by Joyce Marcel, Vermont Business Magazine (This article was first published in the print issue of VBM in August 2015) Dr Mariko Silver, the 10th president of Bennington College, works in an office dominated by a stunning abstract expressionist painting by the great artist Helen Frankenthaler. This huge (68”x126.5”) and priceless work of art, titled “Red Square,” was done by the artist — a Bennington College graduate — in 1959.
“It’s one of the perks,” Silver said with a smile.
Bennington, a private college, is part of Vermont and yet not part of Vermont. Since it was founded as a women’s college in 1939 (it went coed in 1969), it has been internationally recognized for its progressive liberal arts education. It sits on 440 mostly wooded acres in the southwestern part of Vermont, close to the Battenkill River and New York State.
Novelist Jonathan Lethem, a proud Bennington drop-out, described the college in his 2005 commencement address as “a utopia” in an “enchanted quadrant of Vermont.”
Bennington numbers among its alumni a host of Pulitzer Prize winners and one Academy Award winner — that would be actor Alan Arkin. Currently topping the culture scale are famous alumni novelist Donna Tartt (“The Goldfinch”) and actor Peter Dinklage (“Game of Thrones”).
“For our size, we punch way above our weight,” Silver said. “Interesting Bennington people are everywhere. As soon as I was paying attention, every time I was looking at something interesting, it was a Bennington person behind it — whether it was a polka show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York or bringing conductor Gustavo Dudamel to the LA Philharmonic.”
In terms of the numbers, Bennington College is relatively small. It has fewer than 700 students and an endowment of only $18 million. (According to Wikipedia, Amherst College, for comparison, has over $2 billion. Dartmouth College has over $4 billion and Harvard, the great heavyweight, has over $35 billion.)
Silver, who is 37, is fairly new at being a college president — she took over at Bennington on July 1, 2013, replacing a woman who had held the job for 25 years. And she may not fit the conventional image.
Far from being severe, dusty and dignified, she is effusive, sharp, polished, frighteningly smart, fast-talking, witty, filled with energy and quick to laughter.
Silver is also academically distinguished. She has a BA in history from Yale University, an MSc in Science and Technology Policy from the University of Sussex in England and a PhD in Economic Geography from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Her credentials in higher education include stints working at both at Columbia University and Arizona State University. She has also done time in Washington, DC, working at the US Dept of Homeland Security. With an educational interest in Southeast Asia, she has worked in both Thailand and Vietnam.
Silver has mastered the art of speaking in the abstract about education, foreign and domestic policy, concepts and ideas. But she is also quick to use the vernacular to tell a joke at her own expense.
For example, when I asked her how many languages she spoke, she was quick to say, “Only one. English.”
But then she added, “I can get along in Spanish and French. I can speak to very small children in Japanese, and I can shop and take a taxi and eat in Chinese. Thai? There was a time when my Thai was OK, but now all I can say is, ‘I don’t speak Thai. How much is that? And, I like it very spicy’.”
Silver comes from an accomplished family. Her late father was the award-winning documentary filmmaker Tony Silver, who made films about art and artists. His 1983 film “Style Wars” was one of the earliest accounts of New York’s graffiti artists and the then-brand new culture of hip hop.
Her mother is Joan Shigekawa, who spent decades working in public television, then made films on art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then managed the NYC Cultural Innovation Fund for the Rockefeller Foundation and then became acting chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Now retired from that position, she “is doing a number of consulting projects and baby-sitting” for Silver’s two small children.
When I asked Silver what she had learned from growing up in a creative environment with two such high-powered parents, she thought for a moment before speaking. Then she talked first about her father.
“I learned very much from my father how to see other people,” she said. “He had a kind of activist-anthropologist bent to him. He really was interested in both how people make art and the relationship between the individual artist creating and the culture in which that artist works.”
Shigekawa, Silver said, has “a real strategist’s mind and a manager’s mind.”
As a survivor of the Japanese-American internment camps in California, Shigekawa taught her only child “how to manage adversity productively and how to add it to your ability to gain perspective in life,” Silver said. “She is obviously very successful, but at heart she’s a strategist and a thinker. Both my parents were committed in their own ways to making the world a better place -- and a place that is better for multiple perspectives on who we as humans are, rather than better because we’re all the same.”
Silver is married to guitarist Thom Loubet. The couple was aware of each other’s existence long before they actually met. Loubet also comes from an accomplished family. His aunt was the co-founder and long-time editor of Ms. Magazine.
“His aunt and my mother had known each other since before I was born,” Silver said. “But he was born in Albuquerque so we didn’t know each other as kids. But between college and graduate school he was in New York. His aunt had one of those coveted storage lockers in the basement of her apartment building and I had a pair of skis I wasn’t going to give up. And my mother didn’t have one of those coveted storage lockers. So he unlocked his aunt’s storage locker for me. But I didn’t pay much attention and I didn’t think that he did either. When I got back from graduate school and he was living in New York as a musician, he and I met again. We were the only people under the age of 60 — and he was the only man — at a fundraiser for now-Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer, who is also a Bennington alum, as it happens. So he says it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The odds were pretty good at that party. So we met there.”
The couple married in 2008. Loubet is now based in Bennington and does much of his work from home — besides his music and his band, he teaches guitar and manages the intellectual property of the Free to Be You and Me Foundation — while still keeping an eye on the kids, Silver said.
“He also does some traveling around,” she said. “Last night we were just trying to decide if he should take a tour -- how long he would be away and the ratio of child care expenses we would pay relative to the amount he would make. We’re still negotiating all that. His band has come up here a couple of times and he does mini-tours. He does a good portion of the child care. The older one is in preschool and we have baby sitters, but he does a lot of the logistics. He’s also the cook in the family, for sure. He’s much better than I am. So that’s a good division of labor. He doesn’t let me go to the grocery store because he says I only buy snacks instead of real food. I say it’s more efficient and he says it’s unhealthy. He says you can’t just buy baked goods. It’s true, so he does all the cooking and shopping and paying the bills.”
Silver got the Bennington job after “an exhaustive search process,” according to board chairman Alan W Kornberg. “A lot of time was spent talking to and listening to all the constituencies: students, staff, faculty, alumni and supporters of the college. We were lucky because there was robust interest in the position. But Mariko, from the beginning, really ‘got’ the place. She understood the values of the institution and its culture right off the bat in a way that was incredibly progressive. We jokingly accused her of listening in on the board meetings because her language was so similar.”
Silver’s ability to listen — learned from her father — shone through the vetting process, Kornberg said.
“We heard over and over again that yes, she was a strong leader and incredibly dynamic, but she was also a great listener,” he said. “She was someone who was able to build consensus and take into account all the views of the people she deals with. That’s a great combination of skills and talent. My personal viewpoint is that she can see the big picture and have great ideas, but she also understands how to get things done within an institution. I think she’s very focused on financial sustainability and making sure Bennington has a robust financial picture.”
Former Marlboro College president Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, another Bennington graduate, says that the college is lucky to have Silver.
“She is well-suited for the Bennington job,” McCulloch-Lovell said. “She deeply understands the mission. She’s really committed to young people. She is able to see the big picture and how all the parts of relatively a small institution interact with each other — how every decision you make interacts or affects every other part of the institution. And that includes not only on-campus functions but the support systems that sustain a place like Bennington or Marlboro — alums, trustees, donors, the broader community. She’s a systems thinker.”
Other comments I heard were: “flashing with brilliance,” “a person who searches for answers, rather than having them already,” “warm, intuitive and a big-picture thinker,” “an incredibly bright, simpatico, beautiful person,” “a facilitator of change” and “a great addition to the college and the greater community.”
Bennington has 750 students, 196 full-time staff and 43 part-time staff. The undergraduate faculty consists of 106 people — 57 full-time and 49 part-time. The school also has 18 core faculty in its Masters of Fine Art in Writing program.
Bennington is an expensive place to study — tuition plus room and board can cost more than $60,000 a year. But more than 62 percent of full-time students receive some kind of financial aid. The average amount of that aid is $32,556 a year, and the school boasts that it provided $16.5 million from tuition and annual fundraising to help its students in the academic year that just ended.
More than 225 members of the faculty and staff live in Vermont. And over the past four years, during the school’s seven week winter field Work Term, students “have worked for 78 Vermont business and not-for-profits contributing approximately 32,000 hours of work (as of April 2015).”
The school’s FY 2013 institutional spending on goods and services to Vermont businesses totaled $8.7 million. The total institutional economic impact to the state is $30 million.
The kind of elite and expensive liberal arts education offered by Bennington may sound old-fashioned and almost comical in a world of on-line degrees that require no campus presence at all, and an educational environment that seems increasingly focused on vocational training and an attention to potential after-graduation income.
We hear stories of young physicians who eschew general practice because specialization provides a higher income — and an easier way to pay off their mammoth loans.
If future financial reward alone becomes the way to judge the value of a college education, it might feel as if real academic life — learning for the joy of learning — is becoming an endangered species.
Silver, however, believes in a broad, humanistic education that prepares graduates for all kinds of careers and vocations as well as for living in an uncertain world.
“I would like our students to be able to navigate uncertainty,” Silver said. “People don’t tend to go into a company with a job at the lowest rung of the ladder and retire at the highest rung. Some graduates have 10 jobs in the first 10 years. The vast majority of graduates, 18 to 24 year olds, are not moving into a world of linear trajectories — either in where they live or in their personal lives or their careers. Last year, in a conversation with graduating seniors, I talked to a woman who said, ‘One of the most valuable things Bennington has enabled me to do is manage my way through ambiguity.’ And that’s life. We in higher education have an obligation to help our students understand how to navigate nuance, uncertainty and ambiguity.”
Employers actually want students who are trained this way, Silver said.
“Employers want people who have an ability to communicate,” she said. “And in order to communicate effectively — which doesn’t only mean to write an hourglass essay — you have to understand what you’re talking about. And that doesn’t mean having a black-and-white idea of what reality is like. You have to be able to negotiate — and not in the way you negotiate for a used car — social situations and human interactions.
You have to be able to understand and navigate ambiguity and manage yourself in environments of uncertainty. That is actually what employers are saying, although they may not use those words. Do they want people to have technical skills? Of course they want people to have technical skills. But it’s not enough. It’s certainly not enough to be in the executive ranks, to be in a leadership position. It depends on whether you’re talking about having a job or a career.”
Silver happily quoted a young graduate who told her that her Bennington experience gave her “the ability to lead a more audacious life.”
“So I started asking informed questions about what it is about Bennington that makes that possible,” Silver said. “What happens to people when they actually get here? Is it a selection bias? Do we pick people who are already more audacious and we don’t have anything to do with it? Or is it something that happens to students when they get here? Or do we help them to hone that part of themselves? Do we enable people to really build a fulfilled, generative life and trajectory of work and interpersonal engagement that is in the very best way audacious. And I think we do.”
Early Education And Career
Silver is an only child. She was born and raised in New York City, where she grew up in a rich and diverse cultural environment.
“We had all those people over to our house and I was very much involved in that,” Silver said. “One thing I learned early on without knowing I was learning it, was that is there is creativity and art everywhere. It’s not just what someone in power says is important. What people in power say is important may be important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.”
She was exposed to a broad range of perspectives and experiences.
“My father taught me an appreciation of good food and music and just paying attention in the world,” Silver said. “He was something of an hedonist and he loved to be in the world with all his five senses and he conveyed that to me by encouraging me to pay attention.”
Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was 15 and Silver finished high school there. She went back east for college, though, to Yale University, where she took a BA in history with a focus on Southeast Asia.
When she finished Yale, she wanted to continue studying some combination of international development and IT policy. She was looking at Oxford University in England, but a conversation with an advisor changed her course. It would not be the last time that a meeting with a remarkable man caused her to redirect her life.
“Over my years at Yale I had gotten to know a remarkable historian, the late Robin Winks,” she said. “He was one of my recommenders for graduate school. I had applied to MIT, Oxford, etc and was sort of headed for Oxford. And Robin Winks said I was crazy. He thought I was picking Oxford for all the wrong reasons. ‘You’re picking it because it’s Oxford,’ he said. ‘You should pick Sussex. It has a better program.’ At the time it was the first flowering of the Internet. I was really interested in the role of information communication technology in poverty reduction programs in developing countries.”
So she picked Sussex, and while studying there was introduced to a man who needed research done in the archives of the British Library.
“He said, ‘I’ll pay you,’” she said. “And I’m a graduate student eating out of a rice cooker. So the work got me a pass to the British library and trips to London. And I did this very strange research about cats. It turned out that this guy ran a media company in Thailand and he was hired to do a small documentary about some particular breed of cat that British colonials had in Burma. The details are foggy. He said, ‘I’d be happy to pay you in cash, or would you like to come out to Thailand?’”
Silver chose Thailand and soon found herself working for the man’s travel magazine.
“So I went out and worked for him for about a year, and got to explore a lot of Thailand,” she said. “But I found in the end that writing was not my calling. I noticed that I was the only woman on the staff, and they kept sending me out to do all the women’s jobs. Spas are fun the first time, but I ran out of ways to describe what is essentially the same experience over and over again. I think if you were truly a skilled writer, you wouldn’t run out of ways to say it was ‘relaxing’ and ‘luxurious.’ Also, I decided it was not putting my very expensive education to best use, and it wasn’t fundamentally, other than living in Thailand, what I was interested in doing. It was time to do something else.”
New York
Silver moved back to New York, where she could live with her mother and look for a career. But she found herself floundering.
“There I was with an undergraduate degree in history and a master’s degree in science and technology policy, and pretty much everyone I knew seemed to be in either a pre-professional track — law school or med school — or they were in finance,” she said. “So I thought, ‘I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do, even though I wanted to work for a nonprofit.’ I thought if I did some time in finance and learned how finance works, then I could work for a nonprofit. I was kind of flailing around trying to figure out what I was going to do. I went on interviews in finance and got a few job offers, and then I met Michael Crow.”
Dr Michael Crow, currently the president of Arizona State University, co-author of the groundbreaking book “Designing the New University,” and a respected leader in higher education, was then executive vice provost of Columbia University. He heard about Silver’s background and was impressed enough to invite her for an interview.
“And I said under my breath, ‘I don’t want to work in a university. I’ve spent my whole life in education. I want to do something else,’” Silver said. “But he’s extremely persuasive, and my mother taught me that you never turn down an interview because you never know what’s going to happen. So I went in to meet with him, and I was probably, in retrospect, pretty bratty. I pushed him very hard, and said I wanted to learn about finance and how the private sector works and on and on. And he said, ‘Here’s why it’s going to be better than doing it in the context you were thinking of — you can learn it while doing it.’ And so I decided to go work for him.”
I asked Crow by email from Paris why he recruited Silver. His response was immediate.
“I first recruited Mariko in the summer of 2001 and saw in her a person with very fast thinking, a very broad intellect, a comprehensive world view — and fearlessness,” Crow said. “She’s a broad conceptual thinker. Most people do what they do but they often don’t know where they are in the system. Mariko knows. She’s a Why, How, What process thinker, focusing on Why first, which is the hardest.”
Higher Education
At Columbia, Silver began by working on one of Crow’s most important initiatives, which he called Columbia Innovation Enterprises and which is now renamed Science and Technology Ventures. It works in the field of “technology and innovation transfer operations” — which means commercializing research done at the university.
“Some scientist in the university invents something,” Silver explained. “The university owns it as intellectual property. For a long time, universities weren’t commercializing intellectual property. The technology transfer office job was to do that. So that’s what I did. Columbia at the time was the most successful in revenue-transfer in the country.”
Crow had already piloted a program for patent pooling or bundling.
“Say I’m in Columbia and I’ve invented Widget A,” Silver explained. “And you’re at MIT and invented Widget B. If we go to the marketplace individually, big corporations could either play us against each other or bargain with us separately so each of us gets less. It doesn’t work in every case, but if we say, ‘Whereas we bundle together and say we’ve created a new standard by combining, you can’t have Widget A without Widget B,’ we’re in a better bargaining situation with big corporations and investors. So a bit part of my job was to go around with a team of scientists and engineers, depending on the technology, to figure out what the matches were and what the deals could look like.”
And Then Came 9/11
Of course, timing is everything. When the planes hit the twin towers, Silver’s job changed. Columbia — as well as institutions throughout the city — actively responded to the terrorist attack.
“One of the big things we were asked by government to figure out was how to bring people in the computer sciences together with people from the intelligence community,” she said. “We needed to think about some of the information challenges that led to the government’s inability to predict in some way what Osama Bin Laden was going to do. A number of people in government thought it was a machine language translation problem. Others thought it was a sorting problem. Or an information triage problem.”
In the post-Vietnam War era, communication between academic computer scientists — who were thought to be on the cutting edge — and government was virtually nonexistent, Silver said.
“There was a real cultural wall built there,” she said. “But in that moment after 9/11, there was understandably a lot of interest on the part of academics to be more helpful and more directly useful. So I helped organize a series of interactions between people in government and computer scientists, from not only Columbia but from all over the world, to talk about it. And there were some projects that came out of it that I helped to steward.”
While Silver was still working on these projects, in 2002 Crow was offered the presidency of Arizona State University. He was already thinking about how to combine “academic excellence, inclusiveness to a broad demographic, and maximum societal impact” —into what he called the “New American University.”
Basically, he wanted to make a college education available to a wide swath of the population while using a university as a center for raising the economic status of its entire area. These were big, almost revolutionary ideas and he asked Silver to join him as a senior adviser.
“I went partly because I’m a big believer in following the boss,” she said. “Not every boss, obviously. But if you find a good boss, whatever the job says on paper, it’s going to be a better experience — certainly than working for a jerk — but even more so working for a person who’s truly inspiring, someone who has a vision and you get to be part of figuring out how to make happen — and it’s a vision you believe in.”
In Arizona
The governor of Arizona when Crow and Silver arrived was a Republican, Jane Dee Hull. She was succeeded by Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, in 2003. At the time, ASU, which is located in Phoenix, was one of the largest state-funded universities in the country. And Arizona has one of the most conservative legislatures.
The legislature had made massive cuts in ASU funding, so getting money from it became one of Silver’s first priorities.
“I did a lot of work with members of the state legislature and Governor Jane Hull’s office on changing the formula by which public institutions were funded,” Silver said.
Crow’s answer to the budget cuts was to increase the number of students, which he did — undergraduate enrollment increased by nearly 50 percent and graduate enrollment by 39 percent. He increased the number of African-American students by 107 percent and the number of Hispanic students by 130 percent, according to The Nation.
“Over the same time period, the number of students coming from families earning less than $20,000 increased from 219 to 919... He was absolutely opposed to what he called ‘the elitism’ of top-tier American colleges.”
Crow was also determined to use the university to raise the economic well-being of the Phoenix metropolitan area — which includes Tempe and Scottsdale and many smaller cities.
“One of Michael’s core beliefs, and one I share, is that the public part is not just about where the money comes from but about what the institution does,” Silver said. “Taking the responsibility for the place where the institution is located is an enormous part of his vision and the work we wanted to do.”
So along with members of the government and economic development organizations, Silver began working on “how to build a more robust economic profile for Arizona or the Phoenix metropolitan area.”
While working at ASU, she also took her doctorate in economic geography at UCLA.
“Economic geography is the study of economic activity as it is distributed across space,” Silver said. “What drives economic activity being in one place instead of another? Why is economic activity distributed in the way it is? I was building on my previous interest in development and poverty alleviation, but also my interest in institutional development. Fundamentally, I’m interested in both economic development and the role of organizations and institutions in economic development — not particularly in the US — and how do these institutions change? How do they change their ideas of what their goals are? What their jobs are? The way they function?”
Silver became involved with a number of ASU’s international initiatives — she found herself working with China and a number of European partners, and later with Vietnam and India.
“And I was working, too, with some of our relationships in Washington,” she said. “I got to know Janet Napolitano. Somewhat shy of a year before President Obama was elected, she called and asked me to be her policy adviser for higher education, innovation and economic development. She called me on my honeymoon!”
Silver worked for Napolitano while still being attached to ASU.
“I was working for her when President Obama was elected and she announced she was going to be nominated to be secretary of the Department of Homeland Security,” Silver said.
Napolitano offered Silver a job in Washington.
“We started talking about DHS and the challenges and what Janet wanted to accomplish,” Silver said. “And we were talking about things serious and not so serious — how happy we were about President Obama’s election and whether she would be able to find good Mexican or New Mexican food in DC. And the answer is no, in case you’re wondering. We were just talking and she said, ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ And I said, ‘I have a job at ASU, but I certainly want to be of service. She said go look at the Plum Book — every time there’s a new president, the government puts out this book describing all the presidentially-appointed positions —and tell her what job I want. And that’s when you back out of the room — when you have something you want which you didn’t expect you were going to get.”
After perusing the Plum Book, Silver sought advice from Crow.
“Michael gave me a stern and avuncular lecture about not aiming low,” she said. “He was perfectly fine with the areas I was looking at — international development work or science and technology. But Michael insisted I aim for the highest ranked job I thought I could do. My assumption going in was to be humble and ask for less, and he taught me a lot in that one conversation. He told me a man would never ask for less. So I went in with that assumption and that I should put myself in the position where I thought I could be of maximum service rather than being afraid of looking too bold. And Janet made me the deputy assistant secretary for international policy for homeland security. And for some time, I was the acting assistant secretary.”
Washington
As we started talking about her work in Washington, I asked Silver about Obama.
She answered in exclamation points.
“He’s taller and better looking than you can imagine!” Silver said, laughing. “He has held my baby! I once wrote something which he said in a speech! It was quite a thrill!”
In her office, Silver displayed a great picture of Obama with one arm around her and the other around Shigekawa. All three are smiling broadly.
Before Silver could get the job at DHS she had to undergo a thorough psycho-social profiling by the CIA. Her description of it sounds like something out of the old McCarthy era.
“They asked, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party,’” Silver said, laughing. “And I said ‘Really? Do you know how old I am? How old are you?’ I asked. And they said in this serious voice, ‘Just answer the question’.”
Once in office, a lot of Silver’s work turned out to be inter-agency coordination.
“I worked with the State Department and the White House to make sure that what Homeland Security was doing was aligned with larger US policy,” Silver said. “Also, I was making sure that things important to Homeland Security were taken into account when other agencies were creating foreign policy and having direct interactions with foreign counterparts. I helped to help create the first international strategy for Homeland Security.”
The DHS is made up of many constituent parts, and Silver worked to make sure there was “a unified view, at the departmental level, of what we were trying to accomplish by engaging internationally, and what our top priorities were as a department.”
Silver often worked with Canada, the US’s biggest trading partner, trying to make trade and travel more efficient while still protecting the borders.
“One thing was a new bridge in Detroit,” Silver said. “It takes a lot of negotiations at my level, and then it moves up the chain.”
If Silver has one regret about her work in DHS, it is that she wasn’t able to make more effective change.
“While I’m proud in a more positive way of a lot of the things I did when I worked in government, and I learned an enormous amount, I don’t feel I was able to move the needle sufficiently on a number of issues that I care about very deeply,” she said. “Both internal things like organizational reform within DHS and policy issues like immigration reform and data collection. Those are things I would like to have been in a position to push for. So in that sense, I would actually consider some aspects of my time in government a failure. When people ask if I would want to go back into government, I say I would want to be very clear about what I would be able to accomplish and whether I would be in a position of power to do it.”
It was also in Washington that Silver learned about the danger that lurks in being a young and attractive woman in what remains a man’s world.
“When I was working in government, I did lots of travel for my job,” Silver said. “Once I went on a trip and let myself get cornered in a hotel room with a male colleague. It turned out that he was so drunk that escaping was not so hard once I figured out what was going on. But it was a dumb-shit thing to do. He said. ‘Come up and we’ll review the papers.’ And I said. ‘Of course, we’re going to be in a meeting tomorrow and we should review the papers.’ But it never occurred to me what was going to happen. Luckily that didn’t happen, but I let myself get stuck in there. While I was working in government, I told every young woman who worked for me that story as a warning.”
Especially because of her work in Southeast Asia, Silver has bumped up against a number of different gender norms.
“I have gone into more environments than I would have expected when I was in college, where being female was either an issue or noticeable in some way,” she said. “Whether I have been ill-treated for it either by omission or actively negatively, not that often. Although it certainly is still the case that when you’re working in a power structure that is largely male, there are things you will be left out of because you are a woman. Now you might prefer to be left out of them, but relationships are forged and trust is built in those moments and you’re left out of them.”
Coming To Vermont
After leaving DHS, Silver remained in Washington and began lobbying for ASU.
“I was stewarding a relationship between ASU, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and USAID on a number of development projects,” Silver said. “One of the biggest, a $40 million project, involved the Asian Development Bank, Intel Corporation and a number of others. It was a program working with the Vietnamese government to reform engineering education. And then, while I was doing that work and actually considering moving my family to Vietnam to continue that work at the project site, I got the call about the Bennington presidency.”
The job appealed to Silver because it combined her interest and experience in education with her intellectual interest in how institutions work.
Why, I wondered, did she want the job in the first place? Why leave Washington DC to be tucked away in rural Vermont? Why leave a huge institution like ASU for a tiny school like Bennington?
“One of the fundamental things Michael Crow taught me was that higher education is a fundamental platform for social change,” Silver said. “Which doesn’t mean telling your students what to think about politics. It means getting them engaged and giving them a sense of ownership about the world in which they live.”
Crow, who railed against elite schools, gave her a hard time about leaving him for Bennington, she said.
“He said, ‘Why do you want to go from a place where you can affect the lives of 70,000 students a year to where you can affect the lives of 700?’” she said. “While you can get an extraordinary education at ASU and many other places, my fundamental interest is in institutions and how they work. When you have a place that’s so big, you have to atomize it to understand it — to look at the individual parts and how they fit together.”
Bennington was small enough that she could study the entity as a whole.
“I don’t think you can understand if you are creating the kind of fundamental culture that supports the kind of learning that students need going into the world unless you can look at the whole,” Silver said. “So the scale is actually very appealing to me. Also, being able to be in a leadership and management position where I can have a whole team thinking — while they’re doing their individual jobs, of course — but thinking about that on a scale which is human. Not that ASU isn’t human, but it’s hard to think on the scale of a whole city, which is essentially what ASU is.”
Silver was also drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of a Bennington education. Bennington students stake out their area of interest early, develop a master plan process guided by three mentoring professors; they get to pursue their own interests throughout their four years at the school.
“It’s the idea of being driven by inquiry from the very beginning,” Silver said. “It’s like they’re a graduate student. They don't have to wait until they’re a senior, or when they are — by somebody else’s measure — advanced, to do the thing that’s really interesting to them. They start from Day One. We don’t have standards like Chemistry 101. They come into a course or topic, they are drawn to that topic, and they are driven through that experience by their own inquiry, their own scientific questions. Instead of waiting to talk about the drivers of cancer until they are a senior and have taken all the chemistry and organic chemistry and biology, they actually start there.”
Almost in answer to Crow, Silver argued that diversity of experience is one of the great strengths of the American educational system — it can go from huge institutions like ASU to tiny elite colleges like Bennington.
“We need different kinds of higher education institutions,” she said. “My reason for coming here is my interest and belief in the educational philosophy of the place. Bennington is a great place to be thinking — not in the abstract — but actively as part of a community. And from the personal point of view. It’s a place we want to be and raise our kids and live.”
The Future
Silver started off at Bennington by getting to know the people and the values of the place.
“My first year was about trying to understand what it was to enable the place to produce the kind of graduates it does,” she said. “When we talk about higher education at the national conversation, we’re talking about how you get in and what happens when you get out. We talk very little about what happens when you’re there for four years of your young life, and what the relationship is when you’re there and when you get out. I spent a lot of time working on that. I also spent a lot of time talking and listening to the faculty.”
Since then she’s been very, very busy. She started by undertaking a goals and visioning process that resulted in a number of goals for various parts of the institution.
“And now we’re in the process of making sure we’re organized to manage toward those goals,” she said.
Silver has been working to increase the school’s diversity.
"The class of 2019 will also be most diverse class in the history of the college," she said in a recent letter to the Bennington community.
(www.bennington.edu/About/CollegeLeadership/reflections)
"The students hail from 31 states and 27 foreign countries; twenty percent come from minority, underrepresented backgrounds; and they come from a wide range of economic backgrounds. This, too, is part of Bennington's commitment to fulfill the promise of our educational mission: we must inspire more voices, more experiences, and more points of view in the conversations that shape us all, and we must enable more talented students to pursue their life's work."
Silver also plunged deep into fundraising. A newly formed Alumni Cooperative invites alums to “explore how to expand the alumni network and increase the impact we have, as a group, on the college.”
In keeping with that, in her letter she announced, “Thanks to a $5 million challenge from an anonymous alumna, a fundraising effort is underway to renovate Commons so that we might reestablish this building, which has stood at the center of Bennington student life for generations, as an educational hub once again."
She also announced that the visual arts wings of the school's art building will be renamed in honor of Helen Frankenthaler.
To develop a curriculum that is “open, nimble and responsive” to the world outside the campus, Silver created one-credit “pop-up courses” that look at things like the report on the Ferguson police department, the shooting murders in Paris of cartoonists in the office of Charlie Hebdo, the measles outbreak in Orange County and the Nepal earthquake.
State Senator Brian Campion (D-Bennington), who works part-time in Bennington’s development office doing major gift work, said he was impressed by these pop-up courses
“In respect to making change in the larger world, I am very pleased by Mariko's interest in exploring, rethinking and supporting new ideas around course work,” Campion said. “An example is her support of pop-up courses which respond to our students' desire to engage timely events too urgent to wait for the next curriculum cycle. I hope other institutions of higher education follow this lead.”
Another thing Silver did early on was “take a jackhammer — sort of — to the northern gate,” she said, laughing.
By opening the gate between Prospect Street and the campus, she physically connected the college to the town of North Bennington. Then she hosted a series of meeting with town leaders and started building relationships with them. She also built a relationship with the Bennington Museum.
“I would like us to be more intimately intertwined with the town of Bennington and the village of North Bennington,” Silver said. “In fact, the college was founded by members of Bennington the town, and the college would not exist here if it were not for the leadership of the town. The future of the college and the success of the college and the town and the village — it’s a completely codependent relationship, and that should be a good thing.”
Changes are currently being made to the school’s Web site, and cultural activities are being publicized in the local paper.
“I want people to view and use the college as a major cultural asset,” Silver said. “We have extraordinary people who come here every week of every year (Gloria Steinem was the 2015 commencement speaker). I want people who live here to feel like this is their place. Also, there is a spurt of people who want to live in Bennington or North Bennington because there’s a cultural asset here.”
Bennington has a strong future in Vermont, Silver said. It is an important part of state and will remain an important part “unless they move the state line,” she joked.
As to the future of the college?
“Bennington will remain intellectually intensive,” she said. “It will remain interpersonally intensive. It will continue to offer an intellectually intimate experience. It will remain committed to the teacher-practitioner model. It will remain committed to students pursuing their education built around their own driving areas of inquiry.”
One thing is clear: Silver loves her job and is committed to it.
“My first contract is for five years, and hopefully they’ll want to keep me,” she said. “No, I’m not looking for another job. I’m hoping that living in Vermont will keep me young. I know living in DC was making me old.”
Joyce Marcel is a journalist who lives in southern Vermont. She is currently writing a memoir covering six generations of her family caught in the sweep of history across the 20th Century. She is writing another book about Vermont businesses. More of her work appears at her Web site, joycemarcel.com.