Inside Front Cover

Potash Hill 
Published twice every year, Potash Hill shares highlights of what Marlboro College community members, in both undergraduate and graduate programs, are doing, creating, and thinking. The publication is named after the hill in Marlboro, Vermont, where the college was founded in 1946. “Potash,” or potassium carbonate, was a locally important industry in the 18th and 19th centuries, obtained by leaching wood ash and evaporating the result in large iron pots. Students and faculty at Marlboro no longer make potash, but they are very industrious in their own way, as this publication amply demonstrates. 

Editor: Philip Johansson 
Alumni Director: Maia Segura ’91 
Staff Photographers: Emily Weatherill ’21 and Cliff Clifford ’22  

Front Cover: In what turned out to be their last week spent on campus before the coronavirus crisis, students enjoy celebrating Holi, the Hindu festival of spring representing the triumph of good over evil. Photo by Emily Weatherill '21 

Professor of chemistry Todd Smith (right) celebrates the class of 2020 by setting something on fire, an exothermic reaction that occurs when a solid, liquid, or gas-phase fuel undergoes rapid oxidation. The final graduating class of Marlboro Class faced many hurdles this spring, and rose to every challenge to make the college proud. See a congratulations video from faculty and staff.

About Marlboro College
Marlboro College provides independent thinkers with exceptional opportunities to broaden their intellectual horizons, benefit from a small and close-knit learning community, establish a strong foundation for personal and career fulfillment, and make a positive difference in the world. At our campus in the town of Marlboro, Vermont, students engage in deep exploration of their interests while developing transferrable skills that can be directly correlated with success after graduation, known as the Marlboro Promise. These skills are: (1) the ability to write with clarity and precision; (2) the ability to work, live, and communicate with a wide range of individuals; and (3) the ability to lead an ambitious project from idea to execution. Marlboro students fulfill this promise in an atmosphere that emphasizes critical and creative thinking, independence, an egalitarian spirit, and community.