Marlboro's 65 years recognized by Vermont legislators

In a Vermont House of Representatives resolution offered by members from Brattleboro, Vernon, Newfane, Wilmington, Wardsboro, Putney, Windham and Rockingham, the General Assembly voted to congratulate Marlboro College on its 65th anniversary. Referring to Marlboro as “one of America’s most creative and innovative institutions of higher education,” the resolution cites the college’s mission “to teach students to think clearly and to learn independently.” It also highlights Marlboro’s 95th percentile or better ranking, by the National Survey of Student Engagement, in terms of academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, supportive campus environment and collaborative learning. President Ellen McCulloch-Lovell is commended for “unique combination of cultural and political experience in a dynamic and successful campus leadership tenure.” Read the full resolution.

William Edelglass publishes book on environmental philosophy

“This year, many thousands of people will die as a consequence of malaria moving to higher altitudes, a shift made possible by warmer temperatures. Do we bear any moral responsibility for their deaths?” writes philosophy professor William Edelglass in Facing Nature: Levinas and Environmental Thought. Edited by Edelglass, James Hatley & Christian Diehm, Facing Nature brings contemporary continental philosophy to bear on a range of environmental issues, from climate change to environmental justice.

In his chapter “Rethinking Responsibility in an Age of Anthropogenic Climate Catastrophe,” William draws on Emmanuel Levinas’ account of ethical subjectivity. He argues that as individuals we are morally responsible for the human and environmental costs of climate change. Like other authors in Facing Nature, William brings the best of continental philosophy to bear on major issues in environmental thought. 

Marlboro launches programs for teens

New for summer 2012, Marlboro’s pre-college programs offer young adults the opportunity to study directly with faculty members, in the classroom and out. The two programs this June are titled Eating Against the Machine, offered by politics professor Meg Mott, and Philosophies of the Wilderness, offered by philosophy professor William Edelglass. Each program will provide a glimpse of college academics at their best and an opportunity to connect with a group of of other students passionate about learning.

President published in The Chronicle of Higher Education

In a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Marlboro College president Ellen McCulloch-Lovell writes about the benefits of being a college president who comes from a non-academic background. She writes: "If we love learning itself and believe in our hearts, along with Thomas Jefferson, that 'an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people,' then nontraditional presidents come with deep respect for the members of the faculty and, like our academic peers, pledge to uphold teaching and learning."

New Courses and Experiences

Marlboro Joins Vermont College Semester Exchange Program

If Marlboro students ever feel like they need a fresh outlook in their academic field, or a course not available on campus, there is a new opportunity available to them. In February, Marlboro College announced it will participate in a semester exchange program with other independent Vermont colleges. The program, launched this year through the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges, allows students to study for a semester at another private college in the state with no extra tuition costs.

“Marlboro is proud to participate in this innovative semester exchange program,” said Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, Marlboro president. “We look forward to joining with other Vermont institutions of higher education.” Marlboro students could spend a semester at one of 13 other independent Vermont colleges, such as Bennington, Middlebury or Sterling College, where they may explore new perspectives or learn new skills to incorporate into their Marlboro curriculum. Read more.

Marlboro Senior Chosen for National College Dance Festival

The New England regional conference of the American College Dance Festival Association, at Connecticut College, included dancers and faculty choreographers from top schools like The Boston Conservatory, University of Vermont and Middlebury College. The 44 dances presented were of the highest caliber, and 28 schools were represented. Marlboro senior Cookie Harrist’s work was one of 10 selected for the final gala concert on February 11. The solo piece Cookie choreographed, titled “Present Present Present,” was also among three acts chosen for a national conference gala performance in May, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

“It feels so wonderful to know that something I made spoke strongly to an audience and the conference adjudicators,” said Cookie. “It’s sort of shocking that I was able to do that.” Cookie will bring “Present Present Present” to the 2012 National College Dance Festival, held on May 25-27, a biennial event showcasing the outstanding quality of choreography and performance created on college and university campuses across the country. Read more.

Perspectives on Cambodia

In May 2011, 10 Marlboro students, staff and faculty left for Cambodia as part of a service-learning and teaching journey. The students raised $2,500 in aid for organizations in Cambodia. They also brought children's books, medications and medical equipment including nearly a 1,000 pairs of donated eye-glasses, as well as 30 laptop computers donated by Pfizer, inc.

In a new video presented at the Marlboro student film festival in December 2011, junior Kirsten Wiking combined recent interviews of students with Cambodia footage from Max Foldeak, director of health services. The video will be used by the non-profit agencies in Cambodia, the World Studies Program at Marlboro College, and the agencies in the U.S. that donated to this service-learning project.

Spanish professor wins theater prize

Rosario de Swanson, professor of Spanish language and literature at Marlboro College, received the prestigious Victoria Urbano Award in drama, presented by the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica (AILCFH). The award, for her play titled Metamorfosis ante el espejo de obsidiana (Metamorphosis before the Obsidian Mirror), was announced on October 21 at the annual meeting of the association at the University of Barcelona. 

“The play is a monologue in two acts,” said Rosario, who specializes in Afro-Hispanic literature, particularly women writers, contemporary indigenous literature and feminist and post-colonial theory. “It centers on the female protagonist’s struggles to overcome self-inflicted repression and oppression, as she also comes to understand her part in the reproduction of other’s oppression ingrained in her by cultural norms.” 

Although Metamorfosis is a contemporary approach to issues of female oppression, the play is deeply connected to Rosario’s Mexican roots and ancestry. “Being Mexican, I love music and I tend to draw from it a lot,” she said. “In this play I draw on Mexican popular and classical musical traditions, including the aria ‘Obisidian Butterfly’ by Mexican composer Daniel Catán, from his opera Rapaccini’s Daughter.”

In September, Rosario also presented a paper on “Dance as female affirmation in Ekomo, a novel from Equatorial Guinea,” at an international conference titled Africa and People of African Descent: Issues and Actions to Re-Envision the Future, at Howard University. The conference celebrated and reinforced the United Nations declaration of 2011 as the Year of Africa and People of African Descent.

Math professor and student collaborate on combinatorics

The current issue of Australasian Journal of Combinatorics (vol. 51: 243-257) includes a joint paper by Marlboro College math professor Matt Ollis and his former student Devin Willmott ’11. Titled “On twizzler, zigzag and graceful terraces,” the paper adds to our mathematical knowledge of balanced sequences known as “terraces.”

“There are three somewhat separate problems addressed in the paper, tied together through their use of terraces,” said Matt. “A terrace is a structured pattern that might or might not exist in each of infinitely many mathematical objects called groups. They were originally developed to help with the design of agricultural experiments but have since been found to have applications to other situations and mathematicians also study them in their own right.”

For example, “twizzler terraces”—named by previous authors for the turkey twizzlers found on the menu in some British schools—are terraces that appear to twist in on themselves. In their paper, Matt and Devin classify what types of twizzler terrace can possibly exist and exactly when they do.

“Terraces are combinatorial objects rooted in finite group theory,” said Devin, who collaborated with Matt on this paper as part of his Plan of Concentration at Marlboro on group theory. By leaving behind most of the mathematical rules we are familiar with, collections of elements, or “groups,” are found to interact with each other in new and significant ways. “The ideas behind group theory are fairly unlike any other discipline I have seen, and lead to surprising and unintuitive but elegant results,” Devin said.

Students use their heads for charity

“How much can I pay you to dye your hair blue?” “Pay me? I’d just donate it, so why don’t we make it $500 for charity.” This conversation between two Marlboro College students was the inspiration for this fall’s “Green for Blue” United Way Campaign. Anna Hughes, a senior at Marlboro, and Chuck Pillette, a junior with very white hair (pictured right), decided they wanted to raise money for the United Way to help those affected by the recent flooding as well as others in need. Jodi Clark, director of housing and residential life and a Marlboro alumna (also pictured right), was planning the traditional employee fundraising effort for the United Way when Anna asked for help getting her campaign going. 

“It simply seemed like a great way to accomplish both the employee campaign and this student led idea by combining them to make it a whole campus community campaign,” said Jodi. Jodi and Anna started asking other prominent community members if they would be willing to either dye or temporarily spray their hair blue for at least a day if the community campaign reaches specific giving benchmarks. Currently, there are 17 community members who are going to go blue for the United Way, including Ellie Roark, head selectperson, writing professor John Sheehy (his goatee) and Ken Schneck, dean of students. Even Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, president of the college, has pledged to spray her hair blue for one day if the community raises $5,000 by October 13. 

“The United Way of Windham County funds so many agencies and programs that aid families and communities all year round, whether there is a natural disaster to recover from or individual families facing hardships such as a fire, job loss or sudden illness,” said Jodi. “Other programs they support help strengthen our community, and all of the funding stays in Windham County.” For more information on Marlboro College’s Green for Blue United Way Campaign, contact Jodi Clark at jdclark@marlboro.edu.  

Amer Latif counsels love for humankind

In an editorial published in The Commons, religion professor Amer Latif calls for love, compassion and peace on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. "As a Muslim-American, I find such inspiration in the life of the Prophet Muhammad, who, when asked how one could change the behavior of one’s children, replied, 'Start with yourself,'” writes Amer. He says that seeing the suffering of the victims of 9/11 as no different from the suffering of the thousands of Iraqis who have died since is difficult work, work that begins with finding compassion within oneself.

Jaysinh Birjepatil's new book excerpted in India Abroad

“I do not know of any place on earth where successive waves of immigrants have thrived so abundantly,” said retired literature professor J. Birjepatil, referring to the backdrop of his new book, The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights. His book was excerpted, and Birje was interviewed, in the August 12, 2011, issue of India Abroad. “It was also a place where several histories and traditions had collided, sometimes coalescing into a single story, but more often with many unresolved conflicts.”

The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights is the fictional story of an aristocratic Muslim family that flees sectarian violence in their native central India, only to find reverberations in multiethnic urban America. Birje, who was born to secular Hindu parents and went to English boarding schools, told India Abroad that he never knew what it felt like to be discriminated against. 

“Then 9/11 happened,” said Birje, who retired after teaching at Marlboro for 15 years in 2002. His book was born out of his own ambivalence between the need for U.S. vigilance and discrimination against Muslims and immigrants. “I have no ethnic or religious affiliations, but I could see myself being trapped into a Kafkaesque nightmare in some unknown xenophobic city where organized ignorance has trumped reason.” 

Tim Segar exhibit at Oxbow Gallery, June 27 - July 31

Visual arts professor Tim Segar is exhibiting his work in the back room of The Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts through July 31. Call the gallery at 413-585-6300 or visit oxbowgallery.org for hours and directions.

John Willis on Vermont Public Radio

Photography professor John Willis sat down with Vermont Edition's Jane Lindholm to discuss his Guggenheim Fellowship and his work with area youth.

Virtual Plan Room

Explore Plan topics from graduates over the past sixty years.

Rice-Aron Library is "Open"

"What’s inspiring about the Rice-Aron Library is its openness: the open building, the belief in patrons honoring the privilege of the collection, the instruction sessions held out in the open for all to see and learn, and the leap to open source tools and finding out that they work just as well as commercial systems. While many libraries talk about transparency, this is one that is actually living it," Brian Mathews says about Marlboro College's library, which is featured in his May 2011 "Next Steps" column for American Library Magazine.

Perched on its knoll in the northwest corner of campus, the Rice-Aron Library serves the community in ways far beyond its collection of 75,000 books and 17,000 journals. There are classrooms and computer labs, a dedicated space for art exhibits, public reading and other interesting events. But it always come back to the collection. As the library's Facebook page pointed out recently, Marlboro students on average checked out 35 books during the 2010-11 academic year.

Summer service-learning trip to Cambodia

A community-wide auction of paintings, prints, photos, books, ceramics and other artworks created by students raised $2,500 in aid for organizations in Cambodia, just in time for the second service-learning trip to that country by the Marlboro Community in the past three years.

For two weeks this summer, 10 Marlboro students, faculty and staff members will visit Kampong Chhnang, Ang, Pursat, Omani andSiem Reap, among other locations, with support going to water control, irrigation and purification work, a sewing school and a school where children learn English and keyboarding skills to supplement the education they get at public school.

In addition,  the group will purchase and give E.S.L. books, children's books, medications and medical equipment donated from many local sources, including nearly a thousand pairs of eyeglasses as well as 30 laptop computers donated by Pfizer, Inc. Donations are being processed through the World Peace Fund, the Amherst/Cambodia Water project, and directly to the schools mentioned above.

While in Cambodia, the group will participate in E.S.L. classes in the schools and help with the water projects. Secondarily, but also important to this trip will be visits to the capital Phnom Penh, the temples at Angkor and memorials to those killed during the Khmer Rouge period.

Spanish professor publishes article on Afro-Peruvian identity

Rosario de Swanson's article, Women's Words: Orality, Myth and History in the works of Afro-Peruvian writer Lucia Charun Illescas will be included in a volume published by the University of Perpignan in France as part of their Latin American, Africa and Europe research group. 

The volume, entitled Postcolonial Discourses and Renegotiations of Black Identities: Africas, Americas, Caribes, Europas, is part of a joint effort by the Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios Africanos y de la World Diaspora Africana (Americas, Caribes, Europa), Howard university (US) and Le Groupe de Recherche Sur Les Noir-E-S D'Amerique Latina, Universite de Perpignan (France). Click here for their website (in French).