College
president marries partner

The president of Hampshire College and his partner of 27 years announced their marriage in Massachusetts Tuesday, a first for American higher education. Ralph Hexter and Manfred Kollmeier married over the Labor Day weekend but didn't announce it publicly until the annual back-to-school celebration on the Amherst, Mass., campus.

A celebration with students is planned for Wednesday.

"We wanted to announce our marriage to our community first," Hexter said in a press release. "This is our way of celebrating Hampshire College, which so warmly welcomed us as a couple when I was named president in 2005, and of celebrating the state of Massachusetts and all those who helped it become a pioneer in recognizing and upholding the right of gay couples to be legally married."

Hexter is the fifth president of Hampshire, having joined the college in 2005. He holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford (Corpus Christi College), and Yale, and he has held teaching and administrative positions at Yale, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Kollmeier, a native of Munich, Germany, is retired and serves on the board of directors of Commonwealth Opera of Western Massachusetts.

"Ralph and I made a lifelong commitment to one another many years ago, so marrying is not about marking a new stage in our relationship," Kollmeier said in the statement. "We feel it is important to exercise the precious right we have here to marry. Massachusetts should be the first, not the only state where this is possible. Discrimination should end, and all couples who wish to be civilly married, wherever they live, should have the right to do so." (The Advocate)