When he comes into the yellow dining room, nodding hello before joining his friends at a nearby lunch table, the students I eat with huddle forward and turn into myth-makers, wild-eyed informants. “Did you know he was on a first name basis with Nelson Mandela?” one of them asks me. “He turned down Harvard to come to Bennington,” another one exclaims. “I heard he was a political prisoner.” My favorite rumor was announced loud and clear at an intern meeting several years ago, hours after the intern came off of one of those late night, meandering heart-to-heart marathons with him. “He. Is. Superman.”

It is a strange thing to be an editor of an alumni magazine at this time. Alumni magazines aren’t made to break news, and yet covering anything other than breaking news seems so misfit. Alumni magazines aren’t made to challenge or confront, and yet challenges are all around us and confronting them feels like the only right thing to do. Alumni magazines are birthday cakes and champagne. They are made to celebrate. They are not supposed to roar as much as rah-rah.

Erin McKenny is a collector, and everyone knows it. She collects walnuts and acorns, pressed Queen Anne’s lace, old mailbox numbers, felt samples, and quaint little “Made in Vermont” package stickers.

Andy Spence does not display his own work in the office, except for one piece: an 8 x 4-foot test sheet. Kraft paper with a superimposed slide of an older painting he had blown up and silk-screened. It looks like a large “M,” crossed out, retraced, crossed out, retraced. “M, like mistake,” he says smiling.

Sylvan Esso (led by singer-songwriter Amelia Meath ’10) came as close to Bennington as any of their shows would bring them when they played to an adoring MASS MoCA crowd, just 40 miles from the College, in March. The show sold out faster than all of their other tour stops. Meath’s partner, Nick Sanborn, had a hunch. He joked during the show that the venue was probably shoulder-to-shoulder with Meath’s friends and family. He wasn’t too far off.

“Language is generally taught to students as if their primary identity was as consumers. They learn how to order food, how to buy something, how to get something,” faculty member Stephen Shapiro explains when asked why Bennington’s language curriculum looks so different to most people. “We do something else. We teach language by engaging with a student’s intellectual identity.”

On an August day someone with a Bennington College bumper sticker parked at a rest area in Asheville, North Carolina near Smoky Mountain National Park. When they returned they would have found a note on their windshield, “Bennington rules! –Brian”. It was a note Brian Morrice ’10 waited 40 minutes to write. “Creepy, right?” he laughs. “I really wanted to meet them or just see who came out, but after 40 minutes I thought, ‘This has gone too far’, and that’s when I left the note.”

Fatima Zaidi ’16 thinks about culture a lot. She thinks about collective memory, community education, and how art is communicated inside the creative community and outside of it. She thinks about all of this in English because it is the only language she speaks, despite growing up in Pakistan.

Millennials want to be in a developmental relationship with their supervisors. It's not enough to acknowledge work well done. They want to feel that the supervisor's engaged in their professional development.

Kate arrived at Bennington in 1942 at the height of World War II, in the echoing aftermath of the Great Depression. The national mood was dire, the future precarious, but Bennington was buzzing. The campus was a hive on the vanguard. Buckminster Fuller, a frequent lecturer, Peter Drucker, Paul Feeley, and Theodore Roethke were among some of the great minds drawn to teach at the college The New York Times called “an artistic mecca.” Kate was right at home.

As a young doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, Ron Cohen attended a non-violent sit-in one September in 1968. He was arrested, handcuffed, and thrown in the back of the police van, which is where he met Judy, a fellow protester. They married two months later. “I recommend this to everyone,” he chuckled during a campus storytelling event. “Do a lot of nonviolent resistance and meet the person that you love.”

Originally from Whittier, California, the birthplace of lowrider trucks and Richard Nixon, Bill Scully arrived at Bennington’s campus in 1990. The freshman immediately knew this was where he would make a life for himself. And make a life, he did.

Dawn Whitney Bakker—keeper of records and lists, ranker of just about everything, collector of live music, art, magnets, bumper stickers, Stevia packets, and good wine—died with dignity and grace on April 15, 2021, in the company of family. She was 62 years old.

Last Saturday, I made the call that I had prolonged for two years. On Monday, we made the trip we always hoped would be derailed by the destined march of natural causes, but wasn’t because of the swell of pain and suffering that came faster and stayed longer than should ever be natural.

It took a little getting used to the first year student from Englewood, New Jersey, but Anne Lyon soon gained momentum and by her second year, she was taking full advantage of all that Bennington had to offer. 

Born and raised in New York City, Margot fell in love with theatre. When it was time to go to college, she headed to Bennington, where art was in the air and the women took it seriously. “Three or four times a week,” Thomas Brokway wrote, “Everyone climbed the Commons stairs to the theatre to hear a lecture or to find out what the dancers, actors or musicians had been up to.”

Welcome everyone. I’d like to begin today’s ceremony, which I am so honored to officiate, with a word: love.

You might encounter this word if you ever happen to be driving on the border of Massachusetts and Southern Vermont at night. Perched midway up a steep mountain slope, embraced by sky and land and home, there is an unmissable white that towers like a relic of all religions. One giant letter after the other: L     O     V    E. At night, it glows and guides drivers, wanderers, the aimless and purposeful through dark mountain curves with bulb-yellow light: LOVE in all capital letters. LOVE it calls. LOVE it whispers like a sanctuary, like peace, like a holy quiet. LOVE— authorless, dim star suspended, like a lettered moonlight, a gathering ground. LOVE seaming two states, connecting, whose reach extends over borders and lands.