The Thrill of Education Inspires 78-Year-Old MLA Graduate

Published February 6, 2025

On the first floor of her two-story Mid-Hudson Valley home in New Paltz, N.Y. is one large room, the self-titled woman cave of 78-year-old Mary Long, full of books and yarn and mementos from her travels. On one wall is a framed diploma touting her most recent accomplishment, a Master of Liberal Arts from Johns Hopkins University, which she began at age 75. It celebrates her third master’s degree.

“Honestly, the MLA from Johns Hopkins has done more in making me feel fulfilled than anything else I have encountered in my life,” said Long, who will begin a fourth master’s program – an MA in Literature at Northwestern University – in 2025. “My husband thinks I’m a bit strange for doing this. To some extent, he understands the joy I get out of my studies, but he is not quite sure what someone of my age is doing pursuing such focused scholarship. It is here in this room that I find my focus, my happiness, and my joy in studying. I spend a lot of time here doing this for my own personal development. I find joy in being a scholar, and it has taken me a long time to say I am scholar.”

As she shares on a very personal level, Long’s life has not been an easy one. Though prone to anxiety and episodic panic attacks throughout her life, she managed to complete an art history undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College and a master’s in education from the University of Pennsylvania. But the next 15 years got “bumpy” as an eventual diagnosis of bi-polar disorder disrupted her life and kept her imprisoned in her home for several years before doctors found a mix of medications that would allow her to function in the world.

“Once I was on medication and I could go out of the house and stand in a grocery line and not have a panic attack, I knew I could continue my studies,” she said.

As a way to return to the work force and with a new-found love in finance, Long completed an MS in Finance from Drexel University in 1991 and stayed on to work in the school’s MBA program until 1996. She then accepted an offer to teach business classes to university students in Bangkok, Thailand, returning for two additional teaching stints over the next several years with an interim stop back at Drexel as foreign student adviser in their English as a Second Language program.

“Once I finished my MS in finance, I knew I could go to Bangkok. Once I knew I was free, I knew I was free to do anything,” Long said.

The freedom included an eventual retirement to Utah, an accidental internet search that introduced her to the JHU MLA program, and a relocation back to the East Coast in 2021.

“I was drawn to Utah because of its five beautiful national parks, but I was tiring of living there and went searching for something new to focus on,” she said. “I wish I had discovered the MLA when I was younger, because I could have gone further and done more, but I am grateful that I discovered it when I did because this MLA program has allowed me to continue my life in a way that I never thought I would be able to. I learned I was accepted into the program three weeks before Christmas. It was the best Christmas present I have ever received.”

The MLA brought Long full circle and immersed her in the liberal art world that she has always loved. She connected with the JHU professors and her much younger classmates, engaged in the courses, and drew on her love of art history to craft a 10-week course on cubism using hermeneutics as a teaching strategy as her final project.

“Instead of writing a paper, I wrote lesson and discussion plans for a 10-week course on cubist art, including all the slides and artwork that would be discussed. It was fascinating and really exciting to see how hermeneutics worked as a teaching strategy at the graduate level. It turned out to be really interesting.”

Most especially, the program reminded Long of what first drew her to liberal arts as a teenager.

“It had been a half century since I was at Mount Holyoke, but immediately at Johns Hopkins I was reminded of the value of a liberal arts education,” she said. “The liberal arts have such depth and breadth of topics and thinking. Studying liberal arts teaches you critical thinking, which is necessary for anything you do in any job. It teaches you how to think, and it develops your brain. For me, it has kept me young and kept my brain working. I feel fortunate to have met program director Laura DeSisto. She is a brilliant, kind, amazing woman who is quite a teacher. She is my idol and my heroine in a lot of ways because she guided me and helped and encouraged me. I have learned so much from this program, and I am sad to leave Johns Hopkins because it has meant so much to me.”

As she enrolls in the fourth master’s degree program, Long takes pride in the titles of lifelong learner and scholar that she has earned among her daily meditation group in New Paltz. To celebrate her success when she could not collect her degree in person in Baltimore, the group organized a scripted graduation ceremony for her, “the finest graduation ceremony I could have ever had,” complete with the playing of pomp and circumstance, flowers, a wise owl candle, and a champagne toast at 9 a.m.

“I learned through all my mental health struggles that I can put up with a lot more than I thought I could and that I can say yes to things that I have never done before,” Long said. “Because of that, I am doing my thing, and I love doing it. Some people say I’m crazy. Some people say it’s wonderful. My mother lived to be 99 and was sharp as a tack until the day she died. I have a lot of time to be a scholar. I can. And I will.”