Q: How old are you? A: It depends.

Can we be 40 already?

Well, that’s up for debate! COA was founded in 1969, but our first students enrolled in 1972 after the pedagogy was established, a board was recruited, buildings were repaired or built, and faculty members and Anne Peach were hired. I think we are so student-centered, we didn’t really start the clock running until they got here. How else to explain that our Silver Anniversary was in 1997, not 1994? Still, our official emblem is marked MCMLXIX, so it’s time for a little birthday flashback.

We tend to think of 1969 in two remarkable incongruous images, both of which are cliché: 1) the mud-smeared tripping hippies in Bethel, NY singing with the Dead and 2) the pocket-protected, skinny-tied engineers at NASA in Houston, communicating with the first man on the moon.

But the year was more than Woodstock and Apollo 11. Headlines reported major technological advances, anti-war demonstrations, civil rights gains, and the creation of environmental organizations swirled against the fraying backdrop of the Vietnam War:

The first ATM was installed in the US and the Boeing 747 jet made its debut. Black students at Cornell University took over Willard Straight Hall demanding a black studies program. The first US troop withdrawals were made from Vietnam – the very same year that the lottery was instituted to determine draft into US Forces. The microprocessor was invented, opening the way for the computer revolution that followed. President Nixon issued an executive order requiring all federal agencies to adopt “affirmative programs for equal employment opportunity.” The Environmental Protection Agency was created.

Amid the turmoil, social unrest, and remarkable technological advances, College of the Atlantic was founded. The same generation that created educational television – Sesame Street began in 1969!- that protested for peace and marched for social justice, is the very same generation that founded COA.

Forty years later, the legacy of innovation, activism, and inspiration lives on.  Since 1969, successive generations have come to MDI to study and apply their fresh energy and idealism – along with knowledge and skills – to create a better world.

 COA graduates have worked for the Department of Justice, in the Maine House of Representatives, in the US House of Representatives, for Green Peace, the Nature Conservancy, National Geographic, National Public Radio, and the New England Aquarium. COA grads teach at the Downtown Preparatory School in San Jose, California and the World Teach Program in Costa Rica, curate at the Peabody Essex Museum, Chicago Institute of Art, and are leaders and researchers in organizations such as Common Cause and Newman’s Own Organics, Ibis Consulting, the Department of Marine Research, and Monterey Bay Aquarium. For a very small school, COA graduates have a disproportionate number of scholarships and awards – Watsons, Udalls, Goldwaters, etc. Our size belies the impact we have around the world.

Gas might not cost 35 cents a gallon anymore, and the average cost of a home is a wee bit more than $15,500 (especially on MDI!) but the values and ideals of COA, at forty are the same founded this school in 1969.

Many of us on our own 40^th birthdays look around and say: Hm. What’s the next 40 years going to be like?

COA is doing the same, taking stock of our strengths, the challenges facing higher education today, the opportunities we have as the environmental and social justice movements become more urgent. We’re also looking at parts that might be sagging a little. We will invite you – our supporters, alums, volunteers, friends, and parents – to help shore us up for the next 40  years.

You know, we get by with a little help from our friends.

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Tiger Balm and the Grand Unification Theory

So, I see in the Aspire Princeton newsletter (Winter 2010) that the class of ’67 gave its alma mater a new dorm. The 1967 Hall is an L-shaped building with 75 beds and several lounges for study and relaxation. The price is not quoted which really surprised me.

As a Shakespearean aside, which means –  I want you to hear this, but don’t tell Princeton development officers and donors that I am whining again – I will mention that Princeton’s endowment per student was $1.9M back in 2006.

Get that?

This means for every one of its roughly 7,567 students, there’s a corresponding $1.9M sitting in a bank, churning out interest. At 5% a year, which historically is low, that’s nearly $100,000 in interest earnings per student, per year, or twice the tuition rate.  Today’s Wiki entry for Princeton shows the endowment at $12.6 billion.

This kind of money short circuits my mind the way terms like “Planck scale” and “reciprocal lattice vector” do. I just don’t get it, but I want to. I really do.

From a philanthropic stand point, I think: Why would anyone give a dime to such a rich institution? If donors want to make a difference with their money – and all the research says they do – why would they give to an organization where a million bucks is a rounding error? Planck Scale to that! Lattice Vector! Ok – perhaps that’s just me. I’m a little cranky today. Pass the sour grapes, etc.

Endowments work in so many ways. By now, you should realize that I want a big one for COA. Big! Big! Big! Endowments enable innovative and successful programs to be funded in perpetuity. They work to lower a college’s dependence on tuition, making us stronger, more flexible, and better able to meet the needs of students. Faculty positions are supported by endowments, as are scholarships, and travel funds, and facilities.  Endowments can make institutions democratic – small d – through need-blind admissions. They afford us the ability to bring the best and brightest here, no matter what a student’s estimated family contribution is. 

I want to work to get COA up into the top 10 percent of college endowments per students. What would that take?  Millions. Our endowment is about $17M now – approximately $52,000 per student. But because we’re small, it’s not THAT many millions – imagine that. Just 20 more million dollars, and we’d be over $100,000 per student, around where the College of William and Mary, Johns Hopkins, and Bates are. It is no coincidence that our nascent capital campaign will add about $20M to our endowment when it is successfully completed.

Ok, so onward, upward, with hope.  COA wasn’t even founded in 1967, but it’s heartening to think of a 1985 Hall or a 2007 Hall someday here on campus! It’s not as far-fetched as say, The Theory of Everything.

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Quote of the Day

The results of philanthropy are always beyond calculation. Miriam Beard

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Can we buck the trend?

It did not take the recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed to alert me to this fact: Private Giving To College Dropped Sharply in 2009.

Kathryn Masterson writes: With a battered economy and volatile financial markets taking their tolls on donors’ pocketbooks, private giving to American colleges dropped sharply in 2009, according to findings of the annual Voluntary Support of Education survey, which were released on Wednesday. Donations were down $3.75-billion from the previous year—a decline of 11.9 percent, the steepest in the survey’s 50-year history.

11.9 percent? That’s about right for COA. Our annual fund goal is $1,050,000. We’re 7 months into the fiscal year, and have raised about $600,000. Normally, this time of year, we’re over $800,000. So, let me help you out with the math here: we’re quite a bit behind.

This is not a comfortable place to be. With faculty salaries, regular campus maintenance, student aid and the general costs of running the college being supported by the annual fund, it does not make me sleep any easier to know that a hit in giving is a national trend.

Misery loves company? Perhaps. I’d rather bust through our goal and leave others huddled together with their spreadsheets and downwardly mobile trend lines.

Want to help buck the trend? http://www.coa.edu/support

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The Poker Fairy comes to COA

When I was a wee little girl – old enough to have left Santa behind, but still quite certain that my parents were omnipotent and infallible – my family lived in a tiny house in Woburn, Mass.  There were six of us kids, eight years apart. We were crowded. We were poor. But we knew none of that, because everyone around us lived in approximately the same way, with the same familial proximity and within the same type of aspiring-to-the-middle-class split level ranch.

It was the kind of neighborhood where kids spilled out of their houses into communal back yards and pretty soon, teams would be formed for kickball or tag  or red rover or relevio. Hopscotch boards were more likely to be erased by rain than road traffic.   There were ponds nearby and we played a sloppy game of hockey and there were hills where we sledded and were made dizzy by speed and the New England cold.  In all seasons and weather conditions, we played outside, hard, until the streetlights sputtered on.

All in all, it was the childhood that parents dream of giving their progeny, and it worked for them in many ways, too. Mothers didn’t work outside the home as much back then, when the earth’s crust was just cooling.  They worked their butts off doing such sepia-toned tasks as pegging laundry on the line and stretching a pound of hamburger with tomato soup and calling that “Sloppy Joes”.  But a lot of that physical drudgery was done in close proximity to other mothers who were trying to figure it all out, too. They pegged their laundry together in those communal back yards and together watched their little ones play on the slides and swings, and  had coffee together when we tots finally got off to school with our ironed skirts and blouses, braided plaits, and homemade lunches in brown paper bags. (I didn’t know what an Oreo was until I got to first grade at the Malcolm S. White School.)

And the dads? They had friends. Yep, that’s right. Adult males with friends. This is another one of those throw backs people regard with nostalgia and wistfulness,  like the jingle of Good Humor truck  and the Howdy Doody song. Those neighborhoods had gardens and grills and the men tended to them after work. Those communal back yards opened up a world of male bonding and barbecue sauce. 

Which brings me, finally, to Poker Night. Where it was held, I never knew. But once a month, my father went off  “to play cards.” I am not sure why I put this in quotes. I think because the whole aura of Poker Night had a boozy, male, out-too-late aura that affected my mother in a way that made her eminate heat.  It may have been the fact we did not have money to lose. She never said. But just the same, we tiptoed around on Poker Night.

That is, until the Poker Fairy started calling. One morning, over a breakfast table strewn with boxes of Wholesome General Mills cereal, my bleary-eyed father asked us if we had found anything under our pillows. What? Huh? We looked at each other, dropped our spoons into bowls of  soggy Wheaties,  and ran. Chairs fell backwards. We six kids each found a quarter under our pillow! A quarter! You could buy a pack of gum back then with a quarter! And one time – oh, my, god! – a DOLLAR! It was like Christmas. My mother was way outdone this time. The Poker Fairy was now a favorite. We BEGGED my father to go play cards. Not this week? No game? Why not? Go anyway!

And so, fast forward 30 years – (ok, alright . FORTY. Be that way. Gawd, I am getting so old.) The Poker Fairy turned up at College of the Atlantic! The Poker Fairy wanted to give to the Annual Fund! Imagine my surprise. An old friend, like Flower Child Barbie, had come back!  Only this time, it was not my long-deceased dad, but wait for it….

Ken Hill!

Ken Hill came into the development office with his winnings from Poker Night with the guys. (You know who you are.) He’d won  A HUNDRED BUCKS in quarter-games of poker!  He wanted to donate his pile of ill-gotten gain to the annual fund. You bet I’ll take it!

I asked: Was this ONE night?!

Him: Naw, it was two or three.

What’s your secret, I asked?

Well, I tried something new, said he. It’s amazing how well you can do when you’re the only one not drinking.

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