Reimagining the Academy: Unity Environmental University on Breaking the Higher Ed Mold

The most innovative ideas often come from the most unexpected places. In the quiet landscape of New Gloucester, Maine, a sustainability-focused university is remaking itself to resemble an institution closer to a high-agility enterprise. Unity Environmental University, founded in 1965 as a small, rural college, radically transformed in the past decade by discarding the traditional higher ed playbook.

Leading this transformation is Dr. Erika Latty, the university’s President of the Enterprise and Chief Academic Officer. Under her tenure, the institution grew from a primarily residential student body of 600 to serving over 10,000 learners, 95% of whom study online. In the process, Unity put its campus real estate up for sale and moved to a smaller location. With these changes, “that kind of growth means almost everything has to change,” Latty explains.

We sat down with Dr. Latty to discuss how Unity is defying the slow-moving stigma of academia by embracing a centralized enterprise model, unbundling the faculty role, and preparing for a future where AI is the new baseline.

Shifting to an Enterprise Model

Unlike traditional provosts who oversee a layered academic organization, Dr. Latty manages what she calls "The Enterprise,” a centralized engine that supports a range of functional areas, from distance education to sustainable ventures.

“The enterprise model means that we have a number of centralized services at the university that we provide to different business verticals," Latty explains. "Our centralized services may be needed by some of these verticals or they may not be necessary in a given vertical.”

This structure allows Unity to be both big and small at the same time. While back-end functions like IT are centralized, the student experience remains hyper-specialized. “Our instructional capabilities within academics are very decentralized because we expect the instruction to look a little different in the online programs than it is in the in-person programs," she notes. "They all have different sorts of pedagogical techniques they're employing, different audiences they're catering to and, therefore, they're highly decentralized."

To successfully run this type of organization, leaders must be willing to unlearn traditional structures and operate differently. “I spend more time thinking about how we keep scaling and how we keep changing instead of protecting an established structure.”

Unbundling the Faculty Role

One of Unity’s most radical moves is the total reimagining of what it means to be a professor. In the traditional model, a single faculty member is expected to be a researcher, a learning designer, an administrative expert, a mentor, and more. Latty describes this expectation as “really too much to ask of a single individual.”

To solve this, Unity divided the faculty workload into six distinct roles. “We've thought about instructors and we've thought about subject matter experts. We think about learning designers. We think about curriculum designers. We think about program advisors who are different than mentors in the field. And we also think about curriculum assessors.”

This unbundling of responsibilities does more than optimize daily operations; it fundamentally changes the politics of program management. Because faculty are valued for their expertise rather than their attachment to a specific major, the university has successfully removed the fear of redundancy that often leads to institutional resistance.

“We've let go of this idea that each individual is so tied to a major and that if a new major comes on or a major goes away, so do those people," Latty explains. "That's not the case because majors are very transdisciplinary, especially the ones that we focus on that have that sustainability lens. People become less concerned about preserving a given major because they know there's still a lot of work for them to do and they become more invested in what's the major we need at this time that serves the purposes of the learners.”

While this transition has been effective, Dr. Latty acknowledges that the shift can be challenging for those who are used to a traditional model. The university also has to be intentional about translating this work for accreditors and assessors who are used to working within more traditional frameworks.

The Secret to Fast Program Launches? Dropping the One-Size-Fits-All Committee Structure

While many institutions take years to approve a new degree, Unity can build a program in three to four months. This differentiator comes from eliminating traditional committees in favor of hyper-functional working groups.

The university’s agility stems from reimagining who needs to be in the room. Rather than restricting curricular decisions to solely academics, Unity ensures it includes "the right people in the room" by inviting voices that are traditionally absent from these high-level academic discussions. These task groups span the university’s functional areas, including representatives from marketing, student success, and advancement. By including these perspectives early, the university ensures that new programs are not only academically sound but also marketable and student-ready from day one.

Furthermore, the university isn't afraid to look beyond its own walls to fill knowledge gaps. “We really try not to restrict ourselves to just what we can do but rather think about: What do we need to do to serve the learners in this moment and how do we make that happen? How do we change who's in the room? It's not just who's here at this moment, but who else do we need to add to the conversation?” Latty notes. If the expertise for a burgeoning field isn't available in-house, Unity recruits outside experts to inform the curriculum.

Even with input from multiple parties, these decisions funnel through a streamlined approval process. Each task group has one decision maker who owns the decision to move forward. “Having a clear decision maker can speed the time to a decision because the decision maker is really trying to get the best information to make the best decision and then advance the concept for approval to senior leadership,” Latty explains. This model has allowed Unity to launch specialized, workforce-aligned degrees such as Regenerative Hotel Management and Agroforestry at a pace that is challenging for most traditional institutions to achieve.

Flexibility as a Mission: Redefining the Academic Calendar

Unity’s transformation is perhaps most visible in its radical departure from the traditional academic calendar. Recognizing that their learners, with an average age of 29, are often balancing families and full-time careers, the university pivoted away from the standard 16-week semester in favor of a year-round, term-based schedule. Undergraduate students now move through eight five-week terms, a structure designed for life’s interruptions to simply be interruptions, not an end.

“We started thinking about the structures that we were operating in and how could we add more flexibility for students," Latty explains. This model allows a student to "stop out" for a single five-week term to handle a medical or family situation and return immediately after, rather than losing a full semester or a year of progress. “That level of flexibility was sort of unprecedented, especially for in-person programs.”

This pivot directly supports Unity's core mission of accessibility. By lowering the stakes of a single withdrawal from 15 credits to three, the university provides an achievable path for its expansive student body, which includes 35% first-generation and 70% Pell-eligible learners.

This commitment to the student experience is also bolstered by a long-term pledge to affordability. "We kept asking ourselves, how can we maintain an affordable tuition and maintain flexibility for our students?” Latty reflects. “Those are easy questions to ask but hard questions to answer.” For Unity, the answer was a bold financial commitment: a tuition freeze for distance education through 2030, maintaining a rate that has not increased since 2018. “It sounds easy on the surface but it's much harder to achieve operationally and we were willing to make those hard changes.”

Beyond a Knowledge Broker: Why Differentiation is the Only Shield Against AI

When asked about the future of higher education, Dr. Latty was quick to call out the role of AI both presently and in the future. While many institutions are scrambling to formulate a stance or treat it as a threat to academic integrity, Unity is leaning into the disruption.

“Instead of trying to detect it and say you can't use it, we are trying to understand how to embrace it, how to change our assessments so that AI becomes irrelevant to whether our assessments are telling us what we need to know," she says. "We just pivoted to that space of ‘AI is here.’ How can we all embrace it?” For Latty, this isn’t just about preparing students, but also examining how the university operates. “How can we leverage it to keep tuition flat, for example?”

According to Latty, the rise of AI signifies the end of the university as a mere "knowledge broker." The future, she believes, belongs to those who provide unique, differentiated value. “How do we remain relevant in a day when you can get on your phone and use Gemini and ask the question and get the answer?”

“We're not going to all offer the same value proposition, and that's okay. We need to lean into the differentiation.” She encourages others to consider: “Are [institutions] still hanging on to some traditions that aren't really serving the learners? Can you discard some of those traditions?”

Dr. Latty acknowledges that while these are difficult conversations to have, they are imperative for institutional survival. At Unity Environmental University, those discussions actively shape their approach to meeting their mission of providing affordable, accessible education with a sustainability lens.