Those both in and out of the COA community, if you are ever anxious about what Human Ecology is, this is the day to be here, this morning of senior projects and this afternoon of amazing award winners; if the rest of the year we see it through a glass darkly, this is the day we see it face to face. Even for faculty, this is the day we get to lift our eyes from the microscope of our own passions and see how our students have put them together to make a whole.

Springtime in downeast Maine is unlike springtime in Boston and points south. In Maine there's an moment of existential doubt that it will never happen, which makes it a particular miracle when it occurs. It's somewhat the same with our senior projects. Each spring they come from the emptiness of winter and blow us away with the energy of creation and over-creation. When I reached for Heidi Hanley's massive two-volume study of Human Trafficking in India, a student stopped me and said "Don't try to lift that, you're too old." Considering Heather Nazarewicz's 360-page novel, Ben Nimkin's expertly produced video on solar powered wells in Africa, Jamus Drury's all-time bird photo exhibit plus a whole book to accompany it, Amanda Spector's gonzo veterinary tour - and she didn't read you the part where she reaches up to the shoulder into a farm animal - I realize these seniors are not just meeting some minimum requirement set by the school; they are following an inner standard and sense of completion that they set themselves.

We debate the meaning of Human Ecology for hours, we hire external consultants to tell us what it is, we dig up the original faculty and prop them in their chairs for one last question, but all these attempts fall short because we keep trying to see it as a noun and a thing to be defined instead of seeing it as it is, a verb which is only visible in action: from Kate Tompkin's AIDS program in Kenya to Stefan Calabria's New Mexico poems to Ashlesha Khadse and Katarina Jurikova's NAFTA study in Chiapas, to Kate Hassett's graphic lobsterman in Muscongus Bay.

At any other college these would be honors projects, not for everyone but the elite of the department, the top 10%. At COA we don't make such distinctions. Every spring-term senior is a celebrity. We don't have departmental honors; we don't even have departments!

We don't have Phi Beta Kappa, publish or perish, summa cum laude, medieval academic regalia, faculty rank, dean's lists, associate professors, class rank, merit pay, department chairs, valedictorians, marshals, salutatorians, or generalissimos. "I do not call one greater and one smaller," says Walt Whitman, "That which fills its place is equal to any." 

I confess, when a universal honors project was first proposed as a graduation requirement, I voted against it because I didn't believe we could expect this level of work from every single student, but thirty-five years of great senior projects have proved me wrong, showing that students can find within themselves  personal standards of excellence without the status and reward systems rampant in American colleges and so infectious in American society. The awards this afternoon represent the generosity of donors wishing to recognize individual excellence and the judgment of faculty members as to outstanding students in different areas of the college. But the students receiving these awards know well that even the most heroic individual efforts are inseparable from the energy of the student body as a whole, and any prize conferred this afternoon to an individual is really a prize to all.

One event from the spring of 2008  will live for me as the image of all its energy and creativity: the performance of a classic Greek tragedy in Week 8, The Bacchae from the 4th century BC. We have no theater department, no named chair, no drama competition, yet Euripides himself would have approved the dance and music and would have been awestruck as we were by the spectacle of the god Dionysus before their eyes. This play is ancient, yet when we saw King Pentheus ripped apart by his own mother the message is still clear, if our belief in human individualism and human glory allows us to turn our backs on nature and the collective community, if we forget for a minute who our mother is, she will decapitate and dismember us and Stefania Marchese will appear on stage with our severed head. That play, a group action, carried the scope of Human Ecology back 2,500 years to Periclean Athens, just as the senior projects extended it around the world.

These honors and projects comprise Human Ecology in space and time, for today and tomorrow, and then we'll take this stage down and make room for next year, a year we try to plan in committees and faculty meetings but whose actual form will come from the unprogrammable creativity of the class of 2009, so the best thing we can do is erase all definitions from the blackboards and stand out of the way.