Welcoming the new academic year

It’s a moment to become immersed in the energy that students bring to campus, the creativity and care that faculty and staff pour into their work, and the opportunities we have to learn from one another. It’s also a moment to welcome the COA Class of 2029! Thank you to all of our RAs, OOPs leaders, and Peer Mentors who have helped stage a wonderful and welcoming introduction to our community during these past few weeks.

As I enter my second year as president, I am energized by what students, faculty, and staff are building together. Our human-ecological framework depends upon our human connection. What makes COA unique is not just our broad curriculum but our community: a college where people are welcomed as they are, where curiosity is encouraged, and where students are supported as they turn passion into practice. However imperfectly we all may proceed at times, we are committed to working with care, respect, and responsibility. Together, we are altogether better.

At the same time, we know we’re doing this work within a world that is often turbulent, uncertain, and unequal, with policies and rhetoric that put members of our community at real risk. These realities remind us that our community cannot take safety, respect, or belonging for granted—we must create and sustain them every day. That is why our commitments to generous listening, learning, and acting with care are not abstractions but urgent necessities (If there ever was a moment to read The Plague, by Camus, with his treatment of the danger of abstractions, now would be the time! I highly recommend that novel.). By standing with one another, and by modeling the collaborative, ethical approach at the heart of human ecology, we show that even in the face of division and instability, we can and do build community, and a future, rooted in dignity and hope.

What makes COA unique is not just our broad curriculum but our community: a college where people are welcomed as they are, where curiosity is encouraged, and where students are supported as they turn passion into practice. 

As we begin the new academic year, I want to share how the President’s Cabinet—our colleagues serving as department heads and advisors—is helping to focus our collective work. These FY26 strategic initiatives reflect both the priorities I’ve set as president and the insight and leadership of the cabinet, grounded in the COA 2030 Strategic Plan which was passed by All College Meeting in 2024. Together, they represent the work that will strengthen COA and improve our quality of working and learning here.

Our aim is to share progress on these initiatives throughout the year via beginning-of-term emails, updates, and ACM conversations. These priorities reflect the administrative work happening across departments, under my direction, to support the student experience and the institution as a whole.

As always, students are central to this work—shaping curricula, leading research and community projects, and serving on working committees. The partnership between students, faculty, administration and trustees is the engine of COA’s distinctiveness: it’s how classroom ideas become community projects, and how fieldwork becomes careers and civic leadership.

This past year I’ve learned so much about COA’s history from founding faculty and long-time community members. I also enjoyed watching The omens are good: The early years of College of the Atlantic. It’s a fascinating deep dive into the visionaries who created COA, including our first president, Ed Kaelber, businessman Les Brewer, and Father Jim Gower.

During his 12 years as president, Ed was fond of sharing that phrase, “The omens are good,” which now emblazons the nameplate on Kaelber Hall. I love that phrase and have taken to quoting it often. It embodies COA’s palpable spiritual pulse, present from the start and still felt today. COA’s founders knew that strong relationships, families, organizations, and societies thrive when they forefront space for the sacred, and with that a drive for collective peace and love. As we begin this year, let’s keep peace and love in our hearts as we pursue knowledge and truth.

There is much to be proud of, and I am honored to be on this path with you.

Warmly,

Sylvia