College of the Atlantic Association Newsletter Vol. 1, No. 1 This publication is the first College of the Atlantic association newsletter. It is not only the voice of people and committees actively involved in association work, it is an effort at promoting better communication between COA and its alumni. Therefore, we welcome your thoughts, dreams, ideas, criticisms, questions, and accounts. Through the use of class correspondents and questionnaires, we will make a more formal attempt at getting in touch with you. But we also love your sideline comments that slip in under the rug or get passed along via blimp, satellite, or alien. Our main objective is to keep in touch, and the purpose of the association? "the promotion of the welfare of College of the Atlantic and the establishment of a mutually beneficial relationship between COA and its friends and alumni." -Megan Godfrey Kraus, Chair of Communications Committee BOARD AND COMMITTEE REPORTS From the Board of Directors submitted by Dodie Jordan The Board of Directors of COAA has met four times since the June organizational meeting at the aquarium. At an initial meeting, we elected John March and Bruce Bender secretary and treasurer, respectively, and began dealing with the early priority of getting ourselves incorporated as a non-profit corporation of the State of Maine. Additionally, we have been engaged in the on-going process of drawing up a set of by-laws for the association. We've also discussed at some length the board's relationship and channels of communication with both COA and the association's committees --Communications, Admissions and Recruitment, and Alumni-Giving -- and are soliciting ideas of ways in which the board might be of assistance to these groups and vice versa. On the social side, we are hoping to organize a Boston-area party for January or February. We also plan to discuss at a future meeting what sorts of annual social events the association might sponsor -- times when we all can get together for fun, relaxation and re-connecting without feeling pressed to discuss business! We'd be glad to hear any/all ideas/suggestions regarding the above items or other concerns. You can contact the board c/o COA, or any of us individually. Board members include: Bruce Bender (), Joan Feely (), Dodie Jordan (), John March () and Cathy Ramsdell () page 2. From the Admissions/Recruitment Committee submitted by Jim Frick Although the COAA Admissions Committee has not been active as a group, we have solicited some valuable help from several COA graduates. Special thanks go to Tom Fisher, Cynthia Jordan Fisher and Sue Freed for representing us at college fairs in their local areas. Tom showed the kind of initiative we would like to see from more graduates. He discovered that there was a fair going on in his community, registered for it and sent a request to the COA admissions office for recruitment materials. We realize that not everyone has the time or opportunity to represent the college at fairs. There are other ways that COAA members can help in the recruitment effort. By now most of you have received a letter from Jo Todrank, Admissions Committee Chairman, in this regard. From the Communications Committee submitted by Megan Godfrey Kraus Our biggest jobs to date have been: -helping to establish a complete COAA mailing list -getting our association newsletter off the ground -finding a full complement of class correspondents from previous years to help enhance communication between COA and its alumni. We can report that the mailing list will be computerized this winter. If you keep the college informed of your address changes, you should be receiving no end of newsletters and notices from the college. If you or someone you know aren't receiving news from the college, let us know! Our COAA newsletter will be coming out three times yearly: March, July and October. Twelve people volunteered to be group correspondents for the association newsletter. They will make greater efforts to stay in touch with all of us and will submit notes for each issue of our newsletter. Presently, we are still looking for: a correspondent from the class of 1979; a former staff correspondent; and a former faculty correspondent. If you are interested, please write Megan Godfrey Kraus at 36 Joyce Road, Medford, MA 02155. We are scheduling a joint communications committee/correspondents meeting for January 22nd in Freeport to discuss the duties of correspondents and efficient means of keeping communication lines open. **Attention all! We are temporiarily calling this the "Association Newsletter." Can you think of a better name? Please send your ideas to Carole O'Donnell. Missing persons list: We do not have accurate addresses for the following people. If you know of their current whereabouts, send Carole their addresses or tell them to do so. David Andrew Douglas Crawford Elizabeth Lundberg Dianna Ruth Bruce Becque Anne Goodwin Jane Machamer Denise Schlener Peter Carisi Dianna Hallen Leann MacIntire Jim Shamberg Nancy Caudle Emily Kawano Candace Martin Cathy Straka Peter Cohen Ann Kesselheim Whitney Massey Irene Szurley John Cooper Patricia King Allen Kathleen Massimini Kevin Timoney John Cox Steven Long Sydney Rathbun page 3. REPORT ON ENROLLMENT As many of you know by now, enrollment at COA was down this fall for the first time. The reasons are varied and not altogether clear. Certainly national trends, the decline in student age population, concern about tuition and financial aid are all factors. Increases in leaves of absences and the number of students graduating also play into the equation. In a final burst of energy before leaving her post as registrar, Lucy Honig compiled an enrollment report showing trends, attrition rate, number of students on leave, etc. If you would like a copy of this one-page report, it is available by contacting Carole O'Donnell. For those of you who haven't heard, Lucy left the college as of the first of the year. Her plans are exciting though tentative, and include traveling and writing and traveling some more. Be on the lookout for a green Mazda GLC packed to the roof rafters. Sally Crock is our new registrar; requests for transcripts may be sent to her. REPORT ON THE FALL QUESTIONNAIRE Carole O'Donnell Of the 300+ questionnaires sent last fall, we received 73 responses, a respectable percentage for a questionnaire of that length. Of those who responded, 12 people indicated interest in serving as correspondents, and a meeting of these people is being scheduled in Freeport for late January. Many other people volunteered their support in fundraising, student recruitment, and on the communications committee. People's various responses to questions on fundraising have been helpful to Albie Smith and others in the Development Office, and there was almost unanimous support for the publication of an association directory. This topic will be raised at a future board meeting. The creation of this newsletter is a direct result of people's responses. Although we won't be able to include all suggestions for the newsletter in a single issue, we will take all comments into consideration in publishing future issues and wish to encourage articles from members of the association. We received good information from our questions concerning the curriculum at COA -- about what was good and not-so-good in one's experience here. Over half of the respondents felt they had received adequate academic guidance at COA, and there was almost unanimous agreement that the degree of academic freedom is a positive influence on one's educational experience. Very few people felt that our limited laboratory and library facilities were a serious liability; in fact several expressed the opinion that limited facilities forced them to fend for themselves, plan ahead, and be innovative. The question on important gaps in the curriculum was hard to summarize because comments were related to years in attendance. For instance, the absence of history, political science, and government were all mentioned, but by people who attended COA prior to the hiring of Sue Mehrtens, Paul DuBois, and Don Meiklejohn. In response to the question concerning the "single strongest aspect of your experience at COA," the most frequently occurring comments were about the close personal contact with faculty and other students and participation in a supportive community. Frequently occurring comments concerning the weakest aspect of the COA experience concerned the isolation of the school and of Bar Harbor and the lack of diversity among the student body. A more formal compilation of this information will be available at a later time. I want to thank all of you who took the time to fill out the questionnaire and return it to me. page 4. The questionnaire put us in contact with many people we haven't heard from in years. There is too much information to comment on everybody, but I would like to mention a few people, particulary people who haven't been mentioned in previous newsletters. For instance, after attending a winemaking school in Davis, CA in 1979-80, ROB DEFORD is currently winemaker/manager of Boordy Vineyards in Maryland. JUSTINE BARCLAY DENISON is living on a farm in Sidney, ME, raising sheep, growing vegetables for the Kennebec Valley Growers Cooperative, and teaching at the Maranacook Community School. She and her husband Brian are looking for a a farm to purchase. SALLY (SKYE) CORNWELL PERKINS has a small farm in Ossippe, NH. She and her husband Daniel have a daughter named Rachael born this past year. Speaking on the subject of births, there have been either an extraordinary number of births this year or I am particularly sensitive to them. At any rate, Helen O'Donnell was born April 6th - in the midst of an outrageous blizzard. BILL GINN and JUNE LACOMB GINN had a daughter about the same time; BRUCE BENDER and his wife Barbara Simon had a son named Evan in August; JUNE TUSON DUFFORD and her husband James gave birth to son Aaron James in July; PAUL and DONNA MUNRO had a daughter in July; RICK WATERS and Becky had a daughter in May; and DAVID and CHRIS DEMERS gave birth to a daughter about two weeks ago. The population boom has hit staff as well as former students. Jacob Hyman was born in July, Joshua DuBois and Sander Van Twisk were born in August, and Amanda Cass was born in November. JULIAN HATCH writes from Boulder Utah that he has started a church of "Deep Ecology.' REBECCA RENAUD married Mark Hoglund in 1977, is renovating a brownstone in Brooklyn and working in New York City as a performing arts administrator for a number of experimental dance and theater companies. MARY K ELIOT is Director of Development for the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston, and DODIE JORDAN is enjoying Cambridge and her job as Office Manager of the Harvard Law Review. She is studying German at Harvard and will spend nine weeks in Prien, West Germany this summer studying the language, the culture, and the beer. This is only a fraction of the information we received from members of the association. We will report more news in future issues. BENEDICTION Philip Kunhardt, Oct. 9, 1982 The following benediction was given by Phil at the inauguration of Judith Swazey in October. Phil is currently pastor of the Church of St. Asaph in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. "Friends and People of COA: We are gathered here today at a turning point in the history of our college. Speeches today have looked back and have looked forward. Ed Kaelber has finally been allowed to move on to other things, and Judith Swazey has been welcomed and invested and heard from as our new president. It is a grand turning point, a pause, a fine moment, along the way. The college now has a history: An origin which needs chronicling (Sam Eliot?!) a wealth of memories, including swims in bright lakes and quests for tidepool creatures and ecological legal battles fought and won, and stranded whales helped, and friendships with music around fireplaces, and classrooms alive with discussion! Careers have been launched. Faculty have come and gone. Dear Dick Davis has died. Our college has a history. page 5. We have a philosophical history as well. A history grounded in a vision, or cluster of visions, having to do with the relationship between humans and the natural world of which we are a part. Dick, our philosopher, struck at the quick of our visionary life in his fascinating course named "Humans and Nature". To live into our future we need to continue in our vision - we need to know where we are going, what we most care about, what our priorities are, what finally matters. We need Rachel Carson's "Sense of Wonder" and the sensitivity to nature of Black Elk, of Lao Tzu, of Darwin, of Emerson, of St. Francis. Our own existences are intricately connected to nature itself; we are animals of language and culture, fellow creatures of all else that lives. Our family and social bonds are inheritances from a rich evolutionary past which includes the rise of the warm-blooded mammals with their live births and extended nursing of young, creating astonishing new mother-infant relationships as well as new forms of group behavior. We inherit meaning, and we make meaning; both are essential human processes. And yet, our very gift of lanugage, so distinctive of our species, by articulating the world into noun and verb, into subject and object, can sometimes obscure the myriad interweavings of life in our world. The bee and the flower can instead be seen as a single organism; the beech tree filled with green warblers for a moment becomes a new creature: a bird-tree. The planet itself, indeed the universe, can be seen as organism. We need new eyes, new vision, new compassion. Our new president, among other things, is an ethicist, and I think this is good. We need more attention in the years ahead to the great problems of human behavior. We need all of the humanities: psychology, sociology, ethics, history, political science, anthropology, literature - them all. We need attention to our cities, to our poor, and to the huge problems of international economic justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. once sang out, "I have a dream", and then spoke of a future where justice and freedom and peace might reign for all people. Let such humanitarian visions burn anew in our midst! And so, my benediction is not a benediction. Instead, I call upon each of us - all of us together - to become living benedictions, human sources of blessing to our world and to those in need around us. With wonder in our hearts, and thankfulness for all that we inherit, including our college and its first and second presidents, with passion for justice and with compassion for the oppressed, and with love and commitment to the good earth, - Let us burn with new vision, that a better, safer, more beautiful, more richly diverse, more equitable, more joyful world may yet come for us all." Amen