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(04/01/21 10:00am)
Dance professors Lida Winfield and Christal Brown explore their differences and similarities in performing “Same But Different,” a show about curiosity and friendship. The show opens on April 2 and will be followed by a Q&A with Winfield and Brown. It will be available to stream through April 9.
“I’ve seen the power of empathy and connection in both of our lives. This show is a representation of that,” Winfield told The Campus. “The nuances of who we are is what makes up our individual lives.”
The idea for the performance — sponsored by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts — first emerged during the Bates Dance Festival in 2016, when Brown approached Winfield.
“[Christal] is a visionary,” Winfield said. “She said, ‘I think we should make a duet that’s called ‘Same but Different’ about all the ways that we’re the same — but because of the way that we look on the outside, no one else would ever connect the dots. We should connect the dots for them.’”
The performance draws from both their shared experiences — as artists, professors and educators — and areas where they differ, including Winfield’s background as a disabled learner in a special ed classroom where she says there was a lot of “hopelessness” and Brown’s background as Black student in a predominantly white classroom.
Winfield explained how in some circumstances, she and Brown reached the same conclusions from very different experiences.
The two have worked together for years, and the new show has brought them even closer — which Winfield says is what the show is really about: the compassion that can exist even when two people appear to be so different. Brown was unavailable for comment before press time.
“When you spend time and energy really dancing with someone or really connecting with someone, the level of grey — the spaces in between — [is] infinite,” she said.
(01/28/21 11:00am)
Ripton voted on Jan. 12 to leave the Addison Central School District (ACSD) in an effort to keep its elementary school open amid declining enrollment, budget cuts and potential school consolidation. The town of Weybridge voted to stay.
Vermont schools have faced funding challenges in recent years due to the aging and decreasing population of the state. To combat ongoing demographic and funding shifts, ACSD is considering closing schools in Bridport, Ripton and Weybridge. The closures are meant to streamline the ACSD and eliminate the cost of maintaining additional staff and infrastructure. But in order for Ripton to leave ACSD, the other six towns in the district must vote to allow Ripton to leave. The bid will then move to the Vermont Board of Education, which will ultimately decide if Ripton can become independent.
Ripton mother Erin Lacey Robinson is leading Ripton’s effort to secede from ACSD. Robinson says she does not believe that closing Ripton Elementary School is a long-term solution to the budget problems that ACSD has cited as reason for consolidation. Her sentiment has been echoed by others parents in the town and across the state.
“The problems that our schools are facing across the state are not an individual school’s problems,” Robinson said. “It’s not all about declining enrollment.”
But it is, in part, about declining enrollment: Vermont’s schools are funded by property taxes from across the state, meaning that taxpayers from the Northeast Kingdom to Bennington are paying to keep schools open in places like Ripton. With so few students, the tiny elementary schools require higher overhead costs in comparison to larger schools with lower teacher-to-student ratios.
Robinson believes teacher and staff healthcare costs are the biggest drains on funding, but did not indicate other potential avenues for funding benefits for school employees. She said that budget issues will continue to occur until schools are better funded at the state and federal levels.
And she believes that closing Ripton’s school will only create additional problems, including hour-long bus rides for students and a lower ratio of teachers and paraeducators to students. This would mean students would spend less time outdoors and would receive less individual attention from educators.
“I’m worried about kids falling through the cracks,” she said.
Molly Witters, another Ripton parent involved in the effort to keep Ripton Elementary School open, voiced concerns about what closing Ripton would do to the community.
”Without Ripton Elementary School, the town becomes a vacation community and loses the reality and grittiness of working people that still exist here,” Witters said, adding that she is concerned young families and working class people will be less likely to settle in Ripton without a local school.
“People like myself think that [Ripton elementary school] could not only be the place for our children to be educated but could be even more of a community center,” Witters said. She said that a range of residents want the local school to stay open, from young families who moved to Ripton specifically for the school to elderly residents who attend the school’s Thanksgiving dinners.
The situation in neighboring school district Addison Northwest School District (ANWSD) foreshadows what may happen if Ripton Elementary School is closed.
Addison Central Elementary School closed in 2020 and students were moved to Vergennes Union Elementary School. ANWSD parent Mary O’Donovan said the transition has been better than expected. The process of consolidation, however, was painful.
“It was heartbreaking the way the school board treated us,” O’Donovan said of the school’s swift closure.
But O’Donovan has worked hard to put any hard feelings aside.
“When you send a kid to a new school, you can’t hate it,” she said. “You have to embrace it, otherwise your kid will feel it.”
O’Donovan also mentioned deeper issues in funding Vermont schools and recognized that improvements are necessary. More money is needed, she said, either at the state or federal level. As it is, school funding is coming mostly from property taxes, an untenable solution in a state with a declining population.
The Ripton Elementary School’s independence, if successful, will transfer operational budget woes into the hands of Ripton residents.
Witters said she believes funding will be the school’s biggest challenge going forward. This is in addition to questions of staff and student retention.
Far from feeling hopeless, however, Ripton’s organizers seemed energized, ready to work and think outside the box for creative solutions to save their school.
And if they succeed, Ripton parents will be able to make decisions on their own. As is, the school is represented by a single member on the 13-man ACSD School Board.
“So even if you do the math,” Wittters said, “there’s no way to really have a voice about our future school choices in the school district.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Bridport as Bridgeport.
(09/24/20 9:57am)
For Vermonters, a complete 2020 Decennial Census count is within reach. As of Tuesday morning, nearly 99% of Vermonters have responded to the census.
“We are close to having it as complete as can be,” said Jason Broughton, state librarian and chair of Vermont’s Complete Count Committee.
Broughton explained that the census is responsible for largehuge amounts of federal funding, as well congressional redistricting and the reapportionment of U.S. House of Representatives seats. as the redistricting of congressional seats.
He said that miscounts — particularly undercounts — can lead to massive funding losses. A 2018 paper about the 2010 Decennial Census reported a possible 1% undercount and discussed the undercount’s effect on a single program funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.
According to Broughton, the possible 1% undercount meant approximately 6,000 Vermonters may have gone uncounted. He said that relatively small miscounts like this can have a big impact.: Tthe paper reported a possible $14 million federal funding loss in 2015, alone.
“If you think about it, some people say, ‘Oh, that’s not that bad,’ until you say, ‘That’s $14 million for that small amount of people, every single year, for ten years, until the next census.’ And that was one specific program,” Broughton said.
In 2016 alone, it was reported that Vermont received nearly $2.5 billion based on data collected in the 2010 Decennial Census.
To make sure everyone is included in the survey, Broughton said the Complete Count Committee has worked with Vermont groups and agencies to reach out to hard-to-count populations. These populations include single mothers with children, the elderly, the disabled, and migrant workers who may be undocumented.
“We were doing a lot during the tail end with Vermont Migrant Justice,” he explained. “They let us know that they were able to get in touch or do outreach with 400 persons in that community.”
The partnerships with Migrant Justice and other organizations haves also helped distribute correct information to individuals. This information includes the wording that the census counts “all whole persons” residing in the U.S. at the time of its conduct.
The inclusion of undocumented persons in the census is something that presidential officials are working to change in this year’s count. The State of Vermont joined aA lawsuit filed earlier this year against the Trump administration was joined by the State of Vermont, with Broughton cited in the opinion submittedfiled by federal court justices.
Broughton said that Vermont’s involvement in the suit was crucial to its success, but he added that the Trump Administration is currently working on an appeal.
“I do anticipate that there’s going to be a lot of conversation about the accuracy of this year’s numbers,” he said.
But for now, he’s concerned with concluding a complete count of the state.
“Everyone has worked feverishly and endlessly in our outreach effort to make sure we get to as many people as possible,” he said. “It’s been a very interesting year.”
Census response ends Sept. 30. People who have not yet responded can self-report online or by calling (844) 330-2020. The questionnaire contains nine questions and can be completed in under ten minutes. It is completely confidential.
(05/07/20 9:50am)
The Campus asked Middlebury students to participate in the second annual Zeitgeist survey in November, looking to gain insight into campus culture by asking the questions that are often not discussed. This year’s survey included an exploration of love, relationships and the ever ill-defined “hook-up culture.” A total of 1,245 students responded — nearly 48.25% of the student body.
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The vast majority of Middlebury students — 90.82% — prefer a romantic relationship to a hook-up, according to the second annual Zeitgeist survey.
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Despite this indicated preference, 50.44% of respondents said that they have had a one-night stand in the past and 43.53% reported having had an, “unspecified, slightly-monogamous ‘thing.’”
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About 55.37% of respondents, or 686 students, reported having been in a committed romantic relationship before starting at Middlebury. However, only 39.43% of students, or 491 respondents, reported being in a committed/monogamous relationship at Middlebury.
Athletes are 7.09% more likely to have partaken in a one-night stand and, on average, have a higher number of sexual partners than non-athletes.
Students identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community are equally as likely to participate in all forms of relationships and sexual activity as non-LGBTQ+ students.
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When asked about their satisfaction with the romantic scene at Middlebury, 46.01% of respondents answered that they were somewhat dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied, 30.41% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, 23.58% said that they were somewhat satisfied or extremely satisfied.
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The length of relationships for students have varied. 34.90% of respondents said that their longest relationship lasted over a year, while 22.35% have never been in a relationship.
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More than one in ten students — 10.17% of respondents — said they have cheated in a romantic relationship.
Respondents were asked how many partners they have engaged in consensual sexual activity within the last 12 months. The most common response was 2-4 partners, with 386 students. 263 students reported they had not engaged in sex within the last year. Respondents who identified as cisgender female were more likely to have not engaged in sex compared to their cisgender male counterparts: 24.25% compared to 16.26%.
Despite the fact that many students have participated in hook-up culture to some degree, it is not clear what this term actually means. Students attempted — and struggled — to define “hook-up” in the survey. 1,130 students heeded the call to demystify the ambiguous (and popular) term.
“Hook-up is a deliberately ambiguous word in English that can connote anything from just making out to full-on sex,” reads one response, adding that “hook-up” is not a term they use when speaking of their own encounters. “I believe that encounters of any sexual nature would constitute a hook-up, but I’d be wary of defining mine as such because of the social implications this term carries.”
Many responses stated that hooking up is the range that begins with making out and ends with sex. Some designated hook-ups as an act that must occur privately, while others included infamous Dance Floor Make Outs (DFMOs) in their definition. Many others explicitly defined hook-ups as, “anything more than kissing”, requiring some sort of sexual encounter.
One respondent wrote that hook-ups are, “Something sexual in nature that can turn into something more, but [that] doesn’t necessarily have too much meaning or … emotion.”
The word “party” appears in responses 40 times. One response says that hook-ups are “having sex with someone after a party and then not getting into a relationship for more than a couple weeks or so afterward.” The words “casual” and “casually” appear 66 times in responses. “Spontaneous” and “spontaneously” appear seven times.
A common theme in the responses is a lack of emotional connection or significance. As one respondent puts it, hook-ups are, “Having a sexual relationship with someone without necessarily the need for an emotional/romantic connection or committment to that person.”
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For those involved in the romantic scene at Middlebury, survey respondents were given a range of options to select how they have met romantic partners. The most popular option was through mutual friends, with 527 people, followed by on nights out (495), extracurriculars (275) and through residence halls (225). Respondents also pointed to orientation and on-campus jobs as places they met romantic partners.
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The data also shows that Middlebury students tend to download dating apps during their later years at Middlebury. The percentage of students who use dating apps increased as students aged, with only 17.25% of the class of 2023 respondents having used a dating app at the time of the survey compared to 44.19% of the class of 2022, 48.36% of the class of 2021 and 57.32% of the class of 2020.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in The Campus' April 23 Love Issue.
Riley Board and Caroline Kapp contributed reporting.
(04/23/20 12:58am)
The Campus asked Middlebury students to participate in the second annual Zeitgeist survey in November, looking to gain insight into campus culture by asking the questions that are often not discussed. This year’s survey included an exploration of love, relationships and the ever ill-defined “hook-up culture.” A total of 1,245 students responded — nearly 48.25% of the student body.
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}})}();
The vast majority of Middlebury students — 90.82% — prefer a romantic relationship to a hook-up, according to the second annual Zeitgeist survey.
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}})}();
Despite this indicated preference, 50.44% of respondents said that they have had a one-night stand in the past and 43.53% reported having had an, “unspecified, slightly-monogamous ‘thing.’”
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}})}();
About 55.37% of respondents, or 686 students, reported having been in a committed romantic relationship before starting at Middlebury. However, only 39.43% of students, or 491 respondents, reported being in a committed/monogamous relationship at Middlebury.
Athletes are 7.09% more likely to have partaken in a one-night stand and, on average, have a higher number of sexual partners than non-athletes.
Students identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community are equally as likely to participate in all forms of relationships and sexual activity as non-LGBTQ+ students.
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}})}();
When asked about their satisfaction with the romantic scene at Middlebury, 46.01% of respondents answered that they were somewhat dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied, 30.41% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, 23.58% said that they were somewhat satisfied or extremely satisfied.
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}})}();
The length of relationships for students have varied. 34.90% of respondents said that their longest relationship lasted over a year, while 22.35% have never been in a relationship.
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}})}();
More than one in ten students — 10.17% of respondents — said they have cheated in a romantic relationship.
Respondents were asked how many partners they have engaged in consensual sexual activity within the last 12 months. The most common response was 2-4 partners, with 386 students. 263 students reported they had not engaged in sex within the last year. Respondents who identified as cisgender female were more likely to have not engaged in sex compared to their cisgender male counterparts: 24.25% compared to 16.26%.
Despite the fact that many students have participated in hook-up culture to some degree, it is not clear what this term actually means. Students attempted — and struggled — to define “hook-up” in the survey. 1,130 students heeded the call to demystify the ambiguous (and popular) term.
“Hook-up is a deliberately ambiguous word in English that can connote anything from just making out to full-on sex,” reads one response, adding that “hook-up” is not a term they use when speaking of their own encounters. “I believe that encounters of any sexual nature would constitute a hook-up, but I’d be wary of defining mine as such because of the social implications this term carries.”
Many responses stated that hooking up is the range that begins with making out and ends with sex. Some designated hook-ups as an act that must occur privately, while others included infamous Dance Floor Make Outs (DFMOs) in their definition. Many others explicitly defined hook-ups as, “anything more than kissing”, requiring some sort of sexual encounter.
One respondent wrote that hook-ups are, “Something sexual in nature that can turn into something more, but [that] doesn’t necessarily have too much meaning or … emotion.”
The word “party” appears in responses 40 times. One response says that hook-ups are “having sex with someone after a party and then not getting into a relationship for more than a couple weeks or so afterward.” The words “casual” and “casually” appear 66 times in responses. “Spontaneous” and “spontaneously” appear seven times.
A common theme in the responses is a lack of emotional connection or significance. As one respondent puts it, hook-ups are, “Having a sexual relationship with someone without necessarily the need for an emotional/romantic connection or committment to that person.”
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}})}();
For those involved in the romantic scene at Middlebury, survey respondents were given a range of options to select how they have met romantic partners. The most popular option was through mutual friends, with 527 people, followed by on nights out (495), extracurriculars (275) and through residence halls (225). Respondents also pointed to orientation and on-campus jobs as places they met romantic partners.
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var e in a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.getElementById("datawrapper-chart-"+e)||document.querySelector("iframe[src*='"+e+"']");t&&(t.style.height=a.data["datawrapper-height"][e]+"px")}})}();
The data also shows that Middlebury students tend to download dating apps during their later years at Middlebury. The percentage of students who use dating apps increased as students aged, with only 17.25% of the class of 2023 respondents having used a dating app at the time of the survey compared to 44.19% of the class of 2022, 48.36% of the class of 2021 and 57.32% of the class of 2020.
Editor’s Note: All the results from the second annual Zeitgeist survey will be published on May 7, in the special Zeitgeist issue.
Riley Board, and Caroline Kapp contributed reporting.
(04/22/20 9:56am)
With Middlebury students now scattered across the globe, many have found themselves in long distance romantic relationships they had not planned for. Following the evacuation of campus in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, students had to make quick and unexpected decisions about their relationships.
While some of these students already had experience with distance dating, the announcement to leave campus came suddenly and threw many students for a loop.
Katelyn Mei ’22 has been dating her boyfriend, Cater Wang ’21, for over a year. The couple dated long distance last summer.
Still, the new challenges brought about by the sudden evacuation of campus took the couple by surprise.
“There was definitely a shock to [realizing] we weren’t going to see each other for half a year,” Mei said. “It was like, ‘We have four days we need to spend together, now.’”
Wang, who is still on campus, is an international student from China. For now, they are both in the same time zone, with Wang in Vermont and Mei at her home in Brooklyn.
But Wang will return home in May, placing a 12-hour time difference — and thousands of miles — between them. Mei said she’s worried about when Wang returns to China.
“There’s definitely a day’s delay of conversation unless we make time to meet each other [over] FaceTime,” she said regarding the time difference. “At least I have this person [who] I can share my emotions and my feelings [with].”
[pullquote speaker="Katelyn Mei ’22" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]There was definitely a shock to [realizing] we weren’t going to see each other for half a year,” Mei said. “It was like, ‘We have four days we need to spend together, now.’[/pullquote]
Will Hoppin ’22 from Mill Valley, California is dating Chloe Zinn ’22 who lives in South Hero, Vt.
“Vermont is a much different place than California and [Chloe] is a much more humble person and a much more caring person,” Hoppin said. He noted that his Bay Area private high school, on the other hand, fostered a culture of elitism and narcissism. “It’s so refreshing to be around someone who’s so genuinely present and caring, and I think I have a lot to learn from her.”
Hoppin and Zinn now sit on opposite sides of the country.
“I was at her house for a week before I decided to go home,” he said. “That was a really hard decision to make because [I had to decide,] do I want to be with my girlfriend — her family was really excited about me staying there — or with my family?”
He said that while he is “at peace” with his decision to go home, he misses Zinn greatly.
“I’m not going to see her until August, if things keep going this way,” he said. “We have plans for her to come out to California if she doesn’t have a summer job that’s in-person, but it’s scary to be like, ‘I’m not going to see this person that’s so important to me.’”
Maeve Callahan ’22 expressed similar concerns.
“It’s definitely a bit more of a roller coaster,” she said regarding hopes to see boyfriend Jose Morales ’22. “Some days I think, ‘yes, I am going to road trip as soon as classes are done.’”
But other days, she feels nervous about making the 27-hour-journey from her home in Massachusetts to Dallas, Texas, where Morales lives.
“I don’t want to endanger people if I go on a road trip, I still have to get gas and I still have to eat,” she said.
Nick Wagg ’22 decided to stop waiting and travelled from Maine to Minnesota on April 16 to be with girlfriend Elsa Soderstrom ’22.
Wagg, who arrived in Minnesota on April 16, decided to follow Soderstrom after a few weeks at home.
“I felt I wasn’t totally understood at home,” he said. “I was seeking some type of normalcy of what college was like and I felt that coming [to Minnesota] would feel a little more like how things were.”
Wagg said that he ultimately decided to make the flight because of the indefinite nature of the situation.
“We’ve had to deal with distance before, but what was different about this time was not knowing when we’d be able to see each other again,” he said. “This time there was no light at the end of the tunnel.”
While Wagg and Soderstrom are together in Minnesota, Matt Fliegauf ’22 is still waiting until he can safely head to South Carolina to see his girlfriend Raeanne Smith ’22.
“I’m going to head down to South Carolina as soon as it’s safe, but we don’t know when that’s going to be,” Fliegauf said. “I can’t put myself in a situation where I’m threatening either my health or her health or her family’s health.”
Fliegauf and Smith recently celebrated their one year anniversary over FaceTime.
“[Celebrating our anniversary] was tough,” Fliegauf said. “We knew that it was going to be spent apart, but it was really hard to have such a significant anniversary so far apart.”
But he has enjoyed the opportunity for them to have longer conversations together since heading home.
“At school … you don’t have the chance to just sit down and have a long conversation,” Fliegauf said. “I think that this has given us a little more time to just sit and talk, which I really appreciate.”
In addition to long FaceTime conversations, Fliegauf said that he and Smith frequently have movie nights together.
“Netflix party has been a blessing,” he said. “We’ve been watching ‘Tiger King’ together.”
[pullquote speaker="Matt Fliegauf ’22" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]At school … you don’t have the chance to just sit down and have a long conversation,” Fliegauf said. “I think that this has given us a little more time to just sit and talk, which I really appreciate.[/pullquote]
Despite their distaste for technology, Madison Middleton ’22.5 and Sean Lovett ’22.5 have also found using Zoom and FaceTime necessary since leaving campus.
“Even though I hate FaceTime, I hate not seeing Mads more than I hate FaceTime,” Lovett said.
For Middleton and Lovett, quarantine has been particularly unusual, as they both live in the D.C. area.
“We’re lucky in that we live only a 45-minute drive from each other at home, but since we can’t leave home, it’s become difficult,” Middleton said. “My routine with seeing [Sean] has changed.”
Instead of seeing each other a couple times a week as they usually do when they are home, Middleton and Lovett have not been together in person in over three weeks.
“It’s torture. It doesn’t feel right at all because part of my natural inclination at home is to go visit Sean and his family,” Middleton said.
Lovett agreed, but said that he is glad that they are not too far apart.
“I have been in a long distance relationship before — both across the country and on another continent — and I feel a lot more secure having Madison so close,” Lovett said. “We’re not able to see each other, but being only 25 miles away is really reassuring.”
(04/16/20 10:02am)
Following the 2010 census — termed by the Census Bureau as “the most massive participation movement ever witnessed in our country” — the 2020 decennial census risks miscounts as a result of Covid-19.
The decennial census, which has been conducted every ten years since 1780, is a complete count of the U.S. population. As stipulated by the U.S. Constitution, the census determines state representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. It also dictates how federal funding is distributed.
“The census tells us who we are and where we are going as a nation and helps our communities determine where to build everything from schools to supermarkets,” reads the census website. In a time of social distancing and mass hospitalizations, however, conducting a count of the U.S. population is proving more difficult than usual.
“We know that there are many people who have died in the last few weeks who, a couple weeks ago, would have been counted as Americans but might not be,” said Middlebury Assistant Professor of Sociology Matt Lawrence. He added that the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the usual distribution of certain populations, including college students.“College students have moved away from campuses,” he said, “and there are some concerns about what that might do for local counts.”
Middlebury has responded to this issue by sending out a school-wide email reminding students that they will be counted by the college, which Lawrence commends.“This is a census that is being completed in a moment of uncertainty,” he said. “I don't think there's any question about that.”
Middlebury Professor of Geography Peter Nelson said that Covid-19 also hinders certain efforts the Census Bureau has used to encourage responses. These efforts include sending community advocates into neighborhoods to talk with citizens who might be wary of filling out the census. Another planned effort was for the Census Bureau to encourage ministers to endorse the census in their Sunday services. This effort is not an option this year.
“We know that churches aren't meeting,” Nelson said, “so some of the traditional vehicles that the Census [Bureau] has used to turn out the vote, so to speak, are closed given the constraints on mobility.”
Such actions reduce undercounts, something both Nelson and Lawrence are concerned about.
“[Undercounting] tends to be minority communities, low income communities, hard to reach communities [and] communities that don't trust the government,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence said that frequently undercounted communities include homeless populations and others who do not have a consistent address. This creates a funding problem for populations in need.
“The people who need the most federal funding for social services also tend to be the people who are least likely to be counted, which is why [undercounting] ends up being such a problem,” he said.
Despite these difficulties, Nelson said that the Census Bureau has the capacity to correct for possible undercounts.
“Typically, the Census Bureau will release the uncorrected results from the 100% count of the population, knowing that there are people that were missed,” he said. “Then, they have statistical mechanisms to adjust those counts.”
Nelson says these mechanisms include exit and follow-up surveys that help gauge the extent of the census’ undercount. Even correcting the undercount can prove difficult, however.
“[Correcting the undercount] becomes a really politicized process,” Nelson said. “It’s to the advantage [of certain political interests] to have the corrected numbers, and other groups benefit from having the uncorrected numbers.”
This politicization results from the link between the census and the distribution of political power, the latter of which is determined using census data.“Representatives that represent [undercounted] constituencies often advocate for the corrected numbers, [because] then there are more people in their districts,” Nelson said.
These areas, often urban and communities of color, are being disproportionately affected by the novel coronavirus, Lawrence pointed out. He said that census data is needed to better understand Covid-19 and its spread.
“I think that if we want to know how much more at risk, say, African American communities are to Covid-19 — which is something that a lot of the numbers are showing us — we need to know the community, or we want to know the community's racial and ethnic composition,” he said.
He added that the census may offer a chance to look more closely at inequality in the wake of the pandemic.
“If anything, I think Covid-19 demonstrates the importance of having information about local communities,” Lawrence said. “We will need to rely on census data — about racial composition, about household composition, about sex — to be able to understand, to be able to detail [and] to be able to document this crisis we're all going through right now.”
Nelson also noted that the 2020 census was going to prove challenging even before the Covid-19 pandemic. He cited that the potential inclusion of a citizenship question contributed to the expected difficulties.
The citizenship question —which would ask about a respondent’s citizenship status — does not appear on the 2020 census form. However, Nelson said that just the prospect of such a question has still discouraged certain communities from filling out the census.
Lawrence, too, had concerns that the prospect of a citizenship question could discourage responses.“If there are citizens who live in areas that might have a lot of surveillance from ICE officials, for example, or if there are citizens who have relatives or housemates who are not citizens, they might also not want to draw attention to those people in their census forms,” Lawrence said.
Aside from worries concerning citizenship, Nelson said that another factor he is thinking about is accessibility. Nelson said that this census, which is the first census that can be completed online, may make it difficult for certain populations to respond. He acknowledged, too, that the opposite may be true.
“My guess is that [internet technology] would have improved the coverage, though we also know that there's an age component to that,” he said. “My 78-year-old mother might not be as savvy at filling out her form online.”
Nelson added that there are also populations who do not have access to reliable internet, which could make responding to the census difficult.“There's a digital divide that could compromise the count,” he said. “The undercount could be higher in rural areas where the internet coverage is more spotty, or among marginalized populations that are less likely to have reliable internet.”
For more information, visit www.2020census.gov
(03/05/20 11:10am)
Hundreds of Middlebury residents gathered at the town meeting at Middlebury Union High School on Monday night, approving all seven proposed articles. The town meeting, a manifestation of direct democracy, involved the discussion of several proposals, followed by a voice vote. Residents also reviewed and discussed information on three more legislative articles that were decided on Tuesday via Australian ballot.
The meeting featured first-time Moderator Susan Shashok, who replaced former Vermont Governor and longtime town meeting moderator Jim Douglas ’72. Shashok has previously attended the town meeting as a member of the selectboard — the town’s governing group of seven elected members — and was endorsed by Douglas last year after he announced he would not be running again for the position of moderator.
“[Douglas’s endorsement] felt pretty good,” Shashok said in a phone interview Wednesday. “He’s been a very good mentor to me during this process. Even though it’s big shoes to fill, I told everybody I’d have different shoes. Jim’s okay with that and so I’m okay with that.”
At the meeting, Middlebury Selectboard Chair Brian Carpenter read a year-in-review report, which mainly focused on progress of the Middlebury Bridge and Rail Project.
The town budget was approved without dissent and included increased funding for the replacement of public works equipment, such as the town’s 25-year-old street sweeper. Tax surpluses will be used to fund downtown projects like the railroad platform and updates to light fixtures.
The two most contentious articles of the night were Article 4 and Article 2, both of which allocated additional extra-budget funds to first responder services. Article 4 requested a $63,721 increase in appropriations for Middlebury Regional Emergency and Medical Services (MREMS).
Some residents expected money requests for first response care to be part of the town budget, and not presented as a separate article. But the the selectboard said it had not had enough time to review the MREMS allocation request to add it to the budget beforehand.
Opponents were concerned about giving such a large sum of money to a non-profit without the selectboard spending time to review the proposal. Advocates for the article however, claimed that emergency and medical services are essential.
“I understand and appreciate the concerns expressed regarding municipal appropriations for independent, non-profit entities,” said Ben Fuller, vice-chair of MREMS, in an email to The Campus. “That said, I also believe that the critical, life-saving services we provide put us in a slightly different category than most other non-profits.”
These concerns led to a motion to postpone consideration of the item, an action that Shashok said she hadn’t anticipated.
“We had one motion to lay the item on the table, and that’s very rare,” Shashok told The Campus. “I knew what to do, but I had to stop the meeting and double-check my notes just to make sure I had it right.”
The motion to table eventually failed, and Article 4 passed with an amendment to limit the increased funding to one year.
“I think it was the best solution to support them this one time, and make sure that the selectboard had full authority to vet and include what we feel is appropriate in next year’s budget,” Carpenter told The Campus.
Article 2, which allocated $80,000 to the Middlebury Police Department (MPD) for the purchase of new police cruisers, also incited discussion at the meeting. Residents pointed out that funds for vehicle replacement are an annual expenditure, not a one-time purchase. Police Chief Tom Hanley agreed and said during the meeting that he is not sure why the police vehicle allocation has not been added to MPD’s budget.
Discussions centered around the high wear and tear on police cars, which can be used for four years before requiring heightened levels of maintenance. In focusing on environmental concerns, the police department replaced one of its cars last year with a hybrid car. Though the cruiser is not yet in service in Middlebury, the department is considering purchasing two more hybrid cruisers this year.
Other articles dealt with 2020 tax collection dates and allocation of funds from the Cross Street Reserve Fund for water system improvements. The selectboard's goal is to complete the water system improvements before the state begins a repaving project throughout town.
“Ideally, we would not replace the roads and then dig them up again,” said selectboard member Heather Seeley at the meeting.
The meeting ended with discussion of other articles that would appear on the Australian ballot the following day, including Article 9, a proposition that allocates funds to flood resilience projects in East Middlebury. Article 8 proposed allocating $5,000 to the Turning Point Center, a non-profit that provides services to those suffering from substance abuse, and Article 10 proposed using $850,000 to rehabilitate dilapidated buildings near the police station. All articles passed with healthy margins on Tuesday, according to Carpenter.
Dave Silberman, attorney and Middlebury resident, spoke multiple times during the meeting.
“Democracy only works when people participate in it,” Silberman said. “I really feel that I’m exercising my civic duty.”
For Vermonters like Silberman, who values democratic participation, and Shashok, who considers herself a “democracy geek,” town meeting presents an opportunity to take advantage of an important tradition.
“I love Vermont’s town meeting,” said Fuller, the vice-chair of MREMS. “It’s an iconic tradition that helps preserve the sense of community in our towns and allows for the most direct and transparent form of democratic government.”
(03/05/20 11:10am)
The Middlebury Student Mail Center received an award for efficiency in distribution from technology company Neopost in October after delivering over 89,000 packages in the 2018-19 school year. In comparison, Miami University, a public research university with around 24,000 students, received the same efficiency award for colleges and universities with more than 7,000 students. The university, in the 2018–19 school year, received 91,000 packages — only 2,000 more than Middlebury.
To Jacki Galenkamp, mail center supervisor, the award signals what she had already noticed in the mail room.
“We’ve been receiving over 1,000 packages a day,” she said last week, adding that the Mail Center processed 99,600 packages in the 2019 calendar year. “We receive staff and faculty packages, but the majority of packages are student [packages].” Galenkamp added that she believes the rurality of the college has everything to do with the abundance of packages.
“We don’t have a lot of shopping [in town],” she said. “The options here are more limited than even [those in] Burlington, or those of any college in New Jersey or Connecticut.”
In accordance with reporting from fall 2018, Galenkamp said she does not believe that the increased package volume is a result of the online bookstore, alone.
“I don’t really see a huge increase [in books] since the college bookstore stopped carrying books and inventory—that’s been a question that’s been posed to us quite a bit,” Galenkamp said.
The months that mark the start of each semester — February and September — are the busiest months in the mailroom, according to data from the Mail Center. Despite this observation, Galenkamp’s claim that the online bookstore is not the only factor in higher delivery rates is substantiated: the data shows a 4,000-package difference between the months of February and September, suggesting that the increase in packages may also be the result of students moving in and returning to campus.
Feb. 2019 saw the second-most packages by a narrow margin, the third-busiest month being Oct. 2019. Assuming students have ordered and received their books by the second month of the term, the idea that the online bookstore is solely responsible for the increase in packages seems unlikely.
Though the mail center staff is unsure which factors have led to this influx of packages, Galenkamp says that Neopost — the company that presented the Mail Center with the efficiency award — has been key in the expedient nature of the mailroom.
The cloud-based system enables package tracking within the College. It emails students an hour after their package is processed in a message that states the package’s type, tracking number and recipient’s name. When processed, this information is logged into the mailroom’s searchable database. This system allows packages to be tracked within the system, provided they have been processed.
Before Neopost, Galenkamp said that students received paper slips in their mailboxes upon a package’s arrival.
“[The paper slips] were really inefficient because many college students don’t ever even check their mailbox,” she said. “With the electronic system, they get an email as soon as the package is processed.”
Galenkamp told The Campus that this processing is something some students still do not understand. She said that many students arrive at the Mail Center as soon as they receive notification from the package’s sender that a package has been delivered. This, she said, causes problems — even with a system as slick as Neopost.
“Frequently, we get students coming down and saying, ‘Amazon said my package is here.’ That’s great, but so are 1100 other [packages],” she said. “If you come down looking for a package before you’ve gotten an email saying it’s been processed, it makes processing come to a screeching halt and it takes longer for you to get your package.”
In a mailroom that often processes and delivers over a thousand packages in a single day, Galenkamp said that patience is important.
“As soon as it’s processed, you’ll get an email,” she said.
Note: Ariadne Will is a mail clerk at the Middlebury College Mail Center.
(03/05/20 11:09am)
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ESSEX JUNCTION — Exactly 31 years after his first mayoral win in Burlington, Vermont Senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders held a rally at Champlain Valley Exposition to cap off Super Tuesday.
The fairground venue, which expected an audience of around 10,000, filled up Tuesday evening with Sanders supporters who came to watch primary results roll in all evening. The boisterous crowd listened to speeches by Bernie himself, Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman, Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan and Jane Sanders, the Senator’s wife.
“[This campaign] is about transforming this country,” Bernie told the crowd. “This movement started right here.”
The movement Bernie is leading, Jane said, is characterized by community — one that should feel familiar to Vermonters. “[Vermonters] taught me that being a community organizer is more important than being a politician,” she said.
Bernie also made multiple appeals to the working class at the rally, a hallmark of his campaigning style.
“What we need is a new politics that brings working class and young people into our movement,” he said in his address. He added that the inclusivity of his campaign will help achieve high voter turnout, echoing hopes of creating a coalition similar to Obama’s in 2008 and contradicting claims that he would not be able to generate a sufficient voter base to beat President Donald Trump this November.
Bernie addressed the prominence of billionaire campaign funding, which has been a fixture of other Democratic campaigns.
“We’re going to tell [Michael Bloomberg] that in America, you cannot buy elections,” Bernie said, contrasting Bloomberg’s campaign spending with his grassroots efforts. Bloomberg, who spent $500 million of his own money on his campaign, according to AP, dropped out of the race Wednesday.
The rally also featured live music by the Mallett Brothers Band, a Maine group who was joined onstage by bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman of the jam band Phish.
“Phish and Bernie — two things I love,” said Billy Stark ’22, a Middlebury student who drove up to attend the rally. “What draws me to Bernie [is that a] lot of his campaign is built on raising class consciousness, something that’s sorely missed in [this] country. It’s been inspiring to see so many people in America embrace Bernie’s platform.”
Stark said that he first started supporting Bernie in 2016 and has supported the candidate since.
Loyalty was certainly one of the themes of the night, and Bernie invoked his Vermont roots to talk about some of his most stalwart supporters.
“We have come a long long way,” Bernie said, referencing his position 30 years prior. “I want to thank the State of Vermont and all of the people in Vermont for years and years of love and support."
By the end of the night, Bernie had secured four out of 14 Super Tuesday states, including California, which holds the most delegates, and (unsurprisingly) Vermont. Though Bernie had hoped to win Texas at the time of his address, the key state was later won by Biden.
(03/05/20 11:03am)
This is the second article in a series on school consolidation. Read the first article in that series here.
Over the last three years, Middlebury and the surrounding towns have shifted from conversations about district consolidation to school mergers and closures.
Act 46, the 2015 legislation that is often connected to the closure of small Vermont elementary schools, was initially focused on the former and not on school mergers.
“The goal of Act 46 is to improve education outcomes and equity by creating larger and more efficient school governance structures,” reads the State of Vermont Agency of Education’s website. By this meter, many believe that Act 46 has been successful not only in saving money but in streamlining school governance structures: it is under Act 46 that Addison Central School District (ACSD) formed in 2016, a decision that joined eight different school districts into one governing body.
“Act 46 was not about closing small schools and it’s not to blame [for school closures],” said Amy McGlashan, a member of the ACSD School Board and the director of Adirondack House at the college. “What’s to blame is declining enrollments, increasing costs and the equity gap.”
The decline in enrollment, McGlashan says, has led to strains on resources. In smaller elementary schools, a drop in enrollment cannot be met with budget cuts, as can be done at larger schools, including Mary Hogan Elementary School in Middlebury.
McGlashan explained that at larger elementary schools like Mary Hogan, an enrollment decline of 20 students — about the number of students in a class — leads to the elimination of a staff position. At smaller schools with between 50 and 100 students, such as McGlashan’s local Rutland elementary school, the loss of 10 pupils does not affect the number of staff employed at the school.
That the smaller school continues to use the same amount of fiscal resources as its enrollment declines promotes tension between district schools. It is viewed as unfair that the loss of a larger percentage of the student body at these smaller schools does not affect their resources and staff, while larger schools are forced to cut positions in response to budget cuts.
Schools and districts, which are funded in part per pupil, lose state money when enrollment dips. Asking larger schools to support smaller schools takes a toll on the larger schools, since all schools in the district are sharing an amount of money decided, in part, by the number of pupils in the entire district.
Since the creation of ACSD, state funding for the elementary schools that previously resided in eight different districts is now given to the single, overarching district. This makes funding and resources easier for smaller schools to access but forces larger schools — in this case, schools situated in the town of Middlebury — to support funding shortfalls occurring at all schools in the district.
Because even larger schools are experiencing declining enrollment, pooling funds takes money disproportionately from larger schools.
In Middlebury and surrounding towns, it is this strain that brings up the prospect of school closures. With seven out of 13 ACSD Board Members representing Middlebury, it is likely that declining enrollment at smaller schools will eventually lead the board to vote to close and merge smaller schools.
Population distribution makes this representation possible, explained Angelo Lynn, editor in chief of the Addison Independent. This proportional representation gives Middlebury more sway within ACSD — the town holds a majority of the board’s votes.
Since Middlebury is the town that would benefit most from closures and mergers of smaller schools in the district, Lynn says that the representative makeup of the board has caused some smaller towns to worry about the wellbeing of their schools and has fostered an environment that may soon vote to close smaller institutions.
“When we created the articles of agreement for [ACSD], that took the power away from towns, and when that happened, the conversation around that was, ‘We need to do this because we need to run schools in a more effective economically efficient way. And we’re not going to close your school,’” Lynn said.
Now, the prospect of keeping small community elementary schools open appears overly optimistic to many, including Lynn.
“I think there are lots of people feeling a little betrayed by where the board is at,” he said. He added, though, that there comes a point when the math does not add up: “Certainly some schools are going to be too small to continue,” he said. “I think there is a number that’s not efficient.”
(02/20/20 11:03am)
“This is a story about the transformative power of art,” said Assistant Professor of Dance Lida Winfield in a performance on Jan. 16. Her work, titled “In Search of Air: Growing Up Dyslexic,” has been performed across the country since 2011 and combines oral storytelling with dance to depict Winfield’s journey to knowledge.
Winfield, who struggled in school — a challenge exacerbated by the presence of a learning disability — says that this piece allows her to frame her disability as “a glimpse of brilliance.” In this manner, Winfield’s show inspires possibility and rebukes a narrative of humiliation and self-hatred.
In her show, Winfield is candid about the shame she experienced because of her learning disability and the love that surrounded her despite it.
“I think that shame is really the crux of what happens with learning disabilities,” she said. “I think I was loved by many of my former teachers, but I think because of the situation and the circumstances and the system, I was misunderstood.”
Toward the beginning of Winfield’s poignant program, she faces the audience and says that “opportunity was in our fingertips; love was in our arms.” In spite of the support, Winfield points out that she did not learn to read until much later in her life.
“[Not learning to read] happened because of a whole set of circumstances,” she said. “Part of what’s so tricky about these things is that our lives are rarely straight lines: they’re these wandering, messy, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes amazing pathways. I think for me, the scale tipped that there was too much shame, there was not enough access [and] I then couldn’t get myself through.”
Though the show’s narrative is centered around Winfield’s learning disability, it is also a story that offers themes of hope, strength and resilience. Its universality allows the show to connect with audiences and leave an impact after its viewers exit the performance space.
For Winfield, connecting with her audience through personal story has been a pillar of her performances even before “In Search of Air: Growing Up Dyslexic.”
“Years and years ago, I was working on a different show and I told a story that [I now tell] in ‘In Search of Air.’ I was really struck by how moved and interested people were in that particular story,” she said. “It felt clear to me that there are so many folks that have amazing, rich and complicated lives who have stories to tell, and this happens to be mine.”
By speaking up about her experiences, Winfield has used her show to open up conversation about accessibility in education. As someone who “think[s] better when [she’s] moving,” Winfield’s performance is not just a celebration of knowledge, but also an invitation to revisit other methods of learning.
“I think before reading and writing really became a commodity in the West, [human interaction] was really how knowledge was passed,” she says. “I think my body and all of our bodies are smart, that there is wisdom inside of us, and I know that I process the world by moving, by doing.”
It is perhaps because of this initiation of dialogue – one culminating in a Q&A Winfield conducts at the end of each show – that “In Search of Air: Growing Up Dyslexic” remains regularly booked.
“I think [this show still gets booked] because there’s a desire and an interest to be talking about the value of the arts and to be talking about learning disabilities,” Winfield said.
Along with details of Winfield’s struggle to learn — beginning in elementary school and lasting through her high school years — the show also involves moments where she realizes her potential.
“I could be a doctor,” she tells the audience, later in the piece, during a moment when her character is attending college. “I could be your doctor,” she adds. Ensuingly, she says, “I start to think and I start to feel smart.”
It is this empowering feeling of capability that Winfield hopes to instill not just in her audience, but also in her own students.
“I think as a learner, you sometimes need someone else to help move [fear and self-hatred] out of the way,” she said. “There is so much self-hatred and there’s so much fear riddled inside of all of us and that is a barrier to being our best self. If, as a facilitator, I can help shift that in any way, then I think the other things just get to grow.”
(02/20/20 10:56am)
As the student body will soon vote on whether to keep the five SGA commons senator seats, I would like to argue in favor of these representative positions.
I will begin by addressing the obvious: there is, of course, the fact that there will no longer be any commons for commons senators to represent come the fall of 2020. There have, however, been proposed alternatives to the position of common senator. One I quite like is the prospect of assigning representatives to each dean, an idea that was proposed at the last SGA senate meeting of J-Term. This would still eliminate one of the current positions — there will only be four deans come fall — but would maintain the spirit and character of the commons senator seats. (Because a new iteration of the commons senator may reflect the position currently in place, I will refer in this article to these future positions as they are currently known – as commons senators.)
My belief that these representative positions should remain is directly tied to my experience with my own commons senator. Wonnacott Senator Myles Maxie ‘22 is someone who cares deeply, both about the SGA and about communicating with his constituency. When I hear from my sophomore senators, they send emails that tell me they know I don’t like long emails. Instead of serving as a considerate introduction to their email, however, this statement usually takes up about a third of the email and makes me want to stop reading it, which I often do. Maxie, on the other hand, is the only SGA representative I hear from in a way that feels meaningful and important. Unlike the lists of bullet points I receive from other representatives, Maxie takes the time to tell me when his office hours are, to dissect the decisions made by SGA, and to explain the bills and legislation that are being discussed. I do not know how other commons senators interact with their constituents, but as a member of Wonnacott Commons, I find the information Maxie shares with me valuable and informative. I would be sad to see that dialogue disappear.
I fear that the elimination of commons senator positions will, furthermore, impact the transparency of the institution, an institution that is already obscure in its processes. Take, for instance, the absence of meeting minutes on SGA’s website. Near the end of last semester, Maxie sent out an email to the members of Wonnacott Commons with the minutes from fall meetings attached. Those are minutes that may not have been made accessible otherwise, and Maxie told me later that he received backlash for sharing those minutes — minutes that should be public information. While those minutes are now available on the SGA website, no minutes after November 17 are available to the public. If Maxie were not a member of SGA, a part of me wonders if even those minutes would be available to the public.
While I have heard the argument that the position of commons senator may be taken advantage of by people looking to soothe their egos (and so, by extension, the position is not worth much), I would like to point out that it would be a huge undertaking to run for a position for the sole purpose of adopting its modest title. “Commons senator” is a title that often requires thankless effort: it is a position that stipulates carving out time on Sunday afternoons to sit and listen to bureaucratic discussions, as well as finding time to write emails to people who may never read them. I therefore do not believe that people interested in running for the position of commons senator are people who are eager to have a fancy title. Besides, if I were not someone who attended Middlebury, I would likely furrow my brow if my friend told me they were a commons senator – “What would that even entail?” I would ask.
Because it is such a humble title, the position of commons senator does not attract people who are interested only in self-promotion. Instead, it allows people who are genuinely interested in SGA to become involved in student government without having to brave what often become popularity contests associated with positions like class senate seats or senior positions such as that of the president. This is because there is lower interest in the common senator positions, so they have in the past been won by default — this was Maxie’s case in the election last spring. The disinterest in serving in these positions, I believe, may be related to the obscurity of their titles, which are connected to a system that did not fulfill its goal in connecting students within each commons. Though the noncompetitive nature of these positions has been used to support their elimination, I believe that this allows people a starting point from which to gain SGA experience.
Lastly, as commons senator positions are often held by underclassmen (four of this year’s five commons senators are sophomores — the fifth is a junior), there is often increased incentive for commons senators to initiate change, as they will actually see the impact of their terms on SGA during their years as upperclassmen.
I recognize that these five positions reside within a much larger and intensely bureaucratic body. Even so, it strikes me as not only pointless, but potentially harmful to eliminate these positions, positions that encourage transparency, dialogue and change.
Ariadne Will '22 is a Local editor for The Campus.
(02/13/20 11:05am)
Rural Vermont schools are consolidating with larger schools under the guidelines of Act 46, a bill passed in 2015.
“It is the conclusion of a multiyear process to create more sustainable and efficient school governance structures and improve access to quality PreK-12 education for all Vermont students,” reads the State of Vermont Agency of Education’s web page.
While the Senate passed Act 46 — which stipulated school consolidation — in 2015, it allowed schools to merge on their own terms, not forcing consolidation until 2019. This led the act to resurface at the start of last year.
Although some schools requested and received an extension on forced school consolidations at the start of last year, many are fighting against forced mergers altogether.
In a vote last November, the town of Ferrisburgh voted against merging its elementary school with the larger school in nearby Vergennes. Even with the support of the popular vote, Ferrisburgh Central School may still be forced to merge with Vergennes Elementary School next fall, a shift incentivized at the administrative level with the possibility of budget savings.
In addition to voting locally against the mergers, over two-dozen districts have sued the State of Vermont in an attempt to fend off consolidation. The case was heard by the State Supreme Court on Jan. 15, though a decision has not yet been handed down.
The plaintiff schools and attorney David Kelley argue that consolidation of districts disproportionately impacts rural schools, the rural towns that will lose such schools and the students who would be forced to attend school in larger towns nearby. The case against consolidation states that lengthened bus rides, larger class sizes, and the impersonal nature of larger schools disproportionately affect students who previously attended smaller, rural elementary schools.
Editor’s Note: This is the introductory article to a series on school consolidation in rural Vermont.
(01/23/20 11:03am)
Editor’s note: Ariadne Will is a member of the Dance Company of Middlebury and a Local Editor for the Campus.
After five months of rehearsals, the Dance Company of Middlebury will be performing a new work, On A Limb, this upcoming weekend. Dancers Lí Buzzard 22.5, Christian Kummer ’22, Emma Lodge ’19.5, Mai Thuong ’22 and I have been working since early September to create work centered around the concept of “presence as performance.” Led primarily by Scholar in Residence Karima Borni, the dancers also worked with Portland, Ore.-based artist Meshi Chavez.
Chavez, who practices primarily the Japanese dance style of Butoh, has used the opportunity to introduce dancers to more intentional methods of movement.
“I feel like my job as a choreographer is to help my dancers shine in the best light while learning how to get out of the light in a certain way,” Chavez said. “I think part of Butoh is learning how to remove ourselves, our opinions and our judgments and let the beauty of simplicity arrive.”
This practice of patience and simplicity has been challenging for the dancers, but they have used it to create something they hope resonates with their audience.
“I hope the audience can see our honest and genuine effort to feel movement and intensity without having to add anything performative to it,” said Mai Thuong ’22. “I hope that the audience will embrace the simplicity [the piece] has to offer.”
Even with strong intent behind movement, Chavez says that an idea alone is not enough to create a stimulating performance. “It’s not enough to have an idea. We have to be able to communicate the idea,” he said. “What do we have to say? Right now I am trying to help the dancers figure out what they’re trying to say.”
The dancers, too, are trying to decipher what they want to tell their audience.
“[The creative process] has been about committing to the task at hand, whatever that task may be, and knowing that in 15 minutes the task may be entirely different,” said Emma Lodge ’19.5. “There’s been so much working with other people and learning to listen in new ways.”
As Lodge has been learning to listen, other dancers have been relearning the ways different bodies fit into the dance narrative.
“We have learned about the difference between doing choreography and allowing choreography to be done unto you,” said Christina Kummer ’22. “The latter allows for a more authentic performance to take place as the piece gets to live and breathe as its own entity.”
Thuong learned that anyone can become a member of the dance community. “Before coming to Middlebury, I hated dancing,” she said. “I thought dancing [was for] the sake of aesthetic beauty or entertainment and meant long legs, flexibility and shallowness.”
This changed in her first semester, when Thuong attended the Fall Dance Concert. “I thought, ‘where are all those stereotypes about dance?’ I felt there was a meaning I wanted to grab,” she said. Thuong then took Intro to Dance in the spring of 2019 and has been dancing ever since. “I love this feeling of being free and letting my body be open to the vulnerability and thrill of moving,” she said.
It is perhaps this attention to learning — an attention that has played as large a role as the movement itself — that has led the work to assume an essence which dancers have described as both “uncomfortable” and “meditative.”
“If you’re wanting to feel comfortable and catered to, this may not be the piece for you,” warned Kummer. Despite his disclaimer, Kummer believes that this work also carries with it a universality.
“I want this piece to be a sounding board that brings up particular emotions and memories for everyone in the audience,” he said. “That is something that is so exciting about the dance we do in the department – [dance] means something different to everyone. The task becomes to make something that is compelling enough to draw out meaning.”
The universality to which Kummer hopes the work appeals is something Chavez says is the result of the ages of DCM’s dancers.
“I think the work is about [the dancers’] experience at the age that they are right now,” he said. “You go off to college and you’re on your own and you’re discovering what that ownness is. So in some ways I feel like this piece is about feeling our ownness and all of the emotion and feeling that comes with that.”
(12/05/19 11:02am)
This fall, Special Collections curated an exhibit commemorating the 1969 Stonewall riots. The exhibit, on display in the Library Atrium, is titled “Before and After Stonewall: Queer Stories Throughout American History” and was curated by Suria Vanrajah ’22. The exhibit is partnered with a display on the Library Lower Level titled “Middlebury College Coming Out: A Foundation for Queer Activism,” which was curated by Halle Shephard ’22, Reid Macfarlane ’21 and Joseph Watson, Preservation Manager for Special Collections.
The exhibits were the ideas of Watson and Rebekah Irwin, Special Collections’ director and curator. Watson and Irwin had long wanted to do something to mark the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, Watson said, so he proposed the downstairs archives exhibit, while Irwin had the idea for the atrium literature exhibit.
With the help of the MuseumWorks internship, a program that connects current students with the college’s collections and museum, the Special Collections team hired Macfarlane, Shephard and Vanrajah to curate the exhibits.
“I’ve always been very interested in history — I went to an American history high school — and am from New York City, so I recognized how important the Stonewall Riots were to my city, the LGBTQ community and our country,” Vanrajah said. “I wanted to be a part of the exhibit, and I was lucky enough that Joseph and Rebekah took a chance on me.”
Vanrajah said that she hopes her exhibit points out ripples made by events like Stonewall. As curator, she said she wanted viewers to draw their own conclusions about the impact of the riots on queer literature and history. “I felt that my role as a curator was not to try to create a narrative about the Stonewall Riots but rather to create a context through which anyone who sees the exhibit can reflect on the impact [of Stonewall] and understand it in their own way,” she said.
Beyond Stonewall, however, Vanrajah says her display is a nod to the activist aspects of the authors she has chosen to focus on. “I would consider each of these authors activists in their own right, whether or not they saw themselves that way, because their work helped make queer stories public and brought them to the attention of the American public,” she said. “By normalizing LGBTQ stories, these authors helped to normalize LGBTQ individuals and their experiences.”
While the atrium exhibit focuses on literature written by authors who identify as members of the LGBTQ community, the exhibit on the lower level is centered around past Campus articles detailing events occurring within Middlebury’s own LGBTQ sphere. “[Halle] and I spent about two days going through bound versions of The Campus, looking for things that might pop out — [words like] gay, queer — and compiling them and noting them,” Macfarlane said.
Watson, who had the idea for the exhibit, said that he had hoped to survey the five decades since Stonewall, but said that he, Macfarlane and Shephard decided instead to focus on the first three decades of the time period. One reason behind this decision was space.“Once 2000 came around, there was much more student activity and the student groups were much more high profile,” Watson said. “It would have been really difficult to fit those next 20 years in because there would have been so much.”
Waton also said that he hoped students would use the exhibit to learn more about the efforts that laid the groundwork for LGBTQ visibility on campus. “Pre-1970, there’s no open history of queer people at Middlebury,” he said. “I think that’s an interesting thing for people to realize, especially current students, who can say, ‘oh, these people are my parents’ age, and there were no [visibly] queer people before them.’”
This observation was something Macfarlane and Shephard became aware of as they worked on the exhibit.“At first it was really hard to find [Campus] articles,” Shephard said. “The gay student groups were really kept under wraps.”
The underwhelming presence of LGBTQ visibility was something Macfarlane also noticed. “I think that for a long time, queer people on this campus didn’t feel comfortable in their own visibility,” he said. “I think in the ’70s and ’80s there wasn’t a lot of queer visibility on campus. There weren’t a lot of people in organizations or starting initiatives to engage a discourse about the queer population on campus. You saw people attempt to do that, and then people wouldn’t show up to meetings.”
Shephard, too, noticed attempts made by students to establish an LGBTQ community on campus.“One of the first [student LGBTQ] groups was Gay Students at Middlebury,” she said. “Eventually the membership dwindled off, and then people just didn’t know where to go. It was sad to see it disappear.”
Watson also acknowledged this historical absence and lack of visibility.“When you’re doing research into underrepresented groups, they’re called that because they’re underrepresented,” he said. “In the archives, we have very little related to LGBTQ people.”
This underrepresentation was something Vanrajah was thinking about in terms of a broader literary tradition. “Queer stories are rarely told and many people never learned about Stonewall in their history classes, or never read seminal queer works because of the stigma surrounding many of them,” she said, adding that she hopes to address this gap in narrative with her exhibit. “While this exhibit is by no means a comprehensive analysis or display of queer history and literature, I see it as a way to introduce a general audience to these topics,” she said. “If everyone who looked at the exhibit walked away with an appreciation for the activists at Stonewall and the writers that came before and after them, I would be really proud.”
(11/21/19 11:01am)
Students in Dance Professor Laurel Jenkins’ class “The Place of Dance” and artist-in-residence Tori Lawrence will perform original works at the annual Fall Dance Concert. The concert, which will take place at 7:30 p.m. this Friday and Saturday, Nov. 22–23 features six pieces by the class’ five students and Lawrence. According to Asha Williams ’22.5, a choreographer who will be performing her piece in the concert this weekend, the concert serves as a finale for the course.
Williams, who began dancing when she was five years old, says that she still has much to learn when it comes to dance.“My journey always continues, and I never know what my relationship is going to be with dance,” she said. Her piece reflects this idea of journey, and contains three parts: Naked, In Flux, and Unwritten. “I made [my piece] about a journey because I’m going through a journey right now,” Williams said. “This semester has been a very tumultuous time, emotionally. I’ve been going through moments of understanding that I’m going through a journey for the first time in a long time.”
Unlike Williams’ heavily choreographed piece, John Cambefort ’21 built his primarily improvised work by beginning with a single word. “I started making [my piece] with no theme in mind,” he said. “I started with the word ‘play.’” Cambefort used early rehearsals to experiment with different “scores” – tasks and loose direction used to aid improvisation – and began to build a piece that varied considerably between performances.
“[Choreographing] has been kind of hard,” he said. “When we started, the first showing was extremely improvised, and people loved it. But that’s the thing with improvisation: some days it’s good and some days it’s just not.” To help solidify the piece – a trio featuring Cambefort, Kole Lekhutle ’20 and Martin Troška ’21 – Cambefort added an audio track of a subway train. “I settled with the metro idea because we had these individual sections,” he said, “but people were like, ‘Where’s the thread?’” Now that he has settled on a score, Cambefort says he has been focusing on preserving the energy improvisation brings to a piece.“I need to think about how I can I keep the fun-ness and the originality of improvisation,” he said.
Marquise Adeleye ’20, another student in the class, is working on lighting design for his piece as well as the pieces choreographed by Cambefort and Williams. In addition, Adeleye has designed the costumes for his piece and edited the music that accompanies his work.
Adeleye, who is not dancing in the concert, says that his choreography reflets themes of relationships and emotions that are at the center of those relationships. “[Relationships] develop us into the person we are at the end of the day: whether they’re familial, whether they’re romantic, whether they’re friendships, they’re all relationships that have some type of emotion individually attached to each person,” he said. “Those relationships are what create us, and that’s what [my piece] is about.”
His approach to dance as it concerns human interaction is something Sam Kann ’20.5 is also interested in. “I decided that I really wanted to make a piece about belonging and what it means to belong and where we belong and how we don’t belong,” she said. “It started out as thinking of how people can be really similar but not belong together – like all these students at Middlebury are the same age and are interested in a lot of the same stuff but are super lonely and isolated, or like people in New York City who are all wearing suits and are probably working at the same type of company but never talk.”
Kann has fused this idea with Jenkins’ class to experiment with the intersection of music, words and dance. This experimentation, Kann says, originated over J-Term when she and collaborators created a 45-minute-long work. The work, titled “Intimacy and Future S*it,” explored the simultaneous creation of music and dance. This is a concept Kann has elaborated on in her new work with the addition of words and stories spoken by her dancers.
“I really like words in dance because I think it really helps dance feel more accessible,” she said. “It’s radical and boundary pushing. I think words make people more comfortable and allow people to think about themes more easily than in abstract dance.”
Though Kann’s piece is the only work in the concert featuring vocal storytelling, student Lucy Grinnan ’19.5 is using their thesis to explore story in dance. “I’m interested in how texts work within pieces and the potential of visual metaphor to build narrative,” they said.
To build such a narrative, Grinnan turned to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “I was thinking this summer about the vulnerability of changing in front of people – not physically changing but the feeling of being watched while you are evolving as a person,” they said. “I wanted to make a piece about that.” They found themselves focusing on the story of Arachne and Athena to explore this concept of change. “One of my dancers said, ‘I feel like I used to be a really angry person and I’m trying to be a less angry person,’” Grinnan said. “I started thinking about the story of Arachne and Athena and the ways that story represents anger. That became [central] in terms of the ways that people can hide vulnerability and also the ways that communities show, but also help, with vulnerability.”
Along with the five student works, Artist-in-Residence Tori Lawrence has also been building a piece for the Fall Dance Concert. Her piece – the only faculty piece in the show – is the annual Newcomer’s Piece. A pillar of the Fall Dance Concert, the Newcomer’s Piece is open to any dancer who has not yet performed with Middlebury’s dance department. Lawrence, a dancer and filmmaker, used 16mm film to produce a silent, “handmade” motion picture.
“It’s been fun to teach [the newcomers] as if they were collaborators of mine,” Lawrence said. “Everyone has a say in what we’re doing, and if there’s interest in the camera, I’ll take time to be like, ‘Oh, this is what this is, this is how you load the film, this is how I used the light mater.’ It’s been fun to teach people in the field.”
The film will be put to music composed by guest musicians Seth Wenger and Cole Highnam from New Haven and New York City, and will also be accompanied by a foley (which Lawrence explained as “recreating diegetic sounds of the wind, grass, movement sounds, etc.”), as well as by a melody composed by Wenger and performer by Peter Sergay ’22.
(11/14/19 10:58am)
I woke up Thursday morning to loud voices outside my door. I am not someone who enjoys being jostled from sleep by someone else’s conversation, however interesting. As a result, my internal monologue went along the lines of, “Who do these loud people think they are?”
And then I began listening to their conversation.
“It will be nice to have weekends off, now,” said one voice.
“Where were you working before this?” asked the other.
“I did security. I worked at McDonald’s for a little bit, too.”
They shared a laugh, from which I guessed that neither of them thought very highly of the employment opportunities offered by Ronald McDonald.
Then, the second voice asked, “How old are you?”
“I’m 22,” the first voice replied.
22. The person behind that voice was 22 years-old and cleaning bathrooms used by people about their age — people like me. That voice was 22 and spent what might otherwise have been their college years working seven days a week, while I am spending mine typing out op-eds and essays.
I am undoubtedly a member of the middle class. At Middlebury, there are many people who are more affluent than my family and I. There are also people who are as well-off as I am. There are also people who grew up with far less than I did (at least socioeconomically speaking).
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]The aspect of wealth I abhor is the distance it creates.[/pullquote]
On campus, discussion often turns to money. Money, here, is a topic of contention. There are people — and I have been this person at times — who roll their eyes at those who are from more affluent backgrounds. But the aspect of wealth I dislike is not the wealth. The aspect of wealth I abhor is the distance it creates. This distance can be observed in assumptions that we make about people whose socioeconomic statuses are different from our own. These assumptions range from assuming a person is able to buy a flashy new sweatshirt, to more severe notions such as the belief that peers attending community colleges are not motivated or ambitious. These kinds of money-related assumptions are not always symptoms of cruelty or malice, but are often simply the result of ignorance. This is an ignorance that I am not immune to.
In fact, this ignorance is why I was shocked to awaken to a 22-year-old talking about their previous work experience. I was shocked because, surrounded by my primarily wealthy or comfortable peers at Middlebury, I had forgotten my own privilege. Still, that conversation reminded me — first thing in the morning — that I am someone who is lucky. Lucky enough to forget about questions of distance and ignorance and privilege on a Thursday morning; lucky enough to attend a school where someone else (someone who is only a few years older than me) takes out the trash and wipes down the bathroom mirror.
I thought about that for a moment — thought about the way this other world was existing right beside my own. I shivered thinking that, if things had shaken out differently, that voice and I could have ended up in class together.
I began to reflect on the good fortune I had taken for granted — the way I had the means to spontaneously travel to Boston for Fall Break, the way my mother was determined to minimize my college debt. I thought about the way my aunt always wiped down the counter with a washcloth when we stayed at hotels, saying that she wanted to leave less work for whoever had to clean up after us. And then I thought about all the dried-yellow urine that was left on our Gifford toilet seat after every weekend, about this voice that was being trained to clean it up. I thought about the invisibility of their world, their world that did not have the opportunity that I had. Their world was right outside my door. I wasn’t going to forget that. I sighed and got up to use the bathroom.
Writer’s note: I would like to note that this op-ed makes the assumption that the “voice” is working as a custodian as a result of not attending school. I do not know the full story of this individual, as this is a conversation that I overheard. This piece is a reflection of myself, and I would like to acknowledge that I know only the context of my own privilege.
(10/31/19 10:04am)
The commons system will no longer exist come next fall, the college administration announced in an email to the Middlebury community on Oct. 24.
The email detailed a host of changes to the current residential life system following a multi-year review of the system, including the creation of a new Office of Residential Life, a push to work towards building a new student center, and the consolidation of deans’ offices into two first-year “clusters.” All together, the administration is calling the changes “BLUEprint.”
The review process, which started to take shape in spring 2018, originated in Community Council in 2017, after a New York Times article about income inequality inspired the council to conduct a student survey . The survey ultimately pointed to discrepancies in residential life experiences among students. The following year, an external committee convened to build the report that would eventually become “How Will We Live Together.” The report’s recommendations informed the upcoming overhaul.
Currently, first-year students live in one of five first-year halls, depending on their assigned commons. Per the new system, first-years will instead either live in Allen and Battell halls on the north side of campus, or Stewart and Hepburn halls south of College Street, depending on which “cluster” they are in. These changes will turn Hepburn from a sophomore dorm to a first year dorm, while removing first years from Hadley, a first-year dormitory located in the Ross complex.
Administrators chose to move first-years nearer to each other in response to the external committee’s report, which said that relocating first year students to live in closer proximity to one another “should increase students’ sense of belonging at Middlebury, and reduce some of the tensions related to diversity and inclusion that we heard about during our visit to campus.”
These changes effectively put an end to the commons system, which was first established after the removal of Greek life from campus in 1989 and modeled off of the house system at universities like Harvard and Yale. The commons were put into place in 1991 and have faced major adjustments twice since then.
The upcoming changes to residential life attempt to combat the “inefficiency” produced by the commons model, while also working to better serve and support students, administrators told The Campus.
“I was shocked at how complicated the system was... and the faculty were not being used as effectively as they could be,” said Rob Moeller, a psychology professor who specializes in the mental health of college students.
Moeller has been an integral member of the How Will We Live Together Steering Committee. The committee formed in the spring of 2018 to develop and write the final recommendations.
“[We realized] that the experiment of randomizing students into communities didn’t work,” Moeller said. “You can tell someone that their new mascot is a squirrel or frog or a rhino, but it didn’t resonate with students. Students weren’t walking around saying, ‘Go squirrels.’”
The plan also suggests planning will soon be underway for the renovation or replacement of Battell Hall, the biggest first year dorm on campus, as well as for a new student center. Administrators said that the college cannot operate without the beds provided by Battell Hall, meaning that the building will likely continue to operate while a new facility is built.
A re-centralized residential life office
The shift away from the commons system will fundamentally change how the college approaches student residential life staff. It will also add two new positions to the residential life team, including an associate dean for residential life and an assistant director of student success. These positions will be filled by AJ Place,who served as theDean of Brainerd commons until spring 2019, and Michelle Audette, who now works as Middlebury’s ADA Coordinator, respectively.
The positions will both fall within a consolidated Office of Residential Life. This office, in addition to directing students towards resources, will work to remove some of the workload from deans, the number of which will be downsized from five to four.
The college will use new software to help deans manage student needs, and deans will be relieved of some of their residential life responsibilities. This shift is intended to help ease deans’ workloads as they become responsible for larger numbers of students.
The creation of these positions is already underway, according to AJ Place.
“I’ll be supervising the folks that we know now as the CRDs, which is what I’m already doing this year,” Place said.
Place will also be supervising Assistant Director for New Student Experience and Residential Education Kristy Carpenter and Assistant Director for Housing Operations Kady Shea.
These positions are one such way the college hopes to reach students “proactively” and move away from what Place termed a “purely reactive” approach. Place hopes this re-centralization will provide students with heightened access to resources, including programming that will help educate students on a range of topics.
“In Brainerd last year, we piloted a program in the fall [where] we did a number of series of events for first-year students, specifically,” Place said. “We had our first program with the CTLR on time management, which doesn’t sound like a fun topic, but we had well over 60 people at [the event] just here in Stewart. That tells me that students value having that [kind of resource] right here and that we’ve missed the mark on not doing that.”
With this shift, the administration hopes to have deans work in concert — rather than individually — to promote student wellness.
“When we think about what mental health is, when you think about health in general, it’s not just responding to problems, it’s about prevention,” Moeller said. “We’ve got all these great people on campus. We don’t need to just be in crisis response mode. Let’s start to use these skills in meaningful ways to really help all students.”
History of the commons
While the commons shape current students’ perceptions of how Middlebury organizes housing and residential life, this was not always the case. American Studies Professor Tim Spears was a member of the 1998 Residential Life Committee that fleshed out the College’s original idea for the commons system.
Spears said the original plan stipulated that each commons would have housing for all four classes, a dining hall, a dean’s office, and housing for the faculty head. If fully realized, these commons would have resembled Ross and Atwater facilities.
While this original plan was passed with hopes of creating five “microcosms” that would function together as the Middlebury experience, the plan was drastically altered in 2007, when it became clear that the college did not possess the financial means to build the infrastructure required by the 1998 plan. The last commons construction project was Atwater, which occurred at the same time the Davis Family Library was being built in 2004.
Due to the financial constraints, the college turned to a 4/2 plan, which features “a 4-year commons affiliation and a 2-year residency,” as described by a blog post written by Spears and dated September, 2007. This is the plan students at Middlebury have come to know — a plan under which students maintain their relationship with their commons Deans for the duration of their college experience, while only living within their commons for half of that time.
The 4/2 plan looked to keep the elements of the commons that had already been implemented, while letting go of the price tags required by the original framework. Though the move saved the college millions of dollars, it left the original commons vision largely unrealized.
Karl Lindholm, a retired American Studies professor who has worked in all five commons, including as faculty head of Atwater and the dean of Cook, explained that the idea behind the plan was to “decentralize” administrative offices.
“The word that was on everybody’s lips was decentralization,” he said. “In other words, we decentralized the Dean of Students office.”
Spears, who was the dean of the college when the 4/2 plan went into effect, said the goal of this decentralization was to create well-resourced communities to enhance the student experience. He wrote on his blog that he was saddened by the move away from the original vision of the commons, but that the shift was made with the belief that inter-commons relationships would be enough to sustain the reduced system.
“You build connections with students or faculty and commons staff during your first year or two, and then you move off and do other things, but those connections bring you back to the commons,” he said.
Those benefits were reflected in the 2018 survey — over 65% of students reported that the commons helped them to get to know other students, while 58% reported that the commons system helped them meet other people.
While the commons spurred inter-student connections, the data did not support the idea that the commons was central to community building, which was the intention behind its implementation.
“The impact [of the commons system] is only being seen mostly in the first two years and in a very small number of students, and it’s a very expensive program,” said Baishakhi Taylor, the Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students.
John Gosselin, a senior who has served both on Community Council and on the How Will We Live Together Steering Committee, said that the faculty head model in particular does not make financial sense.
“The role of the commons heads originally worked a lot better than they do now,” he said. “The way it works now is we have very small dinners that cost $150,000 to cater for the five houses. That money could be spent better elsewhere.”
Gosselin said three people could be hired to work directly with students for the same amount of money.
Though the college has not confirmed whether the commons heads positions will be eliminated in the new model, there is no evidence suggesting that positions will carry over. The recommendations submitted by the Steering Committee describe the faculty head model as “real,” but says that “the preponderance of evidence suggests that [the reach of the faculty head position] is limited to a relatively small number of students, and relatively limited in scope, manifesting mainly as hosting dinner events.”
Both the Steering Committee and the administration used information gathered in the 2018 Student Residential Life Survey to support the idea that the common head positions are largely ineffective: data show that only 32% of students report having gotten to know their commons head.
Spears said that it is a “fair question” to assess how impactful the faculty head position is, especially because faculty are moving beyond the classroom, in some capacity, to serve in that role. He also noted figures such as those provided by the survey are hard to interpret.
“Just putting a number on it doesn’t really explain whether or how faculty are enhancing residential life and benefitting particular students,” he said.
Even if over 50% of students surveyed reported not having gotten to know their faculty head, it remains difficult to imagine eliminating the position, which is founded on support and care, Spears said.
“I’m sensitive to the fact that, in doing these interviews and meeting with people, there isn’t one single person connected to the current system who didn’t put their heart and soul into it,” Moeller said. “Each person really cares about students. Sometimes it’s difficult being told that you’re a part of something that’s not working as well as it should — it’s hard to hear that you’ve been pouring your soul into something and the outcomes clearly are not where they should be.”
Commons senators and student res life staff opine
Many students involved in the commons feel they were not properly consulted regarding the upcoming changes. Myles Maxie ’22, Middlebury’s Wonnacott Senator, is worried about how students will represent themselves given that the recommendations do not specify how the Student Government Association will change with the elimination of the commons. The current structure has five Senate positions affiliated with the commons — one seat to each commons — and the possible elimination of those positions would decrease senate seats by one third.
“I don’t appreciate the fact that this [new] system doesn’t have full thought behind it,” Maxie said. “They’re unsure on the status of commons councils, given the fact that they’ve removed the commons.”
Teddy Best ’22, who serves as Ross commons Senator, expressed a similar worry.
“I am concerned that the administration did not notify commons senators or commons councils of where they were headed with this process,” he said. “There’s no doubt there are problems with the commons system — that isn’t the question. The question is, what should we do about it? If it’s the case that the commons system is going to be abolished, that seems like a drastic response.”
Maxie also identified poor communication during the plan’s creation as a source of concern. Commons senators were officially notified of the final changes at the same time as the rest of the student body, leaving many to feel that they were not adequately involved in the review process.
“I don’t appreciate the lack of transparency that exists throughout this process,” he said. “This report is titled How Will We Live Together, and how can you live together with people when you can’t trust them to actually tell you the details on how they’re completing this process?”
Maxie and Best are not alone — residential life staff, including Ross Community Assistant Steph Miller ’20, expressed concern with the move away from the commons structure.
“I think a lot was overlooked in the ways these reviews were done,” Miller said. “I think some of the reviews were done hastily. The external reviewers were on campus for less than two or three days,” said Miller, who also expressed concern with the methods used to conduct the review.
“They didn’t talk to that many people and they didn’t talk to the [commons] teams as a collective,” she said. “I think if they had done that, they would’ve seen what is so magical about the commons.”
The Steering Committee, however, viewed the process differently.
“I don’t think there’s anything we could do that would have made this more transparent,” Moeller said. “Everything, the notes, the meetings, the reports on the go site. We would actually send out email invites to groups, blasting out [messages and] saying, ‘who’s willing to come for 40 minutes, an hour?’”
The past week has seen little public backlash to the elimination of the commons system, but it is a dimension of this announcement that is undeniably present. Though the greater student body has, for the most part, shown indifference towards the changes, many people affiliated with the commons and their offices were not available for comment or unwilling to speak on the record for this story, and several alluded to feelings of uncertainty and sadness at the prospect of moving away from the commons system.
Correction: A previous version of the article misstated that commons senators were informed of accepted changes prior to the rest of the student body. The article has since been updated.
(10/10/19 10:00am)
Vermont Governor Phil Scott (R) made public his support for the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump at a Sept. 26 press conference, making him the first Republican governor in the nation to do so.
“I think the inquiry is important, yes, and where it leads from here is going to be driven by the facts that are established,” Scott said in the press conference.
Scott, a Republican, has been a critic of Trump since the 2016 election cycle.
“[Scott’s] criticism of Trump is pretty well-known,” Professor of Political Science Matthew Dickinson said. “It is a signal, in a very moderate way, that states, ‘I’m not one of those Republicans that will die in support of Trump.’”
Dickinson, an expert in American politics, said that Scott’s decision to back the inquiry was not the first time he publicly spoke out against President Trump.
“When Trump first announced his candidacy and it was clear he was going to win the nomination, Governor Scott was one of the first governors to come out against him,” he said. “That raised a lot of eyebrows because he didn’t have to do that.”
Though Dickinson noted that Scott has never been afraid to critique the President, Dickinson said that Scott’s decision to endorse the inquiry differs from an endorsement of an impeachment.
“At this stage, it’s not a full-blown impeachment,” Dickinson said. “It’s an inquiry into whether we want an impeachment. There’s no actual case being made that says, ‘Yes, the President should be impeached.’”
Dickinson said the real test will be if the Democrats can come up with evidence that warrants impeachment proceedings, and if the Republicans respond by refuting that their criteria for impeachment does not fit within the parameters of the Constitution.
“Then what will Scott say?” Dickinson said.
Dickinson also believes that backing the impeachment inquiry may help Scott’s re-election campaign. As governor of one of the bluest states in the country, Scott’s decision to support the impeachment inquiry reflects Vermont’s larger political atmosphere. It could be a decision that many Vermonters agree with.
“If Phil Scott is running for reelection in a state that is very liberal, he’s hoping that by supporting an impeachment inquiry, he’s telling the voters more in line with Vermont’s politics more than the Republican national, and he’s hoping it will help him,” he said.
“The governor is certainly reflecting the views of Vermonters who aren’t strong supporters [of Trump],” former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas ’72 said. Douglas, also a Republican, was governor of Vermont from 2003 until 2011.
Like Scott, Douglas identifies with a more moderate form of Republicanism that he says has remained in the Northeast, despise growing partisan tensions in Washington.
“Vermont Republicans generally are viewed as more moderate,” Douglas said. “I always felt I had to work across the aisle. I had democratic majorities most of the time I was in office.”
Though Vermont politicians have maintained relatively civil as tensions have flourished elsewhere, Douglas said that he, too, has witnessed the partisan divide grow in Vermont.
“The way I usually put it is it’s not as good as it used to be,” he said. “I was talking with a former legislator last weekend and we agreed that there is a little more rancor and partisanship in Montpelier than there was in the old days. Some of the national mood can’t help but bleed into Vermont, unfortunately.”
Regardless of how party politics differ between Vermont and D.C., Douglas, like Dickinson, was quick to point out that there are many steps that must be taken before impeachment proceedings begin in earnest.
“On impeachment, this is just an initial step,” he said. “My own thought was that if the House leaders feel they have a basis on which to begin an inquiry, then they should do what they feel is right. I think the governor was just saying that if they want to take a look at it, that’s fine.”
While Scott’s decision to support the inquiry makes a political statement, his position in Vermont politics ultimately does not allow him to weigh in on the national level.
“Phil Scott, whether he supports [the inquiry] or not, is not going to affect the debate in the House or the Senate,” Dickinson said. “But it reminds us that the brand of Republicanism that he espouses is a more moderate version than that of the national Republican Party.”