Thank you seniors for the invitation to speak at your commencement. I have attended almost all of the commencements since the first one in 1974 and have heard many inspiring speakers. I've thought a lot about what to say today not because there was too little I wish to express but because there is so much. I grew into adulthood here at College of the Atlantic and there have been many personal changes in the years since that time. I learned to think, to teach and to paint at this special and wonderful little college.

Though I grew up in Massachusetts I had spent almost a decade before coming to Maine in 1972 studying and teaching in the Midwest, first receiving a graduate degree at the University of Minnesota and then working and teaching in Chicago. The early seventies were a very traumatic time in America. The draft had created frustration and furor on college campuses. Events at Kent State and other protests dominated the news. Nixon had been elected on the promise of ending the war in Vietnam and instead it had been expanded into Cambodia and Laos. I was an editor at the Encyclopedia Britannica when Nixon came to Chicago to campaign and I was caught up in demonstrations. I saw demonstrators beaten and arrested. I was frightened and angered.

Many of us were also disillusioned by the events of the sixties especially the assassinations of President John Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy. People of my generation had lost respect for authority and had come to distrust the institutions of government and of higher learning. Society seemed blighted and many of us longed to begin anew away from urban centers.

In spite of these attitudes, I carried away from this time and these environments other more idealistic feelings, ones perhaps harder to portray but even more meaningful to me. These centered on the academic world where we thought about and treasured the highest achievements of our culture. I remember spending Saturday nights reading Shakespeare's plays with friends, attending the Guthrie Theatre and the Walker Museum of Contemporary Art in Minneapolis and the Art Institute of Chicago. When I visited museums, I often found myself returning to the same works because they had come to seem like old friends. In Chicago, I was able to take my students on walking tours of extraordinary buildings designed by great American architects like Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright. I was trained as a humanist and believed that the arts represented the best of what it was to be human.

I was a city person mired in the conflicts of my time but also a humanist who believed that the creative nature of humans was expressed in the arts.

It was against this background that I came to Maine to help create a new college. Instead of the urban scene, on Mount Desert Island I encountered a world of great natural beauty and a community that seemed innocent of the conflicts of American cities in the sixties and seventies. Although the 1947 fire was still apparent in some places, the worst scars were gone. Some of the tree stumps from this fire were still visible on Cadillac Mountain and the summer homes abandoned at the time of the fire could also still be seen. Nonetheless, much of the island felt the way it was portrayed in the nineteenth century paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederick Church. That first summer I picked lots of blueberries, hiked and took my son to the beach. Before the summer's end, we had decided to leave Chicago and settle here.

Like all the others, I was caught up in the enthusiasm of planning for a new school. The dilemma for me was what contribution could I make? What was the relevance of the humanities, art history and the arts to a curriculum focused on environmental issues? And so as soon as I was hired, my search for new course offerings appropriate to this small college began.

The humanists teaching here in those years had the idea that since the college had an environmental focus we would act as supports for the scientists. So the earliest courses in the humanities and the arts centered around the works of Thoreau and the transcendentalists, the art of the Romantic nature painters and the Hudson River School. Later when Roc Caivano joined the faculty and began teaching architecture, I supported his classes by teaching courses in architectural history. I even taught a history of Bar Harbor and as part of that class three of us Barbara Sassaman '78, Mary Dohna ('79) and I hiked the island and studied the remains of abandoned houses and cottages. We explored George Dorr's estate and its salt-water swimming pool, the ruins of an old cape in the national park, and the tracks of the cog railroad that used to climb Cadillac Mountain. In spite of the joy I felt teaching these classes, as an artist and art historian I was still searching for my place.

In those first years, the courageous students who chose to gamble on this unaccredited little school idealized nature. Many were what we then called whole earth people. They came with their dogs and for a number of years there were probably as many dogs as there were people on campus. Dogs attended and often interrupted classes with their barks and skirmishes. During one class, to every one's amazement, a dog suddenly jumped into the third floor window of Kaelber Hall. Trees were treated with the same respect as pets. In fact, they were almost revered. Steve Anderson, faculty member in economics, decided one early morning to cut down several cedars that were obstructing his view of the ocean. He proceeded to chainsaw the trees without the approval of All-College Meeting. When the trees were discovered, Steve had a lot of explaining to do.

 

The attitude toward humans by many at COA was in inverse relation to their attitude toward nature. Many saw the only solution to the environmental problem as zero population growth. They attributed all ills to people and felt that humans and human societies were either malignant or aberrant. Humans were the problem. In the eyes of many of the students and some of the teachers, it was important to become self-sufficient. We would grow our own food, we would dig wells, we would learn to repair our cars and we would heat our houses with wood. Our goal was to unplug entirely from the grid that made us reliant on our corrupt society. In this view, not only were people and society despoilers of what was good and beautiful but in so far as people were highly cultivated, they were in fact inferior. The closer one lived to the land the more moral one was. The myth of the noble savage was strongly held by many COA people in those first years. Could I teach students who believed humans were only valuable insofar as they were suspicious of the culture that I so treasured?

Luckily, a new perspective was coming into being and at COA we explored these new ideas in depth. This new thinking, in which humans and culture were resituated in the natural order, helped to resolve the dichotomy between nature and humans. We at COA, both students and teachers, began to perfect and expand this new more ecological way of seeing the world. I was beginning to realize that teaching about the arts and the humanities was not irrelevant. Humans were after all another of the world's creatures and culture was what humans had invented to adapt to the natural world.

In the first years at the college, we spent many more hours in committee meetings than we do now.

 

After hours in endless discussion, I began to slip away in order to spend time alone and clear my head. I would wander into the woods in the park. Meditating and looking at the natural beauty that surrounded me was just not enough. I needed to make the natural world and my thoughts and feelings one and so I began to make watercolors. During this process, it became clear to me that art is a way to bind the inner life to the natural world. I was aided in this new conviction about the importance of the arts by a similar change in the attitude of many in the COA community. More and more of our students valued the arts and seemed to intuit that creativity is natural for humans. Increasingly people here were beginning to recognize that the creative process is central to an ecological perspective and to a degree in human ecology.

We believe teaching knowledge and information is not enough. The emotional, instinctive life must also be shaped. Just as thinking can be refined and expanded through education, so too can intuition and emotions. It is through arts such as music, poetry, drama and painting that undifferentiated feeling is given form and made conscious. Knowing about the arts and making art can refine and complete the individual by increasing self-awareness and enhancing compassion for both the human and the natural world.

In1990 I went to the University of Pennsylvania in order to complete my education as an artist. While there, I taught in the art department. At this huge institution I learned that you could spend days without running into anyone you knew, that you had to have a computer card to get into a class, and you often had to have a code number to enter a building. When I returned after two years, I recognized the significance of the differences between the University of Pennsylvania and COA. Additionally I realized that my own achievements are, in large part, the result of the encouragement and support I have received from the COA community.

 

The democratic nature of this college allows us to transcend our limitations and accomplish more than we had thought possible. Instead of a huge impersonal institution, this is a community in which each person makes almost daily contact with everyone else and everyone participates in the mission of the college. At COA, teaching goes in every direction. Faculty learn from students, students learn from the maintenance crew, students advise students, and staff and students help make administrative decisions. If art can help to educate, so too can a good community such as the one we have achieved at College of the Atlantic.

In this intimate setting, each of us is a mirror for each other where we can question our values and motives. Perhaps most important is the respect with which we treat each other in spite of divergent backgrounds, jobs and positions on issues. All my struggles to understand the nature of the arts, to integrate nature and society and to find a balance between my individual desires and the need to be part of something larger have come together here at the college. This wonderful group of people has helped me become a teacher, an artist and hopefully a better person and part of a community I truly value.

Over the years, I've always felt a little sad at graduation because the students that I have worked with and have come to treasure are leaving. It always seems to me that these very special people are irreplaceable and that my experiences in the future will never rise to the standard of the class that has just graduated. And yet, every fall I've been delighted and excited by the new students' energy and idealism. Four years ago, you graduates were those freshman that renewed this college with your intelligence and creativity. And now you are the seniors who are leaving us. All of us who work at College of the Atlantic are sad to see you leave for we have come to treasure you as people, as students and also as our teachers, for many of us have learned as much from you as we have taught you. In your four years here you have helped to make this institution of higher education into a community of learning. Now you are going back into the world as freshman and because of my retirement from this place that has sustained me for all my adult life so am I.

It's kind of a scary time. We'll have to learn once again how to use our talents and personalities to create a community that is nurturing. It will be hard. The world seems like a pretty formidable place at this moment. Global warming, wars, economic difficulties and world hunger confront us. Don't despair. If you can rise to these challenges with the same optimism and energy that you displayed over these four years at COA, perhaps history will remember this time as a renewal, as a time in which a new order was born. As human ecologists and as smart, creative and concerned people, you are privileged and so you can make a difference. We are all counting on you. Good luck and my love and good wishes go out to all of you.