Letter from the president

By Darron Collins ’92

I’m curious about your thoughts on the cover of this magazine. I can’t get enough of it. Blakeney is a fellow COA alum and I’m therefore wildly biased. But, irrespective of the affiliation of the artist, I find it hard to turn away from that blue Portal among the sky, the rocks, and the sparse vegetation. It also taps into my fascination with Stanley Kubrick and the black, rectangular monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey. From both, I cannot look away, yet I’m strangely unsettled. In both, I find questions about the future of humanity—maybe that’s the source of the disquiet: moving through that portal, what possibilities might you find on the other side, good or bad?

In this edition of COA Magazine we’ve used that idea—possibilities—as a thread to gather our thoughts, news, and ideas from across the year and from the thousands of people who are part of the College of the Atlantic community. The idea is inherently future-focused and, because we’re embarking on our next long-term strategic plan, the timing is spot on for us. Over the course of this calendar year, we’ll be asking questions steeped in possibility: What can we do differently? What should we do differently?

This kind of strategizing also requires that we think about the ideas and approaches from our history we should be carrying through that portal into our future. Embracing our place is, in my eyes, one such approach, and herein you’ll read about North Woods Ways, COA’s new wilderness outpost in northern Maine. Conceptually, we have long bathed in the interstices, between disciplinary boundaries and betwixt ridged academic silos. You’ll get a good sense of what that looks like in the world beyond COA in the piece called Keepers of Sheep, featuring entrepreneurial 2018 graduates Arlo Hark and Josie Trople. Finally, although some might conflate human ecology with conservation or environmental science, ours is an expansive curriculum that embraces the arts and humanities with the same vigor we embrace the STEM fields, and you’ll read about that in the news of the Kippy Stroud Artists-in-Residence Program as well as the Supreme Court roundtable discussion, which asks us to consider what might be possible in that institution. 

For certain, the most important thing we will collectively carry through that portal and into our institutional future is our commitment to supporting people. We have a unique mission and vision and we cultivate great ideas here. We are blessed with an amazing, inspiring campus and location. But it’s the many incredible people within the COA community who make us our strongest and most creative. More than anything, these pages tell the story of attracting great people, putting them together to work cooperatively on projects, and nourishing their ideas. I’m quite certain that emphasis is what makes our possibilities as breathtaking as they are. 

Enjoy, Darron