Bread Loaf School of English awards
37 master's at Vermont commencement
RIPTON, Vt.—On August 13 at Middlebury's Bread Loaf campus, the Bread Loaf School of English completed its 86th summer with commencement ceremonies, during which 37 students received master's degrees.
The speaker at the Saturday night event—selected as always by the "seniors," as the students who are completing their degrees call themselves—was Alan MacVey, a longtime member of the Bread Loaf faculty and director of the school's theater program. Introduced on Saturday night by Bread Loaf School of English director Jim Maddox, MacVey is a professor in and chair of the theatre arts department at the University of Iowa.
"Each summer, the senior class chooses one member of the Bread Loaf faculty to deliver the commencement address," said Maddox. "This is always a signal honor, bestowed by the seniors with both admiration and affection. It is arguable and, I think, probably true that this year's speaker has won more students' admiration over the years than any other single professor in the history of the School. One reason for that is that he has taught at Bread Loaf for a longer string of years than any other current Bread Loaf faculty member: he first came here in 1976, and he has returned every year since. ... But tonight's speaker is not only our director in this theater. He is the founder of the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble, which enters classrooms every summer and shows how acting can be introduced in the most illuminating ways into pedagogy."
The hooder, who adds the master's hood to each graduate's academic regalia during the ceremony, is also picked by the senior class, and this year's choice was Bread Loaf faculty member John Elder, who teaches in the English department and the environmental studies program at Middlebury College. The degrees were conferred by Middlebury College President Ronald D. Liebowitz.
Thirty-four students at the Vermont campus earned master's degrees in English (the M.A.), while three earned master's of letters (M.Litt.) degrees—more specialized degrees for which the M.A. in English is a pre-requisite.
Earlier this summer, the Bread Loaf campus at Oxford in England conferred 26 master's degrees, on August 6; 10 were awarded at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 27; and one at the Alaska campus on August 3. The total for the summer at all four Bread Loaf School of English campuses was 71 M.A.'s and three M.Litt.'s.
About the Bread Loaf School of English
Since 1920 the Bread Loaf School of English has offered a rich array of graduate courses in literature, the teaching of writing, creative writing, and theater to students from across the United States. For six weeks each summer Bread Loaf students, most of them secondary-school teachers, work toward an M.A. or M.Litt. and study with a world-class faculty at one of our four sites: Alaska, New Mexico, Oxford (England), and the home campus located outside Middlebury at the foot of Bread Loaf Mountain in Vermont. In summer 2006 Bread Loaf will open a fifth campus at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.