Snapshots from COA, fall 2019

I was fortunate enough to spend the fall 2019 trimester at the College of the Atlantic on Mount Desert Island, Maine, as a visiting faculty member. From early September to late November, I taught a class called Digital Design where we explored the specific possibilities of visual communication in digital media.

Here are a few visual and verbal impressions from the college and the island.

COA is a liberal arts college with some 350 students and 35 faculty members. Nearly all students graduate with a BA degree in Human Ecology, which entails the study of the relations between humans and their natural and social environment. Students choose three courses per trimester, and the choice is rather unrestricted except for a mandatory core course in human ecology and some requirements on covering all the resource areas of Environmental Science, Human Studies and Art and Design. Classes are small, often with 10–12 students and rarely more than 20.

The three visual elements of the college logo represent Human, Earth and Water. Inscribed together into a circle, they make up the COA take on human ecology.

The college works actively towards creating and upholding a sense of community. One example of this is the governance model, where many important operational decisions are prepared in mixed committees and then made in weekly all-college meetings open to staff, faculty and students. Students also contribute actively to admission and recruitment processes.

The work study program is another way in which students share many of the joint responsibilities: campus maintenance, the cafeteria, the college library, and so on. Nearly all students participate in work studies.

The norms of the college are explicitly inclusive and accepting. When teaching, I found that students were prone to praising and supporting each other in class, without any overt sense of competition.

The artist-activist group Complex Movements from Detroit visited the college to present their work and run a workshop. The presentation was scheduled for a Friday night at 7pm, yet attendance was very impressive with students and faculty as well as local community members showing up.

In every week of the trimester, the college calendar offered several invited speakers, seminars, performances and other opportunities to learn, interact and be inspired to make change and explore alternative ways of living. For example, the weeks around Complex Movement’s visit also had visitors from the children’s village Jhamtse Gatsal and the Twin Oaks intentional community, who gave talks and spent a couple of days each with students and faculty members.

There was a Fridays for Future climate strike in the central park of Bar Harbor in late September, with many students and faculty from the college speaking and participating. Much of what COA does seems to be preparing students to participate in making change – the motto of the school is “life-changing, world-changing.” This is also manifested in the language and culture immersion programs that are offered. This term, for instance, students were taking immersion classes in Spanish in preparation for spending the winter term on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico where they would live with host families, take classes taught in Spanish or Maya with local academics, and do individual projects on aspects of local culture.

I spoke to a recently hired faculty member teaching data science and programming, who told me that during his job interview he was asked what course he would propose outside his own area of expertise. He responded by pitching an idea about an interdisciplinary course on bikes, ranging from mechanics and bike repair to energy calculations to urban planning and the roles of bikes in historical and contemporary societies. He thought that pitch was probably one of the reasons he got the job (and he is now very active in working with a group of students to set up a bike shop to repurpose and repair used bikes for the community’s free use). Interdisciplinarity is a priority at the college in general, which is not surprising considering the consistent focus on human ecology.

A key idea of COA seems to be to combine the work of head, heart and hand. The college owns two farms on the island where much of the food is produced that is served in the student cafeteria, and where many students do work study and internships. Another example is the senior project that every student has to do, where one option is to do a pure practice project such as restoring an abandoned garden on campus. There is a museum of natural history on campus where more or less all exhibits were made by students, mostly as taxidermy class projects and senior projects. Of course, there are also other options such as art projects or scientific research projects (and, not infrequently, projects combining art and science!).

Building and sustaining a community does not come for free, though. Students at COA as well as faculty and staff devote much time and energy to their work and to the common good. Sometimes there just isn’t enough hours to go around.

The college was inaugurated in 1969 and sits at the edge of the village of Bar Harbor, on the shoreline of Frenchman Bay which is part of the Atlantic Ocean. (Hence the name of the college.) Aquatic mammals studies and marine biology are big topics at the college, for obvious reasons.

There is room for all first-year students to live on campus, in a mix of older and newer buildings. Higher-year students mostly rent rooms and houses in town, which is a good way to keep residency up during the off-season. On the other hand, it means that many students have to move often during their college years.

Bar Harbor used to be a summer resort for the East Coast wealthy in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This building was originally erected as a “summer cottage.” It is now part of the college and used for admin offices and teaching spaces.

This picture comes from the building in which my temporary office was located – another repurposed “summer cottage.”

Mount Desert Island is a fairly large island off the coast of northern Maine. Much of the island consists of the Acadia National Park, which provides the real-life laboratory for many of the classes at the college, as well as healing and recreation for college students and island residents alike.

The tourist season extends into October, including several cruise ships per day with day-trip visitors to Acadia and the villages on the island. In total, the island and the national park receive millions of visitors every year during spring, summer and fall.

Still the national park is large enough to provide a sense of serenity if you just get away from the most popular sightseeing spots.

My oldest daughter is currently a senior at COA, and a bonus reason for the trip was that my wife and I were able to spend a lot of time with her. This also meant that we were invited to many gatherings and activities outside the college, such as pumpkin carving for Halloween.

Our heartfelt thanks go to all the people we met during our stay, in the college as well as outside it, for inviting us into your communities. And my equally heartfelt thanks to the colleagues at LiU who made it possible for me to go away in the middle of a busy teaching semester!