Supporting the Whole Person

Worried she wasn’t going to finish her project on time but not wanting to lessen her commitment to her team, she sought counsel from her capstone advisor, Philip Nyhus, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Professor of Environmental Studies and chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Division. “I remember sitting in his office, and he asked me, ‘What are you going to remember in 20 years—this report, or the fact that volleyball has been so incredible for you?’ He told me to focus on volleyball, and we’d wrap up the project later. Because Colby is a smaller community, you can support the whole person.”

Twenty years later and now an assistant professor of environmental studies, Cleaver keeps Nyhus’s message and advice top of mind when counseling her own students about academic issues, career decisions, or anything else. She knows what it’s like to be in their shoes.

“I tell my students, ‘I went here too.’”

As an ecologist, Cleaver often works in the intertidal zone, a liminal space between the sea and the land. These spaces are not always simple but they are important, and rich with possibilities. So perhaps it’s not a surprise that she is comfortable in other kinds of liminal spaces, including those where the tide meets the town. Cleaver is able to blend marine ecology with social science, and looks at the future of Maine’s coastal restoration, fisheries, and aquaculture with a wide lens that includes the people who work on the coast as well as the species that live there.

As a marine scientist and wife of a lobsterman, she is in a sometimes delicate position of conducting research that might impact the livelihood of her husband’s fishing community and of families in their social circles. But being in that position also gives her unique standing among both fishing communities and her academic peers, as well as a vital perspective about the importance and impact of her work. She learned to live in this in-between space early in her career when she studied how right whales dive as a research technician for the Maine Department of Marine Resources. The research showed that whales tended to dive to the ocean floor and roll around, which meant the floating ropes that connected lobster traps at the bottom of the ocean posed entanglement risk.

Her involvement in the Basin Oyster Project at Phippsburg’s Basin Preserve is ongoing. With funding from the Maine Community Foundation and working with numerous local partners, Cleaver is monitoring two oyster restoration sites in the Basin, a sheltered saltwater inlet on the New Meadows River. Over a period of years, she and her students are exploring whether Maine’s warming ocean waters will enhance oyster growth and production, as well as the social-ecological factors involved.

Elsewhere in Phippsburg, at the Sprague Marsh in the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, she is working collaboratively with her colleagues at Bates College and members of the Wabanaki nations to find out if sweetgrass, whose native salt marshes are vulnerable to sea-level rise and the pressure of coastal development, can be successfully transplanted. If so, this could safeguard and increase the resilience of a species critically important to Indigenous culture.

Further, he said, Cleaver embodies the kind of academic discipline and training that distinguish Colby scholars. She is loyal to Colby and loyal to her students just as she was loyal to her volleyball teammates when they won the NESCAC title 20 years ago, he said.

“She has the potential to be an incredible teacher here at Colby, just as she was an incredible athlete while at Colby,” Nyhus said. “All of us at Colby should be proud every time we hire one of our alumni. We have launched them into their careers and then they come back with new skills to pass on to the next generation of students.”

Island Center for Science and Leadership. While doing that work, she earned a master’s in public administration at Columbia University (“like an M.B.A. for the public sector— very practical”) and later added master’s degrees in marine policy and marine biology from the University of Maine.

She was finishing her Ph.D. at UMaine, focusing on aquaculture as a diversification strategy for fishermen, when the position in the Environmental Studies Department at Colby opened up. As a student, she was encouraged to follow her interests, instincts, and passions—in the classroom and on the volleyball court. Coming back as a professor has allowed her to develop those interests, become an expert, and encourage her own students to be fair-minded, passionate, and curious.

“I have always felt right at home in environmental studies,” Cleaver said, noting that Nyhus, who encouraged her commitment to volleyball when he was her professor and advisor, has an office next to hers and remains influential, now as a colleague and peer. “I love it here at Colby, and I have always loved it here. It’s like family.”