Marlboro College

The Marlboro College campus was located on South Road in the town of Marlboro, Vermont, in the Green Mountains. Marlboro was just off Route 9, which runs east–west across southern Vermont, ten miles from Brattleboro to the east with Wilmington and Bennington further to the west. Boston is two and a half hours to the east, Burlington is two and a half hours to the north, Hartford, CT is one and a half hours to the south, and New York City is four hours to the south.

The closest major town is Brattleboro, and students frequently made the 20-minute drive along Route 9 to hang out there at night and on weekends. The similar but much larger Amherst–Northampton area of western Massachusetts, easily accessible via Interstate 91, was also a favorite hangout.

The dining hall and Mather building at Marlboro College

Marlboro's facilities were relatively small because of its enrollment numbers. Many of the buildings—including the main classroom building, the dining hall, the admissions building and the administration building—are converted farm buildings that predated the college. Students and faculty worked together to convert these historic buildings for use by the college.[7] Through grants from federal, state and private entities, the college improved the energy-efficiency of the Dining Hall, Dalrymple classroom building, Mather administration building, and the Admissions building since 2008, as well as the student residences. In the summer of 2011, the half-circle driveway at the campus entrance was converted to green space and walking paths.

Marlboro College Library

The Serkin Performing Arts Center has a 125-seat auditorium, an electronic music lab, practice rooms with baby grand pianos and a 5,000-square foot dance studio. Whittemore Theater is another performing arts space which is used primarily by the Theater department. Attached to Whittemore theater is Drury Gallery, a gallery space often used by fine arts students to display their works, although students from other departments have also used the space to showcase their work.

The Snyder Center for the Visual Arts, a $3.5-million dollar, 14,000-square-foot visual arts center that houses studios, classrooms, and gallery spaces, opened in May 2016.[8]

Freshman students usually took one or more classes designed to boost their writing skills to an acceptable undergraduate level. All freshmen were required to submit 20 pages (4,000 words) of nonfiction writing to the English Committee by the end of their second semester. If the committee decided that a student's writing skills needed more work, they recommended a class to help, and the student would prepare another portfolio, at least 10 pages of which must be new, at the end of the next semester for re-evaluation. In the event that a student failed the writing requirement for three consecutive semesters, the school will ask the student to leave with the caveat that they can return after receiving high marks from an English class at another school. However, virtually all students passed the writing requirement within two semesters.[11]

Juniors and seniors focused on developing an individualized Plan of Concentration rather than on heavy coursework. "Plan" was a large, self-designed project often involving a combination of disciplines. Juniors and seniors focused on independent work and increasingly take tutorial classes where the student collaborates closely with a faculty member to design an individualized syllabus. For most students Plan culminates in a written thesis, although art and science students may demonstrate work through other projects. All Plans were required to include a written portion constituting at least 20 percent of the total plan work. In addition, all Plans were required to include an independent project prepared without direct faculty input, also constituting at least 20 percent of the total plan. Plans that consisted entirely of academic writing usually ranged from one hundred to two hundred pages, double-spaced.

The results of this work were defended in an oral examination before two Marlboro professors, and one outside evaluator who has expertise in the student's field of study but was not connected with the college. The presence of the outside evaluator was meant to ensure that the grading process is fair and objective. The final plan was then put on permanent file as a reference work in the college library.[12]

Loren Pope, original author of the Colleges that Change Lives college guide and former education editor for The New York Times, writes about Marlboro, "You will find the Marlboro adventure far more intense and intellectually demanding than Harvard, any other Ivy, or Ivy clone. There simply is no comparison."[13]

Marlboro College received a perfect academics rating of 99 and was also ranked #1 nationally for its quality of professors ("Professors Get High Marks") in The Princeton Review's 2014 annual college guide.[14]

Since 2012 the college has offered the Beautiful Minds Challenge, an essay contest for high school students that rewards winners with 12 full or partial scholarships and other prizes. Essays may take the form of text, images, audio, or video. Submissions are judged by Marlboro faculty, staff, and students. Finalists are flown to the Marlboro campus for a Symposium where they present their work.[15] The Beautiful Minds Challenge was discontinued after the 2018 competition.

• Wyn Cooper taught at Marlboro.
• Jay Craven taught film at Marlboro
• Paul J. LeBlanc served as Marlboro's president from 1996 to 2003 (currently president of Southern New Hampshire University).
• Peter Lefcourt taught literature and writing from 1968–1970 (novelist David Rhodes was one of his students)
• Leslie Lamport taught at Marlboro in the late-1960s
• David Mamet taught at Marlboro for one semester
• Joseph Mazur taught mathematics at Marlboro
• Blanche Honegger Moyse taught music at Marlboro
• Louis Moyse taught music at Marlboro

• David Asman, television journalist
• Shura Baryshnikov, dancer
• Deni Ellis Béchard, novelist
• Sophie Cabot Black, poet
• Regina Lee Blaszczyk, academic
• Sara Coffey, member of the Vermont House of Representatives
• Sean Cole, journalist
• Alicia Dana, Paralympian
• Marcus DeSieno, lens-based artist
• Deborah Eisenberg, author (left after two years)
• Ed Fallon, member of the Iowa House of Representatives
• Daniel Harple, entrepreneur and investor
• Parnell Hall, novelist
• Joshua Harmon, poet, novelist, and essayist
• Emilie Kornheiser, member of the Vermont House of Representatives
• Ted Levine, actor
• Robert H. MacArthur, ecologist
• Cate Marvin, poet
• Jonathan Maslow, journalist and author
• Chris Noth, actor
• David Rhodes, novelist
• Hans Rickheit, cartoonist (left after one year)
• Eneriko Seruma, poet and novelist
• Jock Sturges, portrait photographer
• Missy Suicide (left after one year)
• Matthew Temple, actor and filmmaker
• Tristan Toleno, member of the Vermont House of Representatives
• Charlotte Watts, mathematician, epidemiologist, and academic

• Robert Frost, poet, one of the college's first trustee[16]
• Ethan Gilsdorf, author, worked in the marketing department in the late-1990s