Opening of the Academic Year
Dear Colby Community,
We rang in the new year at convocation yesterday. Representative students from each class took turns ringing the Revere Bell, cast by Paul Revere’s foundry in 1824 and designed for South College on Colby’s original campus. It is one of the few significant relics we have from the old campus, and for years it has been packed away in storage. Yet for well over a century, the clang of the Revere Bell marked important moments, whether morning classes or the end of a world war, as it did in the fall of 1918. That semester the College struggled to contain the spread of a deadly flu pandemic. With limited resources at its disposal, Colby’s commitment to educating its students never waned.
That commitment is equally strong today. Last year our students were in classrooms when many other colleges moved to online instruction. Our experience has prepared us for the year ahead, which we approach with powerful new tools to limit the impact of Covid-19. The challenges we face are still very real and present, but so are the reasons for optimism.
It is easy to be hopeful after witnessing how our students were willing to make small but important sacrifices to protect the rights of the entire community to live and learn together. I have no doubt that same willingness carries over into this year and is already being passed onto our students in the Class of 2025, who enter the Colby classrooms for the first time today.
With academic achievements that set new standards for the College, our 667 first-year students bring a wonderful diversity of backgrounds and experiences that will enrich Colby’s intellectual and campus life. Non-U.S. citizens comprise nine percent of the class, 37 percent of the U.S. students identify as students of color, 11 percent are first-generation college-goers, and more than 100 students are Pell Grant eligible. The doors of Colby continue to swing open wider to provide access to the most talented students from around the world, made possible through our exceptional financial aid program. The Chronicle of Higher Education rated Colby’s financial aid as the fourth most generous in the country, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, supporter of the American Talent Initiative, ranked Colby second among all leading colleges and universities for enrollment growth of low-income students.
We are also welcoming back our talented staff and our faculty, who were unmatched in their commitment to providing an outstanding education last year. The unwavering dedication of Colby’s professoriate to teaching excellence is the defining essence of the College. With a record 269 faculty members this year, including 10 new tenure track faculty, we are able to expand our course offerings in disciplinary subfields that will take us in important new directions.
This fall we open the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, led by our founding director, Amanda Stent. We are incorporating artificial intelligence modules in more than 20 courses across the curriculum, and there is no doubt this is just the beginning of a robust set of courses, research projects, and internships that will ultimately make Colby a leader in this burgeoning field. We have also created a partnership with the new Roux Institute in Portland that allows our students to enroll in a jointly coordinated master’s program in data science and machine learning.
First-year students will benefit from an entirely new residential program designed to support their success and introduce them to opportunities that can make them deeper learners, freer thinkers (in fact, our student-selected Goldfarb Center theme this year is “freedom of speech”), and more engaged global citizens. Our sophomores, who missed out on COOT last year, will share a weekend away this month that we hope will create new and lasting connections.
We also open the academic year with our campus having been reimagined in exciting ways. The Harold Alfond Athletics and Recreation Center, the finest at any Division III institution, will be fully open for competitions this year. We added new playing fields over the summer, invested further in our recreational and intramural programs, and created stunning outdoor gathering spaces where the former athletic center once stood. New campus pathways have replaced internal campus roads, and enhanced outdoor spaces, from an outdoor dining terrace at Roberts to landscaped patios at East and West, are all designed to improve campus accessibility and facilitate informal interactions. Millett House has been transformed into an on-campus childcare center, meeting a critical need in our community.
The Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts, made possible by Trustee Michael Gordon ’66, is fully under construction on the site of the former Mary Low parking lot. It will establish a new gateway to campus when it opens in the fall of 2023 and will ensure that the arts are a visible and essential element of our programs and lives. The Gordon Center builds on the strength of the Colby Museum of Art and will be complemented by two major projects we are undertaking on Waterville’s Main Street: a collaborative arts space that officially opens this fall at 18 Main, and the Paul J. Schupf Art Center, which will open in just over a year on Castonguay Square.
Improved financial aid, the growth of our faculty, the establishment of new and leading academic programs, the expansion and enhancements of our campus, and our support of Waterville’s revitalization would not be possible without the generosity of our community and the prudent, disciplined management of our resources. We closed the books on the last fiscal year with a balanced budget for the 42nd consecutive year, despite committing $10 million to Covid-19 remediation protocols. We surpassed $625 million in the Dare Northward campaign, well on our way to our goal of $750 million when the campaign is scheduled to close in two years. And we start the year with an endowment valued at $1.26 billion, up from $740 million when I arrived at Colby in the summer of 2014.
Colby has never been stronger or better positioned to meet the ongoing challenges created by the pandemic and larger forces reshaping higher education. Yet we still have much more to do. We are planning for the construction of up to three new residential complexes on campus, we are working on innovative new academic programs in areas such as public policy and structural inequalities, our Board of Trustees and Museum Board of Governors will be initiating changes based on a yearlong exploration of how our governing boards can be more racially just, and our efforts in Waterville continue unabated.
Our mission of education and scholarship has never been more essential, a fact driven home for me as millions of young people were denied a quality education over the last year. That hasn’t happened at Colby, and while we will all need to continue making modest sacrifices for the greater good, the reward is the chance to live and learn together and be part of a truly amazing community.
What a gift that is for us all.
David A. Greene
President