Remembrance: Judith Swazey
1939–October 4, 2025
By Professor Emeritus Bill Carpenter
The COA community has learned of the passing of Judith P. Swazey, PhD, longtime Bar Harbor resident and College of the Atlantic’s second president. Swazey died on October 4, 2025 at the age of 86. She succeeded the college’s founder, Ed Kaelber as the President of COA, and served from 1982 to 1984. Her background was ideal for the interdisciplinary center COA had become in its first decade. She was a Wellesley graduate with a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard. Before coming to Bar Harbor, she was the Executive Director of Medicine in the Public Interest at Boston University, as well as an adjunct professor of sociomedical sciences and community medicine.
Though barely 40 years old when she arrived at COA, she was a widely known historian of science and medicine, and of the social, ethical, legal, and policy aspects of contemporary medical research and practice. She had already published nine books in her field, and was a member of the Institute of Medicine of the American Academy of Sciences.
Swazey arrived in Bar Harbor in July 1982 with a vision for the young college as a “community of scholars… in a small center of great excellence.” She valued COA’s self-governing and interdisciplinary approach to education, and saw human ecology as “a revolution in human thought.” Her two-year administration witnessed the most tumultuous chapter in COA history, including the tragic death of academic vice president Dick Davis on the opening day of her first term, the 1983 fire that consumed COA’s main classroom building and library, and, in its aftermath, the creation of the Phoenix Fund, which furnished the initial resources for COA’s rebirth. She likened the college to the mythical phoenix that rose from its own ashes. By the time of the September 1983 convocation, Swazey said that, “it is nothing short of a miracle that we are all assembled here today.”
After Swazey left the college in the summer of 1984, she remained in Bar Harbor to lead a life of public service, including the presidency of the Jesup Memorial Library, as well as founding and directing the Acadia Institute, an independent, nonprofit research organization focused on the intersection of medical, scientific, ethnographic, social, and policy issues in biomedical research and healthcare.
Working both individually and with her friend and collaborator, Renee Fox, Swazey wrote several more books after leaving COA, including Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society (Oxford University Press, 1992), and The Ethical Climate of Academic Work (Oxford University Press, 1990s). Her life’s vocation was to hold educational and medical institutions to the highest standards.
In the words of former president Darron Collins ’92, “Post-Covid, we would gather on her back porch. She would smoke cigarettes and we would drink boxed white wine and cautiously chat about the past. I loved that time together, and came to appreciate this smart, insightful, driven woman. Her want for change came from a good, honest, creative place, as a thoughtful and experienced academic and intellectual leader. I hope in her death we can honor these qualities of humility and self-awareness alongside her smarts, her insight, and her drive.”
Her presidency challenged the identity and purpose of our community, and we rose from the ashes with a greater strength, coherence, and knowledge of who we were. The college extends its condolences to her family, including her children Woody and Beth, who attended Bar Harbor schools and are fondly remembered on Mount Desert Island.
