What is the Capital Campaign for? 

COA’s Life Changing. World Changing. Capital Campaign will create more opportunities for the entire college. It will enhance the academic programming, attract new faculty members, and bring COA’s technology up-to-date.

Here are the key elements …

Endowing Professorships

Unlike their counterparts at more conventional institutions, COA faculty members work together in support of individual students and to provide a rich curriculum for self-directed student learning. COA professors are carefully selected to support these aims. Endowed professorships could include—but are not limited to—the following examples:

• Teaching Excellence
• Physical Sciences
• Human Ecology
• The Humanities
• Natural Sciences
• Philosophy and Religion

Endowing faculty members’ salaries provides an alternate revenue stream, easing the burden on tuition and enhancing our ability to increase faculty pay.

Endowing a Faculty Compensation Fund

Gifts directed to COA's endowment in support of faculty salary and enrichment enable the school to continue to attract and retain the very best teachers while reducing our reliance on tuition revenue. Our goal: to give our faculty salary parity with peer institutions and provide funding for professional development.

Bringing the World to COA Through International Students

COA's commitment to recruiting international students strengthens our connection to the broad world of ideas, learning, cultures, religions, and people. Different mores, languages, ethnicities, religious views, flavors, and fashions have enriched the undergraduate experience for the entire community.

COA has received a lead pledge of $6M for international student scholarships at COA. We intend to raise an additional $2M in endowed support.

Endowing Scholarship Support for Students

COA seeks to enhance its ability to recruit and retain students who will be leaders and entrepreneurs in business, the environment, arts, sciences, and medicine. We are committed to making COA affordable and doing our best to ensure that financial limitations do not prevent prospective students from being a part of the College.

A Fund for Global and Civic Engagement

To support this experiential learning, COA will develop additional support for students to undertake this travel, study, and research with a dedicated endowment of $2,000,000.

Students will be able to apply for funding to take courses in other countries, on other campuses, travel, undertake internships, or conduct research for senior projects all over the world. This would generate $100,000 per year in scholarship for which students and faculty members could apply.*

*COA is currently providing $50,000 from the operating budget for these expenses.

Adding a Chair in the Visual Arts

The creative arts at COA are approached differently from other institutions of higher learning. They open people’s minds through new kinds of thinking, perceiving, and connecting. The creative process brings us beyond the mere factual dimensions to the imaginative. Giving that to a college student is a tremendous lifetime gift, a new way of seeing and problem solving.

*Lead gifts totaling $1.7M have been donated by the family and friends of Allan Stone.

Adding a Chair in Food Systems and Sustainable Agriculture

The study of sustainable agriculture practices at COA engages students in examining the myriad social, cultural, political, ecological, and economic implications of the ways our food systems work, or do not work. From rural development to the politics of globalization, students are encouraged to use interdisciplinary perspectives to understand, critique, and work to improve global and local food systems.

*The Chair in Food Systems and Sustainable Agriculture has been fully funded by the Partridge Foundation.

Adding a Chair in Earth Systems-Geosciences*

There has never been a more important time to understand the dynamics of earth science and global systems. COA wants to add this new discipline to offer students field-based courses and labs in geology and earth sciences. COA is particularly interested in helping students understand climate science, earth systems and the environment, environmental chemistry, and energy and natural resources. Other areas of critical interest for the challenges of this century will include soil science, bio-geosciences, paleo-biology, meteorology, hydrology, and oceanography. 

*This chair will be filled by a new faculty member when the funding is complete.

Adding Connectivity to COA

To keep up with the ever-changing technology landscape, COA must upgrade our infrastructure and develop state-of-the-art learning environments, information technologies, and global access.

The goal: bringing the world to COA—and COA to the world—through expanded teleconferencing capabilities, presentations, lectures and conversations.

New Research Vessel

The time has come to replace both Indigo and Borealis, the two hard-working vessels that have served the two research stations for many years.

The new vessel has three missions:

1. For research — finding and following whales, conducting transects, taking water samples, etc.
2. To support life and work on the islands: Conduct programs on the islands and in the bays, haul equipment to the islands such as generators, lumbers of repairs, water, food, supplies.
3. To be a classroom platform for Oceanography, ornithology, Island life, etc. boat capacity 15 people and the instructor and be undercover when it rains.