Academics like it’s 1999

1999. The year Vladimir Putin took power and the one in which Bill Clinton survived impeachment proceedings. The year we anxiously awaited “Y2K.” The year SpongeBob Square Pants premiered. And the inaugural year of Skidmore’s Academic Festival. 

20 years later, we’re looking back at how this once humble event came to be. 

Academic Festival is an outgrowth of the college’s decision in the mid-1990s to create the Honors Forum to support its highest achieving and most intellectually curious students in both academic and co-curricular endeavors. 

Learn more about what is now called Periclean Honors 

In year one, just 35 students participated in the inaugural Academic Festival before an audience of two. This year, about 270 students will present their work—a combination of capstone, thesis and independent projects; collaborative research; readings and performance; and documentary film. The total audience will include hundreds of onlookers from across the campus community.

Browse the 2018 Academic Fest Program

“In the beginning, Academic Festival was for all students who had a project they wanted to show and celebrate with the community,” says classics professor Michael Arnush. Arnush was the first director of Honors Forum and co-founder of the festival along with Tina Levith, then an associate dean.

“If you have creativity we have an audience for you,” Arnush recalls telling students. “There really wasn’t a venue for this sort of thing. We told students there were no constraints in terms of subject matter or class year. And ultimately, it highlighted the latent creativity that was always here.”

If you have creativity we have an audience for you." – Michael Arnush

It sure did. By 2009, the festival had grown to 350 student participants—although exciting, the size of the event was also on the cusp of creating logistical challenges.

“We hit a good, optimal size,” says math professor David Vella, who took over Honors Forum after English professor Phil Boshoff in 2007. “If Academic Festival became much bigger, it would have created scheduling conflicts and perhaps a decline in audience numbers.”

When English professor Catherine Golden took over the reins of the program in 2011, her goal for Academic Festival was to focus on “excellence” by making the application process more selective. Submissions moved from students or individual professors to academic departments, thereby enhancing the vetting process, ensuring variety in the programs represented and, arguably, the quality of presentations. 

Says Golden, “Academic Festival now has fewer presenters and fewer concurrent sessions, but more attendees at each session and a consistently high academic caliber.” 

Current Honors Forum director and government professor Flagg Taylor agrees: “Academic Festival is simply Skidmore’s best students presenting their best work. That’s as it should be because that’s what Honors Forum stands for.” 

Taylor continues, “That and the opportunity for members, indeed the entire community, to get interested and engaged with one another across disciplinary boundaries, especially in a time when specialization seems to be increasing in higher education.”

Twenty years after its start, Academic Festival has become a true showcase of student academic excellence and creativity, as well as a celebration of Skidmore’s special blend of the liberal arts.

“Whether it be presenting a poster in psychology or education studies, reading critical and creative work in the English department, showcasing public history, or presenting findings from senior research in sociology or anthropology, our students rise to this occasion and dazzle us with creative thought and excellence,” notes Golden.  

Adds Vella, “The bar is supposed to be high for academic festival presentations. Yet, at the same time, it truly is a celebration. No one is being evaluated for their presentations. The students have already earned their wings and the moment is just to watch them soar.”

The students have already earned their wings and the moment is just to watch them soar." – David Vella

“To the community at large, it affords an excellent showcase of what’s happening across the College. I’ve always felt that students and faculty should take the opportunity to see what’s happening in a discipline far from their own. It’s really very impressive,” says Vella.

As the festival father, Arnush gets the last word on this year’s 20th-anniversary event: “I could never have imagined that Academic Festival would be as rich as it’s become. If you are reading this, just go. Be curious. You are here because you are curious, and this is a day for curiosity. Go to presentations that you wouldn’t necessarily think to go to. It’s the liberal arts after all.”