Sterling Commencement Address: Working Hands, Working Minds (and Muddy Feet)

Sterling College Commencement Address

May 16, 2026

Thank you, President Thomas, for your kind words, and it’s a sincere privilege to join you and all of the Sterling community today. This task of trying to find the right words has seemed somewhat daunting from the outset, but now it’s even more so trying to follow on the heels of your eloquent graduates, Al and Enoch. 

Greetings to all: to this year’s graduates, to the faculty and staff, the alumni who have returned in such incredible numbers, to the Board of Trustees, and to the community of Craftsbury Common. 

To the graduates of 2026, I want to begin by saying that today is, first and foremost, about you–it is a celebration of your accomplishments and your preparedness to tackle the world in a way that few of your age and ilk are. You know what it is to truly live not only in community but also within a community that embraces the physical, the intellectual, and even the emotional rigors of living a life of “benevolence”-- from the Latin, “to wish well” or “goodwill.” 

Okay, there we go. We just got the mandatory etymology for a proper commencement address out of the way. No more Latin roots from here on out, I promise. Let’s get down to business!

Graduating from Sterling College is about so much more than walking away with a degree. Instead, this is a moment of reflection regarding the degree to which you’ve been challenged–by the faculty and staff, by your peers, by the wild-ass weather of the Craftsbury microclimate, by your own inclinations and aspirations. And all the while, you’ve been nourished by the best damn college dining hall in the entire United States!

So today is about you and your accomplishments, a day made all the more poignant by the fact that you are celebrating your collective successes and memories amid yet another pivot point in Sterling’s enduring history. My hope, which I’m sure is shared by others here, is that amid the mix of all of the emotions harbored here today by everyone–students, faculty, staff, alumni, board members, and the local community–you find joy and solace in the gifts you have been given and the deep responsibility to pass those gifts forward in ways that you and the rest of us have yet to fully imagine. 

We are here today because of an idea that has taken many human forms, in one very particular and special place. Ultimately, we are here to celebrate several rites of passage, for students, for faculty and staff…for one iteration of an institution that will be a beacon for other dreamers, in other places, who are not finding the kind of education that they need, that the world needs. Sterling College will be a story told time and again, spoken of less as something that was lost than something that still eludes us–an education that doesn’t always put our human species on a pillar but rather embraces us as part of a magnificent ecological journey and encourages humility and reverence and living with less as the path to discovering more – more about ourselves and more about the world that sustains us. 

Why do I say with such confidence that the story of Sterling will be a narrative that speaks to others for decades to come? Because I’ve seen it happen before. I’m a product of educators who were profoundly impacted by a college that ceased operations in 1957, the year before Sterling first opened its doors. And I’m willing to bet that the founders of Sterling were influenced by that college, in some form or fashion. 

Black Mountain College was founded as a private liberal arts college in 1933, influenced by John Dewey and dedicated to a holistic education based in the arts. In its short 24 years as a college, it had an extraordinarily outsized impact on the arts and higher education, despite the fact that it was based in Black Mountain, North Carolina, a place that in 1933 would make Craftsbury Common today feel like an overcrowded metropolis. 

Based on community democratic governance, shared campus construction, and farm chores, the college had little patience for hierarchy and a high tolerance of anarchy, all in the name of artistic license and the development of intellect and citizenship. Even amid the push and pull between egalitarian principles and strong personalities, the college spawned modern schools of visual arts, Merce Cunningham’s dance troupe, composer John Cage’s first “happening,” and the the orchestrated construction of one of Buckminster Fuller’s first geodesic domes, conducted by Bucky himself. 

In 1987, I joined a band of aspiring artists and educators to reinhabit the Black Mountain campus–at that point a boys camp, Camp Rockmont–to see if we could “revivify” that experiment in education. Well, it was a lot of fun, and I spent the winter freezing my ass off in Beat poet Robert Creeley’s cabin with no fireplace and nothing but a piece of plastic over the bedroom door and an electric heater running full blast all night long. It was inspiring and creative and utterly chaotic, but it only intensified my passion for “education on the edge”--education that shrugged off convention and embraced what felt missing in contemporary culture. I did learn that a little more structure and financial savvy and discipline were requisite ingredients for even the most radical educational experiments. 

But my point here is that small institutions, even in what seems the blink of an eye, can have enormous unforeseen cultural impact – and there is no better case in point in the US right now than Sterling. 

So maybe it’s becoming a little clearer as to why I feel so humbled by the deep honor of being here with you today. I would like to think that it is first and foremost because I believe in everything that Sterling – in all of its forms over the past 68 years—is, does, and teaches. I believe it to the very core of my being and do my best to live it: “Working Hands, Working Minds…” and today, “...Muddy Feet.” The mission has been clear from the beginning and never more relevant than now. And the task is far from done.

It is the privilege and relative wealth of American society that has afforded Sterling the opportunity to blend labor and deep intellectual inquiry in a setting where one reinforces the other. It is also the far-reaching wealth and privilege of our society that has driven one false wedge between intellect and labor – and another false wedge between our species and all other species.

I suppose I am also here because I was extraordinarily lucky to savor what felt like a magical moment in time during my short tenure here at Sterling right before Covid hit, and all of our worlds were upturned, by Nature’s power, no less. 

But I am probably also here because some of your colleagues here understand the depth with which I feel your pain, your frustration, your uncertainty, and your burning collective desire for a good outcome. I could tear up as easily as anyone among you, and I still might. As it turns out, with the impending transformation of Sterling in the coming months, three of the institutions that I have most cared about, worked for and benefited from are, as colleges, out of business. I refuse to say “closed” because I don’t believe in closed doors. And as for the healing that is part of this scenario, “closure” is also the wrong word. 

It’s not about “putting closure” on something this dear, this vibrant, this meaningful for so many—this absolutely brilliant spark of genius among giants that we have long called “Sterling.” We don’t dismiss the things we most cherish, and we don’t reject our shared virtues and values just because they don’t easily fit within certain financial models. 

In 2019, Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont ceased its academic operations, and the Board of Trustees put the campus on the auction block, literally. I watched as everything I had worked to build over 23 years–a vibrant Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems undergraduate major, a 23-acre organic research farm, and the first online graduate program in food systems in the US–all of it suddenly vaporized.

Fortunately for me, I saw the demise coming and hoped that I might continue on that “Working Hands, Working Minds” journey with like-minded peers here at Sterling. In joining the Sterling community just before Covid upended our worlds, faculty and staff were incredibly welcoming and compassionate and helped me process some of what had happened, all with hopes that we might use some of those lessons and resources to help Sterling find a way to avoid the “demographic cliff” that we all knew was upon us. Maybe, just maybe, Sterling could outniche the niche of environmentally-focused colleges. I guess that didn’t quite happen, but my hat is off to everyone here for the tenacity required to hang on this much longer. 

Last spring, my alma mater, St. Andrews College in NC, announced that it would cease operations, a serious gut punch to yet another rural community and to higher education itself. While not environmentally-focused per se, St. Andrews was another grand experiment in higher ed, heavily influenced by Black Mountain College. Founded through the merging of two other institutions in 1958 – the same year as Sterling – St. Andrews was the first college in the country designed for full wheelchair accessibility, meaning that about 6% of our students were disabled. We called them “wheelies,” and they adroitly dubbed us as “TABs” – “temporarily able-bodied.” We learned much more from the wheelies than they did from us. The general education program required involvement from all faculty and in four years took us from the Big Bang and the world’s creation myths all the way to current geopolitics, ensuring that we put our own cultural and religious traditions in a global context. The gen ed program was ranked with Harvard’s as one of the three best gen ed programs in the country. 

But, like Sterling and GMC, the demographics and finances eventually became too much, with intense damage from Hurricane Florence in 2018 ultimately putting the college under water, literally and figuratively. Never underestimate the weight of bricks, mortar, and deferred maintenance in the tipping of the scales for educational institutions. Add to that the cost of technology and the weight of trying to provide faculty and staff with reasonable wages and benefits, and you soon find yourself struggling to keep costs affordable for students while paying even the most necessary of bills. 

I’ve seen enough of the books at various institutions now that I understand much better just how challenging the financing of private higher education is. And honestly, the same goes for public higher education. Just look at the news from this past Thursday about UVM’s announced struggles with a 15% decline in freshman enrolment for next year and an overall decline of 7% across all majors. 

When I first came to Vermont in 1996 to work at Green Mountain College, one of the first (dreaded) consultants we hired to look at admissions and recruitment put up a chart to show us the predicted “demographic cliff” of college-aged students 30 years out. That would be this year, 2026. Let that sink in for a moment. (Maybe some consultants are worth listening to…)

We knew these challenges were coming, and we didn’t totally ignore them, but our appetite for change only got us so far. Many of us tried to “outniche the niche” in the specialized spaces we claimed and inhabited. That worked to some extent, for a little while. But we didn’t want to recognize what was perhaps becoming increasingly obvious: we might need to change our habits and habitats.

…I think it wise now to share a little secret with you: as much as we educators are committed to helping you be prepared for change, we educators often don’t care much for change when it involves us, especially what and how we teach. We like to predict change, but we often prefer to avoid change and live in relative equilibrium. 

I’m going to make a claim that may seem preposterous, and it’s a bit of a confession from a person who you could reasonably cast as a progressive, left-leaning, tree-hugging, environmentalist-farmer-educator type who doesn’t care much for polarization…

Educators like me have long studied the potential and even probable impacts of climate change on humans and the rest of the planet, and we have even found ways to prepare in part for those changes. But despite having known 30+ years ago what we now know all too well about the swiftly changing higher education climate and its impacts on the institutions that we love, we have perhaps not been quite as creative in thinking about really changing the model. In some ways, we’ve been more rigorous in researching climate change than we have been in researching the higher education climate. We’ve thought harder about climate refugees than we have about higher education refugees. I call myself a “free range prof” these days because I’d rather live on the periphery of higher education than in the center of the vortex.

So is this all depressing? Are we witnesses to a domino effect that is leading to a collapse of all the things we know and care about?

I don’t think so. I think we are on the precipice of something new, if we embrace the opportunity to “change up our habits and habitats,” and signs seem to indicate that the Sterling and Craftsbury communities are thinking along these lines. 

When it comes to an ecological education—and by that I mean both education that focuses on ecological systems and an education that is a tightly crafted ecosystem itself—we have to recognize that evolution is part of the game. 

We have to be nimble, read the environment not just as it is but as it will be in both near and distant decades. When we talk about evolution, we tend to define things in two interrelated ways – genotype and phenotype: “genotype” being the genetic makeup, “phenotype being the physiological expression of that makeup. 

While Sterling may be undergoing what feels like a rapid phenotypic change in its appearance, its physical manifestation, its genotypic essence remains both stable and nimble. You are the ones carrying those Sterling genes forward, and they are incredibly resilient and adaptive. Think about it—how many institutions have had so many phenotypic changes over the course of nearly seven decades and still remained true to their core? I would argue that Sterling’s genetic code remains strong and adaptive. 

Is Sterling a specialist or a generalist? I would argue that Sterling and its kin—all of the places where I have studied, taught, lived, and thrived—appear at first to be specialists because they take one theme, one thread, and use that as a lens of examining the world in its entirety. But that doesn’t make these places of higher education “specialists.” Sure, they all habit a specialized market niche, but they are all the ultimate generalists – not untethered, unfocused generalists floating around in a sea of relativism. Instead, they are generalists who are sharing a carefully ground lens that serves as a way of seeing with more precision and accuracy.

Think about what it takes to polish a lens—take the nearly 8’ diameter lens for the Hubble telescope, for example, not just because of its scale and the time and care it took to do the job, but also because the first version had a flaw, and it took enormous effort to correct it. That effort is no different from all of the polishing Sterling faculty and staff have done on the Working Hands, Working Minds lens over the past seven decades.

I’m about to get controversial and suggest that, while Sterling excels in its brand of analog education, it also possesses in its genetic coding an unusual affinity for AI : 

…I’m sorry, I know AI is not necessarily popular in a community that loves its analog tendencies, but rest assured, I’m talking about Sterling’s brand of AI:

Agrarian Intelligence …something we need more than ever.

As part of my education both as a college student and as a teacher, I spent about four years farming in the German-speaking province of South Tirol in Italy. I worked with and studied the Bergbauern, or “mountain farmers,” people who lived and breathed what my boss and mentor Sizzo de Rachewiltz called “manual intelligence.” 

As you can imagine, those years farming alongside those Alpine farmers comprised the most intense and condensed learning of my life. And one of the most important lessons they taught me was captured in one single word: “Voert’l,” a dialect version of “Vorteil,” which means “advantage” in high German but in dialect actually means to turn a disadvantage into an advantage. In other words, when you are living on the steep slopes and half of your life involves snow and ice, you find a way to use the slopes and the snow and the ice to your advantage. 

So when the cows returned from their summers on the high pastures, where they were housed at night in their stalls, the farmers would pre-cut the bedded pack of manure into rectangles of about 4 feet wide and 8 feet long that would freeze and become big brown sleds. They would bore a hole in the precut manure sled so that they could stick a wooden pole into it in the winter. 

Once winter struck and there was ample snow cover, they would remove the precut and prebored manure block from the stall, stick the pole through the hole to act as a brake, and begin to ride and pull it several thousand feet in elevation down the mountainside to spread on their fields below once spring arrived. That’s “Voert’l,” turning a seeming disadvantage into an advantage. That’s also “AI”: Agrarian Intelligence. 

This is all to say that now is not a moment to assume that the Sterling story is over. To the contrary: with the right mindset, it could well be that the Sterling and Craftsbury communities find that lifting the burdensome yoke of “College” from the shoulders of the visionary faculty and staff who are already here and experienced and full of ideas – that lifting of intense financial, regulatory, calendar, and infrastructural burdens, may in fact be the key to Sterling’s next best iteration. It’s hard to be nimble and truly “meet the moment” as a college these days, and it’s hard to start something from scratch, but it’s not so hard to find creative ways to stay true to a mission that has endured for so long.

If you need an image to hold onto in the near future, consider for a moment the audacity of sycamores. That phrase came to me this past December while driving along the Potomac as I entered Harper’s Ferry. The stunning whiteness of sycamores, leaning in a downstream direction while stretching toward the light in the middle of the river…all  in total contrast to the dark surrounding forest, caught me by surprise, and I found myself thinking about the audacity of sycamores…

What tree species in its right mind would not only be so brazen as to forego the usual dark shades of bark but also plant itself repeatedly amid the constant surges of seasonal waters, sometimes even claiming sandbars often overwhelmed by flood waters? And how brilliant was the evolutionary trick of creating buoyant button-balls of seeds that would float downstream, nestle into the alluvial soils, and continue the lineage downstream? 

The audacity of sycamores is, perhaps, akin to the continued audacity of Sterling: taking root in unexpected places, growing bigger than anyone anticipated, deviating from the norm, and always braving the currents.

The optimistic message I’ve been hearing from you is that today represents one more moment of diaspora—this scattering of seeds – while those who remain will nurture the Mother Tree so that she remains strong, stout, and utterly audacious.  In the meantime, the endurance of Sterling’s genetic code depends on all of us to carry those seeds forward, to help them germinate in other places and offer the same shelter, comfort, and nourishment we have all found here. That task will be even more important tomorrow than it is today.

Finally, if I have any final wisdom to share on moving forward, it is this:

Embrace the grief, 

seize the joy, 

release the anger and frustration, 

and hold fast to the mission:

Working Hands, Working Minds.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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