When Marlboro College held its first graduation in 1948, Hugh Mulligan showed up wearing a cap and gown he had borrowed from a Bennington student. To get it, he loaned her the contraband copy of Henry Miller’s erotic “Tropic of Cancer” that he had smuggled back from his wartime service in France. He was the only graduate, and six decades later he’s still impressed by the dignitaries Marlboro President Walter Hendricks assembled for the occasion. They included Gov. Ernest W. Gibson Jr., Sen. George Aiken and the presidents of both Harvard and Yale, along with Robert Frost, who wrote a poem for the occasion, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who told the gathering: “Trust in God, she’ll be with you always.”

Now, as Marlboro marks its 60th anniversary, he’s also impressed by the stability and respect it has achieved. “It’s good that it’s lasted,” says Mulligan, who went on to get graduate degrees from Harvard and Boston University, report from 146 countries for The Associated Press and write “Been Everywhere — Got Nowhere,” a memoir of a life spent in journalism. “I’m very proud of what they’ve done.”

What they did was to build a school that famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith would call one of the “jewels of American education,” and The Princeton Review would praise for “the rigor of its academic program, its philosophy of self-governance, and students who value learning for its own sake.”

Marlboro College took shape on a hill farm in southeastern Vermont where Hendricks had summered for years, and there’s something uniquely Vermont in its roots. The collection of white clapboard buildings on Potash Hill looks like a small village. It’s governed in part by monthly “town meeting” forums in which students, faculty, grounds crews and kitchen workers all have a vote. Lisa Christensen, the school’s chief advancement officer, says it was forged by “a combination of Yankee frugality and a do-it-yourself attitude” that continues today.

The idea for Marlboro sparked in Biarritz, France. The war in Europe had ended, and the Army was creating a “university” abroad for soldiers who weren’t needed in the South Pacific but didn’t have enough service time to rotate back home. Hendricks, an Amherst graduate and Chaucer scholar, headed the English department. As he watched villas being turned into classrooms and hotels into dormitories, he began thinking about turning his farm into a college. The GI Bill had been passed in 1944, and there would be a sudden flood of tuition money available for veterans who wanted it.

When he returned to Vermont, Hendricks set about converting a farmhouse into a dormitory, a barn into classrooms, and a stable into a library. The school opened in September 1947, with 50 students, 35 of them veterans. These included, according to Marlboro lore, two deer hunters who had wandered onto the campus and were signed up by Hendricks when he found they had GI Bill benefits due them.

A school filled with combat veterans couldn’t be run with “in loco parentis” rules, and town meeting governance came into being. The small classes resulted in spirited discussions rather than lectures. Everyone ate together in the same dining hall, and a sense of community quickly formed. The students watched the school being built around them, much of the work done by Marlboro handyman Luke Dalrymple. There are buildings at Ivy League schools named for Colonial heroes, but Marlboro’s Dalrymple Hall is named for the carpenter who turned a barn into classrooms.

The early days were lean. The library was stocked with discards from the Brooks Memorial Library in nearby Brattleboro, students slept in tents borrowed from the National Guard, and finances were shaky.

Hendricks, though regarded by some as a visionary and superb teacher, was pushed out by the trustees in 1950 for letting expansion plans get ahead of economic realities. It was a constant theme: The school spent decades on the brink, saved repeatedly at the last minute by benefactors writing checks, by faculty members agreeing to take pay cuts and by the loyalty of the students, who kept returning in spite of the uncertainty.

As postwar America changed, Marlboro eventually became known as a free-spirited place, where alternative lifestyles, recreational drugs, casual nudity (naked Frisbee was a rite of spring) and sexual diversity were not only accepted but applauded. Because students could shape their own courses of study, it attracted the highly creative. There were no fraternities or sororities and nothing in the way of serious athletics. The soccer team called itself the “Fighting Dead Trees.”

This lack of convention sometimes masked the reality that Marlboro (also home to the esteemed chamber music academy in summer) was built on an Oxford-style tutorial system that was challenging and tightly knit, with about 330 students enjoying a student-faculty ratio of about 8-to-1. It was a place where Latin and Greek were being taught, and where close to 70 percent of graduates were going on for advanced degrees.

Today, the college is led by President Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, a former chief-of-staff to Sen. Patrick Leahy who also headed the Vermont Arts Council and spent seven years in the Clinton administration working on educational, cultural and arts programs.

Increasing the endowment — now about $32 million, up from $17 million three years ago — is a major goal, and the hope, of course, is to sustain Marlboro’s traditions and its place in Vermont. “The more trends go the other way,” says McCulloch-Lovell, “the more I believe there must be a Marlboro.”

View this article as a PDF of the actual magazine pages.

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Report card

Marlboro College makes the grade with The Princeton Review, scoring highly in categories both serious and whimsical.

The review’s “Best 366 Colleges” for 2008 puts Marlboro:

• ■ No. 7 in “class discussions encouraged”
• ■ No. 11 in “their students never stop studying” (just behind No. 10
  Middlebury College)
• ■ No. 15 in “professors get high marks”
• ■ No. 13 in “Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging, clove-smoking
  vegetarians”
• ■ No. 4 in “nobody plays intramural sports”
• ■ No. 2 in “dodgeball targets”

Another review book, “Best Northeastern Colleges: 222 Select Schools to Consider,” ranks Marlboro 98 out of a possible 100 for its academic rating along with such schools as Wellesley College, Vassar and the United States Military Academy (West Point).

Marlboro President Ellen McCulloch-Lovell says on the college’s website she is delighted with the rankings honoring academic and classroom achievements, “and yes, we are different enough to be proud of rating second in the ‘dodgeball targets’ category.”