September 5, 2007

Just two days ago, College of the Atlantic lost one of our most devoted and visionary supporters, Don Straus, whose simultaneous presence as student, faculty member and trustee exemplifies everything I'm saying here about the transcendence of traditional educational roles. I want to dedicate my segment of this occasion to Don, who I remember so vividly in our "Twentieth Century" course, both as a guest faculty member at the podium, and, in the back row of the lecture hall, his hand always raised, the brightest student in the room. Don never allowed himself or anyone else to be complacent, and I have tried to keep that spirit alive in these remarks.

Thirty-five years ago this fall, COA convened as an academic institution with thirty-two students, roughly the same as we have faculty today. In the fall of 1972 every issue involved in starting a college-large and small-was on the table, right down to whether we would go along with the rest of the country and turn the clocks back to standard time. I think of those first years in the 70s as the Big Bang of human ecology; we were willing to question all that came before in education, level it to the ground if necessary and build it over. The trustees started it before students or faculty or administration arrived, with a visionary challenge, to take a brand-new concept-human ecology-breathe life into it and make it work as a college education. They knew and we knew that it wouldn't be just another academic discipline, but a complete transvaluation of how we learn. Of the uncountable gifts the trustees have bestowed on COA over the years, the greatest has been those two words, human & ecology, the zygote of the organism that has come to be COA. This is your theme, the trustees said to us, now do something with it. We spent a summer thinking and talking, the first handful of faculty, we made a definition, "humans and their relation to the environment," which has grown greatly in scope as we've added programs and people, but has kept its focus not on the things of this world but between the things, on the ever-shifting relationships that hold them together.

But a definition is only the skin of an idea, not the heart; and it was not till the students came that first week of September one score and fifteen years ago, that we truly began this great evolutionary experiment in modifying liberal education to serve a new millennium. The liberal arts had been formed in the middle ages to respond to a world that was fixed in place while the sun revolved around it, a world where humans were at the top of a vast and unchanging pyramid of life. In contrast, human ecology would teach an open, unconstrained, creative response to a post-Darwinian world that has never stopped changing and never will. Like that world, human ecology is frustrating because you can't freeze and define it; but for the same reason, its mercurial indefinability, it is the ideal instrument for understanding and responding to the world we're in.

With due respect to colleagues past and present, most of my learning in human ecology then and now has been from the students at COA. In the fall of '72, neither faculty nor students knew what human ecology was, and the excited collaboration of jointly assisting each other to comprehend it has been for may of us the most meaningful and adventurous journey of our lives. The first students have long since gone forth to creative life voyages in service to both humans and the environment; while the faculty is still here on the shore of Frenchman's Bay, trying to figure out what human ecology is, a task we've been chipping at for 32 decades. By now you would think we'd know something about it, and could take that hairy, anarchic tarball we call human ecology wrap it up in a textbook, Human Ecology, and could impart it to our students in a more orderly way than the Big Bang.
 
But that book hasn't been written and probably never will; it would be obsolete by the time it got to Sherman's. I see the faculty as having quite the opposite mission, and that is never to allow human ecology to freeze into a discipline to be known and transmitted by professional human ecologists to passive students. If anything the faculty must use all our knowledge of human ecology to keep it unknown, so that each fall when we come back to it with a new COA generation, it is as new to us as when we first encountered it. And, if I could ask for anything from the new students, it would be not to demand from your teachers a settled knowledge of what human ecology is, but to join us in the active co-exploration of a changing territory that is unknown to all of us. Through your vigilance as students, human ecology, which has a birthright of constantly questioning authority, will never become authority itself.

For human ecology is not just a subject matter but a way of apprehending the world, not through things but through the relations of things, in their ceaseless interaction and change. It is knowing yourself to be part of the world you study, so relations are not between A & B with you as passive observer, but A & B and you fully involved in the equation. Human ecology's breakthrough has been to see every entity in context relative to everything else, including the absolute involvement, responsibility, and power of our own selves in the relation. As students, if you assume the faculty already knows and all you have to do is take notes, if you assume the administration already knows and all you have to do is follow the rules, you will be missing the point of human ecology, which is your own creative involvement in the destiny of your personal education and of the institution as a whole.
It takes courage on the part of faculty to give up the comfort of mastery and see our subjects as unknowns again; and courage on the students' part to give up your traditional role as disciples and consumers. Some say students and teachers can never be equals, there are inherent power differences that enforce a faculty-student hierarchy, but the COA story offers living proof that that doesn't have to be the case. In the eyes of human ecology, we are all questioners and no one has more inherent power than anyone else.

The best thing we do at COA as teachers and students is to drop those roles and proceed as joint partners in the investigation of human ecology. Faculty should take on the best qualities of the students--their radicalism, and eager openness, and students should assume the best of the faculty, our wise articulateness and self-confidence, right or wrong. In this way we can join against the stereotype of one-way authoritarian learning and keep the Big Bang going in its creative intensity and freedom.

What keeps human ecology from being just another academic discipline, is the intensely personal encounter each of us has with it, student or teacher. And the highest expressions of this encounter are the superhuman achievements that come forth in the spring at senior project time-and that you entering students will be producing in a few short years-because all-out personal creativity-whether in art or literature, mathematics, music, history, ceramics, economics or field ecology-is the only response to the unanswerable questions that will be asked of you, and that you will continue to answer all your lives.