Media Coverage

Colby's plans for reopening campus and COVID-19 testing was included in a June 30 Maine Public story titled "COVID-19 Tests Planned For Thousands Of Students Heading Back To Maine College Campuses In The Fall." President Greene said that in addition to requiring face coverings, social distancing, and other safety measures, Colby will test students and employees before they return to campus and retest three times during the first few weeks of school. "Every week thereafter we will test them at least twice. We’re going to do 85,000 tests in the first semester alone, which is pretty close to what the entire state has done for over 1.3 million people since the beginning of this pandemic, and we’re going to do that our population of only 3,000 over the fall semester,” President Greene told Maine Public.

A Huffington Post story titled "Democrats Are Making Mitch McConnell The Star Of Senate Race Advertising" referenced a poll conducted by Professor of Government Dan Shea.  "A Colby College poll of Maine conducted in February showed that Trump was more popular in the state than McConnell," the Huff Post reported on its story reporting that "Democratic and liberal groups in three states with vulnerable Republican senators are running television and digital ads linking them to Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s increasingly unpopular leader in the Senate." This story was also picked up by Yahoo! News.

The Portland Press Herald featured two startups founded by Colby students in its June 28 article "Waterville-based tech startups mark milestones in their development:" Easy Eats, founded by Christian Krohg '22 and Katharine Dougherty '22, and Sklaza, founded by Josh Kim '22.   Both tech-based businesses competed in the Greenlight Maine Collegiate Challenge pitch competition, "a statewide collaboration of entrepreneurial catalysts and corporate leaders that promotes and mentors the development and growth of business in the state," the Press Herald reported. Easy Eats, an app-based food-delivery service platform that delivers to college dormitory doors, is a finalist in the competition, while Sklaza, an online marketplace devoted to college students that "tackles overconsumption, encourages recycling, and environmental sustainability," was a semi-finalist. “Technology and innovation is a key area of growth for downtown Waterville, and the mid-Maine region, and the success of Easy Eats and Sklaza is both a testament to their founders’ hard work and to the support of incredibly dynamic partners including MTI, Bricks Coworking & Innovation Space, and Colby College,” said Garvan Donegan, director of planning and economic development at Central Maine Growth Council.  

For the most recent installation in its series "Ask Me," the Portland Press Herald reached out to Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies, for her thoughts on the question: When will life get back to normal? Gilkes believes that "Normal, as we once knew it, will never be the same." Because of the coronavirus pandemic and the racial unrest spurred from the George Floyd murder, there's a new level of consciousness. "The new normal, I think, will be a higher level of self-education, and a higher level of consciousness about race and racism, especially among white people in America."

A commentary in Fortune titled "Universities should support their most vulnerable students to champion education equity" mentioned Colby's new initiative, Pay it Northward, as an example of colleges taking care of their students during the COVID-19 pandemic. 'Smaller institutions, too, illustrate how it is possible to make transformative commitments to equity, even with finite resources," the authors wrote. "Colby College, with its Pay It Northward initiative, has deployed its full alumni and professional network to connect each and every graduating senior with a postgraduate opportunity."

Assistant Professor of Biology Chris Moore was tapped to comment on a Portland Press Herald article titled "Widely cited health institute keeps missing the mark on Maine death projections." Models often get a bad rap, Moore said, because they're not perfect and numerically imprecise. "That is just the nature of dealing with complex systems," he told the Press Herald.  "Moore liked one of his student’s comparisons of infectious disease modeling to using a smartphone for driving directions. Your phone’s GPS should be able to predict with some precision when you will arrive in, say, nearby Fairfield from Waterville. But your ETA in Boston from Waterville depends on traffic, accidents and other factors," the article said. “When you are watching your phone and traveling, it is dynamically updating and taking into account all of these variables,” Moore said.

Maine colleges, including Colby, are releasing details for reopening their campuses, recounted in this June 15 Portland Press Herald article. "Colby College in Waterville will likely start in-person classes earlier than normal and look to complete the semester by Thanksgiving, though the planning process is ongoing and more detailed plans are expected next month, the college said in a statement," the article reports.

Research on the end-Permian extinction by Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, was the subject of a Daily Californian article on June 11. The article highlighted Gastaldo's recently published work that identifies a new timeline for the end-Permian extinction. “We now know after 18 years of research … that whatever happened to the plants, and maybe to the animals, … did not happen at the same time of the greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history that occurred in the oceans,” Gastaldo said. “Whatever happened on land happened 300,000 years, or maybe a little more, before the catastrophe in the ocean,” Gastaldo to the paper. 

Cacophonic Choir, a work co-created by Hannen (Hannah) Wolfe, assistant professor of computer science, was featured in an ACM SIGGRAPH blog post. The project "amplifies the voices of sexual survivors' stories ... and uses machine learning through carefully spaced agents to demonstrate the effect of the mass media on survivors’ stories," the blog reports. Click here to read the Q&A with the creators and learn about their "inspiration, algorithms, and audio."

An op-ed in the June 13 Portland Press Herald co-written by Catherine Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology, points out concrete steps Maine can take to correct inequalities for people of color living in the state. Places to start, suggested by the authors, include:

• • Maine should take more steps to protect the sovereignty of tribes in the state.
  • Maine should not incarcerate children.
  • Budgets for police departments should fall and funds should be redirected to support the construction of affordable housing, free health clinics, addiction recovery support, substantive job skills training and adult education.
  • Because the CARES Act discriminates against many categories of legal immigrants, Maine should step up to ensure immigrant Mainers receive equal supports and protections.