Keeping the Minnesota in Macalester PHOTOS BY GREG HELGESON
Grateful for the big world Macalester introduced them to, alumni are offering scholarships to small-town students. BY LAURA BILLINGS COLEMAN
Less than 150 miles lie between Macalester College and the southern Minnesota farm where Mark Vander Ploeg ’74 grew up—though seen from the distance of years, the mileage can seem much greater. The son of Dutch immigrants running a busy dairy farm outside Blue Earth, Vander Ploeg attended a rural school that housed all 13 grades in a single building. State schools were the usual destination for the very few of his classmates who did go on to college, so when his school librarian suggested Macalester, Vander Ploeg didn’t think it was possible. “There were a few problems—it was private, it was expensive,” says Vander Ploeg, who knew he couldn’t cover his tuition with the money he’d earned at a canning factory and doing odds jobs on neighboring farms. “The whole idea was just foreign to everybody.” His first visit to campus came in the spring of 1970, in the days following the shootings at Kent State that caused campuses nationwide to erupt in chaos. Macalester was no exception—classes were cancelled, and makeshift military headstones were set out in front of Old Main to protest the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. “It was a highly unusual time for a visit—it wasn’t typical Macalester,” recalls Paul Aslanian, a professor emeritus of economics, then a young as-
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sistant professor, who was introduced to Vander Ploeg during his campus tour. Aslanian invited “this little skinny, blonde kid” into his office, and the two of them spent most of the afternoon talking, a conversation that made more of an impression on the prospective freshman than the surrounding chaos. “I was determined to come to Macalester after that,” Vander Ploeg says. It wasn’t just his meeting with a welcoming professor that made up his mind. Along with the acceptance letter he received from the Admissions Office that spring came a second letter informing him that he’d been selected to receive the Charles and Ellora Alliss Educational Foundation scholarship, an endowment earmarked for academically and financially deserving students from Minnesota. “That scholarship made all the difference in the world,” says Vander Ploeg, who went on to graduate with majors in geography and economics. After graduate school at the University of Chicago, he began a long and successful career in investment banking, as well as 18 years of service to Macalester as a trustee, including six as board chair. When he stepped down from the board, he and his wife, Jeanne, marked the occasion by creating the Vander Ploeg Family Scholarship, an endowment modeled on the scholarship he had received more than 30 years earlier. “I wanted in some way to acknowledge and pay back what the Alliss family did for me by establishing a similar scholarship,” Vander Ploeg says about the fund, which gives preference to students from rural Minnesota or rural Wisconsin, Jeanne’s home state. “I don’t want anyone who wants to go to Macalester to choose not to because they don’t have the resources or the encouragement. I know that scholarship shaped the course of my life.”