Marlboro Edition

The Berkeley Beacon November 6, 2020

It’s been one year since the Marlboro merger was announced.

What happened?

By Jacob Seitz

November 6, 2020

H ar me out Former Marlboro students and faculty

“Memories of Marlboro” Page 4

Four different Marlboro community members described their single favorite memory on the Potash Hill campus—a spot they all still hold dear.

Features Jacob Seitz

“The Complete story of the Marlboro merger” Page 6

Diti Kohli Editor-in-Chief Domenico Conte Content Managing Editor Dylan Rossiter Operations Managing Editor

The Beacon’s senior Marlboro reporter checked in with the merger’s key players— students, faculty, and administrators—a year since the merger was announced

Tomás González Visual Managing Editor Jakob Menendez Magazine Advisor C. Fox Ditelberg Copyeditor Contributors Jacob Seitz Aaron Pilarcik Aaron Damon Rush Seth Harter Todd Smith

Any and all comments on articles can be directed to Magazine@BerkeleyBeacon.com Pitches can be emailed directly to our Editor-in-Chief at Diti_Kohli@emerson.edu

Photo: Pine trees line one of the few roads that wind through Marlboro’s Vermont campus.

The Arts

Former Marlboro Students

“Photos of a campus no more” Page 14

The Beacon Magazine asked students to send us photos they feel capture the essence of their time at Marlboro.

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Love letter to Marlboro

The first day I visited Marlboro was filled with grief, sadness, and despair— but also an overwhelming amount of love. Love for a campus that had served as the grounds for countless stories. Love for the community that had been built from the tenderness of those that attended Marlboro in its final years. And love for an institution that allowed them to thrive and exist freely, yet also bind together as a community.

I’ll dearly miss my visits to Potash Hill, but what I’ll miss more was the people that would meet me with open arms every time I stepped into that dining hall. I’ll always have dreams of the cookie drawer. While the campus may be gone, the memories made there will live on forever, in the minds of those who made Marlboro so special.

Jakob Menendez Magazine Advisor

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H ar me out Emerson’s premier destination for sharing opinions

Memories of Marlboro

The town crier bell which was used during meetings held in the Dining Hall. (Jakob Menendez/Beacon Archive)

Aaron Damon Rush Former Student

Aaron Pilarcik Former Student

“Marlboro College was a place unlike any other on earth. It was more of a poem than a school. It was a place where you could achieve anything you could imagine. A place where the lines between dream and reality became blurred. It was a place where one could study anything from astrophysics to photography, dance and everything in between. It was a place where students, professors, and staff all sat together at lunch and shared ideas as friends. Snow would fall peacefully and gently outside the dining room windows against a backdrop of forested mountains, creating the effect of being inside a snow globe. Life at Marlboro College was like living in a fairy tale, meeting people from all over the country and world, each with a vision and plan uniquely their own. Days were filled with lively discussions, stimulating classes, and quiet moments over tea with friends. Nights were about walking over a gurgling mountain stream to the flickering candlelight of the outdoor wood fired sauna in the snow covered forest under a canopy of stars, while contemplating the mysteries of quantum physics. It sometimes feels like Marlboro really was just a dream, too precious and beautiful to exist. But, having lived it, I know it was real, and anything we dream can become reality, like this magical school we called Marlboro College.”

“I was at Marlboro for three semesters, but the moment I keep coming back to was actually over the summer, during the Music Festival. Me and another student sneaked into the climbing wall under Whittemore and spent the night on the mats. We just spent the whole night gossiping, looking up at the fairy lights, and trying not to freeze in the basement air. Even during the summer, it felt like home. I don’t know that any campus can replicate the feeling of ownership that Marlboro gave its students.”

Todd Smith

Former Faculty Member “One project holds a special place in my memories of Marlboro, though. Marlboro was really small, and most people had more than one role and were busy trying to handle all of their competing responsibilities. That meant that if you wanted something to happen, you probably had to be the one to make it happen. The college also had an ethic of encouraging students to pursue imaginative and difficult projects. One student wanted to build a permanent greenhouse at the college from local and salvaged materials, by hand. Students, staff and faculty would provide the expertise and the labor. For his Plan of Concentration, Kenny Card made a compelling argument for the greenhouse, and designed the structure. He hauled rocks for hand-built portions of the foundation, and worked with the college’s head carpenter, Don Capponcelli, to turn his design into construction plans. Some of my favorite memories are of working with Kenny and Don (and many others) on the construction - from concrete to local lumber to the solar array - and finally, growing salad greens throughout a cold Vermont winter.”

Seth Harter

Former Faculty Member “One of the best traditions at Marlboro College when it was on Potash Hill in Vermont was ‘Midnight Breakfast.’

Every semester there was a deadline for the submission of ‘writing portfolio’ - the highest hurdle that 1st year students had to clear. The portfolio was composed of essays, written and extensively revised for Marlboro classes, and then submitted to the entire faculty for assessment. Very stressful and a lot of work. The night before this deadline, the faculty and staff joined forces with the college dining hall crew and cooked an enormous breakfast for all the students: the ones who had to submit their portfolios and all the others who’d been through it before and were there to cheer them on (or just to give them a hard time). Shortly before midnight, hundreds of students would pour into the dining hall and queue up for bacon, pancakes, eggs, hash browns, bagels, homemade pastries, coffee, oatmeal, cut fruit - you name it. Everyone looked haggard by that time of the semester, but the mood was very positive. The faculty had a good time assuming a very different role from the one they’d inhabit the next morning, while grading the portfolios. The students ate their hearts out, then turned down the lights, turned up the music and danced blowing off nearly a whole semester’s worth of steam.”

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Features: The Complete story of the Marlboro College merger

On Nov. 6, 2019, President M. Lee Pelton invi Majestic Theater to announce the merger and was riddled with controversy and received shar alike. Now that the contract has finally been sig

Story by Jacob Seitz

ited the Emerson community into the Culter aquisition of Marlboro College. The deal rp criticism from alumni, students, and faculty gned, one question remains. What happened?

In the fall, Potash Hill is silent.

The smell of dying trees, turning leaves, and rotten apples on the forest floor wafts through the air. At the former site of Marlboro College, a serene and remote school often caked in snow at the top of a Southern Vermont mountain, there was usually a sense of peace. Of waiting. But this place is not what it once was. The place is not Marlboro, at least not anymore.

A year ago, the apples and brush were still there, paired with the smell of fresh peach cobbler cooking in the dining hall—a renovated cattle barn. But the air at Marlboro was thick with anticipation.

Around 150 students gathered in the only auditorium on Nov. 6, awaiting an announcement from the college President Kevin Quigley.

Charlie Hickman, a junior at the time, was there.

“Throughout the whole meeting, I was really relaying the information the whole time,” Hickman said. “I felt like I was sitting in that room, like a stone statue.”

Hundreds of miles away that same day, Boston smelled of burnt rubber and gasoline. Of cigarettes and construction dust.

Cars honked. The MBTA screeched. In the Cutler Majestic Theatre, the Emerson community also awaited an announcement from President M. Lee Pelton. Not with nervous anticipation, but with curious wonder.

Emerson would be acquiring Marlboro, its $30 million endowment, and funds from the sale of the campus, free of charge, at the end of the 2019-2020 school year. In exchange, the Boston college would accept Marlboro students at the tuition rate they

Sept. 2019 Marlboro unsuccessfully concludes merger discussions with University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.

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already paid and offer faculty contracts to teach in the city. The “alliance” intended to flood an indebted Emerson with an influx of cash. Emerson’s crowd erupted with applause as Pelton announced the figures.

At Marlboro, there was one glaring detail in the Emerson deal that left students stunned: the college would be losing its beloved campus.

“There were people behind me sobbing,” Hickman said. “I was seeing my professors crying.”

When the dust settled, 57 students, 18 faculty members, and roughly $20 million in assets transferred from Marlboro to Emerson. That was after the community suffered through an early campus closure because of a global pandemic, a fight from alumni to stop the deal, and a controversial sale of the Potash Hill campus.

As The Beacon’s senior Marlboro reporter, I was tasked with covering the ins and outs of the merger. In total, I wrote nearly 40 stories on the beat. But in the end, Marlboro, a school I had fallen in love with, was inevitably closing. Covering this merger has been like riding a rollercoaster blindfolded. Nothing I experience will ever come close to the love Marlboro students felt for the place. Still, it pained me to watch this community that was so full of love, life, and a sincere emphasis on the liberal arts be stripped of everything it held dear.

In this story, I’m revisiting the logistics behind the Emerson-Marlboro merger and the people involved a full year after the initial announcement.

History of the Hill Walter Hendricks—a student of American poet Robert Frost—founded Marlboro College in 1946 after the end of the second World War. Hendricks wanted a place where students could have autonomy over the classes they took, instead of selecting one-size-fits-all style majors.

In the 1960s, students were required to work in the dining hall or for facilities.

They received no credits nor pay. Instead, it was a part of their commitment to the campus.

“When I was there as a student....everyone had to work a certain number of hours a week,” said Dena Davis, one of 22 Marlboro Board of Trustee members. “There was more of that kind of DIY, we’re in this together feeling. I don’t know when that stopped...But I think it was a mistake.”

Like most small liberal arts colleges, Marlboro’s peak is in the rearview mirror.

That’s clear in the numbers.

Since 2010, the college saw a 49 percent decline in total enrollment, according to data from the Department of Education.

In 2017, Marlboro admitted 117 out of 121 applicants. But only 28 of them came. The next year, the admissions team was much more selective, with the hopes that admitting the right people would boost enrollment. They admitted 92 of 156 applicants, a 10-year low acceptance rate at 58 percent.

Thirty-eight students came.

As Marlboro’s admissions dwindled, the average financial aid awarded to students increased every year, as did the number of students receiving financial aid. In

Nov. 13, 2019 Marlboro college President Kevin Quigley told the student body in a town meeting that the college’s administration would have no power over the fate of a campus.

Nov. 6, 2019 Both colleges announced the merger.

Marlboro was slated to donate its $30 million endowment and $10 million estate to Emerson.

Nov. 14, 2019 The Beacon reported that Marlboro’s graduate school was on track to close as early as 2020, according to Quigley.

The school stopped admitting students at the start of the 2019-20 school year.

the last three years of Marlboro’s existence, federal data showed that 100 percent of undergraduate students received some form of monetary help.

Hickman said the decline of Marlboro speaks to an ideological shift in America.

“I don’t know if there can be a viable place like Marlboro in the future, because of the economic system that we live in,” they said. “It does not value places like Marlboro against places like the Ivy Leagues.”

Fumio Sugihara, the former dean of admissions at Marlboro, said one of the other problems is the cost of higher education for the institution, rather than for the student. Colleges depend on grants and federal subsidization, as well as tuition deposits from wealthier families, to mitigate their operating costs. But that model is unsustainable.

At least six other New England colleges have shuttered since 2017. Four of those—Southern Vermont College, Green Mountain College, College of St. Joseph, and Newbury College—all closed in May 2019, all with eerily similar circumstances to Marlboro.

Before the Emerson merger was announced, Marlboro administrators leveled a deal with the University of Bridgeport.

Under the terms of that agreement, drafted in summer 2019, Marlboro would still operate on Potash Hill as a satellite campus of Bridgeport, and students from either institution could attend classes at both campuses.

However, it became clear as time went on that Bridgeport was not as economically sound as it had claimed. Pulling out of the merger would prove to be a wise decision for Marlboro, as Bridgeport would be acquired by three separate colleges in the spring with a plan to teach-out its

Nov. 19, 2019 Administrators told The Beacon Emerson intended to funnel part of Marlboro’s endowment to pay incoming faculty members from the merger.

remaining students.

“What we found out...was that they weren’t in good faith,” Davis said. “And once we had turned over our endowment, which at that point was pretty close to $40 million, we would have had very little control over what happened next. We could not have stopped the sale at the campus.”

When Marlboro and Bridgeport ceased merger talks in Sept. 2019, the Vermont college initiated the search for another partner—and fast.

“There was a glorious month-ish between the Bridgeport merger falling through and the Emerson merger being announced that everyone, even me, lived in this blissful denial,” Hickman said. “It was easier to ride this wave...than to prepare for it to crash.”

Students on Potash Hill didn’t need to worry about what would come next.

“It was the fall again,” Hickman said.

“We were having our apples from the apple trees on campus. My professor made a pie from the peaches that grew on the campus. It was so easy to lose myself in the beauty.”

A campus remembered It’s hard to explain what made the Marlboro campus special.

The view, obviously, is impeccable, especially in the fall or the winter. Climbing to the crest of Potash Hill and winding through the backwood Vermont roads is a sight to behold. The first time I went to Marlboro, one week after the merger was announced, I couldn’t help but take pictures out of the car window. The leaves were starting to turn, as greens, reds, yellows, and oranges swarmed the ravine below the parking lot. It reminded me of a

Monet painting. Maybe it was the cars in downtown Boston, but getting out of the car in Marlboro for the first time felt like walking into a soundproof room. It was eerily, yet calmly, silent.

The first time I interviewed Charlie Hickman was in a smoke shack, right across from the Marlboro dining hall. The tiny, wooden shack was littered with beer bottles on the bench seats and a broken, stripped guitar zip-tied to the roof. It felt cozy in the way a college basement feels cozy. I sat next to them, swapping my phone back and forth between my hands because of the cold.

Hickman served as Head Selectperson, which is essentially the Marlboro equivalent of Emerson’s Student Government Association President.

“I knew that the announcement was coming,” Hickman said. “I knew five days before the Selectboard was told, and Selectboard was told the day before the announcement…There were rumors going around that it was a place in upstate New York or Boston.”

Hickman pauses, obviously pulling at memories and feelings that are buried deep or painful to recollect.

“The way that I experienced it was very different than others,” they said pausing for nearly half a minute. “I felt so responsible for the well-being of my community, and of course, sitting in Whitmore Theater, I was devastated to hear what was happening.

But I was like ‘Okay, Emerson College, not the worst.’”

Hickman said they still haven’t processed the loss of the Marlboro campus.

“I don’t think it’s going to be real for me until I graduate,” Hickman said, thinking about their graduation this spring. “We’re not going to be able to come back and visit Marlboro….I’m not going to be able to go

Nov. 22, 2019 Marlboro graduate school faculty told The Beacon they had not been told about the graduate school’s impending closure.

Nov. 20, 2019 President M. Lee Pelton and senior staff members visited Marlboro’s campus for the first time since the merger was announced.

Nov. 23, 2019 Marlboro’s Chief Advancement Officer Rennie Washburn told The Beacon Marlboro needed an influx of $200 million to stay open.

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to the dance studio whenever I want...no matter how much we are trying to adapt and grow into our place at Emerson, there is an irrevocable loss with the campus.

And that cannot be transferred to a place in the middle of Boston.”

Students aren’t the only ones who wax poetic about Potash Hill.

Davis, a 1972 alum, said she misses her time on the Marlboro campus. Davis met her partner at Marlboro in the 60’s and has served on its Board for almost a decade.

“I grew up there like a lot of people,” she said. “I met the love of my life there. I was just thinking the other day about how I learned at Marlboro that I’m really good at math. I thought I was miserable at math.... obviously, that’s in the past, no matter what happened. But, you know, the closed door on that is hard to accept.”

Her colleagues feel the same way, she said.

“This isn’t the kind of board where you get to meet influential people or something,” Davis said, tearing up. “So obviously, only your love for this institution would make you do this. And it follows therefore, that the death of this institution on your watch must be...I mean, it was worse than my divorce in terms of gut wrenching, and it still is.”

Sugihara said he did everything he could to keep Marlboro open.

“We use the word ‘believer’ [at Marlboro], and I still very much have that quality,” Sugihara said. “It’s a little tempered, it’s a little beaten up...My dream would have been able to keep Marlboro open. I would have given anything. I would have scratched lottery tickets.”

Sugihara was the first person I met at Marlboro. The car full of reporters I was with had no idea where to go or what to do when we first got to Marlboro, so

Nov. 24, 2019 Approximately 40 Marlboro students toured Emerson’s campus. They also met with Provost Michaele Whelan and several Emerson deans in a closed meeting to talk about academics.

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we thought admissions would be a good place to start. The small admission lobby was not meant to house five reporters, our backpacks, and our gear. Our peacoats and lack of weather-appropriate attire made us stick out like a sore thumb.

“You must be The Berkeley Beacon!” a voice said, from an office I could not see.

Sugihara came out of his office and immediately set us at ease. He always made sure we were fed, insisting we eat the dining hall food before we drove back to Emerson, which was a blessing on the countless 12-hour days we spent on campus.

That dining hall was a sacred space for some Marlboro students.

“It’s very much a community space,” said Felix Bieneman, a senior at Emerson who came from Marlboro. “Especially this time of year, in the dining hall the lights would be on. There’d be people in there and... there’s always somebody you could talk to.”

Marlboro’s campus was loved by the wider community as well.

Jesse Kreitzer, a town resident and Emerson alum, said growing up near the Marlboro campus made an impression on him as a kid.

“I have a sort of nostalgia with a campus growing up here using the trails or some of its facilities,” he said.

I still remember the last reporting trip I made to that campus. When the other reporters and I left Boston, it was maybe 40 degrees, but there was no snow on the ground. By the time we got to Marlboro, the walkways looked like bowling lanes, bumpers of snow keeping the occupants on the designated paths.

No one knew what was coming.

On March 11, Marlboro administrators

announced that they would elongate twoweek spring break because of a new threat: COVID-19. By the 13th, the school had closed its dorms, and college officials were asking students to move their belongings off of campus quickly. “[We were hoping] to have a semester that we were all going to have together to be able to commiserate with one another, and now we’re going to be scattered across the country—that is heartbreaking,” Hickman said in March.

Felix Bieneman left before the announcement. They were originally going to apply to stay in the dorms for Marlboro’s spring break but changed their plans because of the uncertainty from the virus.

“It was impulsive, like I packed everything I knew that I didn’t want to lose,” they said. “It was really surreal. I stopped to take some pictures. And [Quigley] waved outside his window, like his office window.” they said. “I was hanging out taking pictures and I was really emotional, too. I was not ready to be waved at out the window.”

Bieneman said they didn’t really feel the gravity of the closure until they started driving down the hill.

“I was like ‘Man, I am driving away,’ I’m just never gonna come back,” they said.

“But it was like I just had to drive...It was extremely surreal.”

Hickman said while it was painful, they’re glad they have some final memories on campus. They organized a last minute dance performance as a final community event.

“I will savor this memory because Serkin dance studio is such an important place to me, but I remember we were starting the show, and we had to put seats around that were all six feet apart,” they

Dec. 20, 2019 The Beacon reviewed years of financial documents released by Marlboro amidst cries for transparency, and found that Marlboro had been operating in the red for several years.

Dec. 12, 2019 At a Faculty Council meeting, Marlboro faculty and staff union leaders demanded Marlboro administrators and Pelton involve them more in merger discussions.

Jan. 8, 2020 Both colleges announced that Emerson would not cover the $5,555 difference in housing costs for Marlboro students who attend Emerson in the fall.

said. “And there were all these questions of like, ‘Should we even have an audience?’

And the tears were flying, and looking around this room at people’s faces who I have not seen since then. Then after that performance that was it. That was the last tangible, Marlboro thing to happen in its intended form on campus.”

While Marlboro closed its doors sooner than expected, the merger itself was far from over. Soon, new faces would emerge as key—and controversial—players in the process.

A contentious path forward When Marlboro sent over the Asset Transfer Agreement—a document that detailed the funds, and assets that would transfer and when—the Vermont Attorney General postponed a review until the campus sale contract was approved.

Davis said President Pelton’s stance on the campus was evident.

“He was real clear that the campus was a white elephant, and it had to go if we were going to conclude this deal,” she said.

In April, Marlboro hired the Boston-based real-estate firm Colliers International to help market and sell the campus.

But Davis said Marlboro didn’t necessarily want to find the highest bidder—just the right fit.

“We were not interested in just getting every last penny,” she said. “We were interested in finding a buyer who would be good for the town, a good landlord for the [annual Marlboro] music festival, and so on.”

According to Davis, the realtor presented the Board with four bids. One was from the Music Festival, which has a 99year lease on the campus and also loaned Charlie Hickman posing for a photo in the famed smoking shack. (Jakob Menendez/Beacon Archive)

Jan. 20, 2020 Dozens of Marlboro alumni, as well as former faculty and staff, wrote a letter in The Beacon fighting for the college’s future.

Feb. 8, 2020 The Marlboro Board of Trustees announced plans to expedite the merger process—partly to aid students planning their fall semester.

Jan. 23, 2020 Marlboro announced it would cover the difference in housing costs for Marlboro students transferring to Emerson.

Feb. 13, 2020 The Beacon reported that Marlboro students would be subject to Emerson’s annual tuition increase.

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Marlboro $1.5 million for new buildings.

Another was from an entirely unknown entity: Democracy Builders.

Democracy Builders is the brainchild of Seth Andrew, who has more than 15 years of charter school experience and served in the Obama administration as senior advisor in the Office of Educational Technology. His nonprofit partners with several education nonprofits and charter schools, namely Democracy Prep, which currently has 21 schools nationwide.

Democracy Builders’ bid included a new venture for the group: Degrees of Freedom. The program for late high school and early college students aims to flip the traditional higher education model on its head by offering five concentrations—Finance, Technology, Education, Health and Justice—over two years.

The Board eventually picked Democracy Builders and its Degrees of Freedom program in May after a six-month search process. The organization paid $225,000— just 2.25 percent of the $10 million estimate—for the 600-acre campus.

Davis said she voted for the program in part for the diversity it promised to bring the town.

“Selling [to] Democracy Builders, my understanding is most of the people running that, except for Seth Andrew, are people of color,” she said. “And they’re living there with their families and sending their kids to the local school.”

Marlboro President Kevin Quigley said that the college picked Democracy Builders to maintain the ethos of Marlboro on the campus.

“We recognize that all of us would prefer that Marlboro College remain as is on our beautiful campus in the foothills of the Green Mountains,” he said in a May statement. “We are, however, very fortunate to

March 11, 2020 Marlboro administrators began discussing how the rapidly spreading coronavirus pandemic would affect the college’s spring break and semester plans.

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have found a path that both continues our distinctive liberal arts mission at Emerson and offers an opportunity for something new to take root here on the Hill that will be respectful of our heritage.”

Soon after the announcement was made, however, students and faculty from Democracy Prep, which Andrew founded in 2005, spoke up. This whole deal took place against the backdrop of yet another racial reckoning in America. A national conversation is happening—spurred by protests after the death of George Floyd— about the treatment of people of color within corporations, news organizations, and schools. Former Democracy Prep students and teachers started to speak publicly about abuse and neglect they experienced in the schools.

A group named “Black N Brown at DP” released anonymous testimony on social media, detailing hundreds of allegations of systemic abuse and neglect against Andrew and Democracy Prep. The allegations gained widespread attention in the town, which held a town meeting in late July on the matter.

A statement on the Marlboro website in July said the Marlboro Board of Trustees was doing everything to “encourage a positive and constructive learning environment for all students who come to Degrees of Freedom” and acknowledged the “regret and anguish the campus sale...has caused.”

Students at Marlboro, while they were not on campus, were still tuned in to the happenings of the sale. Hickman said that, at the outset, they were excited that Marlboro was being sold to a school.

“I was glad that it was still going to be an educational institution,” they said. “Of course, I was not jazzed about the campus being sold to a charter school. And of course, I was even less glad when I heard

“The death of this institution on your watch must be...I mean, it was worse than my divorce in terms of gut wrenching, and it still is.”

April 7, 2020 Pelton said the merger would be finalized in May and implemented by June 30, despite disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic.

March 13, 2020 Marlboro announced it would vacate campus on March 28 because of the threat of COVID-19. The college initially intended to pursue online instruction for two weeks.

May 16, 2020 Marlboro officials said Emerson would receive $22 million of Marlboro’s $27 million endowment in a Board of Trustees meeting held over Zoom.

about the racist history of Seth Andrew and his institutions. But I knew that the campus being sold was one of the things holding up the deal from being finalized.”

Then Marlboro students were left in limbo. While the semester was done and the merger deal was signed, Marlboro students could not enroll in Emerson courses or plan their education until the details were complete.

Two months after, the Vermont Attorney General T. J. Donovan approved the deal. Now Democracy Builders is operating on campus with a small chunk of students, according to Chandell Stone, chief growth officer at Democracy Builders.

“We are developing a program that meets the needs of historically marginalized communities,” she wrote in a statement. “All of our design work is being done in collaboration with our 20 Freedom Builder Fellows, who are amazing young adults from all across the country united under the vision of making higher education more accessible for all students.”

Stone said the first Degrees of Freedom class is anticipated to be on the campus next fall, with around 300 students coming to the campus three times per year for two week periods.

The view from Boylston Emerson administrators named the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, the college’s home for liberal arts classes, after Marlboro. There, 18 former Marlboro faculty now teach alongside Emerson faculty.

While Marlboro itself is no more, Emerson has attempted to give Marlboro students a voice at the college. Several working groups that aided the merger

May 28, 2020 Both institutions entered into a “provisional agreement” for Emerson to acquire Marlboro, bringing the merger one step closer to completion.

still meet regularly, and there is a Marlboro Representative in SGA. However, Marlboro students must remain within the Individually Designed Interdisciplinary Program if they wish to keep their tuition discount, and they cannot study away at any of Emerson’s programs, including Emerson Los Angeles and Kasteel Well.

“We wholeheartedly welcome Marlboro students and faculty and the launching of the Interdisciplinary Studies major within the newly named Marlboro Institute,” Dean of Liberal Arts Amy Ansell wrote in an email announcing the completion of the deal. “In this way, we honor and preserve the legacy of Marlboro’s distinctive approach to undergraduate education.”

It’s unclear how the Marlboro Institute will incorporate Marlboro’s curriculum in the future, but Charlie Hickman is fighting to keep the college’s spirit alive at Emerson.

“I hope that the Marlboro Institute is given a standing space on campus, that they can have some governmental control over, that there can be space for democratic decision making and flexibility within the curriculum,” they said. “Both Emerson and Marlboro are stretching to create this new thing. But it will never be what we had. And that’s a shame, but it’s an inevitable shame.”

At the end of the merger, everything seemed to stop. Towards the end of the deal, news was happening at such a rapid pace. It felt like being on Boylston Street, swerving between passersby and growing deaf from the car horns. But, at the end, it felt like standing on top of Potash Hill.

Eerily quiet, and deafening in a completely different way.

There will never be another Marlboro College. While Emerson can do its best to incorporate its essence into the Marlboro

Institute, it will always be a skeleton of what Marlboro was—though there’s no shortage of efforts from President Pelton and upper administration to prove otherwise.

“Marlboro‘s legacy will live on, their students will benefit from enhanced educational programs, and their tenured and tenure-track faculty will continue to teach in an environment that supports intellectual creativity, innovation, and experiential learning,” Pelton said in November.

Marlboro was not special just because of its education. It was special because of its people, its history, its system, and its campus. A school like Marlboro can only exist in the isolated foothills of the Green Mountains, yet the likelihood that other schools like it will survive is slim.

Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen predicts half of all colleges and universities will be bankrupt in the next 10 to 15 years. Marlboro should not be remembered as another statistic or another college that closed its doors. It should be upheld as a model for a better education and a place that aimed to shape a better world.

“I realized, during my time at Marlboro, that I am more than the world I grew up in,” Hickman said at the end of our interview. “I cannot imagine another place where I would want to go to school.”

Jacob Seitz is a Senior Reporter at The Berkeley Beacon and is a senior studying journalism.

jacob_seitz@emerson.edu

June 26, 2020 The Marlboro Board of Trustees officially approved the Emerson-Marlboro merger. At that point, it still needed approval from the Vermont Attorney General.

June 24, 2020 Democracy Builders founder Seth Andrew published a short statement on Medium addressing the allegations of racism brought against him and his chain of charter schools.

July 23, 2020 The Vermont Attorney General approved the merger. Emerson would receive $20.25 million, 57 students, and 18 professors from Marlboro.

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The Beacon Magazine sought out photos from Marlboro students, chronicling their favorite scenes from the beautiful campus in the foothills.

What resulted was an amalgamation of memories both full of nostalgia & brimming with life. An energy and reality only Marlboro could produce.

Photos courtesy of Charlie Hickman, Felix Bieneman, Hunter Corbett, and Brianna Tilton

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Beacon reporter Jacob Seitz sitting down for an interview with former Marlboro President Kevin Quigley in his Vermont office on Potash Hill.

Want to go on reporting trips?

You can if you join us! Email us at Magazine@BerkeleyBeacon.com