The once small, residential college now enrolls nearly 10,000 students in mostly online degree programs, and will honor about 1,000 in Portland’s Merrill Auditorium Friday.
| Riley Board, Press Herald |
NEW GLOUCESTER — Once a small college struggling with declining enrollment, Unity Environmental University is bringing in astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson as its commencement speaker to help graduate its largest-ever class this Friday.
The president of Unity Environmental University, formerly Unity College, says the school has evolved in response to the challenges of higher education and its 10,000-person student body is now mostly online.
“Our purpose at Unity is to offer quality environmental science and sustainability-based degrees, for everything from traditional students to working adults, so they can make an impact where they are,” President Melik Peter Khoury said in an interview Wednesday at the school’s new campus at Pineland Farms in New Gloucester. “But anything else is basically a construct.”
Unity is now the second-largest university in the state based on enrollment, behind only the flagship public University of Maine with 12,000 students as of this fall. On Friday, more than 1,000 students will graduate with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in environmental fields; about 200 are expected to walk in-person at Merrill Auditorium in Portland, joined by more than 1,000 guests.
Tyson, the famed astrophysicist and science communicator, is just the latest in a line of notable commencement speakers: Khoury said primatologist Jane Goodall and the zookeeper TV star Steve Irwin have both given the address in the past.
“With this invitation from Unity Environmental University, I am reminded that some institutions of higher learning have taken the shepherding of our precious Earth seriously enough to embed it into everything they preach and everything they teach,” Tyson said in an announcement from the university.
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