Ellen McCulloch-Lovell's first marlboro Moment happened when she met the college's presidential search committee. "They said to me, ‘what do you think of us?'" she recalls. "And I said, ‘I probably idealize Marlboro's too much.' And then they laughed and everybody's heads nodded up and down and they said ‘so do we!' I think that's what attracted me the most profoundly. It was the ideals, the values." In a career like Ellen McCulloch-Lovell's, there are many Moments. There's 1978 at the Vermont Arts Council, asking IBM for more money than she'd ever asked of anyone before, to tour a Vermont folklore exhibit around the state. When she got the good news "I remember hanging up the phone and jumping up and down and shouting all over the office," she recalls. Her IBM contact later told her she had such a good proposal she should have asked for more than just $25,000. There's 1993 in Washington D.C., pulling all-nighters to save the confirmation her boss, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, backed for head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. McCulloch-Lovell and her staff succeeded and Vermonter Molly Beattie got the job. There's the Moment she created at the White House in 1999, bringing together for a Millennium Evening Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and Dr. Odette Nyiramilimo, a survivor of the Rwanda massacres. It was an event meant to celebrate the humanities, not talk politics. But U.S. warplanes were bombing the Serbs out of Kosovo, and Wiesel, in front of hundreds in the East Room and many thousands over C-Span and the Internet, turned to President Clinton and asked, "Why are we so involved, so nobly, in Kosovo—why were we not in Rwanda?" McCulloch-Lovell held her breath. The National Security Advisor shot her "a look." The President answered calmly and at length. "I had my heart in my throat," she says, "but I realized it was one of those moments that was unfolding by itself, and very powerfully." McCulloch-Lovell's career trajectory has not been what some might expect of a Bennington College philosophy major who failed at landing a grade school teaching job after graduating in 1969. For others, her experiences could exemplify the power of a liberal arts education, one that has brought her full circle, out to the national stage and back, back to Vermont, back to the liberal arts, to become Marlboro's eighth president.