Meet the President
Ellen McCulloch-Lovell is Marlboro College’s first woman president and the seventh woman college president in Vermont. She has strong ties to Vermont: she was chief of staff to U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) from 1983 to 1994. As executive director of the Vermont Arts Council (1975 to 1983), she was co-creator of the Governor's Institutes, a program that gives high school students the opportunity to work with artists, scientists and international experts in summer institutes, now in its 25th year. She was a 1969 graduate of Bennington College.
McCulloch-Lovell spent seven years in the Clinton administration from 1994 to 2001, serving as executive director of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, deputy chief of staff to the first lady, and deputy assistant to the president and advisor to the first lady on the Millennium Project. In her role on the Millennium Project, she spearheaded national campaigns in historic preservation and in educational, cultural and environmental programs. The Save America’s Treasures program (SAT), now administered by the National Park Service, the President’s Committee and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has won over $30 million each year since 1998 from Congress and attracted over $100 million in private contributions. Among the hundreds of national icons that SAT helped conserve are the Star-Spangled Banner, the Washington Monument, and the cave dwellings of Mesa Verde. Other White House initiatives included: a televised Blue Room speaker series called Millennium Evenings at the White House, a national trail-building and designation program with the U.S. Department of Transportation, states and communities; a tree planting program with the U.S. Department of Agriculture; an international cultural diplomacy initiative with the U.S. Department of State, and a program with the U.S. Department of Education to improve science and arts skills in schools, among other national projects.
A believer in civic engagement, McCulloch-Lovell serves on a number of organizations, including as a member of the National Science Foundation’s BIO Advisory Council, a regent of the American Architectural Foundation, an advisory council member for the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution, a member of the Vermont Council on Rural Development’s Council on the Future of Vermont and on the boards of Building a Better Brattleboro and the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum.
Ellen lives on campus in the Captain Dan Mather House with her husband, Dr. Christopher W. Lovell, a professor for Union Institute and University. Her son Evan, his wife Kristi and grandchildren, Lucia Eve and Isobel Sarah, live in Stowe, Vermont.
Publications by Ellen McCulloch-Lovell
“Colleges as Catalysts for the Creative Class”
The Chronicle Review, December 8, 2006
“Art as Diplomacy”
Op-Ed, Boston Globe, September 4, 2005
“Why the Liberal Arts Matter for America’s Future”
Op-Ed, Burlington Free Press, January 30, 2005
“A Vocation of the Imagination: Creating the Creative Campus”(pdf)
Connection: The Journal of the New England Board of Higher Education