Narrator /Philosopher William Edelglass, PhD taught the last 12 years of Marlboro College before it closed in 2020 amid strong feelings in the community about the loss of a 'sacred place' of learning of particular import to Brattleboro. The gorgeous campus is now owned by the Marlboro Music Festival which brings world-class musicians to Potash Hill in Marlboro every summer and had enjoyed close ties to the college. Edelglass reflects on what attracted him and others to Marlboro and made the college the 'beautiful thing' it was and also a victim of changes in American higher education and society at large. He discusses the origins of Marlboro College, founded by Walter Hendricks who brought in Robert Frost as the college's first trustee and whose educational philosophy shaped the college's approach to students and learning. He shares how Hendricks founded the school after creating a post WWII college for veterans in Europe, and how veterans helped build the college, literally and figuratively, and shaped it as 'a training ground for democratic citizens to participate fully in civic life.' Universal particpation in a regular 'town meeting' gave students a rare say in essential campus decision-making. He discusses how Hendricks was fired after accusing colleagues and students of being Communists during the red scare. He discusses the shift in leadership to Tom Ragle who led the school for 23 years and brought in the 'plan of concentration' where students did a PhD-like defense of their topic for sometimes prominent outside examiners. He discussed the impact Marlboro had on the larger Brattleboro area and how many creatives and politically minded folks who went and/or taught at Marlboro have enriched the region, especially people like political leaders Emilie Kornheiser Sara Coffey and others and artists John Willis, Jay Craven, Blanche and Louis Moyse, Met Mott, and more. He spoke of the importance of the writing requirement and how many authors arose from Marlboro like T. Hunter Wilson and Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. He described the painful process that led to the decision to close the campus and partner with Emerson College in Boston to form the Marlboro Institute of Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies. He discusses the current stewardship of Marlboro Music Festival over the some 65 buildings and lush grounds and new programs happening in the old Marlboro campus, like the Marlboro Studio School and the Contemplative Semester. He ends with reflections on how Marlboro College lives on through the festival and in the many people who came there and settled to contribute in many ways to the greater Brattleboro area, and how it was 'a beautiful thing.'
This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast was narrated by William Edelglass, a Professor of Philosophy and a co-founder of the Brattleboro Words Trail. Executive Producer Lissa Weinmann interviewed William at BCTV with engineering support from their staff. Alec Pombriant – that’s me – edited and designed the sound. The interstitial music heard in this episode is 6 Épigraphes Antiques by Claude Debussy as performed by Peter Serkin.
Marlboro College: A Beautiful Thing
July 2025 Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast, Narrated by William Edelglass from an interview with Lissa Weinmann at BCTV studios June 4, 2025
INTRO MUSIC AND THROUGHOUT- Peter Serkin playing 6 Épigraphes Antiques by Claude Debussy
NARRATOR WILLIAM EDELGLASS: For four years before coming to Marlboro College, I wrote a letter to Marlboro and to College of the Atlantic. I was teaching at Colby College at the time, and I wanted to teach at a school that was smaller and that was more student centered, and that there was more of a sense of community. And so every year I'd write a letter to Marlboro and say, ‘Is there a job for philosopher?’ And one year they said ‘Yes.’ And so I started teaching at Marlboro in 2008 and was there the last dozen or so years of Marlboro College.
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So My name is William Edelglass, and My PhD is in philosophy, and the areas that I publish in are philosophy, especially at the time 20th century, European philosophy, phenomenology, and also Environmental Humanities and Buddhist studies.
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There are many small liberal arts colleges, but mostly not as small as Marlboro was. We only had about 300 students, a little bit more when I arrived. And one of the things I loved about it was that there was a sense both of rigor that every student had to pass the clear writing requirement, they had to be able to write well, and even as there was a sense of rigor, there weren't particular requirements to take this course and that course, the requirement was to pursue one's own questions with depth drawing on the content or methodology of whatever disciplines would best serve the exploration of that question. It was appealing to me to be able to support students who could really pursue what they were interested in in a way that was deep and rigorous, but still that they were pursuing their intellectual passions.
WHILE Marlboro college was not widely regarded as a prestigious institution, I think it was highly regarded by many educators and many of my students, there were children of professors elsewhere who were very happy to have their children at Marlboro. in 2014 I remember the Princeton Review gave Marlboro an academic rating of 99 or maybe four or five other institutions who earned that degree nationally that year, who earned that rating nationally, and it was ranked number one nationally for the quality of its faculty.
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So the origins of Marlboro college, I think one can go back to maybe 1930 when Walter and Flora Hendricks, who at the time, were living in Illinois, and Walter bought, and Walter and Flora bought a home on Potash Hill in Marlboro that was an old farm, and they would summer there. And so they had been spending about 15 summers there, with their kids and spent a lot of time there.
And during the Second World War, or after the Second World War, there were a lot of us service folks still in Europe, and the army was wondering what, what can what should we do with all these folks? And one of the things they decided to do was to start a University of sorts in Biarritz, in the southwestern corner of France, just above the border with Spain.
So Walter Hendricks was invited to head the humanities program at this institution for GI’s to learn to study before they were shipped back to the US, and he was inspired by working with students who were older. These, of course, were students who had been in war. They took intellectual questions very, very seriously in a way that appealed to him, and he thought, maybe on this farm where we spend our summers, we can start a college that would be suitable for such students, students who are older, students who had life experience, and students who could participate as adults, as free individuals, in the construction of the institution, in the running of the institution, and in the creation of their curriculum. So I believe Marlboro was they did the paperwork in 1946 and they started entering their first class in 1947
The veterans were the first students who came to Marlboro college in the early years of Marlboro college was very much a time when the students were returnees from the war, and they participated in building the buildings and renovating the buildings, and running the organism of the institution, so that it was much more than just, say, going and sitting in on classes. It was participating in the creation of the institution.
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Walter Hendricks was obviously a remarkable human being, and he had a deep connection with his teacher, Robert Frost, who, when it was time to start Marlboro college, he invited in as his first trustee. And he invited a number of other interesting, established, thoughtful people to steward the college.
One of the sad things about Marlboro College history was that in 1951 I believe, the Board of Trustees felt it was necessary to let Walter Hendricks go. My understanding is that Walter Hendricks accused Roland Boyden, who was a much beloved maybe sociologist or historian, of being a communist, and this, and maybe also a student accused a student of being a communist, and also the local Marlboro postmistress, and this was early in the Red Scare.
McCarthy didn't have quite the power that he was going to have a few years later, but it was alread on the horizon, and the board seems to have felt that these accusations for one, they didn't think they were true, and for two, it was driving the community apart. They made the decision, I think, a very hard decision, to fire Walter Hendricks. I never met Walter Hendricks, but I'm sure that was a deeply, deeply painful experience, because Walter had been on that land by that time for over 20 years.
Roland Boyden was brought back in, and I think, eventually became acting president. In the late 50s, 1958 I believe Thomas Ragle was invited to be president, and Tom Ragle was president for 23 years and played a major role in the history of Marlboro College.
So after Walter Hendricks left Marlboro, right afterwards, he started another college in Putney Vermont, called Windham College, named after the county, Windham County, where Brattleboro is located, and that campus became what is now Landmark College.
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The early years of Marlboro college were very formative. And at some point in the 50s, there were fewer veterans that there were more veterans again with the Vietnam War. And the college worked on getting more veterans to come with the Iraq War, and we ran programs for writers, veterans who were writers, that were very successful. The ethos of having a college that was designed for veterans permeated the history of the institution, because the curriculum really was designed for students who were mature enough to set their own path.
So, for example, the at the center of the college was, yes, the curriculum, but also what we call town meeting, which was based on the New England town meeting model, in which at different times, once a week or once every couple of weeks, the whole college community, everybody worked in maintenance, and people worked in the kitchen, and all the staff and students and faculty would gather together in the dining Room, which was a old barn that had once housed cows, and the relevant questions of the day would be debated.
And when I say relevant questions, it wasn't abstract questions. It was questions about policy, questions about budget, some budgetary issues. Initially it was everything other than the curriculum and medical issues, so the curriculum was in the hands of the faculty. But interestingly, I remember being amazed when I heard this when I arrived at Marlboro: Town meeting could veto a decision by the faculty meeting. The veto meant that the decision went back to the faculty meeting, and the faculty could override a veto by two thirds majority in the time that I was part of the college,
Students were on faculty committees that reviewed tenure dossiers and on all the hiring committees for for new faculty and even for the President. So students were included in the running of the college in a. Way that I've not seen at most other institutions.
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Marlboro College was located on Potash Hill, the land that Walter Hendricks had initially bought for his family's second home, and then the neighboring farms which the college gradually bought along with it. Potash HIll is at the end of South Road, off of Route nine, in a very small town which still hardly has any paved roads. And so it was very secluded. And because of its seclusion, that meant that the cultural life that was to happen at the college was dependent on the people who were there. So that was true from the beginning. In my time, that meant that students could get very, very creative in creating cultural life.
And so the seclusion invited that kind of creativity, and it also invited a way of engaging with the surrounding landscape and what it might mean to live in a place where there are fox and moose and bear and porcupine, that context. The land itself becomes a it's not just the container for where we are, but it's something that you engage with and becomes really precious the place. And I think that's still the case for alumni and others who come back, that that place is almost like a sacred place of something really important.
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One of the many things that I loved about teaching at Marlboro was that you could have deep, intellectual and personal relationships with students. I appreciated that at Marlboro, the faculty, students and staff all ate together, and they collaborated in town meeting and on committees,and it felt like, without waxing too nostalgic or painting an overly rosy picture, the kind of education that that included the whole person in who could show up. And in that sense, it was more like a certain model of what Aristotle or Plato may have thought about how we should do education, that is an education where personal relationships are important part of it.
Walter Hendricks was committed to the idea that Marlboro college could become a training ground for democratic citizens to participate fully in civic life and the town meeting especially, but also other parts of Marlboro community, court and the various committees gave students an opportunity to actually practice democratic engagement. And by democratic engagement, I mean the rhetorical practice of speaking to persuade others of your viewpoint, and collaborating with others and building coalitions to compromise, to try to find a path forward that would meet the needs of most people, and then participating in voting and voting with some responsibility, responsibilities over certain parts of the budget and responsibilities over rules and regulations that governed how the community functioned.
And it's been interesting for me to see a number of our local representatives in Montpelier are Marlboro college graduates, Emily Kornheiser and Tristan Roberts and Sara Coffey for a while and Tristan Toleno, all of them are our local reps who are alumni, who stayed in the area, who learned to practice the craft of democracy at Marlboro College.
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From the beginning, there was a deep connection with the arts at Marlboro College. Walter Hendricks made a relationship with Rudolf Serkin, and that led ultimately to the Marlboro Music Festival coming to Potash Hill and being there to this day, and stewarding and shepherding the campus now that as the as the owners. And so from the beginning, there was chamber music, and that drew a lot of people from elsewhere. So many people would come for the summers to be close to the music festival. And some of those people stayed on.
Over time at the college, the arts became more and more important, and the arts also understood broadly. Gib Taylor taught furniture making, and there are many local craftspeople who learned their craft with classes at Marlboro college, but also ceramics, painting, sculpture.
There are innumerable people who are in this wider area and then far beyond, who integrated art into their education at Marlboro. So I had students, for example, who may have mostly studied philosophy, but every semester, for eight semesters, did contact improv also, or did painting or writing poetry, and it was the arts were fully integrated into the education at Marlboro in a way that I think is relatively rare.
And one of the things that happened with Marlboro college is that people fell in love with this gorgeous corner of southeastern Vermont, and it's hard to imagine what this town would be without Marlboro, without Marlboro College, the Coop and the arts organizations and the museum and the way in which Marlboro and Brattleboro… having a local organization that had a budget at times of up to $14 or $15 million a year, that was being infused into the local economy, bringing jobs and bringing people.
One of the resources of Marlboro college was simply having academic scholars available. So for example, with the Brattleboro Words Project, the philosophical orientation came from thinking things through at Marlboro, about place, about deep mapping, about the ways in which places are contested, the ways in which stories shape how we think about our histories and how we live together.
There Marlboro College faculty who supervised courses, college level courses at Brattleboro Union High School, and there were local students who were in high school who were able to take college level classes at Marlboro. And having the resources of an academic institution, of an institution of higher learning in the community is meaningful. It provides a lot to local people.
Rudolf Serkin was one of the leading pianists of the 20th century, as was his son, Peter Serkin. And when Serkin settled in Guilford as part of a European emigre chamber music group, other folks came to this area because of Serkin and because of the Marlboro Music Festival. One of those was Blanche Moyes, who was married to the flutist Louis Moyes. And Blanche Moyes was one of the main founders of the Brattleboro Music Center, which has provided concerts and education to generations of local families here in Brattleboro, and has had a huge impact on our local culture.
Louis and Blanche Moise both taught at Marlboro college for decades, and Luis Batlle, who came for the music festival, was also a really wonderful pianist and taught at Marlboro college for decades. Just as music became a big part of what happened at Potash Hill theater also was a huge part of the culture. Jeffrey Brown taught theater, and then Paul Nelson and Brenda Foley and they would do a lot of productions that faculty, staff and students participated in and they would often take their productions on the road, and it was a big part, I think, of people's education. David Mamet was at Marlboro doing theater for a short time, amongst others.
More recently, John Willis, who was Professor of photography at Marlboro the last many years and is a wonderful photographer, started Insight Photography in Brattleboro. And Jay Craven taught film for many years at Marlboro and has made a lot of films about Vermont, involving Vermont folks in the films and telling Vermont stories. Meg Mott, who has been a big part of thinking about how to frame debates that might look like they pull us apart, but to frame them in ways that allow citizens to speak together, in ways that are more productive. All these folks came to this area because of Marlboro College.
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Because of Marlboro’s emphasis on writing and the clear writing requirement, a lot of students came because they saw themselves as writers or wanted to become writers. T Hunter Wilson, who taught at Marlboro for 47 years, was a poet and also a publisher, who published some of Gary Snyder's early work right in Marlboro.
One figure who, one writer, who comes to mind is Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, who was a Marlboro College student and a board member, and later the first black woman chair of an Ivy League English department, who wrote one of the books that inspired the Brattleboro Words Project, a book about Lucy Terry Prince who lived in Guilford, and was a black woman, a former slave, and that book disclosed a local history that had largely been hidden, a history of African Americans in this area who were active in all kinds of ways.
Moving more broadly to the science curriculum at Marlboro, the something that John MacArthur felt was very important was experiential education, and that set a tone for the teaching of science at Marlboro College, which was very experiential.
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It was under Tom Ragle that the student body grew tremendously the Vietnam War and the GI funding certainly helped, and the desire not to go to Vietnam certainly helped. But also, it was under Tom Regal's leadership that the plan of concentration was developed. And at the end of that time, there would be an outside Examiner from another institution who would come in, and there'd be a two hour oral exam based loosely on what a PhD exam might be, and the student would be invited to speak as a peer of sorts to help the examiners understand their project and to defend their project and to have a conversation that could take it further.
And it was quite often the case, not always, but quite often the case that outside examiners were deeply, deeply impressed. I remember David Abram, a thinker who I find very inspiring, was brought in to be an outside examiner. And I remember him telling the student who had written a fantastic plan of concentration, “I feel less lonely in the world reading your work.”
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Yes – So we can talk a little bit about the last years of Marlboro College.
Like many people who were part of Marlboro College, this was a challenging time for me. So there was a certain vision that I had of my life that the end of Marlboro college altered. And I think that was true for many faculty who were drawn to Marlboro in part because they were drawn not just to teaching at any old college, but they were drawn to the sense of community, to the education that felt intertwined with the whole person, and where the primary role of the faculty was to teach. It was really a teaching institution, even though there were artists and researchers sometimes doing really remarkable work, it wasn't the primary role of the faculty.
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I think that many of us at Marlboro thought there we were secluded on Potash Hill, and that we were small enough that we could weather the storms and the larger dynamics of higher education the United States, and that we could always bring in 100 students – that wasn't many, that was a small number – and we would be able to find them as we had in the past.
And in 2008 I believe, Marlboro College had 307 students. And basically every year it went down after that. There were a couple years when it went up, when we had particular programs, but really the Great Recession, which exacerbated the inequality in our society and led to the kind of economic anxiety that meant that middle class students weren't feeling so free to just choose a liberal arts school, and a non prestigious liberal arts school like Marlboro, that they could choose for their love of learning. But there was so much pressure, living in a society where many people couldn't afford houses anymore, living in a society where there was a sense that it was much harder to move up the economic ladder, to use a bad or overwrought image, and Marlboro College had, for lack of a better term, a difficult time competing in that environment.
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But by late 2018 our income from tuition was so small compared to the overall budget, and a process began that involved primarily the board, but also faculty, some small number of faculty, to think about, what is the situation that we're in, and what does it make sense to do?
And at the rate that we were going, if we had continued during COVID and tried to make it on our own, we would have probably had two more years, and at that point, the endowment would have been gone. And so ultimately, a partnership was made with Emerson College that involved letting go, essentially giving the campus away, letting go of the campus, and starting the Marlboro Institute for Lliberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studieswithin Emerson College. And any tenure track faculty and tenured faculty who wanted could continue their teaching and research at Emerson.
And the Marlboro Institute at Emerson developed a program that is like the plan of concentration, that involves working closely with faculty and the that and all the students from Marlboro college who wanted to continue their education at Emerson could do so at the same with the same payment amount as they had at Marlboro, which was much, much less than what a student at Emerson would have been paying.
Now, this was a contentious decision. It resulted though from a community wide process whereby faculty, staff and students were asked to prioritize the values that they wanted to retain, and those involved the place, the curriculum, the people and the pedagogy, and the community generally said it's the pedagogy and the people that come first.
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Marlboro College was officially absorbed into Emerson on July 1, 2020, during COVID, which was a difficult time, because there couldn't be the kind of shared ritual that might bring closure to the college and to the community.
There are now, I believe, fifteen Marlboro College faculty who teach at Emerson, and they have played a very prominent role there. So the program is doing really, really well, and Emerson, as with other institutions of higher learning, is having some challenges, especially with the current political administration and the role of liberal arts, working out issues of social justice on campus and diversity.
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The Marlboro college campus is a gorgeous campus with some beautiful buildings. Some of those buildings are relatively new, and some of those are old farm buildings, I think there may be something like 65 buildings. A number of them are smaller cottages that students would stay in. And I'm very, very grateful that the Marlboro Music Festival bought the campus and is really taking care of it in a beautiful way they are investing in any deferred
maintenance that need needed to happen, and they're actually building some new residences this this year, they the music festival is looking for people to rent these gorgeous spaces during the academic year when they're not using it. So there have been weddings there and workshops and meditation retreats, and there's actually a program for young adults called The Contemplative Semester, which brought 34 students to the campus this past fall, and they will be coming again in spring of 2026.
One of the programs that is there is called the Marlboro Studio School, which David Eichelberger, who was the last ceramics teacher at Marlboro college, he is spearheading with a group of supporters, and they offer a variety of different classes and programs and retreats for people doing work in the arts.
So Marlboro College is continuing in some way at Emerson, and it's continuing in some way in the culture and life of Southeastern Vermont, where so many people had an association with Marlboro College.
I think in some way, it’'s also continuing with the Marlboro Music Festival, that the Festival came to Potash Hill because the college was there. And it also, of course, lives on in the lives of so many of its alumni, faculty, staff. And I think the pedagogy of Marlboro College, I know, has been brought to so many other institutions, the values of Marlboro College of democracy, of student centered learning, all of those have proliferated out into so many places around the world. And I think that that's okay. Nothing lasts forever. Plato's Academy lasted 900 years. We are not going to last, we didn't last that long, but we still were a beautiful place… It was a beautiful thing.
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BRATTLEBORO WORDS TRAIL THEME MUSIC RISES
ALEC POMBRIANT: This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast was narrated by William Edelglass, a Professor of Philosophy and a co-founder of the Brattleboro Words Trail. Executive Producer Lissa Weinmann interviewed William at BCTV with engineering support from their staff. Alec Pombriant – that’s me – edited and designed the sound. The interstitial music heard in this episode is 6 Épigraphes Antiques by Claude Debussy as performed by Peter Serkin. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next month on, the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
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