Tom Ragle Memoir
As promised, the alumni council has released Tom Ragle’s memoir with a new forward. As the second president (1958-1980) of Marlboro College, he shares his experiences and relates the most complete history of Marlboro College to date. Tom asks us to remember that, "Marlboro was always we, never I, whoever is talking." In that spirit this document may serve as an origin story for the events and achievements made by the Marlboro Community as a whole, a reminder of where we have come from and an inspiration for the road ahead. Tom sends you this gift that we all hope you will enjoy.
Take care,
The Archive Subcommittee of the MCAA
“These passing years have given me a new and different perspective with which to view and evaluate a past of which I was a part, so much a part that this had to be a memoir and not a history. What, I now ask myself, made Marlboro Marlboro?”
— Tom Ragle
In the excerpt below from the foreword he had written for a proposed but abandoned second printing of his book, Marlboro College, A Memoir, Tom describes how the updated foreword came into existence. The full text of the memoir is available as a PDF file.
2020 Edition Foreword (excerpt), Marlboro College, A Memoir
In the fall of 2019 I was invited by the College to write a forward for the second printing of Marlboro College, A Memoir, originally published in a very limited edition in 1999. This came as a surprise because the original document had been written simply as a typescript for the archives lest some fascinating bits about early years of the College be lost. Although it appeared in a strictly limited edition of sixty copies or so, it was never designed to be printed in the first place. This invitation came at an opportune time, however, for even as I wrote there were negotiations underway to merge Marlboro with Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, and move its operations to the city. Now this has indeed come to pass, the old Marlboro as we knew it is no more, for both its rural location and its independent governance structure, essential to the College we knew, can be no more. I wish any new avatar well but I mourn the loss of the old. The old was a Camelot (without a king, unless Roland be he), but we all know Camelots do not last in this world.
Tom Ragle Biography
Tom Ragle gradated from the Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College with an A.B in ancient Greek history and literature, and Oxford University with a B.A. and M.A, in English language and literature. For six years, with one year back in the service during the Korean War, he served as an English teacher on the Exeter faculty before resigning, planning to move to Vermont to write poetry seriously, and earning a living any way he could. Something happened on the way to the forum, however, and he found himself president of Marlboro College from 1958-1981. Too busy with his new duties and soon a single father, he ceased writing poetry for about twenty years. From 19981-83 he served as visiting professor and special assistant to the president at the University of Vermont, from 1983-89 as director of the Salzburg Seminar in Austria, from 1989-91 as special consultant to the United Nations Development Program in Beijing on the teaching of English literature at the university level, and finally as a visiting professor and special assistant to he president of Trinity College in Burlington, Vermont before retiring to the family's 1780 farm in Guilford, Vermont in 1993. In 2013 under his pen name of Lee Bramble he published Take This Song, a collection of his poems.