Are you sitting down?

That's what a lawyer said to our new college president Stephen Mulkey last Thursday.

The attorney then went on to tell Stephen that the college would be receiving an anonymous $10 million gift, earmarked for our endowment.

Nothing remotely like this has ever happened to our small college.

When the announcement was made at the start-of-term assembly yesterday, Dr. Mulkey asked for questions.

We were all far too stunned to ask any.

This itself was remarkable, since we at Unity College are not generally so reticent with our questions and comments.

When I think back over what it took to bring the college to the point where we could be the recipients of such confidence, well, there's just been an awful lot of hard work for me and my colleagues. At times it was exhausting and demoralizing. At other times, it seemed like we were getting somewhere.

This year of 2011 was shaping up to be a watershed year for the college even before the anonymous gift. We have completely rebuilt our curriculum, updating it for 21st century sustainability problems. We have revitalized our campus with several new buildings, including our Terra Haus, the first student residence in the US to meet the Passive House standard. We hired a good half-dozen excellent and superbly qualified new faculty colleagues, including Doctors Mulkey and Trumble (President and VPAA respectively). We won two $100,000-plus research grants for summer sustainability field research involving students and a $200,000 Davis Foundation grant to support curriculum reform and accessible technology. Things were looking good.

Money was still tight, as it always is at our small institution, and we still had to think long and hard about every expenditure, a process in which I'm heavily involved as the Faculty Moderator and a member of various key planning committees.

There are always at least a half-dozen completely vital and essential things we could do with every last dollar.

Sometimes I feel like frugality, particularly frugal sustainability, is what this college has that is best in itself, to give to the world.

But we were getting somewhere. I felt buoyant walking around campus, doing my daily business, organizing my research crew, seeing the new, super sustainable buildings, the solar arrays on the Unity House and the Terra House, the huge new fields of productive organic veggies grown for the dining hall and the local food pantry, all thriving in the Maine sunshine.

And then someone, name unknown, gave us ten million dollars on top of all that.

Our budget deliberations will still be difficult. There will still be four or five competing and perfectly vital things we might do with every last dollar. (Down from six!) We will still need to be very frugal.

But I think what this gift has dome more than anything -- and perfect timing at the start of a new term and a new college budget year! -- is to ratify all our hard work.

This gift tells us that we are appreciated, that we've come a long way, and that important people understand that we have a long way to go, but we are going to get there.