Ellen McCulloch-Lovell
President of Marlboro College

By Margaret Michniewicz

photo: Jared Benedict

McCulloch-Lovell’s lifelong interest in art, politics, and education are now centered in the state she says “adopted her” back in the 1960s. “I’ve been given the gift of good work, and the arc of my life has brought me back to a place I love, and that’s Vermont and Marlboro College, and the values I learned here.

“I have a very deep conviction that there needs to be a Marlboro College, there needs to be a place like this with the freedom to think, and to create, and find out who you are among intelligent, nurturing adults — then go out and make the world a better place.”

McCulloch-Lovell says, “My parents influenced me in different ways. My father felt very strongly about women being educated and being able to make their own way in the world — that you can do anything that you wanted to do. He was a great reader, loved intellectual discussion — it was like having Aristotle at the dinner table: ‘what did you read today?’, and then we’d really debate it.

“My mom was married right out of her sophomore year in college. It was a really different era — she is a very smart woman interested in everything around her, who was a stay at home mom. I feel very touched by this, that moms of that era were kind of saying ‘we didn’t get to do these things but you can’. They were there with those helping, and even pushing-you-beyond kinds of hands.”

McCulloch-Lovell credits both her parents for providing her with a good education, and for what is so critical for a human being’s development: a sense of possibility.

As a high school student, she spent her junior year in Brazil. “I took trigonometry in Portuguese, Ancient Portuguese literature, I took French in Portuguese — which was really confusing,” she laughs heartily. “Learning another language when one is young really opens the doors of understanding to how another culture thinks. You think differently in another language. There are still words that I say first in Portuguese and then come up with the English word.”

Though McCulloch-Lovell has been privileged in the opportunities that have opened to her throughout her life, she walks the walk of activism to ensure that similar opportunities in education are accessible to everyone. “We have our responsibility that we take really seriously, and that is to try to give enough financial aid so that if people want the kind of education that Marlboro has to offer, they can get it — and they can come from all kinds of family backgrounds and all walks of life. This kind of education should be what education in America is all about.”

McCulloch-Lovell earned her B.A. from Bennington College. She majored in philosophy and graduated in 1969. She then earned her Vermont teaching certificate through a student practicum in a two-room rural elementary school in Fayston. From 1970 to 1975, as Program Director for the Vermont Council on the Arts she created the Artists-in-the-Schools program, traveling statewide to improve arts education. At the same time, she worked to increase federal and private funding to the Arts Council, which she then led as Executive Director for the next eight years.

White House photo

Ms. McCulloch-Lovell Goes to Washington

“My whole life I’ve been trying to balance the arts and politics,” Ellen laughs. “Strange combination when you think about it.” In 1983 she shifted into politics when Senator Patrick Leahy appointed her as his Chief. At the time that she started, she was one of only 11 women serving as senatorial Chiefs of Staff. Did these eleven women support each other? “Yes—very much so. We sought each other out, regardless of party. It was really a matter of there not being many people you can call who are having the same experience you are, and if you need advice, you have to be able to totally trust the person because you’re in a very, very sensitive position and so you need to find a few friends. Being a college president might be like this too.”

She made many friends in Washington, for the next seven years found her in the inner circles of the Clinton Administration. Her tenure began as Executive Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities; then in 1997 she became Deputy Chief of Staff to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and remained in the White House through the rest of the Clinton Administration: “I was one of those people who stayed until the absolute bitter end,” she recalls, laughing. “Literally. On January 20th at 8:00 at night I took off the pass, took off the pager, turned in the security ID, put 13 boxes of stuff in my poor little Volvo, and drove out the gates, watching in the rearview mirror as they closed behind me. I went home and slept for 24 hours. “The Clintons were very active until the end; and I made a conscious choice that I wasn’t even going to look for a job, I was going to play it out and participate in it fully. And after I got a good sleep I woke up – and I didn’t have a job. But I had done some wonderful work.”

White House photo

Coming Up Taller Out of Vermont

One example of McCulloch-Lovell’s Washington success was a study she launched that was born out of her work with the schools of the Green Mountains. “Coming Up Taller” was the first report in the country on the effect of arts and humanities programs on children who were at risk for academic failure. She recalls that while at the Vermont Council on the Arts, she would send a writer or artist to a school, and there would be warnings about students who did not perform or behave well in class. Invariably these students would respond positively to the resident artist. “It happened in theater, and happened in music and it happened in all kinds of residencies… and I asked myself over the years is there something special about the arts? What were the factors that seemed to reach kids who weren’t reached through other educational methods?” McCulloch-Lovell initiated the study which was written and conducted by another Vermonter, Judy Weitz. “Mrs. Clinton launched it at the White House with the whole President’s Committee, and these marvelous artists and teachers who do these programs mostly for love, and a whole bunch of kids. She put her heart and mind and national prestige behind the work.

“I think her power comes first from her convictions, next from her understanding about how to get things done,” asserts McCulloch-Lovell about Hillary Rodham Clinton. “She worked with a senior staff of advisors who were all smart women – they were dedicated to her success; could argue and compete, then work miracles. So there was an atmosphere of seriousness – everyone knowing how consequential the work was – and we laughed a lot. She acutely understood ‘empowering her staff.’

“She has great compassion. She likes helping people. I wish more people knew that.”

McCulloch-Lovell recalls her thoughts when she was invited to interview for the position of Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff by Melanne Verveer, the new Chief of Staff: “I liked Mrs. Clinton very much — I really respected her intellect and knew from the work we had done together in the Arts & Humanities — which was just one of her voluminous interests — that her heart was in the right place. And I was just really attracted to working for a powerful woman. I thought, wow — think of what I would learn, and think of what you can do, when you’re in that seat of power. Fortunately for me, they wanted me to do it.”

She learned “how to get someone prepared for high visibility events; how to think through all the ups and downs of an issue or event before it rolls out; how to write convincing memos!” explains this veteran of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Perhaps even more important is “what things to press for and what to forget; how to build alliances for one’s work across a huge and complex system . . . how to leverage support. How to laugh at your mistakes.”

She was invited to create the White House Millennium Council. One of the projects she created was “Save America’s Treasures”, a historic preservation program led by Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I think altogether she and the President and the Vice President did 100 project visits,” McCulloch-Lovell recalls. On one tour, the First Lady gave the keynote address at the 150th Anniversary of the First Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and visited the home of Harriet Tubman. “That was one of my favorite events … it probably meant more than almost any other place we had gone and a lot has happened to the Harriet Tubman Home since that visit.

“All along the way we did these incredible stops and people lined the streets—I’ll never forget it — to see Hillary Clinton — and waved American flags — it was really wonderful, really uplifting. It also showed how proud people are of their treasures, of their history — places like that are not forgotten. They may be starved for resources, but they’re not forgotten.”

Return to Vermont

After twenty-one years away from where she calls home, Ellen McCulloch-Lovell has insights into our nation’s political capital, and has recently been pondering why Vermont is special: “It is a wonderful, rich, civil society — things that people in other places talk about wanting.

“My grief, if you want to call it that, is over our larger political system. I’m worried about people losing that important American belief that one vote makes a difference, and that if they get involved, and they’re good citizens, they can change things. I’m afraid they’re getting cynical about politics and the way money influences politics—and we are seeing evidence of that.

“We’re seeing another deep division over our military engagements abroad; we’re seeing another deep division over whether our government is being open with us about the information on which important decisions were based. And at the same time, we were attacked; we can’t be naïve about the world.

“I know from my Washington sojourn that there are some really nasty people out there, and they are trying to get us. So we can’t be naïve about it. How do we protect ourselves and protect our democratic society? We’re right back at that core question – and we have to take it very seriously and be able to debate it, out loud, with good information, and feel like we can make a difference.”

She recalls coming of age in the sixties, and the five-year period of the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, RFK, Martin Luther King, while the Vietnam War was raging and cities were burning. “We thought it was all coming down. It just felt like society was disintegrating, and I think that was very influential in my coming to Vermont. I’ve met a lot of people my age who’ll say the same thing. It had to do with finding a place where life and community seemed possible, finding a place where you could be creative and loving, and interact with other people in ways that counteracted what seemed to be happening in the society at large. And we were young; we didn’t know how to change society, but we had some wonderful ideals about how we might be able to live our own lives, with the values we wanted to see in the world.”

What about Vermont allowed that? “I think it was the sense that — because you can get to know people and talk with them and reason with them — it seemed more possible to do things. We still have a community life that we understand as community life, that we try to preserve. And so those of us who aren’t natives but got adopted were intrigued with the possibilities — it was everything from town meeting, to starting your own daycare center; your native Vermonter older neighbor would teach you how to plant a garden — all of those things came together and then I think so many of us stayed and got extremely invested in the state, wanting to make our contribution because we felt that we could make a contribution in the face of the big destructive forces in the world. I think it was that: The sense of possibility.”

A Public Intellectual

“I’ve always been really intrigued at how scientists and mathematicians — people we think of as more fact-based, and clear and sure and objective — talk about beauty: beautiful formulas, the beauty of the design of DNA. There’s a shared language between the sciences and the arts; there are shared concerns. Any scientist who is thinking about how a theory might apply to the world and how people live their lives, is going to ask ethical questions. They need to know history — they need to know ethics and need to think in a broader sense. Inquiring minds are going to say, what do our poets have to say about this? What does religion have to say about it?

“If we’re going to solve some of the big problems, we must have citizens who can think broadly and not be so over-specialized that they can’t see the impact of what they’re doing or how it relates to something else. And especially how they might be changing lives, or changing history.

“To sample from the world’s storehouse of knowledge and creativity, to feel that one can contribute to original thinking; to think about how it might apply to society and to the world; to be — I love this term — a public intellectual. This doesn’t mean that we can’t have our private thoughts, our wonderful creative moments where we might not even be able to say what’s bubbling around in our minds, whether we’re working on an experiment or trying to write a paper. But it is important to contribute that knowledge to the world and think about the impact that one is going to have. To me that’s a huge attraction for me to be at Marlboro: this beautiful combination, the arts and politics. And here’s a place that actually talks about fostering creativity and citizenship in the same sentence; they go together. And who you are as a citizen is taken seriously here.

“Participating in a community and knowing that you are responsible for the quality of community life — if the common room in the dorm is dirty and people aren’t being civil to each other — that’s your responsibility. This is a place where the creation of community is of value and intentional, and is taught and talked about, and not just assumed that it’s going to happen on its own. Because it doesn’t happen on its own — it’s each one of us. That, I think, is an incredibly valuable lesson to take out into the world.”

Ellen McCulloch’s own education is not complete. She reports that her mother is still teaching her. “My mom went back to school in her 60’s. She got up at 6 in the morning and read books and wrote papers and devoured information and took that wonderful curiosity that she’d had her whole life and focused it. She got her BA at 65; and then she wrote a book.

“She’s always encouraging me to realize that I can do many many different things in different phases in my life. And I’ve been very fortunate because I have. Maybe before I’m 70 I’ll write my book.”