COA Vision
Front Cover Marketa Doubnerova ’13 “In the middle of a great city, like Paris, one wishes for a little bit of green wilderness.” Watercolor on paper. Back Cover Andrea Molina ’13 “El Arbol.” Ink on paper. These images were created during a COA term in Vichy, France last spring with art faculty members Dru Colbert and Nancy Andrews. Nine students studied French, French film, and created artistic travel journals, or carnets de voyage. The images on the front and back covers were shown at exhibits in Vichy in May and at the college’s Ethel H. Blum Gallery in October.
COA is published biannually for the College of the Atlantic community. Please send ideas, letters, and submissions (short stories, poetry, and revisits to human ecology essays) to: COA Magazine College of the Atlantic 105 Eden St, Bar Harbor, ME 04609 dgold@coa.edu
Letter from the Editor Just as COA was being formed, the generation of 1992—President Darron Collins’ generation—was being born. Like the college, these children came into a chaotic world. Nineteen sixty-eight, the year Les Brewer answered Father Jim Gower’s question about what could be done for the people of Mount Desert Island with the definitive, “Let’s start a college,” was the same year Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. It was also the year students shut down Columbia University, the University of Chicago went on strike, and the University of California Berkeley erupted. Education was in total upheaval—and by 1970 the unthinkable happened: at Kent State University four students were killed by members of the Ohio National Guard. While protests against the war, against segregation, against authoritarianism, and for women’s liberation continued, while Ohio’s Cuyahoga River actually caught fire due to the pollution within, a quiet group of COA’s first trustees and founding president Ed Kaelber pondered just what kind of education was needed for those troubled times. Clearly this college would need to train students to fathom, and work to resolve, some of these terrible rifts—not only for humans, but also for the plants and animals that were here long before we were. A college devoted to viewing the world as an integrated whole didn’t only make sense—it seemed essential. Much of this magazine is devoted to the alumni of our middle generation, the men and women who—whether in Switzerland, Hawaii, or Maine— were born with COA. As COA’s founders were exploring education, the generation featured in these pages were infants beginning to examine their world with eyes and ears and tongue and hands. What is ultimately so brilliant about COA is that the approach favored by our founders is focused on encouraging and channeling the adventurousness, curiosity, and enthusiasm that is so apparent among children, and so likely to be educated out of adults. Read through the profiles of Darron’s generation at COA, and the celebration of Lou Rabineau, COA’s third president, who led us through those years. The original COA mission—based on a passion for learning and doing, and basic respect for the world and for each other—is clearly embodied in this middle generation, those who have come of age along with the college.
Donna Gold, COA Editor
Printed on recycled paper with vegetable-based inks on equipment using 100% wind-generated power.
Photo by Julia De Santis ’12.
The faculty, students, trustees, staff, and alumni of College of the Atlantic envision a world where people value creativity, intellectual achievement, and diversity of nature and human cultures. With respect and compassion, individuals construct meaningful lives for themselves, gain appreciation of the relationships among all forms of life, and safeguard the heritage of future generations.