Letter from the President
David Hales. Photo by Donna Gold.
As institutions of American higher education wrestle with the consequences of global financial recession, it is important to look beyond the serious economic issues of today and courageously reconsider our purpose and mission. And we must be more honest than ever about the effectiveness of our performance. As institutions, our “report card” must be measured in terms of the economic health of our societies, the way humans interact with each other and the ecological health of our planet.
Our institutions are not performing well. Even as many faculty and students are thoughtfully addressing the challenges of the future, our institutions remain remarkably unchanged, as though fearful of applying the implications of what we know about the way students learn and the challenges we face to the dogma and traditions which too often define us. The challenge to which we must rise is to enable our graduates to not just understand the world we have chosen, but to shape a better one. Almost forty years ago, COA trustees, our remarkable founding President Ed Kaelber, and a select group of (then young) academic leaders, created College of the Atlantic as an alternative to many traditional educational institutions. They believed that it was possible to construct a student experience based not only on state-of-the-art knowledge and the wisdom of the ages, but also on student needs and aspirations. It was an experiment then. We are no longer an experiment, but we are still purposefully and consciously an alternative in what we study, how we teach and in how we try to make sense of the world and our own lives. They created our college to focus on the study of the relationships among humans and their environments, what we call Human Ecology. As relevant as this was in the 1970s, it is even more relevant for the twentyfirst century. And for us, as for all of higher education, the challenge of tomorrow is daunting. C.P. Snow, writing about the dissolution of the British Empire, observed: “I can’t help thinking about the Venetian Republic. Like us they had been fabulously lucky. They became rich, as we did, by accident. They had acquired immense political skill, just as we have. A good many of them were tough-minded, realistic, patriotic. They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many of them gave their minds to working out solutions—but it would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had crystallized. They never found the will to break it.” Our college, just as the world in which we live, is the result of the choices we have made. At COA, we attempt to shape an institution that mirrors a world we would like to see, and which enables our students to develop the leadership skills and judgment that will let them become the authors of their own life stories. We are not saying that we have achieved it, but we know we are better for trying. I am confident that our graduates will leave knowing that it is their choices that will shape our future, and that they, just like the college, will approach that future with a wonderful sense of opportunity and possibility.
David Hales
2 | COA