Notes from the Desk No thanks for the memories

Author: Tamara Hilmes

Between March 9 and March 12, I received three different e-mails in my inbox enticing me to walk over to Axinn to get my picture taken for the yearbook. They made fancy YouTube videos, snazzy posters, and last-minute reminders, all of which assaulted me from my computer screen and dining hall entrances. So, after all of the incentive, did I make the five-minute walk to Axinn to get my face immortalized? Heck no. And though this may seem like mere laziness on my part, in actuality, it is a quite calculated move on my part to eliminate the Kaleidoscope yearbook.

Okay, so that might sound a little harsh, especially coming from an editor of another campus publication. It may seem strange that I am advocating for the demise of one of our own kind, but let me begin by telling you that I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about - I was the Editor-in-Chief of the Middlebury yearbook when I was a first-year. I personally suffered through an insane number of hours toiling away in a closet-sized office in Ross, laying out a 282-page book sans the help of a staff - and for what? All so that a handful of senior parents could have a pretty, navy blue book to put on their coffee tables. It may seem as though I'm exaggerating, but take a look at the following points:

1) The Middlebury yearbook is distributed only to seniors who have graduated, and possibly a handful of Febs who identify with the graduating class. The books are not printed until the fall of the year following graduation, meaning that the books arrive on campus, and are immediately shipped off to the homes of the already-departed seniors. One copy is sent to the library, and a few others may float around, but it remains true that almost no one apart from graduated seniors and their parents ever even get a glimpse of the book that supposedly encapsulates an entire year of our lives on this campus.

2) The yearbook is given to all seniors free of charge. That is to say, we are all paying for yearbooks through our activity fee, as the yearbook budget goes through the SGA Finance Committee. In my past experience, yearbooks usually cost around $45 each, and we are giving hundreds of these away. Here is another key reason that the yearbook should be eliminated from Middlebury: the cost. When I was editor as a first-year, the budget allocated to Kaleidoscope to produce the yearbook falls within the $10,000-15,000 range, if I recall correctly. That's tens of thousands of dollars going toward an obsolete product.

3) Yes, that's right - obsolete. Yearbooks, as Ryan Kellett '9.5 recently cited on MiddBlog, are no longer relevant. In high school it might have been possible - and even necessary - to record a whole year's worth of events in one book in order to trick parents into paying an extra 50 bucks to the school, but really, as students of Middlebury College, do we really think baby ads are necessary? I couldn't care less about looking at childhood photos of my classmates, but perhaps that's just me. Also, as a generation obsessed with Facebook and other digital means of preserving memories, are 282 pages of photos really a worthwhile use of resources? Isn't the yearbook just a glorified version of the New Faces book that we received as first-years? As a former editor of the College yearbook, I know that this is an exaggeration, and had someone said this to me when I was working my butt off to get pages laid out and sent to print during Senior Week, I would have cried. Which brings me to my next point:

4) Being a member of the yearbook production staff is an utterly thankless, and I would argue, impossible task. When I was editor, the yearbook didn't even garner enough interest to build a staff, and I was left to work alone. Even had there been an interest, the tiny office and lone computer would not have supported a yearbook staff of more than one or two people. If a group of students is going to be expected to photograph and record all of the major organizations, events and other goings-on that occur on campus over the course of the year, they are going to need more than one camera and one computer to do so.

I am not trying to say that I don't value what the yearbook stands for, and I certainly don't mean to bash tradition. As a na've little first-year, I, too, believed in the importance of the yearbook, and sought to keep Kaleidoscope alive. After the miserable experience that I underwent while producing the book, however, as well as after gauging the opinions of friends and classmates on the matter, I have come to the conclusion that a yearbook holds no place at Middlebury, and the funds allocated year after year to the dying tradition could be better put toward some other cause, especially in our current economic climate.