RIPTON, Vt. — On August 11 at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus, the Bread Loaf School of English completed its 88th summer with commencement ceremonies, during which 49 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 John Elder, a long time member of both the Bread Loaf and the Middlebury College faculty. Introduced on Saturday night by Bread Loaf School of English Director Jim Maddox, Elder holds a joint appointment in English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury and his courses at Bread Loaf reflect his wide-ranging interests in both fields.
“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. This year’s speaker has taught English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College since 1973 and has taught here at Bread Loaf since 1982. Although he has spent most of his Bread Loaf summers in Vermont, he has also taught in New Mexico and Alaska, at both of which he has been on-site director. ... Everywhere that he has been in his extraordinarily rich and various academic life — maybe most particularly Vermont, Japan, and Italy — he has been attuned to the spirit of place, with ‘spirit’ being a word to which he is perhaps more likely than most to give a definite religious connotation. He electrifies his students, who will follow him anywhere. When he gives one of his famous field-based courses, Bread Loaf students who have long since graduated come, as it were, out of retirement and sign up again for courses with him. I fully expect this to happen when he heads to Asheville next summer and teaches a course there on the early English, Scottish, and Irish ballad, the migration of the ballad tradition to the United States and particularly to the Appalachians, and its transmutation in towns most of which are within 50 miles of Asheville, into the beginnings of American country music, beginning with the immortal Carter Family in the 1920s.” The “hooders,” who add the master’s hood to each graduate’s academic regalia during the ceremony, are also picked by the senior class, and this year they choose two Bread Loaf faculty members who between them have taught at Bread Loaf for a total of 38 years, Michael and Isobel Armstrong. The degrees were conferred by Middlebury College President Ronald D. Liebowitz.
Forty-seven students at the Vermont campus earned master’s degrees in English (the M.A.), while two 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, on August 4, the Bread Loaf campus at Oxford in England conferred 18 master’s degrees; 12 were awarded at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 25; and 13 at the Asheville, North Carolina, campus on August 1. The total for the summer at the four Bread Loaf School of English campuses was 89 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: New Mexico, North Carolina, Oxford (England), and the home campus located outside Middlebury at the foot of Bread Loaf Mountain in Vermont.