BANGOR DAILY NEWS • November 16, 2021
Unity defined itself as a college town. But now most of the students are gone. Unity College was founded to protect the town from rural decay, but in the wake of broad based program reforms that have sharply reduced the number of on-campus students, Unity residents are grappling with how to adapt to the changing future of its namesake school. Unity College’s leaders say the shift has been good for the school, which now has more than 2,500 full-time, degree-seeking students. But Melik Khoury, the president of Unity College, declined to specify how many of those students are presently living on campus. Locals believe that just 50 or 60 students lived on campus during the five-week semester that recently wrapped up — meaning that the college’s change of direction has been less uniformly positive for the town of Unity.