Origins
By Bill Carpenter, founding faculty member
Bill Carpenter retired from teaching after 48 years at College of the Atlantic. His latest book, Silence, was published by Islandport Press in June 2021.
College of the Atlantic was conceived in the late 1960s as a response to the tragedy of war and the looming ecological catastrophe. We came to a remote and beautiful island to reexamine where we had come from and who we were. We established a physical and intellectual center where we could recover the wholeness of vision necessary to understand a broken world. Our name reflected the depth and fragility of the ocean that ultimately gave birth to us. We arrived as individuals but bonded into a single community that has been steadily expanding for half a century.
It was an era of worldwide student revolt. From Paris to Berkeley, students denounced their universities as citadels of meaninglessness and irrelevance. They were demanding a voice in their own education, and that was their expectation at COA. The original faculty spent the whole summer planning the new curriculum; when the students arrived in September they said, “Wait a minute, this is our college too,” and the All College Meeting was born. Students have participated on every committee and all levels of hiring and decision making since Term One.
It’s no surprise that 50 years later we have the highest student voting rate in the United States. Our students’ sense of purpose and agency in the world comes from the equality and self-determination they are learning at COA. Whether you’re a brand-new student or an octogenarian professor or a cook sautéing delicious eggplant in TAB, each community member has an equal voice in the plenary assembly and an equal vote. We were the first and only college established as a direct democracy. We renounced human supremacy and respected the sacredness of all living things. Dogs were welcome in all classrooms and meetings until they voted for meat in TAB and had to be removed.
We questioned every aspect of academic authority: no tenure track, no faculty rank, no Dean’s List, no deans (back then), no publish or perish, no summa cum laude, no Phi Beta Kappa, no valedictorians. “I do not call one greater or one smaller,” says Walt Whitman. “That which fills its place is equal to any.” We discouraged competitiveness because the excesses of human competition were compromising the existence of life on Earth. We removed the boundary between aesthetics and science, and got rid of the specialized majors and departmental silos that had partitioned the mind and fenced off knowledge since the Middle Ages. We based our principles on the direct observation of natural systems and the real-time dynamics of a close, human community. Human ecology was not an established discipline but an unsurveyed dimension for student and teacher to encounter on a level footing, and which every COA generation has interrogated in a different light.
We recycled an old summer estate from the Gilded Age so a new generation could learn to inhabit our planet without draining it dry and carbonizing its atmosphere. It had an elegant circular staircase that rose up through the center and bound the community like a spiral of DNA. The previous tenants had been Oblate priests and seminarians, which lent some religious gravity to the human ecology cult. Their hallowed shrine became our spiritual center, and we echoed their passionate monotheism in our single major reflecting the oneness of all life. We were a tiny college but our totem
