Harvard School of Education, led the group as president. Ed wrote a prospectus for the college and I refer to it all the time. The lines that jump out at me are these:

“The term experimental college has much currency. It is unfortunate that we have to resort to this phrase; it should be a redundancy. Any college that is not constantly seeking new ways of doing things is only half alive. College of the Atlantic expects to be experimental in the best sense of the word. We will not be bound by tradition nor will we make the assumption that because something is different it is automatically better.”

Given today’s higher education growing pains and the tremendous price that’s being charged for tuition, there’s an unfortunate tendency for colleges to equate “maturity” with becoming rigid and unresponsive.

One of COA’s biggest successes as an institution has been avoiding that pitfall for four decades. One of my biggest challenges as president is to continue to innovate and experiment.

We’ve remained experimental by staying small (we have 330 students now), staying department-less and tenure-less, by demanding a flat hierarchical structure, and insisting upon continuous self-assessment.

We’ve also continued to innovate by maintaining our curricular center of gravity on the practice of Human Ecology. Human Ecology can improve upon how higher education evolves. Coming to more of a consensus around a definition and a brand will make it more powerful.

COA students, almost invariably, arrive on campus thinking about Human Ecology like this: as an area of study, like Russian or Botany, and often land on human ecology as “the relationship between humans and their environment.”

Up until this point, life for too many students has cemented the idea that you come to college and declare a major, graduate after a bucket of knowledge has been passed to you by experts in a field, and then you go off using that bucket of knowledge in a job for forty years, and then retire.

The world doesn’t work like that. So, though students find their own meaning of Human Ecology, it’s important that students first unlearn the idea of Human Ecology as a discipline. But for many reasons (including parents and donors), it’s not enough to say what Human Ecology isn’t. We’re asked to define it honestly and without dumbing it down. That process helps in branding.

We’re landing on a working definition that’s a platform for our work at COA and helps communicate our ideas to the outside world and more suspicious audiences:

“Human Ecology is a perspective that cultivates self-direction; a method of problem solving that emphasizes transdisciplinarity; a way-of-knowing that balances hands-on with minds-on learning; and an educational philosophy that inspires purpose and values.”

For this talk I’ve interviewed four COA alumni. Each one helps me flesh out one of the four elements and shows how—as artists, scientists, humanists—they are also human ecologists and highly effective practitioners of their own craft.

I’d like to start with Amy Toensing. Amy graduated in the early nineties and is now a successful photographer. Although she shies from the title, she’s a National Geographic photographer and will have a new story coming out in the magazine this June, on Australia. I’ll admit, part of why I chose Amy was because there was a time in my life where the idea of being a National Geographic photographer was about the coolest idea in the world. I also knew that if I choose Amy, I could feature her brilliant photographs.

When I interviewed her she told me that, more than anything else, at COA she learned to be a storyteller and that no matter what you do in life, storytelling will be an essential element of success. I’d go even further and agree with my colleague John Anderson and say storytelling is elemental to being human and therefore storytelling puts the human in human ecology. Here, Amy tells a story of two brothers on the isolated island of Monhegan in Maine, each with a portrait of the other hanging over their bed.

Another of Amy’s photos tells of a man from Papua New Guinea who tells his story by the flowers in his beard. Amy developed great skills as a storyteller, but for her COA was exceptional because it cultivated self-direction, even though her direction was circuitous. She was encouraged to poke and prod at her own passions and interest and develop a curriculum around those issues working with a team of advisors.

In a final photo of Amy’s, Somali refugees in Maine, tired of following hijab, escape to a department store and don dresses, never leaving the changing room.

Amy started at COA as someone who wanted to be an outdoor educator; her interests evolved into biology and then agriculture. During a class with a faculty member in biology, during a pot-luck dinner at that faculty member’s house, the two were discussing food security on an island further off the coast. Amy spoke of an image she had from that island, when the instructor said, “Go photograph it.” The real magic occurred when her biologist advisor then encouraged her and provided direction for Amy to continue her exploration of photography. There was no turf war and no typical jealousy or ego on the faculty member’s part. Amy’s story also explains that “following passion” is not a random, willy-nilly taking of this and that class, but a thoughtful, guided, example of self-direction.

A second aspect of what we’re doing when we do human ecology revolves around transdisciplinarity, and for this, I interviewed a public school teacher named Ben Macko. Ben teaches eighth grade math and here we see Ben graphing equations with a group of students. Ben works in the context of a public middle school – which is particularly challenging and inflexible. Ben will also eventually be my own daughter’s math teacher, so I thought interviewing him would be a great way to scope him out.

Ben graduated ten years ago and is quiet, smart, and very thoughtful. It may be a less sexy job, but it’s every bit as inspirational as Amy’s and he’s equally as accomplished. In Ben’s interview, he focused on how the college cultivated his passion for kids and for art. Here’s a sculpture by Ben. Where Amy followed a segmented but singular path, Ben followed two paths simultaneously and was encouraged to do so.

Ben requires his students to think of mathematics outside of the context of math. An equation for a golden spiral becomes a golden spiral from the world around us. Ben emphasized to me that there’s nothing new about using art or nature or every day life to discuss the application of mathematics. We all remember “word problems,” a painfully boring example of that.

But Ben’s approach goes beyond that: For Ben, art and mathematics are iterative. He asks students to toggle between the methodologies of math and art. He actually begins the process of acquiring mathematical concepts by cultivating student curiosity in art. You can see student projects hanging in the back where he began the year asking students to doodle; to draw; to let their mind wander.

Eventually Ben guides students to understand art through mathematics, understand mathematics through art, and discover new knowledge entirely. The importance the US gives to standardized tests makes it very difficult for other teachers to work like this and they wind up teaching to the test.

Ben’s students excel as people and excel on exams because Ben and his students discover new depth in the subject matter and new ideas through transdisciplinary thinking. There’s a lot of talk these days about the importance of STEM education—both in Ben’s classroom and at COA we want to move that acronym to include art and make it STEAM.

Third, there’s the importance of hands-on learning in human ecology. Greg Stone graduated in 1981 and is currently the executive vice president for oceans at Conservation International. Greg grew up wanting to be Jacques Cousteau, much in the same way I grew up wanting to be Indiana Jones.

Greg’s love for the ocean was spawned in the ocean and when it came time for college he was one of those kids who said, “I want to be a marine biologist” and started out at a large university known for that subject. After the first month, Greg hadn’t stepped foot in the Atlantic, was confined to the classroom, and promptly left and left frustrated.

During Greg’s first COA class he found himself in a boat designing a piece of humpback whale migration research using fluke patterns. His frustrations dissipated. Classes weren’t generally in class; there were no textbooks but sets of peer reviewed papers; faculty members weren’t talking at you, but were thinking through problemswith you. Greg said to me, “It felt like a graduate school for undergraduates because it was so problem-focused.”

But what Greg kept hammering on during my interviews was how important the “doing” was. There was a craft involved in his work, not unlike an arborist or blacksmith. Some of that craft is mental, but a lot is kinesthetic—like diving, small engine repair, building, landing a boat, storing specimens, drawing, doing what might in essence be called field work.

Greg’s success comes from his experience as a maker, a doer, a builder of tools, techniques, and thoughts for tackling the challenges that plague our oceans. But it gets lonely on the ocean floor. Greg’s good at what he does also because he recognizes that success in marine conservation depends as much on social science as marine science. He also “does” marine science as social science. Luckily he is as much at home working on the ocean floor as he is working with this man, the president of Kiribati in the Phoenix Islands—who is himself equally adept at fishing with a hand line as he is with running a small island nation. Greg’s skills as a doer and a human ecologist have helped drive the creation of the Phoenix Island Protected Area, which, with an area of 408,250 km², is the largest marine protected area in the Pacific Ocean and the world’s first deep water, mid-ocean marine protected area.

Fourth and finally, we approach the more nebulous element of our definition, which centers on the cultivation of purpose and value. For this element I used myself as subject matter, because in addition to being COA’s president, I’m also an alumnus from the class of 1992. (I believe strongly that self-deprecation goes a long way in a presentation and if there was ever a self-deprecating photo, this is it.)

My story began as a high school student and as the first kid in my family of Irish immigrants to go to college, it begins with my dad and me making that trip of college visits. We started at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, and I didn’t even get out of the car. We went to Princeton – that would have made Dad very proud, but it wasn’t for me. We went to Bowdoin in Maine because we had both heard it had a great outdoors program. It was a beautiful school, but something just wasn’t right. I turned to Dad and said, “There’s this other school I’d really like to see – it’s three hours further up the coast. Can we go?”

I’ll never forget the moment he dropped me off at COA. It was magical. Almost immediately I could tell something was very different about the place. One of the most important differences was that everyone—students, faculty, staff, trustees, wanted to be there at COA; nowhere else. They had their own sense of mission, and a very definite sense of purpose.

It was obvious that students weren’t at COA as a right of passage their parents or peers coaxed them in to. Students arrive at COA predisposed to a certain kind of value- or purpose-driven way of life, but the experience itself cultivates purpose.

I came across a good example of this just before the holidays when I had the chance to take these students and drop them off on an Island 20 kilometers southeast of MDI. They wanted to understand the ecology of offshore islands in winter and were worried about the impacts of offshore wind development. The idea didn’t come from the faculty; it came from them. They were giving up Christmas and New Year’s holidays to do this, and they were excited to brave some serious conditions out there.

Here they are on drop-off day. We tried to hang around, but they were ready for us to get on and leave them to their project.

I received this letter a few days after Christmas from one of the students. It concludes with:

“The adventures we are having have been so enriching, experiential and magical. We are constantly learning new things. I just wanted to say thank you so much. You are such a supportive president and having you excited and involved with our journeys is so wonderful and helpful. It means so much to us.”

I don’t read that to pat myself on the back (although it’s been the proudest moment of my presidency so far), but I read it to demonstrate the degree of thoughtfulness and purposefulness there.

As a human ecologist and president, I’ve discovered my own purpose: first, build on what we do best at COA and second, take what we know really works and inject that human ecological thought and practice elsewhere, in other institutions.

I’ll never forget a discussion I had with a mentor when I first started the job. He asked me about goals and I immediately spoke of the quality of our graduates.

“There are over 4,000 universities in the US and I bet every single one of them has at least a handful of great graduates. Graduates are a given. What else?”

I then told him about this four-part curriculum, but ended with, “Hey, it’s not for everyone.”

He almost jumped out of the phone: “No, no, no!! Never say that. It needs to be for everyone. This curriculum is in fact what as many people as humanly possible need. ”

And he was absolutely right.

So when you look at the current situation in the US, there’s a lot of change unfolding. It’s not an easy environment, but it can be an environment that spawns innovation. We’ve seen a trend toward for-profit institutions and the flowering of massive open online courses, MOOCs. The later are being championed because they are free, not because they are great.

MOOCs may help democratize education, but we are in a heap of trouble if they or for-profit schools become the default for higher education. I feel strongly that if we do our job right here at this conference and beyond and begin to think about human ecology in light of a brand which includes these four elements, that human ecology is a far more robust, useful, and critical tool for the brave new world of higher education than MOOCs.

            How we do that is a much more difficult question. Yes, it will take policy change. And it will take new money. And it might take a completely new educational structure. But at the core it takes people and that’s why I’m at this conference.

When we think and act on one of the conference’s themes “re-inventing the future” one of the ways to re-invent must be through getting these four thematic elements of human ecology inserted into a much higher proportion of colleges and universities. Thank You.

It’s difficult for me to cross the bridge between Turrets and Deering without looking away from the Bay.  I’ve got a very strong magnet that pulls me from downstream to up, no matter how humble or urban the stream may be.

On Saturday I decided to yield to this magnet and follow one of our Island’s streams from Sea to Source.  Boating allows you to travel from Source to Sea, which rolls off the tongue a lot better, but in winter and with small streams it’s general a walking journey from Sea to Source.

For this weekend’s excursion I chose Little Harbor Brook.

Little Harbor Brook at its terminus

You cross it on the stretch of road between Seal Harbor and Northeast Harbor – it’s just one drainage past Little Long Pond moving westward along that road.  I’ve walked the lower section of LHB many times.  I always take visitors there because it’s a nice flat walk, it feels like you’re in a Tolkien novel, and about a mile into it you can turn left, scamper up Elliot Mountain, and enjoy an amazing view of the near shore Islands of MDI.  But those walks are somewhat painful when I leave the trail up Eliot.  I pine for knowing where the stream starts.  Today I didn’t have to hang that left.

The turnoff to Eliot Mountain

I recognize, of course, that such a Sea to Source walk is the antithesis of a thinking person’s stroll, of a Thoreau “walk about.”  It’s goal-driven.  You might call it a Type A walk, more fitting of a Richard Burton; a “I will find the Mountains of the Moon damnit!” kind of walk.  Luckily my little Type A excursion didn’t have all the nasties of colonialism and associated ill will of a genius however delusional 19^th century explorer.

Sir Richard Burton (Wikimedia Commons)

My trip was a lot shorter too – 7.2 miles round trip, with an elevation gain of 1194 feet.  The trail past the Eliot Mountain turnoff looks a lot like the first mile, gin-clear water, moss, elves and the like.  Crossing a few sections of Carriage Road, you arrive at Little Harbor Brook Bridge, and that’s where the fun begins.  A western, central and eastern feeder stream come together at this point to form the “main stem” Little Harbor Brook. Although I was temporarily drawn to the western trib up the larger volume Amphitheater Trail creek, I instead decided on the trail-less eastern tributary that would bring me to the Penobscot Mountain Trail and terminate just a few hundred yards from the Penobscot Summit.

A hint along the route

That’s where the going got tough, not surprisingly.  There’s a reason a trail doesn’t follow that tributary – it’s steep as hell.  Making matters worse, the creek’s volume drops precipitously north of LHB Bridge and, well, water freezes in winter.  I spent a lot of time listening rather than looking for the way forward.  The creek carved some obvious paths, but in other areas meandered in a way that left me tracking and backtracking, starting and stopping, shushing my dog Lucy, and getting on hands and knees to listen for the telltale gurgling of a submerged stream.

Above tree line the way became more obvious.  And right where a long crevasse touches the Penobscot Mountain Trail I found my Lake Tana (Blue Nile Source) or Great Lakes Region (The White Nile source is somewhere near the Rwanda/Burundi boarder – the most distant source is still undetermined): a large, greenish, partially frozen bog.

Source of LHB

I’ll admit, I had the urge, like Burton before me, to plant a flag, name it, and somehow own it.  Instead, Lucy and I celebrated with a snack cracker and planned our descent.

Old snow offers a nice set of breadcrumbs for a mindless walk back to the car, but I decided to continue on to the Penobscot Mountain Summit and then peel off down through the western-most tributary and into the Amphitheater.  Setting me up for one of those disastrous return trips – e.g., not paying enough attention to the descent after celebrating the summit – my phone battery died leaving me without camera, communication, or compass (lesson learned).  Thankfully, the way was much more obvious and before long I was back at LHB Bridge and confidently en route to the car, a piece of cake, and a hot chocolate.  Hardly the perils of the Nile, but a fantastic adventure nevertheless.

Map, north

Map, central

Map, south

Our precious Island is just a touch over 100 miles squared; yet there are hundreds of miles of small streams cascading from her peaks.  Knowing their source, knowing their path, and knowing where they touch the sea is key for understanding the character and ecology of MDI and I’m keen on exploring them all.  If you see me in waders slogging through the campus wetlands or crawling through an Eden Street culvert, you’ll know what I’m up to.

Remember: always be prepared for a hike in ANP, no matter how modest it may seem – and always tell a friend where you plan on going.

I’ve never been much of the theater type and will never pretend to know the ins and outs of “good” versus “bad” theater.  This lack of enthusiasm and expertise extends across the entire range of theater, from the classical to the avant garde, though I suspect my patience diminishes significantly with the latter.

But — although just a marginally interested skeptic — I am convinced that theater is somehow innately good for you, like Vitamin C, and I feel certain that performance is incredibly important, like, say, Abraham Lincoln.  As such, my wife and I packed up the kids (girls aged 9 and 11) and headed out to Otter Creek, Maine for the finale performance of Suite Limpet by Dru Colbert and Lisa Levearton.

On the ride over from Bar Harbor I tried to manage the kids’ expectations that this event wouldn’t be like the Shakespeare performance of Twelfth Night that was unwinding simultaneously at the College of the Atlantic.  (I also promised it wouldn’t last as long, which seemed critical to them).   I seem to remember saying, “This might stretch your understanding of performance a bit. “

It didn’t take long to get that point across.  As soon as we had parallel parked and walked the 50 yards to the Otter Creek Hall we were met by half a dozen “limpets” – a marine snail characterized by their conical shells.  The common limpet, Patella vulgata, measures a few inches across, but these were indeed much larger.  They were in fact humanoid limpets, actors dressed in brown, not distant relatives to a teenage mutant ninja turtle, making sucking noises and strange, hard-to-interpret lurching movements across the front lawn and up the front entrance stairs.

I’m not sure what was more entertaining: the humanoid limpets, my girls’ reaction to the humanoid limpets, a neighborhood dogs’ fear of the humanoid limpets, or the neighborhood kids’ who stared, completely perplexed, at the humanoid limpets and the everything else going on at the Hall.

Yes it was entertaining, but it was when one aforementioned limpet began gnawing, gently and limpet-like, on my hand that the light bulbs starting going off: Where did the performance stop and reality begin? Would it be the same if I weren’t here? What were the intentions of the creators, of the actors, of the ticket-holders, of the neighbors?  Was I “in” or “at” a performance? How did all this come together on a Sunday in October to make up the slice of reality I was currently experiencing?

Now I’ve already underscored my naïveté around theater, but I have been steeped in anthropological discourse on postmodernism and I know that performers and theater critiques have explored these kinds of “porous boundary” questions for millennia. But for me – and even for my girls – Suite Limpet brought all of those interesting questions front and center.

But that wasn’t the only point Colbert and Levearton hoped to get across in Suite Limpet.  They also sought to tell a story of place, a small outpost of Mount Desert Island called Otter Creek.  They succeeded there as well.

Up the stairs and in the foyer, Suite Limpet set out a number of historical and geographical markers for the viewer – an authentically dressed 18^th-century woman of historical importance (whose name escapes me) penning a note back to France, two “television heads,” and a fantastical description of an absolutely incredible but real fish, the oarfish (worth looking up – the oarfish can reach 17 feet long and can predict earthquakes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oarfish).

The show began (or did it? Or had it started while I read the oarfish description?; walking up the stairs?: parking the car?) with bus driver Jarly Bobadilla escorting the crowd to their seats on a tour bus situated in the main hall.  The tour brought us through four distinct views of the historical development of Otter Creek using wall shadows, readings, figurines, and dialogue between and among the bus driver and his limpet helpers.  My kids were confused and started shining flashlights at the limpets (we were all asked to bring flashlights and binoculars – again, was this “confused kids with flashlights” part of Dru and Lisa’a intention?).  I was confused too but had the patience and wherewithal and inspiration to put the pieces together.  Here, Suite Limpet made you work, which is yet another thing I hadn’t considered or experienced in any other of my prior outings to theater.

Of course things got more interesting for the kids when we were escorted onto a “real” bus.  My family, knowing that things are always more fun where the bumps are more pronounced, fled to the back of the bus.  Unlike all bus trips I’ve been on – and epitomized by a recent trip to Maine’s Common Ground Fair with 50 sixth graders – no one said a word.  No one instructed us to be silent, but we behaved like a group of third graders recently threatened with detention.  Complete silence.  And off we went.

Jarly the bus driver was replaced by a real driver who didn’t say anything.  Questions of “who’s an actor” blossomed to “where’s the stage” quite nicely and powerfully.  Winding our way through Otter Creek, we were now either “on” the stage or “in” the scene. I gave up on the utility of prepositions.

By this time night had fallen.  Mix darkness with flashlights and you get a light show, all the time.  The reflective interior roof of the bus played with the light.  Adults and kids alike made creepy monster faces with lights-under-the-chin tricks.  We rode by limpets performing on the side of the rode and I started to ask questions like “how did they possibly beat the bus here” and “how did Dru and Lisa manage to convince Acadia National Park that this “tour” was sanctioned? and “was this tour sanctioned?”

The breath of fifty odd passengers steamed the windows and I could only imagine what the humanoid limpets saw as we cleaned the bus window interiors with our forearms.  We passed a deer on the side of the road and my nine year old turned to me and asked, “Did they ‘plant’ that deer there”?  I said “No, silly,” but then questioned my own confidence.

The highlight for me was the scene off the bus, in the middle of the dark, somewhere in Otter Creek, somewhere in history.  The limpets ushered us off the bus and guided us along a small, perfectly situated culvert whose waters ran loudly and echoed beneath the old granite bridge.  Faceless musicians performed and the limpets danced in unison.  If my old, skeptical, non-theater-going self could only see me now, transfixed on humanoid limpets dancing along the shore!

We were revisited by the fishermen, by Madame Maria Theresa De Gregoire (the name came to me), and of course by the limpets of the foyer.  The bus driver’s stories emerged anew under the night sky.  We all peered out across Otter Cove, to the other side, west or east I wasn’t sure, and stood in silence, waiting, wondering how this would all end.  Again, there was no audible instruction, only each audience member’s suggestion at what to pay attention to next – this was a self guided tour, or, better, a selves guided tour.

Half expecting fireworks or some laser light show on the opposite shore, I wasn’t at all disappointed by a faint light illuminating a small structure that I always knew was there, but always questioned its purpose.  This was its purpose.

Back on the bus and back to the fixed stage my daughter wondered aloud at the lights shining in neighborhood houses – were they aware of us?  I scared myself when the thought crossed my mind – what if I’m the only audience member here?

The show “ended” back on the more fixed stage where the passage of time and tides were told by the Madame herself and by the revolutions of Earth and Moon.

Suite Limpet.  Sweet Jesus! – did it open my mind and make me rethink and reconsider the validity and utility of theater and performance.  The production and attention to detail was extremely smart.  Suite Limpet struck the perfect balance between fun and serious and between making my mind work and letting my mind relax.  I’ll never look at Otter Creek, think about landscape history, and consider reality in quite the same way.

Darron Collins

Will Thorndike and I

I remember swimming in the bay twenty+ years ago in one of the earliest Bar Island Swims. It wasn’t the first, but it may very well have been the second. I know Ken Cline was there. I can’t remember, embarrassingly, whether we swam to or from Bar Island, but I don’t remember any long, barefoot walk home, so I’m guessing it was from. It was cold. It was fantastic and, ironically given my earlier sentence, memorable.

When I got the job as president, there was never a doubt in my mind that I would do the swim year after year. Fall of 2011, my “Year One,” seemed a lot colder than 1989 or 1990. I remember a bit of pain in hitting the water. I remember struggling to change clothes in the Gates bathroom and the lights starting to pulse and go blue a bit as my body dealt with cold blood returning to my core. I remember falling asleep at 9 pm that night as soon as my head hit the pillow.

For the “Year Two” swim, Continue reading →

With Bonus Feature: A Human Ecological Problem Solving Reader

(footnotes refer to reader problem solving questions at the end of the piece).

I’ve spent a lot of time in Mongolia and have always been fascinated by how Mongolian kids take to horseback riding — they can ride before they can walk.  A similar phenomenon occurs in Downeast Maine, but in this part of the world knobby tires substitute for hooves. Four-wheelers are ubiquitous in these parts and kids are accomplished riders very early in life.

The greater environmental community looks down on four-wheelers and, frankly, on those that ride them.(1) I love four-wheelers and look down on those that judge a man or woman’s character based on their choice of recreation or transport.  I grew up riding three-wheelers — the less-stable, unruly no-longer-legal four-wheeler cousin — but have made the transition to four-wheelers with only minor complaints.

This is the story of my love affair with a particular Yamaha 4wheeler (note appropriate orthography) named Big Bear.

***

There are many wild stretches of Maine.  One that I like an awful lot is that big block of woods stretching SW to NE between the Penobscot River and the Bay of Fundy, and between Highway 1 and Highway 9, otherwise known as the Airline Road.  It’s full of secondary growth and a perplexing thoroughfare of ponds, lakes, rivers and streams.(2)

I’ve got a buddy, we’ll call him Ted to protect his anonymity though I doubt he cares much about remaining anonymous.  Ted grew up on MDI, fishes for lobster, is Dad to one of my daughter’s best new school buddies, and is someone I now consider a close buddy myself.  We watch our kids swim together, our wives have really hit it off, and I don’t fault him too much for his obsessive admiration of the New England Patriots.  He’s also a Sox fan, but I know better than to mock him for that.

To avoid awkward silence or violence around our polarly opposite professional sports interests, Ted and I typically talk fishing.  Our discussions a week ago led to an invitation to Ted’s hunting camp on Molasses Pond for some ice fishing and that’s where our story begins.

Molasses Pond can be found on the USGS quadrant of the same name, is 1,252 acres, 47 feet deep and used to be one of the region’s best sport fisheries, chock full of land locked salmon and trout.  Someone in the mid-1990s thought it would be a great idea to introduce bass into Molasses Pond.  The bass have thrived at the expense of the salmon and trout and there’s now a bounty on that idiot’s head.  We will find him.(3)

Though folks curse the bass and their evil salmonid-killing ways, we delight in catching them under the ice and feeding them to bald eagles in something of a “you are not welcome here” ceremony.  In the course of so doing, I’m convinced Molasses Pond anglers have single-handedly brought back the bald eagle and, concomitantly, have driven bird biologists close to the brink as those raptors dine on off-island ducks and assorted sea birds.(4)

I’ll come right out and say it: I’m envious of Ted’s camp.  It’s perfect.  It’s heated by an enormous ancient wood stove in the kitchen and a bigger one in the main room. There’s a loft.  There are animal skulls and pelts. There’s a toilet that you have to flush by filling the tank with pond water.  There are large piles of cut and stacked wood.  There’s a dock and a boat house and in that boat house, adorned with a stolen “HUNTERS WELCOME” Budweiser banner, there is a Yamaha 500cc 4runner appropriately named Big Bear.

Now, although Ted owns Big Bear in the legal sense, Ted’s eight-year-old son Francis owns her in a metaphysical sense.  And he can ride.  When I couldn’t get Big Bear into neutral I didn’t call for Ted’s help.  Francis is a great kid and I live vicariously through him as he blissfully spends hours running Big Bear out onto Molasses Pond and up around the camp, onto the pond, around the camp, onto the pond, etc.  As a kid in New Jersey, I never had the space or freedom to develop this kid’s riding chops.

But I tend to make up for a lack of skill with plenty of enthusiasm.  So when Francis’ mom called him in for dinner, I saw the hole open and enthusiastically took Big Bear for a ride.  With that little fart mowing down on hot dogs and hamburgers I kicked Big Bear into gear and took off.  Francis would likely have tackled me if his Mom hadn’t wielded that “stay seated or suffer dire consequences” glance.

Ted had given me some general sense of the landscape and surrounding trails, but the geographic illiteracy added a lot to the general thrill of riding.  I made my way onto a marked snowmobile path and found ecstasy in the hum of the engine, the fading light on white birch, and the cold, scathing wind on my face.

“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle (or 4wheeler) in a way that is completely different from any other.  In a car you’re always in a compartment … and everything you see is just more TV.  You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone.  You’re completely in contact with it all.  You’re in the scene and not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

– Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 4.(5)

Don’t get me wrong, I also love that absolute solitude you can get by walking, running, skiing, mountain biking, sailing, kayaking, or otherwise just being in the woods, but there’s an amazing mind meld that occurs when you mix in the movement of pistons, the grip of hard rubber and the growl of internal combustion.

I moved off the snowmobile trail and onto neighboring Scammon Pond.  At about 1,100 acres Scammon Pond is smaller than neighboring Molasses Pond and is surrounded by a wildlife management area.  There are no camps on shore and it feels worlds away.  Stumps pepper the icy surface.  It’s colder here.  And darker.  Crows catch my attention to the south and I make my way in their direction because I love crows more than any other bird.

As the east and west shore of the lake begin to pinch in I see a huge glacial erratic and I’m drawn to it.  Moving closer I see a long swath of dark ice just west of that boulder and fifty feet from the color change I discover that the dark ice is actually open water.(6) Before I can react I feel Big Bear plunge and feel the nauseating embrace of almost frozen water.  Across this second or two, time slows to a near stop.

***

I’ve run that event over and over in my mind, poking and prodding it with ‘what ifs’ and ‘why’: what if I hit my head, what if I had one of my girls on the back; why didn’t I react more quickly, why did I go out on a pond I didn’t know? I suppose our lives are full of decision points like that, but not all of them have such devastating potential consequences.(7) I’m hoping that writing will help turn that broken record off.

***

This story might be more interesting if I went under the ice completely and managed some heroics to extricate myself from beneath the ice.  But I was out of that water as quickly as I was in it.  When Big Bear dove, she pitched me to the other side of the open water and I bet my last touch on her foot peg was what gave me the needed leverage to go from being arm-pit deep in ice water to eye-ball deep in shit laying on the ice worrying about what to do next.

I turned, watched her bob for a second, and started to run.  Well, run isn’t quite right.  My boots weighed close to ten pounds a piece and my body went pretty stiff.  Something closer to a Big Foot shuffle might describe it better.  I’m guessing it was about three miles from the water back to camp and, again, this act in the play could have been full of much more adventure and hi-jinx: lost in the woods, night shelter lean-to construction, wolves, etc.  But the run back was only mind numbing.  As I shuffled along the pond shore, the snowmobile trail and eventually the driveway to camp, all I could think about was how in the hell am I going to tell Ted — and, worse, Francis — about Big Bear.

Of course they were worried about me and not Big Bear, though I slept with one eye open that night half expecting Francis to seek some kind of devious revenge.   After some color returned to my skin, the conversation quickly turned to extraction.  And, in my mind, here’s where our story gets really interesting.

We woke up the warden down in Gouldsboro.  I have to think he hates getting these kinds of calls at these strange hours.  Maine has lost several folks going through thin ice or open water this year.  Pulling a frozen corpse out of a muddy pond must rank right down there as the worst part of any natural resource management position with the state.  But once he was assured that no one was killed or hurt in the accident his attention also turned to Big Bear. “You’ve got 30 days to get her out of there else the DEP gets involved with a law suit.”

Not that I would ever think about slashing the tires, removing the tags and hoping that Big Bear would find a deep watery grave and never resurface, but we weren’t too enthused by the prospects of getting her out of the drink.  Ted’s buddies from the backside of the Island, however, were very much enthused by the idea of trying and by daybreak they were en route from Bass Harbor outfitted with come-alongs, another 4wheeler (that I was not allowed to go near or even look at), alarmingly long lengths of chain, chain saws, python-thick rope, a brainstorm of ideas that would make any McKinsey consultant’s head spin, and an impressive cache of Bud Light (in bottles).(8)

Now here you have a college president, a college president from away, a college president from New Jersey of all places, and a New Jersey native college president who just drove a 4wheeler right into open water.  I don’t have to tell you the razzing that went on when the crew arrived.  It was an ego beat-down I well deserved, but I can honestly say the gang of four (Ted and his three buddies) razzed me just enough to let me know how bad this could have been, but never enough to make me feel stupid (that might come later I suppose).  The added case of Bud Light I brought to the extraction event also may have helped smooth things out some.

We were a team on a mission and there was never a pessimistic moment – that girl was coming out of that icy inferno no mater what.  Verde, the biggest guy in the bunch, also happened to be the least fearful on the ice edge.  A polar bear clawing for seal, he managed to hook the rear axel with a chain.  Ted and his brother Ned got to working on the leverage point — big timbers set at an angle in the ice to provide the necessary upward pull, rather than straight horizontal which would have just dragged her against the ice edge.  The contraption looked like a cult cross and we prayed to it.  KC, who seemed like the ring leader, strung the line and manned the rescue 4wheeler.

With far less drama than I had imagined, Big Bear was pulled up onto the ice.(8)  Water flowed from every orifice as she stood their shivering in the fading light — a reminder that though we may have rescued her from her aqueous grave, the chances of her running again were slim. We shook our heads, saddened a bit by that thought, and then broke into the case of Bud Light.  Our gear gathered, our libations consumed, we pulled Big Bear to camp hooting and hollering the whole way home.

***

Epilogue

I just got off the phone with Ted.  Big Bear was brought right from Scammon Pond to the best ATV guy in Downeast Maine.  I was really hoping for some good news — not just because it wouldn’t cost me as much, but because I’d started to develop that same relationship to her that Ted and certainly Francis had.  But it doesn’t look good.  Her innards would have to be stripped and rebuilt.  The consensus: let the shop class have at her.  Big Bear served Ted for 13 years and Francis for his seven; she would leave this world a working corpse, shedding light on the mysteries of internal combustion.  God bless her.

Lesson learned: In all seriousness – never be so stupid as to take a 4wheeler on ice you don’t know.

***

For the many book clubs that might gather to discuss the human ecological implications within this story, I provide some guiding questions as end notes.

1 What are the economic and ecological implications of 4wheeler use in Downeast Maine? What are some of the cultural origins of the bias toward or against 4wheeler use?

² Why do you suppose that Hwy 9 is called the “Airline” Road?  What are the unique geological conditions that have given this region its shape and context?  How have human communities been influenced by that geological context?

³ Are bass an invasive species, a successful species or both?  How would you design a plan to eradicate bass in order to re-establish the salmonids?  How might you prevent bass from being re-introduced if you were successful?  What are the biological and economic implications of the bass/salmonid dichotomy?  What does it mean to hold a vendetta against someone?

⁴ How might you go about measuring the impact the bass fishery has had on the recovery of bald eagles in Maine?  Can you imagine a scenario where there might be other win-win situations involving invasive species eradication and endangered species recovery?

⁵ In the text Robert Pirsig also says “The Buddha resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”  Do you agree?

⁶ Why do you think I found open water where I did?

⁷ How do you evaluate risk in your daily life?

⁸ Think about altruism, gift giving and reciprocal altruism.  How are peoples’ lives tied together by favors and gifts?  Is gift giving more or less common in urban or rural environments?

⁹ Imagine you have to design a sign warning people of thin ice and the dangers of vehicular traffic on thinning ice and imagine you have to incorporate a message about “changing climatic conditions” on that sign?  What images or messages do you use to ensure the sign is useful as a warning rather than as target practice for a shotgun?

It was a scene right out of a pre-prime time PBS nature doc: a tropical forest floor somewhere off in Papua New Guinea or the sixth grade playground in Parsippany, NJ.  Two leks, two species; Young males desperately seeking the attention of females.

Her name was Pam and she belonged to an elite class of Littleton Elementary School girls.  As a new kid — worse still, as a new kid from the recently closed Mt. Tabor elementary on the wrong side of the tracks — I must have been somewhat exotic.  Having scrapped with Tim Aldrich a few days earlier I may have been categorized as a loose and dangerous cannon.  Jersey girls wearing Jordache definitely like bad boys.

I made my approach.  She was surrounded by her elite friends.  I can still see her curls.  I can still feel my heart beating, pounding and the sensation of time warping and the gurgle of words tripping over my tongue and teeth.

I don’t recall the exact verbiage (probably, “Will you go out with me?”) but I’ll never forget the rejection and the ripple of giggles coursing through her friends.  Ouch.

Fast forward two years.  I’m in a leather chair sitting across from a priest.  Somehow my relationship woes with Pam didn’t send me into a complete tailspin.  I’ve made good grades and have passed tests and have garnered the respect and admiration of teachers (if not elite-level elementary school girls).  But Delbarton High School wants more than good grades and admiration.  Delbarton is a Catholic High School — I may say (channeling Professor Willard) an elite Catholic High School — in the wealthiest enclave of Northern New Jersey.  Two — count ‘em — two of my cousins matriculated.  I’m legacy material.

The squeak of leather echoed from the headmaster’s spacious office waking sleeping and dead priests.  Monsignor McCalley’s weasel eyes saw right through me.  There were no giggles, but there may as well have been. Rejected.

Advance one more time … eight years.  I’m a COA student preparing to graduate in a few months.  I had, if I may say so myself, “kicked ass” over the past four years (you can take the kid out of Jersey, but not the Jersey out of the kid).  Yes, Chris Petersen gave me a B+ in statistics – I’m still contesting that.  My recommendations were, I assume, pretty sharp.  My experiences and essays were wild and meaningful enough to grab people’s attention.

My LSATs were low, but look at the whole picture for Christ’ sake!  Ken Cline and I were at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, preparing for the inaugural Whitewater, Whitepaper class – my senior project and capstone experience. The letters came in.  Vermont Law – no. Lewis and Clark – nope. Colorado University – negative.  Three rejections.  Three forceful blows to the gut, head and ego.

I thought about those sets of rejection all last night and, though I’m exhausted now, I feel much better having written them down.  Writing exorcises.  But I’d like those experiences to have utility.  It’s the time of year when all kinds of decisions seem to be made; decisions that you no longer have any control over — graduate school applications, Watson Fellowships, possible jobs, etc.

It can be painful to look back at rejection, but it’s also kind of fun to think through the “what ifs.”

Pam?  Her loss for sure.  I mean, I would have been a great catch!  But I can’t help but think that success on that day would have brought me into an elite class, at least in terms of popularity.  I don’t think that the popularity would have done right by me.

Delbarton? According to my Dad, who likely gave the headmaster a good tongue-lashing after my rejection, I was not admitted to Delbarton because it was clear from my interview that I had no interest in going there.  I don’t ever remember saying “I don’t want to go to Delbarton, I’d rather stay at my public school with all of my friends and less-than-elite girlfriends.”  But I bet I shouted it in body language.

Law Schools? I blame those rejections on my very middle of the road LSATs.  But if I was simply dying to study law I bet you I could have found a school to take me.  Maybe those LSAT scores told a story of brain mechanics just not cut out for success in law school?

Choices are sometimes made for you by others (Pam).  Sometimes you make covert choices (Delbarton). And still other times an option gets whittled down to  choice that steers you in a completely different path.  That was certainly the case with Law School, because along with the wad of rejection letters came a letter with much better news from none other than Thomas Watson Junior. The Watson Fellowship brought me to South America, which brought me to graduate school at Tulane, which brought me to my wife and, still later, kids, which brought me … to where I am today, writing to you while getting lost in the path of sea gulls as they drop mussels along the shores of Frenchman Bay.

So, I hope this doesn’t come across as me trying to be old and wise.  But maybe it will bring some levity to the rejection you will all face at some point.

OK, that’s it for now, I’m off to friend Pam on Facebook.

I knew this time would come.  Eventually, I thought to myself while walking, there would be a drug or alcohol “issue” that I’d be forced to deal with.  But so soon?  I’d only been president for half a year and, let’s face it, we weren’t going to make Playboy’s list of top ten party schools.  I never expected beer to get in the way of human ecology.

But the call came. 8.15pm on a Sunday before Martin Luther King Day — a strange and, frankly, dorky time to have a party.  The Associate Dean of students had fielded the call from a neighbor who complained not of loud music or unsightly vomiting in the street but of the pungent, overbearing smell of fermenting malt.  As I quickened my pace down Ledgelawn, my nose hairs beginning to freeze from the biting cold of this eventful night, I tried to piece the forthcoming scenario together but couldn’t.

Sasha Lasa — we called her Slash-ya for her cuts-like-a-knife approach to handling difficult students and difficult student situations — Slash-ya was the Associate Dean of students and would normally take charge in this kind of scenario, but two things sped through her head when she got this call: One, throw Collins in and let him get his hands dirty on something like this – knock him off his pedestal a bit; Two, Collins — he’s Irish, isn’t he? He knows the ins-and-outs of beer.  He’s a subject-matter expert and will handle the situation.  Hence, now I’m walking toward the dump on a freezing cold January night, missing Ricky Gervais’ monologue at the Golden Globe awards.  How did I get roped into this? Continue reading →

I was always a kid that really liked going back to school after a vacation (dork), but my two girls weren’t so excited by the idea or process yesterday.  After a long day of transport from Atlanta to Bar Harbor through Portland and a late night to bed, Tuesday morning at 7:30am was something of a train wreck.

Nothing hits ‘reset’ quite as forcefully as a meteor shower expedition.

Fortunately, the 2012 Quadrantid Meteor Shower made a spectacular showing for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, with 100 shooting stars/meteors per second flashing through the sky.

So, at 2:45am this morning I ran out and did a check of the weather.  Brutal cold, 5 degrees F with a pretty blustery wind, but not a cloud in the sky.  Stage 2: let the car  heat up while piling the hatch full of sleeping pads, sleeping mats, blankets, etc. Stage 3: transporting semi-awake children and mildly-concerned wife (eg, ‘has he lost his mind?’) into the car. Stage 4: drive down the street to Kebo golf course and bring sleeping materials to the middle of the 7th fairway. Stage 5: carry Molly out to the 7th fairway (most difficult task of night) while Karen and Maggie traipse out there. Stage 6: meteors galore.

So, we lasted five minutes max, but we all saw meteors.  And, although Molly and I had a hard time going to sleep after we got back in bed by 3:20, we all woke up sprinkled with the dust of a remarkable adventure.  And the girls headed off to school maybe a bit zonked but with a great story and with some kind of drive to learn about the night sky.

Take aways: a) process can be as enjoyable as the outcome (Deep Purple, “It’s not the kill, it’s the thrill of the chase); b) adventurous learning is as powerful as we say it is.

Wow, those ten weeks certainly do zip by in a hurry.  I hope you all had a great term.  It was my first term back after a 20 year hiatus and will always have special meaning for me.  So much happened for me personally and for the school as an institution, I thought it might be useful (or a least entertaining) to go through a highlight reel for the term.  These are in no particular chronological or “impact” order… just as they come to me.  Pictures will come at the end because I find aligning them in WordPress painful.

* PV ON THE POTTERY SHED.  I loved the work of the PV course, loved sitting in on one session and watching the magic of the COA course unfold.  And now we have 12 units on the shed, all done by students who worked the project through under Robert’s guidance (using a Dave Feldmanism) from soup to nuts (just kidding.  Dave wouldn’t say that). Moving ahead?: more PV and more real carbon, energy and otherwise footprint reduction strategies done on campus, in the community — by students.

* THE BAR ISLAND SWIM.  Wow, that was colder than I remembered.  Thanks very much to my swim buddy Lisa McCusker for making sure I didn’t sink. Moving ahead?: more students on the waters of Frenchman Bay.

* POP!TECHS AIDAN DWYER ON CAMPUS.  Aidan was great at Pop!Tech in Camden.  I’m glad he accepted the invite to come up here and talk with our community and Pemetic Elementary School.  Moving ahead?: More outstanding guest speakers during the school year; more thought on the aesthetics of PV design.

* TODD’S APPLE CLASS, JUDGING. I’m fired-up by the idea of learning local history through apples.  Being an apple-pie tasting judge on the last day of class wasn’t bad either.  Moving ahead?: More history through food; more pies.

* GETTING TO KNOW THE TOM COX PROPERTY. Hale Morrell guided me through the property — she’s doing an outstanding senior project out there.  Moving ahead?: working with the COA community to ensure a relative sense of “pristine” on the property, yet getting more students, faculty and staff out there to use the property as a Land Lab.

* GETTING BETTER AT PUTTING NAMES TO FACES. For me, this summer involved a lot of name recognition — and the Fall? X3!!  I would guess I could name about 100 students.  I recognize maybe another 100.  I apologize for the number of times I’ve asked “what’s your name?” – and to many individuals, multiple times. Moving ahead?: OK, I’m going to start a photo database on my iPad and get to 200 names — first and last.  Thanks for your patience.

* RE-EXPLORING ACADIA. COA had a very solid showing at the Take Pride in Acadia Day.  I was sick as a dog that day and didn’t work much at all, but I HAVE committed myself to knowing and walking/running all the trails/carriage roads on the Island.  The best walk may have been from Conners Nubble to North Bubble.  Moving ahead?: More COA folk in the park, working, studying, doing research and otherwise enjoying one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

* SEEING THE ‘A-HA’ MOMENTS ON STUDENTS FACES COMING BACK FROM THEIR OUTER ISLANDS WORK. Great Duck and The Rock — two amazing pieces of our campus which generate amazing, life-changing experiences for students.  That says it all. Moving ahead? More of the same and some new pieces of infrastructure where needed.

* NAILING MY FIRST LAND-LOCKED SALMON.  This was on Long Pond with Bill Newlin and Lucybell Sellers.  Pure mo-jo gathering.  Moving ahead?: more fishing.

* EATING AT TAB AND SEA URCHINS. Wow, I forgot how good the food here was!  I have to say that my favorite meal was Week 10s hot turkey sandwiches.  Yes, I’ve gotten back to my “winter fighting weight.” Moving ahead?: eat more and less at the same time, and always do so on campus.

* SPEAKING OF FOOD…FARMS. God, I love farms.  Farmers=the ultimate tinkerers.  I’ve felt a lot of progress where our farms are concerned: Moving forward?: more students doing more work and more research and more experimentation on our farms.

* FIRST FUNDRAISING TRIP OFF CAMPUS: Lynn and I had a fantastic, however hectic, fundraising trip in Washington, DC. Moving forward?: more fundraising.

* MORE FUNDRAISING: Actually, my first off campus trip was with Trustee Sarah McDaniel!  We were in Boston raising alumni funds for the Borden Chair. Moving forward?: more fundraising.

* INDEPENDENT STUDY: I managed to supervise Josh Cutler’s independent study on long-distance running.  I believe I managed five running trips where Josh (who trained with Eritrean runners, just so you know) dragged me around various routes on MDI.  Moving forward:? Definitely more running (see the ‘more eating’ above).

* KIDS ON CAMPUS: I always imagined my girls Maggie and Molly would spend time exploring campus and causing a little bit of harmless trouble in the process.  They did, but we’re too quiet.  Moving forward?: More Maggie and Molly.

* INAUGURATION: It just felt right.  Thanks everyone.  Moving forward?: Hopefully, no additional inaugurations for a good long time.

* DRU’S CLASS: Dru Colbert taught Curiosity and Wonder and I was able to sit in and help.  The productions from that class and from Steve Ressel’s Bio-Through-the Lens are in the Dorr Museum and are FANTASTIC. There’s nothing like sitting in on COA classes to really grock what we’re all about. Moving forward: Require key staff to spend a certain amount of time/term in class.

*TEDxAshokaU: Jay Friedlander was robbed. His video was hands down the best – no question.  Goliath (a school with 90,000 students) may have snuck by David (COA — 300 or so students) … but just barely.  Moving forward?: improve our social media outreach.

* OUR BOARD: We’re one lucky institution and wow do we have a group of smart, creative and energetic Trustees who love this place.  Moving forward?: Get to know each and everyone of them better than I do now.

* WATSON FELLOWSHIP: It was an amazing experience reliving my own Watson Fellowship application process by participating on the COA Watson Committee. We’ve got three fantastic candidates in the hopper, now all we can do is wait. Good luck Matthew, Marina and Alice! Moving forward?: more of the same.

*VISIT OF CHARLES HAMBLETON: Charles came to the college for a screening of his film The Cove.  He was welcomed with such open arms and is clearly cut from COA cloth! Moving forward? Partnerships around Bar Harbor’s Criterion?

* LOOKING FORWARD TO NEXT YEAR: I’ve really enjoyed being focused on helping Sarah Baker and her admissions team bring the best possible students into the COA fold next Fall.  The highlight? – Fall Fly-In dinner in Jay McNally’s barn — only at COA. Moving forward?: Visiting high schools and coming up with more creative tools for getting the right students here.

* TAI-CHI WITH JV: OK, so I only attended one Tai Chi session with John Visvader on one lonely Thursday afternoon.  But a spark was lit. Moving forward?: More lighting sparks … seeing if I can audit Ernie’s 2-D Design class in winter.

OK, so the photos aren’t complete and fall out of order … but you get the idea.

Have a great break.  See you in a few weeks!  DC