November 19, 1973
Page 37643
COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, a recent issue of the Harvard Bulletin contained an interesting and informative article about the College of the Atlantic, a College of Human Ecology in Bar Harbor, Maine.
This young institution of higher learning, under the direction of Edward G. Kaelber, has taken a novel approach to liberal education. As the college’s 1972 catalogue described it:
A college of human ecology cannot be an isolated academic enclave; we hope to reduce the distinction between “college” and the “outside world” as much as possible. College of the Atlantic began as a community effort and will remain an integral part of the community within which it grew.
Mr. President, to share with my colleagues the hopes and goals of this experiment in education, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the Bulletin article be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
HOW TO START A COLLEGE WHOSE ULTIMATE GOAL IS TO RENDER ITSELF OBSOLETE.
[By Samuel A. Eliot]
One afternoon in early April, 1969, I took a walk through Harvard Yard. There were dogs and babies in perambulators, and people throwing frisbees. University Hall had been occupied since morning by an unlikely assortment of radicals, curiosity-seekers, and hangers-on. The Yard police were locking the gates as I headed for home, a graduate student in the 333rd year of Harvard’s history, secure in the knowledge that nothing untoward would happen in the night. I was wrong.
Months later, on a September morning, I attended convocation ceremonies at Reed College. Reed was reputed to have the kind of flexibility and innovativeness that had emerged as ideals at Harvard following the University Hall bust and subsequent strike. In fact, the president was alluding to that very flexibility (a myth, as it turned out) when he observed that at Reed one should expect the unexpected. Moments later he was struck by a pie thrown by one of four students carrying the NLF flag. That chilling symbolic assassination spoke more eloquently of where Reed really was than anything the president had said.
A year later, I was teaching English in a small private secondary school in Monterey. This school was truly innovative and flexible. I was encouraged to develop my own curriculum, and so I asked the junior class if they would like their English studies to have a central focus – the theme of the relationship between people and their environment. To put it another way, were they interested in combining English with the study of ecology. All but three said no.
By early 1971, then, after Harvard, Reed, and York school, I was pretty discouraged, partly by the aims and methods of higher education; partly by the increasing deterioration not only of the “environment” but of our ability to see ourselves as organic parts of a whole working system. At that point, I was offered a job at College of the Atlantic, a nonexistent institution on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. I accepted.
College of the Atlantic can trace its beginnings back to 1947, when a disastrous fire destroyed many of the summer cottages in Bar Harbor, ending a way of life that many of the islanders had come to depend on. Over the next two decades, there were several attempts to start a school or college – regarded by many as a “non-polluting industry,” and a much-needed economic boost. Others were attracted by the intellectual and cultural diversity a college would bring to the island’s year-round population of 8,000. One such attempt, led by a Roman Catholic priest and a Bar Harbor businessman, succeeded.
One of the future college's trustees, the Reverend Arthur C. McGiffert '13, proposed human ecology as the focus for the yet-to-be-devised curriculum, suggesting that the term be used in its broadest meaning: study of the different relationships between people and their environment.
College of the Atlantic was incorporated in July 1969 as a private, coeducational college of human ecology. With some seed money, a focus, a 21-acre leased shore front campus, and a vast amount of enthusiasm, the trustees began to do something that none of them had ever tried. In the fall of 1969, while I was being hastily disillusioned in Oregon, the board members began to make a college.
Edward 0. Kaelber '48 began his duties as College of the Atlantic's first president the following January. A man who describes himself as fond of challenges, Kaelber had been a dean at Harvard's Graduate School of Education from 1960 to 1968, before taking on the development of a large secondary school in western Nigeria.
In Bar Harbor he found himself with a couple of drafty buildings, a secretary, a few inquiring letters (mostly of the "what the hell are you up to?" variety, including one such from me), and several pressing questions. Where's the money to come from? Who will teach here? What will they teach? What about students? What are the real goals and philosophy of the college? Why start a small private college when literally hundreds are folding each year? What the hell are you up to, anyway?
During the next eighteen months, Ed Kaelber looked for answers to these questions. He persuaded several prominent scientists and educators to join the board of trustees. Among them, from the Harvard school of Education, were Theodore Sizer Jr., Ph. D. '62, and Dana Cotton, Ed. M. '43, Melrille Cote, a young doctoral candidate at the Ed School, was persuaded to provide help with student recruitment and general planning. That winter of 1970-71 was one of the longest and harshest in Maine history. After it was over, my wife and I headed east from California to see what was going on, to see if we could help. This story is about (some of) what we found, and what has happened since.
"Our purpose as an academic community will be to study the various relationships which exist between man and his environment, including both the natural world which supports his existence and the society and institutions which he created." From the 1971 Catalog.
My wife and I had a chance for some firsthand study of "the various relationships" while we more or less camped out on the third floor of the college's main building. Most of the time, we were on the receiving end. As assistant to the president (read utility infielder), my academic/ administrative responsibilities were supplemented by various chores of a housekeeping nature.
The college's roof leaked – in my office, in Ed Kaelber's office, in the library (where part of the ceiling actually collapsed). In November, the boiler developed a penchant for midnight shutdowns. And with the onset of December's storms, the half-gone skylight in our bathroom provided us with ankle-deep ice water on more mornings than I care to remember.
And into the natural world which supports our existence (in this case, Frenchman's Bay), every flush of a college toilet deposited a burden of raw sewage. And still does. We haven't quite reconciled ourselves to the fact that Maine's college of human ecology is a polluter (and consumer) of natural resources. The best of intentions, and most ecological of attitudes, don't change the economic constraints that have thus far kept us from installing our own adequate sewage treatment system.
"We are determined not to spawn another second-rate liberal arts college. We will make no compromise with quality." E. G. Kaelber, early in 1970, and many times thereafter.
"Quality" is a tough word. Most measurements of it are highly subjective. We had some interesting ideas about education, and some firm convictions about the types of people we needed. But to combine people with ideas, to create a college that is in fact of high quality, you need something more tangible than good intentions. Money.
Ed Kaelber is fond of saying, "The omens are good." He's been saying it for three years, with a regularity that's saved from being monotonous only because it seems to be truer with each utterance. At the beginning, in 1970, omens were about all he had to go on.
Despite the fact that Mount Desert Island is the summer home of some of the world's wealthiest people – with all its concomitant temptations to charge ahead saying "College of the Atlantic is the answer! Support us!" – Kaelber proceeded with caution. He describes early fund-raising efforts as "rifle shot, rather than shotgun." Instead of making a general appeal for funds, he identified people who might, by nature or inclination, be interested in supporting a college of human ecology. The fact that we're here today attests to his success, both in raising money and in persuading people with serious financial clout to join the board of trustees. With the exception of two grants (a planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a scholarship grant from the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation), our support has come from private individuals and family foundations.
I'm told that when the decision to hire me was made in January 1971, a collection had to be taken in order to buy the postage stamp for my letter of appointment. I suspect (though I'm not positive) that this is apocryphal. In any case, since then we've raised close to $1.5 million. We may never be perfectly secure financially, but we're a lot less shaky than we were last year, and the omens are (forgive me, Ed) definitely good.
"We are looking for students who are prepared to benefit from the unique curriculum offered here. Maturity, self-direction, responsibility, imagination, and resilience are among the personal qualities we consider most important." 1971 student recruitment brochure.
Perhaps we should have said "most necessary," since we were inviting students to come to a college that would begin to exist only upon their arrival. Mel Cote and I visited dozens of schools during the fall of 1971. We wrote a catalog, complete with descriptions of projected course offerings, and designed a set of application forms. We made plans for a series of weekend applicant visits.
Early in 1972 the applications, and the applicants, began to arrive. We conducted individual interviews and informal get-togethers, and, weather permitting hiked around Acadia National Park. Of the 32 students who decided to join us (out of 40 we'd accepted from 85 applications), 29 had spent at least two days and nights at the college. They knew that "unique" actually meant that the 1972-73 curriculum hadn't been fully devised yet, and that they were to have an important role in its creation and development.
They came in September 1972 – sixteen men, sixteen women (age range 16-26; fourteen of them with previous experience at places like Reed, Whitman, Denison, Williams, Amherst, Middlebury, and Yale. A few have left; most have stayed. The quotation from the 1972 catalog still holds, but now we know it's true. At a recent conference I was asked, "Besides academic ability and a commitment to ecology, what do you consider most important?"
My answer was "Guts."
"A college of human ecology cannot be an isolated academic enclave; we hope to reduce the distinction between "college" and the "outside world" as much as possible. College of the Atlantic began as a community effort and will remain an integral part of the community within which it grew." From the 1972 catalog.
Easier said than done. The "outside world," including Mt. Desert Island, was highly skeptical about the college's chances for success. After coming up with more than $50,000 in initial pledges, the islanders for the most part sat back with a wait-and-see attitude. The school had begun as a community effort, but it was rapidly being taken over by people from "away." When I joined in 1971, there were unfounded rumors about a Harvard Ed School plot. The real test of our 1971 rhetoric began when the school opened in September 1972. How would the town of Bar Harbor react to the presence of our 32 students? And how would the students feel about spending the winter in a small town that can fairly be called, November to April, isolated and remote?
Today the college is a part of Bar Harbor (and Mt. Desert Island), not because of any administrative programs or "town-gown" strategy, but because the students have initiated and developed so many points of contact within the town that the distinction, though it inevitably remains, is truly blurred. Community service, environmental education programs in elementary schools, singing in the island's churches, sponsoring regional art exhibits ... there is a steadily growing interface between college and community, not because we said there would be, but because the students and the townspeople made it so.
"Our curriculum is based on a conviction that bodies of knowledge are interdependent, and may in fact be regarded as a working system in which all parts complement and reinforce one another. There is no departmental structure, and people with different backgrounds, disciplines, and experience work together." 1972 catalog.
In the 1971 catalog we listed courses alphabetically, by title; now we list them according to the term in which they're offered. That's probably as far as we'll go, at least in the foreseeable future.
The college's curriculum was initially the responsibility of a trustees' curriculum committee, who recognized early on that they couldn't do much substantive planning without a faculty. So we appointed a faculty (five words to tell what took more than two years to do, appointing three men and a woman from a group of about 1,800 applicants), and the curriculum began to take shape in the spring of 1972: Literature and Ecology; Environmental Law; Cultural Ecology; Human Effects on Natural Systems.
We had to plan not only the courses themselves, but the interfaces between them; from the start, we wanted to explore the 'organic' connections linking the great whales, Thoreau, oil spills, and Buckminster Fuller. In most cases, courses were meant to complement other courses: Maine Coastal Culture and Open Space – Maine Coastal Architecture; Human Effects on Natural Systems – Government Regulation of HEONS. Later workshops, such as Native Americans: Philosophy, Culture, and Law, are team-taught and interdisciplinary within themselves.
To that beginning we've added visual arts, physics, philosophy, botany, math, and biochemistry. And the curriculum planning goes on, based on regular evaluations and assessments of what we need and what we're trying to do: develop a problem-oriented interdisciplinary curriculum in human ecology (for all practical purposes we've retained Reverend McGiffert's working definition). What follows are descriptions of three "learning experiences" that took place during 1972-73, reflecting faculty/student goals and aspirations, telling a little of what we know and showing how much more we have to learn.
Much as we would like to, we can no longer prepare students for life in "tomorrow's world." We can barely conceive of tomorrow's world. With the increasing pace of social and technological change, we can hope only to prepare students to recognize the nature of change and to acquire the skills and attitudes that will enable them to deal courageously and responsibly with the problems associated with change.
The Great Heath is a 5,720-acre sphagnum bog in Washington County, on the mainland, north of the college. It is, as the largest sphagnum moss bog in Maine, an ecologically unique area. Right beside it is Pleasant River, which supports one of the few remaining Atlantic salmon runs on the eastern seaboard. Late in our first term, most of the students spent a day on the Great Heath, led by two faculty members: environmental lawyer Daniel Kane, and biologist/ecologist Steven Katona.
Dan Kane, who was then teaching a course called Law, Government, and the Biosphere, and Steve Katona, whose Ecology of the Natural Systems was the college's one required course, had more in mind than a fine late fall outing. Northeast Peat Moss, Inc. had filed an application with Maine's Land Use Regulation Commission to extract peat moss from the Great Heath. As a practical exercise in interdisciplinary problem-solving, the Great Heath seemed tailor-made; the good guys (the environmentally aware COA students) versus the bad guys (the peat-mining company, out to make a buck by destroying 1,500 acres of the heath). But it was by no means that simple.
On January 22, the commission and the Department of Environmental Protection held a joint hearing in Columbia, attended by local residents, representatives of the peat-mining company, and several righteous members of the college's environmental law class. Standing up to speak against the mining company's application, the students were shocked to discover that many of the residents of the area opposed not the mining company but the college. In an economically depressed area, “a traumatic incision and incursion upon the heath” did not seem as important as the number of potential new jobs offered by Northeast Peat Moss, Inc.
I missed the hearing itself, but was on hand when some of the students returned, late at night, from Columbia. "How did it go?" I asked one of them. He paused, at a loss for words. "Was it a good hearing?"
Craig, one of the eighteen students who came to us without previous college experience, said "Good? Christ, I don't know. It sure wasn't what we expected." Then, walking tiredly away, "But I guess it was one hell of a learning experience."
Subsequently, Dan Kane's law class submitted a twenty-item legal brief to the commission, strongly opposing the peat-mining application, on legal, ecological, and aesthetic grounds. The brief was picked up and carried by the local newspapers, which also carried the early March news that the commission had in fact denied the application. And many of the reasons upon which the commission based its decision were taken directly from student testimony at the hearing, and the legal brief. The Bar Harbor Times editorial that week was headlined, "COA on the winning team."
A potential source of employment in Washington County has been blocked. The Great Heath, for the time being at least, is safe. It was an ecological victory, in which the commission agreed with the environmental law class that the uniqueness of the Great Heath outweighed the economic benefits to the area. Early on, we began establishing our credentials as an activist institution (or "a bunch of damned troublemakers," depending on how you felt about it). We were instrumental in preserving Maine's largest sphagnum moss bog. But we also cost some people some jobs.
Craig was right. It was one hell of a learning experience.
An examination of ecological problems – the interrelationship of man and environment – has been chosen as the core of the curriculum not only because of the urgency of these problems (which makes them "relevant" in the narrow sense), but because their very complexities provide the means for developing habits of thought, action, and feeling necessary for coping with a changing world.
Steve Katona came to Bar Harbor from California about a year after I did. He's a biologist; I am, as they say, "in" literature. We hit it off, not only because the chemistry was good, but because we share a common interest: endangered species. So we decided to set up a workshop. (The primary objectives of the workshops are to work toward understanding the complexities of specific environmental problems; and to provide a medium for interaction and synergism between perspectives and disciplines), and called it "Humans and the Great Whales." At the beginning of the first term, twelve students signed on.
Things started off well. In mid-September, cruising on a Coast Guard tug, we encountered at least eight fifty-foot finback whales, feeding in leisurely circles around the ship, and the excitement of that afternoon seemed to promise that the workshop could be nothing less than an unqualified success. Back on land, we tackled such topics as cetacean evolution, biology and morphology; the history of whaling; whales in mythology, folklore, and art. We read Moby Dick, and had a special screening of the film, at which we served grog. We began to realize how very little is really known or understood about the marine mammals we were studying.
By midwinter we were in a semi-crisis state. Seven students had left the workshop. We'd been back on land too long. Steve and I, the originators of the workshop, tried to inject some life into it by assigning some readings, and were politely but firmly reminded that, as all participants in a workshop are equal, we were in no position to tell anyone to do anything. The future of "Humans and the Great Whales" looked grim. We understood the complexities, we had the interaction, but we weren't getting anywhere.
At about that time, when we needed it most, we found a handle. The International Whaling Commission, the regulatory body for world-wide commercial whaling had at its 1972 meeting defeated a proposal for a 10-year moratorium on all commercial whaling, despite the fact that several of its member nations had supported such a proposal at the U.N. Environmental Conference in Stockholm. Why? Although IWC regulations prohibit the taking of several endangered species, such as blues, humpbacks, and Pacific grays, a moratorium seems in order if only because we know so little about the creatures (beings?) we're slaughtering. We made an attempt to persuade all the IWC member nations to support the moratorium at the June 1973 meeting. It was another learning experience. We got into economics, law, politics, and international relations. And we were advised that, should the IWC vote in favor of a moratorium, two member nations (Japan and Russia, the two countries that do most of the world's commercial whaling) would probably drop out, freeing themselves from any regulations on either numbers or species of catch.
Meanwhile, with the cooperation of the Coast Guard, we began setting up a regional whale watch, using the Mount Desert Rock light station as a base of operations for monitoring the migratory and feeding habits of any cetaceans that might pass within 21 miles of Mount Desert Island during the summer. We started hunting up photographic and acoustical equipment, and commenced the search for a vessel suitable for taking our research even further out of the classroom than Mount Desert Rock. (Secondary objectives include group organization, the establishment of priorities for gathering and analyzing data, and the development of skills of communication and advocacy.)
Subsequent personal encounters with cetaceans have not been wholly satisfactory. One morning in late March, Steve left for Ohio. That afternoon I flew to Washington. That evening a ten-foot pilot whale stranded itself and died (or was killed) on tidal flats not far from the college. One workshop member was on the Olympic peninsula, another was in Austria. Those remaining did a partial dissection, and brought back samples for lab study. Then in April, Steve spent three weeks in Alaska with a team of scientists, studying the spring migration of the nearly-extinct bowhead whale. "Belugas, blizzards, and birds," Steve said upon his return. "The expedition was a great success. But I personally didn't see one single damn bowhead."
And that's how things have been going in the whole workshop.
Problems in human ecology require perspectives difficult to acquire within the confines of traditional academic and professional specialization. Parts need to be continually related to wholes. Analysis and synthesis become alternating emphases in a single continuing learning experience. The aim of this kind of education is not the acquisition of a particular body of knowledge by itself, but – as Alfred North Whitehead expressed it – “the acquisition of the art of utilization of knowledge.”
Initial plans for the college called for an eventual enrollment of 600, and it seemed clear (to most of us, anyway) that our present location is too small to accommodate that many people without resorting to high-rise buildings and parking garages. Through late 1975 we have a lease on 21 acres of shore front property, formerly the Oblate Seminary, and before that one of Bar Harbor's most sumptuous summer cottages. The one huge building houses all our classrooms, offices, labs, library, dining facilities, and so on. The grounds are strikingly beautiful, and the soil (as the abundance of riches from my quarter-acre garden can attest) is black, rich, and fertile.
No matter. In the fall of 1971, still proceeding on the 600-student track, we decided to purchase sixty acres atop Strawberry Hill just south of town, and about two miles from the college. Swept by the 1947 fire, the hill is mostly rock ledge and blueberry patches, with a couple of crumbling foundations and a lot of young birch trees. A donation of twenty adjoining acres gave us eighty acres to work with, two hilltops and the saddle between, commanding a superb view of Frenchman's Bay and the mountains of Acadia National Park. The new campus came with a couple of serious built-in flaws. First, as a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization, we were removing eighty acres from the town's tax base. Second, the technical and logistical problems of sewage and utilities were, to most of us, mind-boggling.
We obtained the services of an architect to devise an initial master plan for the campus. Edward Larrabee Barnes '38, M. Arch. '42 is a summer resident of Somesville, a few miles from Bar Harbor, and his convictions, from the beginning, matched ours. Not only must we avoid wreaking ecological havoc on Strawberry Hill, but we must create a campus that is aesthetically pleasing from within, from the top of Cadillac Mountain, and from the waters of Frenchman's Bay. Also it must be functional, non-polluting, easily accessible (the hill is quite steep), and energy-conserving. And economical, both to build and to maintain.
Early in 1973, in a prime example of spontaneous generation, the Strawberry Hill Workshop came into being, composed of a disparate group of students and teachers who wanted to make sure that the campus master plan was a true reflection of the college's aims and ideals. (We consider workshops to be the core of the curriculum: they are interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, and designed to minimize the traditional student-teacher roles.) In many ways the Strawberry Hill Workshop itself reflected not only our aims and ideals, but the confusion and frustration that come from tackling a large problem head-on. Perhaps more than any other single course or workshop, it demonstrated why we don't have requirements at the college. In confronting a problem (in this case, the creation of an eighty-acre college campus on a granite fire-scarred hilltop), students soon discover what we meant in the catalog when we said "complexities." If a student learns statistics, it's because the problem can't be solved without statistics, not because someone said, "Learn statistics!"
The Workshop's central focus was Barnes' master plan, with special emphasis on interior design, environmental impact, and alternative energy sources. The preliminary master plan was modified, after submission of a twelve-page workshop "findings sheet," to include at least two windmills, less parking space, and more cohesion between academic-administrative-living areas. Undoubtedly there will be more findings and more modifications. We want to be able to say of our campus, when it's finished, that it embodies the philosophy and goals of our college. Thanks to Barnes and the Strawberry Hill Workshop, it appears that we will be able to say it, and mean it.
It's 1973, and we're still working on answers for many of 1970's questions. Perhaps we'll find the answers. Perhaps College of the Atlantic will make a significant contribution to higher education, or to the restoration of ecological balance, or both. In a sense, our ultimate goal is to render ourselves obsolete; ideally, "environmental education" will begin in infancy, and the need for a college of Human Ecology will cease to exist. In the meantime, however, we are concerned with survival, with the survival of the species, and the planet, and with the survival of intellectual curiosity, those "habits of thought and feeling necessary for coping with a changing world."
I tried out that bit of rhetoric (it's honest, it's sincere, but it is rhetoric) on a recent environmental conference, and was immediately hit with the question "But what will your students do when they graduate, and what will they have gained that they couldn't have gained somewhere else?" The first part of my answer was – and still has to be – "we don't know yet." We haven't any graduates. We can guess, having been told that job employment in a broad field labeled "environmental protection" will quadruple between now and 1980, what there will be for many of our graduates. Also, as we expand our curriculum and develop resource-sharing ties, we expect our students to meet the entrance requirements of most graduate schools in the country.
Our confidence is apparently shared by the Maine state legislature, which has given us the legal authority to grant degrees, by the regional accrediting agency and by the U.S. Office of Education.
The second part of the answer has to do with what's different about the college. ("Different" doesn't mean "better," but "better" often means "different.") Mostly, that's what this story is about. Mel Cote says there hasn't been a new idea since the Greeks. We're trying new combinations of old methods, building on the mistakes and successes of other educational innovators. We have the advantage of starting from scratch, with no establishment to fight and no existing structures to struggle within. Our college community is governed by a system of committees on which students are equal members. During the third term, faculty meetings were chaired by a student. We have a working responsibility/accountability system. Beyond that, the traditional administrator-faculty-student distinctions are breaking down, and the results of that breakdown are not chaos and anarchy but openness, communication, and increasing willingness to accept responsibility not only for one's own actions, but for the continued growth and well-being of the college.
I'm still asked, in Bar Harbor, Boston, St. Louis, and Santa Barbara, just what the hell I'm up to. Me, personally? Despite the nice-sounding title, I'm still what I was originally hired to be: utility infielder. What that means, in effect, is doing whatever needs to be done. I do some administrating; I do some teaching. Sometimes I go for long walks in the woods and mountains of Acadia; summers I tend my garden. It's an idyllic life. I've developed a duodenal ulcer.
Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, was one of the first people to build a summer home at Northeast Harbor. He loved Mount Desert Island, and helped create what became Acadia National Park. Early in the 1900's, he led an unsuccessful attempt to ban all automobile traffic from the island. Today, on this glacier-riven piece of granite and spruce, there are about 8,000 year-round inhabitants. In the summers, across that bridge, in their campers and trailers, and Winnebagos, come 2.5 million people. The big money now is in land speculation and motels; the summer air is filled with the cries of herring gulls and the smell of automobile exhaust.
Eliot was right. I can't help thinking that he would approve of what we're trying to do here. He had, and we share, a commitment to higher education and a concern for the environment. If College of the Atlantic succeeds, it will be because of that commitment and that concern. We don't have all the answers. But we are learning what some of the important questions are, and how to ask them.