Uplifting speeches by COA President Darron Collins ’92, keynote speaker Julietta Singh, and several members of the 90-strong COA Class of 2023 highlighted the ceremony. The Anah Highlanders bagpipers opened the proceedings with a procession led by three grand marshals—retiring librarian Jane Hultberg and retiring professors Stephen Ressel and Davis Taylor—along with Collins, Singh, and honorary degree recipient Donald Soctomah.
“The experimental, ecologically based education that each graduate here today has received at College of the Atlantic has primed you to live your lives with intention, with ethically motivated purpose, with a commitment to the whole environment, in all of its social, political, and earthly manifestations,” Singh told the gathered crowd. “This moment is a palpable opening toward a life that follows but also departs from the one you’ve been living. It is saturated with everything you’re about to discover and, just as significantly, with everything that will discover you.”
Collins commended the class on their focus and resilience in the face of the three-year-long COVID-19 pandemic that colored their time at COA.
“This cohort, more than any other, has worked through the entirety of the pandemic as COA students. Like our struggles with equity, we struggled together during the pandemic and took collective risks together, not unlike the first 32 students, faculty, staff, and trustees who took the risk of starting this place in 1972,” he said. “Our own collective struggle and collective risk made something magical, if not, at least, alchemical.”
In acknowledging that COA is on the traditional lands of the Wabanaki people, Collins called out the need to support tribal sovereignty, and announced that COA has established a full scholarship for tribal members.
“The Passamaquoddy, the Penobscot, the Micmac, and Maliseet are a lifeforce, shaping and being shaped by this place for millennia. We must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Wabanaki and their fight for tribal self-determination and self-governance,” Collins said. “As a more immediate and more concrete step toward equity, we are establishing a full scholarship to College of the Atlantic for tribal
A grand feast at the center of campus followed the ceremony.
College of the Atlantic was founded in 1969 on the premise that education should go beyond understanding the world as it is to enabling students to actively shape its future. A leader in experiential education and environmental stewardship, COA has pioneered a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to learning — human ecology — that develops the kinds of creative thinkers and doers needed by all sectors of society in addressing the compelling and growing needs of our world. For more information, visit coa.edu.
