About once a quarter I put together what I call “Highlight Reel” for the COA Board of Trustees. This quarter there seemed to be loads of very good news across a wide spectrum of the COA community, so I thought I’d share it with a much wider audience.
Dear Trustees,
It’s still cold — I don’t think it got above freezing yesterday — but it smells like spring. And we took the yellow “Enter Through Side Door to Conserve Heat” sign down from the Turrets front door, so that makes it officially spring.
There’s always a lot going on here, but this time around the good news feels more plentiful. As such, enjoy the many but brief blurbs of the Hopeful Spring Highlight Reel:
- Senior Moni Ayoub is a 2019/2020 Thomas J. Watson Fellow. She’ll be exploring domestic violence in Egypt, Tunisia, Argentina, and Sweden.
- Student Lika Uehara ’20 is a 2019 Projects for Peace winner and will be developing a mobile library for rural communities on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
- Faculty member Doreen Stabinsky has a co-authored a new book entitled Environmental Politics for a Changing World with her colleague Ronnie D. Lipschutz. The text was published by Rowman & Littlefield and can be purchased here on Amazon.
- Capital campaign success has meant that two faculty are now named chairs. Dr. Steven Ressel was recently named the Kim. M. Wentworth Chair in Environmental Studies. After excellent work and long-term negotiating by Lynn Boulger, Jodi Baker is now the Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman Chair in the Performing Arts. Recall that Joanne and Paul’s daughter Nell is a COA alumna from the early 1980s. That brings our total number of endowed faculty positions to 15.
- Trustees unanimously supported the purchase of a set of town homes to add about 30 new beds to our suite of COA-managed housing. We are finalizing the building inspection this week and, assuming all goes well, we will be under contract in just a few days and getting the place ready for students soon thereafter.
- Our Dean of Admission Heather Albert-Knopp organized a conference session called Major Issues: Moving Beyond the Major and Minor Conversationfor the upcoming National Association for College Admissions Counseling meeting this June. She’ll be collaborating with colleagues from Bard College, St. John’s College, and Hampshire College on that symposium.
- Bill Carpenter will be retiring this Spring. We’re working with Bill and local filmmaker Peter Logue in the publication of our 50th anniversary documentary film and using his last COA class (called The Big Bang, an intellectual and institutional history of COA) as a cornerstone for the film.
- All of the boxes have been checked for the Center for Human Ecology (with the town and state). Site work will begin next month and construction will begin in May. Please mark Saturday, May 25 on your calendars — that will be our ground breaking ceremony here on the COA campus!
- Graduation will be here before you know it — Saturday, June 8th. Our commencement speaker will be Koko Kondo, a Japanese peace activist, Hiroshima survivor, and featured personality in John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
- We have nine candidates to consider for the Administrative Dean/CFO position. In short order the selection committee (of trustees, staff, faculty, students) will narrow that field to three finalists who will visit campus this spring.
- Our friends and partners at MD365 held their annual Business Bootcamp, a program designed and led by our own Jay Friedlander. Ten startups pitched their business ideas in the Northeast Harbor Neighborhood House and COA alumnae Joanna Fogg and Teagan White of Bar Harbor Oyster Company were the Audience Choice award winners and received $5000 in support of their business.
- Ken Hill, former Faculty Dean is now Provost and should forever be addressed as Provost Hill!
I could go on, but I’ll let those sink in for awhile.
Enjoy the spring,
Darron
Ps. OK, one more:
- The tree sap is flowing and we will be tapping and boiling up our 2019 Château COA Small Batch Maple Syrup… it will be very expensive, but I should be able to cut you a deal! 😉
COA Déjà Vu 
Sweet! (And not just the maple syrup.)