RIPTON, Vt.—On August 9 at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus, the Bread Loaf School of English completed its 89th summer with commencement ceremonies, during which 30 students received master’s degrees. The degrees were conferred by Middlebury College President Ronald D. Liebowitz.
The speaker at the Saturday night event—selected as always by the "seniors," as the students who are completing their degrees call themselves—was Dixie Goswami, a longtime member of the Bread Loaf faculty. Introduced on Saturday night by Bread Loaf School of English Director Jim Maddox, Goswami is coordinator of Bread Loaf's courses in writing and of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network. She is professor of English emerita of Clemson University.
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During commencement at Bread Loaf, President Ronald D. Liebowitz, left, Lucy Maddox, second from left, and Elaine Lathrop, right, confer a master's degree and add a hood to the academic regalia of a graduating 'senior.'
— Photo: Tom Brant '10 |
“The senior class elects a commencement speaker from the faculty each summer as a token of their admiration and affection, in just about equal proportions,” said Maddox. “Dixie first came to Bread Loaf in 1979, hired by my predecessor Paul Cubeta. That was, arguably, the most important, and the best, appointment Paul ever made; it was, arguably, the most important and the best in the entire history of the School of English. “Dixie was brought in to head up a new Program in Writing at Bread Loaf, to create and teach courses that would be of help to the teachers in instructing their own students in how to write. So, henceforth at Bread Loaf, there would be courses in literature, courses in the theater arts, and courses in writing. … She taught the rest of the faculty, not so much by precept as by example, that the teaching of writing is inseparable from a concern for social justice. Teaching disenfranchised children to read and write, to marshal and articulate their thoughts is to give them the keys to their freedom. Dixie made this lesson of primary importance at Bread Loaf by working to raise money to bring the teachers of those children here.”
Maddox said Goswami’s “greatest achievement is the Bread Loaf Teacher Network, a physical, living network of people who meet at Bread Loaf in the summers and in their cities and states throughout the year, and an electronic network of teachers, whose classes write to one another on our telecommunications system BreadNet; on BreadNet the young students are drawn in, to their teachers’ repeated amazement, to compose with an interest and delight that they have never displayed before.”
In Goswami's commencement address, she urged the graduates to use film, music, photography, and words to teach their own students to create stories that will effect social change. And she ended with this piece of advice: "Go out boldly into the world and make it better."
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 chose one Bread Loaf faculty member, Lucy Maddox, and one member of the Bread Loaf staff, office manager Elaine Lathrop.
Twenty-nine students at the Vermont campus earned master’s degrees in English (the M.A.), while one earned a master’s of letters (M.Litt.) degree—a more specialized degree for which the M.A. in English is a pre-requisite.
Earlier in the day, the Bread Loaf campus at Oxford in England conferred 24 master’s degrees; 10 were awarded at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 23; and 12 at the Asheville, North Carolina, campus on July 30. The total for the summer at the four Bread Loaf School of English campuses was 72 M.A.’s and four 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.