Community

woman speaking at town meetingCommunity life at Marlboro for most students means living in a dorm on the edge of the woods and eating alongside faculty and staff in a dining hall that was once a dairy barn. It means going to Town Meeting to vote on where people can smoke cigarettes and park cars, and whether to give a few hundred dollars to a community service trip to Costa Rica. It means serving on a committee that decides which faculty will be hired, which students will be accepted, which films will be shown and where community art should happen. It means watching—or playing in—the soccer game against Bennington on a Saturday afternoon and then getting dolled up for the event of the season—the Queer Homecoming dance. It means attending a presentation by the Chinese ambassador to the United States and going to your roommate’s poetry reading. There’s a lot going on at Marlboro outside the classroom, and most of it is initiated by the people who live here.