Class was about to start at Bethel University, and no one seemed to know where to sit or how to pass around a syllabus. “What if we divide up the stacks and circle them around?” a student suggested. No one objected, and around the papers went.
A young woman sneaked into the back of the nearly full room, face flushed with embarrassment. “Is anyone sitting here?” she whispered to another student, pointing to an empty chair. But by now, the syllabus had already passed her. Around the papers went again.
If the students seemed out of practice, most were. For some, by more than 50 years.
“Pop quiz!” announced the professor, Bill Rice. Nervous whispers all around. “Nah, I’m just kidding,” he said with a playful smirk.
The two dozen students were participating in an unusual, pop-up learning experience that has become a yearly spectacle in the town of Bethel. For each of the past nine years, residents have dedicated the month of March to teaching classes to each other for free. Run on a DIY spirit and a shoestring budget (about $1,000 so far this year), Bethel University has grown to include more than 50 classes, on everything from woodlot management to belly dancing, for locals who now plan their social calendars around the weeks-long ritual. What started as a small, one-time stunt has come to reflect the neighborly ethos of Bethel and struck a blow for preserving a sense of place and community in a big-box world.
“This is a university for the people, by the people,” said Gene Kraus, a volunteer facilitator, as he opened a session called “Conversations Through an Anti-Racism Lens,” one of eight classes offered on a recent Saturday.
Students and professors, as they are called, range in age from 4 to 94. Most are residents of Windsor County, but plenty travel from farther away to teach or attend classes. Past years’ offerings reflect an eclectic assortment of the practical and the esoteric, with a healthy dollop of whimsy tossed in: tarot card reading, ice skating, home composting, evolutionary thermodynamics, belly dancing, stress management, Nerf gun wars, stamp making (taught by the youngest professor ever, a 4-year-old), hospice and palliative care, kombucha crafting, critical race theory, and dog training, to name a few.
For Rice, an 86-year-old former on-site construction engineer and instructor at Vermont Tech, teaching “House and Garage Building: Avoid the Mistakes” offered an opportunity to pass on mountains of knowledge he had accrued over decades of construction work. The room was packed with Vermonters eager to update their mudrooms or stoke ideas for a future tiny house. Eyes were trained on Rice as he paced the room, explaining how to read a cross-section diagram and preaching the benefits of vapor barriers.
“This is a university for the people, by the people.” Gene Kraus
While students attending Bethel University can gain a varied — and often highly valuable — medley of skills, they also may find something more important: a chance to make friends and get to know their neighbors. That was evident in Rice’s class. In attendance was James Key, a Stockbridge resident who had taught his own class, “Introduction to Beekeeping,” just a few weeks earlier. He was hoping to improve his carpentry skills to benefit his beekeeping business and exchanged numbers with another student willing to help with the enterprise.
A row ahead of Key was Felix Fang, 37, who had moved from Colorado to the town of Washington two years earlier. Over the course of two weeks, Fang had attended more than 10 classes and showed no signs of slowing down. He had made a new friend, Jess, at a sourdough-pastry course earlier in the month, and now the two sat together, with freshly hatched plans to go snowshoeing after class.
The effects of Bethel University can be seen in larger, more subtle ways. When Jesse Plotsky and Owen Daniel-McCarter decided to uproot their Chicago lives to make good on their dreams of opening a small-town bar in Vermont, they picked Bethel, in part because of the ad hoc university and what it seemed to reflect about the town’s enterprising character. The establishment they opened in 2018, called Babes Bar, is now a Bethel institution and one of a handful of small businesses on the town’s quaint riverfront Main Street.
But it wasn’t always this way in Bethel. The old mill town of about 2,000 people, which sits astride the White River, had been in a slump for decades. The buildings downtown were empty. “There was hopelessness,” recalled Kirk White, founder of the Bethel Revitalization Initiative and a Democratic member of the Vermont House of Representatives.
When Tropical Storm Irene slammed the town in August 2011, it served as a wake-up call. People looked around and realized they didn’t know their neighbors well enough to ask for help, White recalled, inspiring him to create the Bethel Revitalization Initiative. The group spearheaded community-building events before offering the first, bare-bones version of Bethel University in 2014, with 18 courses, 83 students and 21 professors. This year’s “semester” boasted 52 courses, 948 students and more than 75 professors.
“We did not anticipate how much it would grow and how much people would love it,” said Rebecca Stone, a member of the Bethel Revitalization Initiative. Since that first year, little has changed in the overall approach. Bethel University remains entirely volunteer-run, free and open to anyone. No class ideas are turned down. Most are one-offs held in the town hall or other public spaces.
The annual program has spawned a slew of other projects in Bethel: community potlucks, pop-up shops and, most notably, Vermont’s first-ever Better Block initiative, an AARP-sponsored tool for enlivening municipalities.
“We’re becoming a great little experiment on how to revitalize a small town,” White said.
Although other towns have attempted to replicate Bethel’s university model, few have succeeded. Irasburg launched its University of Irasburg in 2020 but went on hiatus for the next two years. (The university website promises classes again this month.) And in Northfield, residents have expressed interest in replicating Bethel’s model. “So many of the classes just have these layers of impact,” Stone said.
Some of those layers were on view during the recent anti-racism class, which was taught by Dana Decker, a special education teacher at Rochester Elementary School. Students were led through a sort of confession circle of microaggressions they may have inadvertently committed, then talked about how to make things right. “This feels like therapy,” one participant said with a nervous chuckle. Another student, an educator, said she hoped to share what she had learned with her own students.
Not all the classes demanded such introspection. In a session called “Immigrant Dances From Northern Italy,” Celest DiPietropaolo and Marie DiCocco of Italian Village Dance led students through a “simple” two-step routine that a certain journalist found anything but.
“Some people will be the poets of the dance. Others will not,” DiCocco said, in a cheerful stab at encouragement. “But anyone can enjoy.” Laughter echoed through the town hall as the group swirled in unison. DiPietropaolo and DiCocco would perform later that evening at the university’s “spring break” party, complete with a focaccia bar and Italian music.
Across the street, Judy McClain, a newcomer to Bethel, taught a packed meditation class aptly titled “A Moment of Quiet in a Loud World.” McClain, speaking in a slow, measured cadence, offered tips before launching into a guided meditation that would leave 30 ostensible strangers in silence for 10 minutes. “There’s a distinct probability that you might fall asleep, and that’s OK,” she assured.
Afterward, participants shared their experience. Some were elated, others bored. All agreed it felt special to be together.
A woman sitting near the door told the group she almost didn’t come — her beloved family dog had passed away the night before. She broke into tears. McClain nodded in understanding. “Can we all close our eyes and breathe some healing in our neighbor’s direction?” she asked.
The class assented: Everyone closed their eyes and offered their neighbor the succor of their silence. In that was conveyed a sense of relief, love, condolence. Community.
Corrections, April 6, 2023: An earlier version of this story contained incorrect figures for the amount of money spent on Bethel University and the number of participants in its inaugural year. Further, the type of class taught by a 4-year-old instructor was misrepresented.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Class Is in Session | A pop-up “university” strengthens community in Bethel”
This article appears in Apr 5-11, 2023.
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