30 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(11/21/19 10:59am)
On November 10, journalists from The Daily Northwestern, Northwestern University’s student-run newspaper, posted an editorial apologizing for the way in which they covered student protests of a speech by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The reporters expressed regret for posting photographs of protesters on Twitter without the subjects’ consent, as well as for using the school’s directory to find contact information for protesters. “Ultimately, The Daily failed to consider our impact in our reporting surrounding Jeff Sessions,” the editorial board wrote. “We know we hurt students that night, especially those who identify with marginalized groups.”
In response to this piece, mainstream journalists collectively recoiled, criticizing The Daily’s choice to apologize for using traditional journalistic methods in the strongest of terms. The New York Times’ White House Correspondent Maggie Haberman tweeted, “One of the biggest problems US journalists face in this day and age is how few people understand what standard news-gathering process looks like. A student newspaper saying normal process is somehow a bad thing is incredibly troubling.” Byron Tau of the Wall Street Journal agreed with Haberman’s characterization, tweeting, “In appalling ignorance of the basics of news-gathering, a Northwestern student newspaper: apologizes for taking photos of students protesting Jeff Sessions and for using the student directory to text students to ask if they wanted to be interviewed.” All across Twitter, news programs and newspapers, journalists expressed similar shock and horror at what they perceived to be an irresponsible abdication of proper journalistic practice.
The unified condemnation of this apology by media figures across the political spectrum is misplaced, misguided and representative of an outdated journalistic tradition. What the Northwestern reporters discovered is that journalism does not, should not and cannot simply “stick to discovering and reporting the facts.” Their apology expresses an understanding that the conventional journalistic focus on objectivity above all else very often ignores social and cultural context.
A student journalist should not simply ignore the feelings of those about whom they report; they cannot simply report the facts and detach themselves from the impacts that report has on its subjects. Those who lashed out so strongly against the Northwestern apology forget or refuse to recognize that student journalists are students. In a way that a New York Times reporter never really will be, student journalists are part of the story — they are subjects themselves. As people who also occupy the environment in which a story unfolds, and who have close relationships with those affected by the story, student reporters are often caught between journalistic orthodoxy on the one hand, and empathetic coexistence on the other.
When I was assigned to cover the protests of the Charles Murray speech at Middlebury in 2017, I experienced this dilemma firsthand. As a journalist, it is drilled into your head to gather as much information as you possibly can: talk to as many people from as many different perspectives as possible, take as many photos as possible, record as much audio as possible. But during the process of information-gathering for my article, I came to realize that the very information I collected could be weaponized in online communities. If I highlighted the stories of individuals who were involved in the protests, I would be identifying participants who might otherwise remain anonymous members of a crowd. I knew that the video I took inside the auditorium would likely attract comments expressing vitriol, rage and harassment toward the protesters.
I agonized over whether or not to publish the video and use people’s real names in my article because, whether it was “good journalism” or not, I would be directly responsible for exposing these people to harassment from those with much larger, more influential platforms. In spite of this, I decided to post the video, and I named protesters and organizers in my article. The reaction from society and the Internet was even more significant than I thought it would be. The videos I and a fellow Campus reporter took were immediately inundated with harassing, hateful comments. National news sources even used the videos in their coverage, which was generally neutral in tone but nonetheless exposed protesters’ faces to the world.
These individuals were and are my friends and colleagues, people I care and worry about (likely more so than a mainstream journalist would when it came to their subjects). When you live and go to school with the people who you cover, the stakes are higher and much more real. You have to live with the impacts of your coverage.
A student who chooses to protest is, of course, accepting some risk in doing so. And, high-profile actions like shutting down Charles Murray or protesting Jeff Sessions will inevitably garner more attention than most other events at a college. But these activists — especially minority students who have legitimate reasons to fear institutional and societal backlash — often rely and depend on the anonymity of a group for safety in standing up for something they believe in.
The protesters who shared their perspectives in my story knew that their names would be published, and they expressed desire to counter the narrative that had already taken hold nationwide. I still feel comfortable with that decision. However, I am less convinced that my decision to publish the video was correct. It is one of a small number of videos of the event that I know of, and it very clearly shows the identity of many protesters without their explicit permission. It may still be that the net benefit of documenting and sharing evidence of the event outweighs the risk of harm, which is what so many mainstream reporters argued in response to The Daily. Even so, I would have been irresponsible had I not considered the very real threats of harassment that the participants faced, and had I ignored the challenges that The Daily identifies.
What works for the New York Times does not, and should not, work for The Daily Northwestern and The Campus. Student journalists have a unique window into the situations that unfold on campus which gives an advantage over any external news source. This also means that we have both the ability and responsibility to be more empathetic than standard journalistic practice might suggest. I made a point of forging connections with the organizers and asking for permission in person because I had that opportunity, and thus it was necessary. Responding to the same obligation, the Northwestern reporters apologized for texting students out of the blue, not because such a practice is a breach of ethics in itself, but because there are better options available to journalists at universities.
The editors of The Daily Northwestern were right to apologize and challenge their own methods, even if those methods are considered acceptable by the wider journalistic community. They have the ability and the obligation to go beyond standard practice. As students, these reporters are part of every story themselves. They can do better.
Alex Newhouse is a member of the class of 2017 and a former Campus editor.
(05/11/17 1:59am)
The Middlebury Debate Society is one of the oldest extant student organizations on campus. It has been around for over one hundred years, and was founded around the same time as the Campus itself. Although there has been some sort of debate team around for the past century, it has morphed several times. Today’s society only vaguely resembles the debating clubs of the past.
The exact founding date of the first Middlebury debate team is unknown, but the first active club appears to have begun in 1912-1913, formed by members of the class of 1916. In one of the earliest mentions of organized, competitive debate, a writer for the Campus said, “Members of the class of 1916 interested in debating met some time ago and organized a Freshman Debating Society.”
This first group of students organized mostly for intramural debate, planning a series of topics on current events such as “Resolved: That the U.S. Government should own and operate the railroads.” Although this is an issue specific to their time period, some of their other topics resonate much more with the current political climate. For example, their next debate focused on the topic “Resolved: That the U.S. Government should further restrict immigration.”
Both the students involved and the writer of the article hoped that the debate team would grow into something larger. At the end of the article, the reporter said, “With the material on hand it is anticipated that a credible team will be developed to maintain Middlebury’s standard against her ancient rivals from Northfield.” Northfield presumably refers to Norwich University, which is located in the town and has historically been athletic rivals with the College.
For several years after its inception, the debate team remained an exclusive pastime of first-years. It retained the name “Freshman Debating Society” for some time, although it is uncertain for how long. However, some students were already pushing for a larger, school-wide debate team a month after those first articles about the first-year organization were written.
In an article published in May 1913, a Campus reporter said, “The freshmen have been energetic and brave enough to go forth, survey carefully, and win a good fight in the field of debate. We should, by all means, follow their example and as a college send out men who by intellectual powers and strength of oratory could tack more victories to our record.”
By 1922-23, the society was simply called the “Debate Team,” and appears to have included multiple class years. A photograph of eight debaters and their faculty advisor still hangs on the wall of the Kirk Alumni Center, one of the few hints of early debate artifacts that still remain on campus. After this point, it turned into an established rhetoric organization and held several debates a year.
These debates were big events on campus: they were held in Mead Chapel, the President of the College presided over them, and on-campus musical clubs were often invited to play. Later in the 1920s and in the 1930s, a women’s debating club was founded. Men’s debates had an entry fee of 25 cents, while women’s debates were free. According to documents in the College’s special collections and old Campus articles, the team’s main events seem to have been these scheduled, large-production debates.
They did not simply debate against themselves, either. The College’s debate team invited other organizations from all over the country and even overseas. On Nov. 14, 1934, for example, student debaters from the University of Oxford traveled to the College to debate the topic, “Resolved: that the abandonment of an isolationist policy is essential to American recovery.” Other invitees included a mixed team from Scottish universities, Cambridge University’s team, and a team composed of College faculty members.
The College’s team was able to afford these events because a wealthy alum of the University of Vermont took an early and passionate interest in helping Vermont debate survive and grow. It is nearly impossible to tell when this alum, Edwin Lawrence, began donating to the debate team, but former Debate Society captain Nate Rifkin ’15 believes that he set up an endowment around 1915-16. Associate Dean of Students for Student Activities and Orientation Derek Doucet has traced it back to an original $1000 gift in 1922.
This endowment originally provided funding primarily for special prizes given to winners of tournaments, but over time, Lawrence increased the size of the endowment. It came to fully fund both UVM and Middlebury debate teams, and during the twentieth century, the College and UVM met in an annual Edwin Lawrence debate.
To this day, the Lawrence endowment funds the Debate Society and the Model United Nations team at the College. There is also a Lawrence Debate Room in Wright Theater, although the current Debate Society no longer uses it.
In 1981, the American Parliamentary Debate Association (APDA) was founded in an attempt to organize the disordered state of American debate. According to Rifkin, who studied APDA records while he was enrolled at the College, Middlebury’s debate team joined early on in APDA’s history.
However, it was not until recently that the society has found success on the circuit. Rifkin and Frank Wyer ’15 were the first College pair to make it to an “out” round (an elimination round) in a tournament, while Rifkin and James Callison ’17.5 were the first pair to win a tournament.
Alongside its recent successes, the Debate Society has grown both in membership and in scope. As a result of the Lawrence endowment and the demands of having to travel, the Debate Society now has a budget of over $50,000 a year.
This means that the leadership can send students to tournaments across the country and throughout the world. They have travelled as far as Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Jamaica, and continue to be yearly competitors at the Oxford and Cambridge tournaments.
(05/04/17 3:59am)
The first official judicial hearing for students who participated in the March 2 protests against Dr. Charles Murray is scheduled to take place today, May 4, as of press time.
The hearing will examine the cases of at least 18 respondents — the official term for students who have been charged with violating the College Handbook. The respondents requested to have their hearing as a large group.
The College offered students the option to have their case heard individually, as a member of a small group, or as part of the large group. At the time of this report, no students have chosen to testify as a small group, while a few have opted for an individual hearing. Individual hearings have yet to be scheduled.
The College is viewing the events of March 2 as two separate protests. The first is the protest that prevented Murray from speaking after he took the stage. The second is the one that continued in Wilson Hall as the College live-streamed a conversation between Murray and Allison Stanger, professor of international politics and economics.
Students whom the College believes participated in both the first and second protests are those who are facing official college discipline, and who have opted to go forward with the judicial process. Official punishment is anything that goes on a student’s permanent record.
As reported in the April 27 issue of The Campus, the College has already placed more than 30 students on probation for participating in the first protest. Probation is a form of unofficial discipline, and means that a student will have a letter placed in their file that will be removed at the end semester, as long as they do not violate another college policy.
The 18 students who are proceeding with Thursday’s hearing are not contesting that they violated the “Demonstrations and Protest” policy of the College Handbook. Rather, the hearing will determine the type of sanction that those students will receive. Students who want to challenge the College’s account of what occurred or object to the College’s ruling have been provided with other adjudication options. At this time, it is unclear exactly what those options are. However, according to one person familiar with the situation, they will most likely consist of separate hearings.
SIT-IN
As a response to the way in which the administration has conducted the investigation into the events of March 2, a group of students, with support from faculty members, planned to conduct a sit-in protest in the Services Building on Friday, April 28. Their goal was to push the Middlebury College administration to be more transparent regarding the disciplinary process for students involved in the Murray protests.
The sit-in corresponded with greater efforts from faculty members to seek information from administrators regarding the disciplinary proceedings. Laurie Essig, associate professor of sociology and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, Linus Owens, associate professor of sociology and Sujata Moorti, professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies, were among a group of faculty members who reached out to the administration. Initially, they were hoping for more information from the meeting to better understand the disciplinary process and help students who are facing hearings.
“Our original plan was to support students who wanted to take a stand against the opacity of the judicial process,” Moorti said. “We had invited other faculty to join us as well.”
According to Essig and Owens, they were able to set up meetings with Dean of the College Katy Smith Abbott and Provost Susan Baldridge prior to the sit-in.
However, as students and faculty gathered at Crossroads Cafe in preparation for the sit-in, both groups decided to merge the events. Dean of Students Baishakhi Taylor came to the gathering to answer questions at the request of Moorti, according to both Taylor and Moorti.
The crowd of students grew over the course of about two hours. Tyler McDowell ’19, a student who attended, estimated that 40 to 70 students and 10 to 15 professors showed up. Eventually, both Smith Abbott and Baldridge arrived to answer questions.
According to McDowell, many students asked questions about why the disciplinary process has not been a “restorative justice” model. He said administrators explained that there was an attempt last year to implement such a model, but it failed.
In a comment given to The Campus, Katy Smith Abbott said, “I am working hard on a plan for bringing Restorative Practices training to campus beginning in June.”
Restorative justice is a method of discipline that emphasizes reconciliation with victims and the community at large.
“Middlebury could have gone forward with a non-punitive and restorative process,” Essig said. “A decision could have been made that rather than holding students and only students responsible, all involved parties could have been invited to sit down to figure out what happened, what harm was caused and how dissent can happen in the future in productive ways.”
In the end, Moorti said, the administrators decided to allow students to choose a group hearing.
“The meeting has produced mixed results — a shift in the nature of the hearings but no substantive shift toward restorative justice or a clarification of how and what distinguishes unofficial from official college discipline,” she said.
Essig also described the meeting as having at least some positive effects.
“I think Friday showed a possibility that Middlebury as an institution can occasionally stop and actually listen to students when members of the community stand up for our shared values,” she said. “I hope that Friday’s small and momentary break in business as usual might signal that as an institution Middlebury can stop punishing protesters and decide to incorporate dissent into its notions of free speech and academic freedom in the future.”
(04/27/17 3:59am)
The College has officially begun to discipline those who participated in the March 2 protests that prevented Dr. Charles Murray from delivering a scheduled lecture.
According to an official statement released on April 17, the College has identified “more than 70 individuals it believes may be subject to disciplinary procedures under student handbook policies” due to their participation in the protests.
Of those identified, “more than 30 students have accepted disciplinary sanctions for their actions.” In that same statement, the College said, “We will not comment on the nature or range of the sanctions until the process is complete.”
In an effort to shed light on the proceedings, The Campus spoke with several students who had been called into disciplinary meetings regarding their actions on March 2. Given the sensitive situation and ongoing investigation, they described the nature of their meetings and what they were told would be the next steps on the condition of anonymity.
Individuals involved in the protests began receiving emails about potential discipline on Monday, April 3, the first week after spring break. The email, sent on behalf of either Karen Guttentag or Brian Lind, both associate deans for judicial affairs and student life, asked students to attend a meeting with either Guttentag or Lind in the College’s Service Building.
Initial emails did not say that the meeting pertained to the events of March 2. When some students asked for more information, some were initially told that it could not be provided. Others pressed harder and were eventually given information about the subject and nature of the meeting. They were scheduled for an hour.
Meetings consisted of a basic structure but varied in length and topics discussed. Students engaged in a conversation with either Guttentag or Lind about the College’s position and handbook policies. They were not read a script nor were notes taken, according to multiple students.
Before they were given a punishment, students were asked if they had any questions. Students were told that the College had either video or photographic evidence that they had participated in the protest by either standing, shouting, or holding signs. They either received unofficial or official college discipline. Some, after asking to see evidence, were shown either photos or videos of the protest.
Unofficial punishment, according to several students involved, has generally been given in the form of probation; official punishment is anything that goes on a student’s permanent record.
Students who are placed on probation have a letter placed in their file that will be removed at the end of the semester. However, if a student is placed on probation and then violates another college policy, the probation can become a part of their official record.
According to multiple students, the College has given unofficial punishment to students who participated in the protest prior to the live stream of the conversation held between Murray and Russell J. Leng ‘60 Professor of International Politics and Economics Allison Stanger. Students were told that those who continued to protest during the live stream in Wilson Hall may receive official college discipline. As of April 25, it is unclear whether or not any students have received official college discipline. Those investigations, as well as investigations into the protest prior to the start of the live stream, are ongoing.
While multiple students said that they understood that the College may have had to punish protesters, many expressed frustration with the process, saying that it seemed arbitrary and ill-defined. Others condemned the punishments altogether, citing them as an example of the College stifling students’ ability to express themselves.
The Campus will continue coverage as the story develops.
(03/10/17 3:34am)
On Feb. 22, the Middlebury College American Enterprise Institute Club published a group op-ed in The Campus that extended an “invitation” to the Middlebury College community “to encourage robust discussion and expose the Middlebury Community to diverse thoughts, opinions and understandings on the important topics of today,” according to the authors. The event was a lecture by political scientist and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) WH Brady Scholar, Charles Murray.
Soon after the announcement of Murray’s talk, both students and faculty began organizing in opposition. The reasons why Charles Murray sparked such passionate resistance and controversy are complicated and diverse, and motivations among those opposed to him were varied. Murray is considered one of the leading libertarian academics in the United States and has had significant influence on both political science and policymaking; for example, his work influenced the welfare debate during the 1990s.
Although he was invited to the College to speak on his most recent book, Coming Apart, which attempts to track and explain a growing divide between white “intellectual elite” and white working class people, Murray is best known for his work, “The Bell Curve.” This book has been fiercely debated since its publication in 1994, as it posits links between intelligence and race based on differences in average IQ scores between races.
Parts of his methodology have been challenged, especially his use of certain data to arrive at more general conclusions on the nature versus nurture debate. “The Bell Curve” and some of Murray’s later comments have resulted in his classification as a “white nationalist” by many, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization “dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry,” as stated on their website.
An Invitation to Speak
Murray has spoken at Middlebury before, once in April 2007, on “The Bell Curve.” The event sparked controversy but not to the same extent of last Thursday; it was not covered in The Campus. Last semester, the College chapter of AEI gathered to discuss an invitation for an expert from the organization to deliver a guest lecture. They made a list of academics associated with AEI and submitted it to the national organization.
AEI told the College chapter that Murray had accepted the invitation partly because of his close relationship with the College: he is the parent of a Middlebury graduate. The College chapter was provided funding by the national organization to host Murray and facilitate the talk. “Our goal … was to create a discussion on campus. We thought that his work on “Coming Apart” was really prescient,” AEI Vice President Alexander Khan ’17 said.
In the AEI chapter on campus, the executive board — which made the final decision to bring Murray to campus — disagreed on the best format for his planned lecture. Violet Low-Beinart ’19, a member of the board and a democrat, floated the possibility of treating this event differently than other academic lectures and offered the idea of a moderated panel format.
“We are a diverse group who hold a range of opinions and political ideologies,” she said of the board’s final decision not to pursue a panel format.
Addressing the internal debate, Phil Hoxie ’17.5, president and chair of the AEI executive council, determined that disagreement among board members was due to expectations of social ramifications. “I think the concerns were more of how this would be perceived [by] other people and not wanting to deal with what we’re dealing with right now,” he said.
Organizing Resistance
By evening on Feb. 24, several months after the AEI had scheduled Murray’s talk, the decision to bring Murray to the College had escalated into a campus-wide controversy. Over the weekend of Feb. 25-26, Middlebury Resistance, College Democrats, Wonderbread, other clubs and ad-hoc organizations were already beginning substantive organization efforts. Some of the first goals that emerged were to get the Department of Political Science to rescind its co-sponsorship in the event, to urge President of Middlebury Laurie L. Patton to not appear at the event and to pressure either the College or AEI to retract the invitation altogether.
On Monday, Feb. 27. Professors and students together led organizing efforts, which soon divided into two different groups: those who wished to carry out non-disruptive protests, and those who wished to shut down the event and prevent Murray from speaking.
Arianna Reyes ’18 and Sami Lamont ’17 helped solidify and structure the protests. Both students saw the event as an opportunity to take action and support values they care deeply about. “I was thinking a lot about what’s been going on in the world and how I’ve been really passive before right now in terms of actually organizing,” Reyes said.
Lamont explained that she took a de facto leadership role in the opposition when she realized the opposition energy could use additional direction and structure.
“It was seeing all the ideas floating around just on Facebook and then realizing that we needed a place to consolidate that if anything was going to happen,” she said, commenting on her decision to get involved.
However, both Reyes and Lamont quickly recognized that the protest efforts could never be completely uniform. Reyes focused on the group of students who wished to disrupt the speech, while Lamont instead helped run meetings that brainstormed non-disruptive methods of resistance.
“I was always definitely supportive of a diversity of tactics,” Reyes said. “I wasn’t trying to go against anyone and what they were doing.”
On Wednesday, March 1, the political science department held a community meeting for the purpose of providing a forum to ask questions about the department’s cosponsorship and to discuss the event more generally. In the course of the meeting, political science faculty also revealed internal divisions. Department Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science Bertram Johnson had previously sent an email around that provided insight into the department’s own debate over the sponsorship.
Associate Professor of Political Science Sarah Stroup offered an opening statement that presented her own mixed feelings about the lecture, as well as her thoughts on what made this event so unusual for the department.
“I think that it’s a trope in higher education that we are supposed to make [students] uncomfortable, and I will be honest that most of the time, we do not join you as faculty in that endeavor,” she said. “This is different because we are uncomfortable. Because I am uncomfortable. Because we are asked to be with you and think about what our responsibilities are when we navigate between the free exchange of ideas and our commitment to the community.”
Over an hour, the political science department offered different viewpoints of the controversy, from steadfast defenses of the decision to invite him to campus, to expressions of revulsion at Murray’s views and to encouragements of protest.
A Contentious Afternoon
On March 2, the day of the event, organizers made final efforts to assemble their response with signs, emails and brochures. The Middlebury AEI and the College Republicans clubs, which have partly shared leadership, called for members to arrive at the event as early as possible.
“This has become, for Alexander [Khan] and I, a battle for free speech and liberalism. We do not believe that Dr. Murray is what others claim him to be,” Hoxie wrote in an email.
More than an hour before the talk was penned to begin at 4:30 p.m., students, faculty and community members began lining up outside of McCullough Student Center.
The earliest arrivals were predominantly protesters. Many held signs with declarations like “Respect Resistance,” “F*ck White Supremacy,” “F*ck Eugenics,” and “Charles Murray Is Fake News.” On the lawn nearby, non-student activists gathered, and the flag of the Anti-Fascist movement flapped in the breeze. These activists, and anyone else not part of the college community, were not allowed inside the event.
Finally, the doors to the lecture opened and students went inside — but, due to capacity issues, only a fraction of those outside got seats.
Vice President for Communications and Chief Marketing Officer Bill Burger took the stage and stated the Middlebury guidelines on guest speakers, protests and demonstrations. His short speech incited several responses from the protesters.
“Middlebury College does not allow disruptive behavior at a community event or on campus. Disruptions may include purposefully blocking the view of others,” Burger said. To this, an unidentified student in the crowd said, “And inviting white supremacists.”
Burger continued, “Banners or items that block the audience’s view,” and the crowd immediately raised their signs high in response.
“You’re going to love this next part,” he said. “Noise or action that disrupts the ability of the audience to hear.” At that, the audience burst into cheers, drowning out the rest of Burger’s sentence.
Crowd outbursts and jeers continued through the opening speeches of Khan and Middlebury AEI Executive Council Member Ivan Valladares ’17. When President Patton took stage, she was met with a combination of boos and applause. However, after delivering her remarks, the crowd responded only with applause.
“We are an intellectual community, and part of a job of an intellectual community is to argue. If there ever was a time for Americans to take on arguments that affect us, it is now,” she said.
Murray finally walked on stage, and the crowd erupted into boos and chants. “This is going to be a real anti-climax,” he said. At that point, protesters stood up, turned around and together began reciting a pre-written speech.
“This is not respectful discourse or a debate about free speech,” they said. “These are not ideas that can be fairly debated. It is not ‘representative’ of the other side to give a platform to such dangerous ideologies. There is not a potential for an equal exchange of ideas.”
The speech then transformed into chants. These included: “Who is the enemy? White supremacy!” “Your message is hatred; we cannot tolerate it!” “Charles Murray, go away; Middlebury says ‘no way!’”
After ten minutes, Burger walked on stage again to announce that the format of the talk would transform into an interactive, livestreamed discussion between Murray and moderator Allison Stanger, the Russell J. Leng ’60 professor of international politics and economics. The two moved to an undisclosed location to film their conversation, a backup prepared in advance.
Over the course of Murray and Stanger’s discussion that lasted more than an hour (now available on the Middlebury News Room) some members in the crowd dispersed. But many protesters remained in the auditorium and continued chanting. The protests continued outside, as well, where some spoke into megaphones and sounded off sirens and drums. They had discovered the location of the live stream and made noise outside its window — in the video, their efforts can be heard clearly.
Back inside the auditorium, as administrators attempted to get the livestream projected onto the screen, tensions between protesters and attendees escalated. Students yelled at each other across Wilson Hall. “Respect free speech!” was shouted to some protesters. One protester yelled, “F*ck white supremacy!” to a group of students attempting to view the livestream. In response, one of those viewers shouted, “F*ck censorship!” The altercation ended when the protester yelled back, “F*ck free speech!”
Protesters and attendees alike dispersed as time went on, but a sizeable group of around 20 students continued to chant over Murray’s talk. Many students left to view the speech elsewhere. Outside the McCullough Student Center, a majority of protesters had left by 6 p.m.
About 15 protesters remained standing one entrance to McCullough, still yelling at the window of the room in which Murray was speaking. Among this group were non-student activists. Some protesters wore face masks to conceal their identities. Two masked protesters unfurled a banner that read, “Choke on your silver spoon, you f*cking Nazi.”
As Murray’s talk neared its end, the protesters dispersed around McCullough to cover all the entrances, waiting for his exit.
The events that followed caused the protests to draw attention from national news outlets, but the details and nuances of that day remain uncertain. What is agreed upon by Burger’s statements to the media, Stanger’s public Facebook post, Murray’s statement on AEI’s website and President Patton’s statements to the community is the following claim: When Murray exited the building, escorted by Burger and Stanger, the group was approached by protesters, several with their faces covered and some of whom were non-students. As Stanger and Murray attempted to get inside a car, protesters allegedly placed themselves in their path.
Murray was not physically harmed in the ensuing confrontation, but Stanger suffered from a neck injury following a physical altercation that transpired after she attempted to shield Murray and usher him to their vehicle. Stanger experienced whiplash that evening. On the following Sunday, she was diagnosed with a concussion. She was taken to Porter Hospital on both days.
Beyond this series of events, the nature of the confrontation and its many facets remain disputed. An article on the student-run blog Middbeat, unaffiliated with the administration, shared the perspective of anonymous students who claimed to be present at the conflict. Other recollections have provided contradictory details and viewpoints, and the questions of what happened, who initiated what and who exactly is at fault have ignited widespread and contentious debate, both on and off campus.
Following the day’s events, two seperate investigations are being launched; one an independent investigation by the College, the other an investigation into the confrontation that took place outside of McCullough to be done by the Middlebury Police Department, said President Patton in an email to the community last Monday.
“There is hard work ahead for all of us,” Patton wrote in her email. “Learning to be accountable to one another, and learning to stand in community with one another.”
Community Response
By Friday, March 3, Murray had departed, and students, faculty and staff awoke to a world suddenly focused on their college. The first reports of Stanger’s injury appeared in VTDigger and the Addison Independent, but national news outlets soon began running the story.
Within the College community, many have been asking, “What do these events mean?” In an email sent on Friday, Patton spoke of the event as a disappointing display of a deep divide in College culture.
“Last night we failed to live up to our core values,” she said in the message. “But I remain hopeful.”
“This was the saddest day of my life,” Stanger posted publicly to Facebook on Saturday, March 4. “We have got to do better by those who feel and are marginalized ... We must all realize the precious inheritance we have as fellow Americans and defend the Constitution against all its enemies, both foreign and domestic.”
For Khan and Hoxie, the disruptions and confrontation took them by surprise and seemed to confirm their fears about the state of freedom of speech on campus.
“If we’re not willing to listen to each other and we’re not willing to listen to what we have to say because we feel that that person might say something that we find offensive, or even hateful, we’re going to be in real trouble,” Hoxie said. “I firmly believe that freedom is one generation away from being extinct. We’re going to vote it away.”
Many students who participated in the protests expressed disappointment at the violent conclusion to events, but they also felt some satisfaction with the effectiveness of the protests within Wilson Hall and a determination to continue pushing these issues in the future.
“[The initial protest] was incredibly successful because we coordinated all of these people to turn around and that was a really powerful statement,” Reyes said. “It was successful because we did get [Murray and Professor Stanger] to leave Wilson Hall.”
Lamont and Reyes do not view the division as one that pits proponents of free speech against those who are willing to restrict free speech in pursuit of some other goal.
“That’s one thing [President Patton] mentions a lot in [her statements on] rhetorical resilience — confidence in debate — and I think one big reason why we were not into talking to Murray is that he’s shown that he’s pretty confident in his ideas and he’s not really about talking to them and engaging and reconsidering,” Lamont said.
For other students, however, the disruption of Murray’s talk and subsequent violence brought to the forefront a significant problem engrained in the community.
“The manner in which he was shut down lacked civility and, in my opinion, did not respect the rights of those students (many who disagree with him ideologically) but who, nevertheless, wanted to hear him speak and/or engage with him at an intellectual level,” said Abdi Mohamed ’18.5.
As of this writing, it is unclear exactly how the community will respond to these events. As Johnson said, “I think one of the more powerful things we can say in this moment is ‘I don’t know’. I don’t really know what’s next.”
Many see the events as having unleashed a deep and possibly irreconcilable gulf between students, while others see them as a way to come together, hash out differences and determine a path to progress. According to Lamont, preperations are already being made for meetings and discussions in the coming weeks.
Khan viewed the events as an opportunity for the community to reassess its values and culture, and to push back against attempts to stifle opposing views. “I don’t want the moral of this story to be that Middlebury couldn’t handle a viewpoint that wasn’t consistent with their own. I think that it’s so necessary and important that we try to change the culture on campus and create one of intellectual diversity.”
In an email sent out on Monday, March 6, President Patton reinforced this call for community building and discussion.
“This week, we will mark the beginning of opportunities for reflection and engagement,” she said. “We have much to discuss — our differences on the question of free speech and on the role of protest being two of the most pressing examples. In addition, I am extending an invitation to everyone to submit community-building ideas for consideration.”
“I’m committed to working on whatever’s next, and I’m grateful for those people on various sides of this who have reached out to have conversations,” Johnson said. “That’s how we’re going to proceed — through having conversations.”
Additional reporting by Christian Jambora and Will DiGravio.
(11/17/16 10:43pm)
News of Donald J. Trump’s election as the nation’s 45th president sent waves of shock and uncertainty throughout campus, prompting students to stage protests against the president-elect and discussions of what the next four years will bring.
For many, election night was a surprising and ultimately devastating display of the American electoral system at work. The long election season culminated in a packed Crossroads Café Tuesday night Nov. 8. When, at 7 p.m., Vermont projected to go for Hillary Clinton, the group of mostly liberal-leaning students cheered loudly, proud of the state for being the first in the country to vote for Clinton.
Most students felt optimistic at this point, and Crossroads had a celebratory feel. People chatted with friends and shouted happily when early states were projected for Clinton. For some students, a Clinton victory was all but inevitable.
“I’m very confident in a Hillary victory; I’m just curious to see how much America will go for Trump,” James Callison ’17.5 said early in the night. “The only thing I am concerned about, however, is the Senate election. I’m worried it’s going to go 51-49 Republicans.”
Others did not share Callison’s certainty, but nonetheless felt that Clinton would most likely end up pulling through.
“[I feel] sort of cautiously optimistic, which is bad, because you want to feel hopeful that reasonably optimistic predictions from statisticians and political watchers… are solid predictions that you have faith in,” Noah Liebmiller ’17.5 said. “But at the same time, there’s a lot of self-doubt. I would hate to have my hopes crushed at the end of the day. One in four things happen all the time. Cubs came back from 3-1 the other day. Cavaliers came back from 3-1 in July. Nothing’s ever sure.”
At the same time, Liebmiller felt excited for election night and looked forward to watching the contest unfold.
“We’ve been waiting for this to happen for almost two years, and every day it got a little bit more intense, and so many crazy things have happened,” he said. “If you’re a nerd who loves politics, this is like Christmas morning, but it’s only once every four years.”
Charlotte Massey ’18, on the other hand, did not have much optimism and half-jokingly explained her contingency plan if Donald Trump were to emerge victorious.
“We’re flying to Europe tomorrow for a debate tournament, so the mindset is, if Trump wins, we’re just staying there,” she said.
In spite of the nerves, the atmosphere remained relaxed and congenial well into the night. Students enthusiastically grabbed free Grille food and watched as Matthew Dickinson and Bert Johnson, professors of political science, commented on the results as they rolled in. Until about 9 p.m., Dickinson and Johnson reiterated that Donald Trump had a very narrow path to victory.
And then it became clear that Trump was outperforming expectations. Dickinson and Johnson began to express surprise as states like Virginia, Michigan and Wisconsin remained extremely close with slight Trump leads.
The hum of conversation in Crossroads softened as students realized what was happening. The cheers for the few states that were called for Clinton became even louder. Conversations turned toward expressions of anger and frustration.
“It really pisses me off that it’s even this close because if she wins it’s still really depressing about what’s happening in America,” Caley Henderson ’18 said.
“So many people seemed so confident, and I thought I was ready mentally for the idea that it was going to be close,” Liebmiller said. “And I’m still not clear whether it’s close yet, but it’s starting to feel really close, and that’s not a pleasant thing.”
By 12 a.m., many of the students at Crossroads were thinking back to that moment that Vermont was projected and wishing the rest of the night would have gone much differently. Crossroads had closed, and Pennsylvania would soon be called for Trump.
At 3 a.m. on Wed. Nov. 9, Trump had been declared victorious and gave his acceptance speech to the nation.
“I felt that the values of America had failed those that are most vulnerable in society,” Callison said later about his reaction when he realized that Trump had won.
He and several other students gathered in Crossroads again on Wednesday morning to discuss the results, express their feelings and commiserate. Political Science professors, including Johnson, Sarah Stroup, Erik Bleich and Orion Lewis, led the conversation and attempted to give students some context for the election. But even they had a challenging time making sense of the results.
“This has been one of the most extraordinary elections in memory, with a result that most political scientists would not have bet on,” Johnson said later. “Those of us who study U.S. elections will now have to examine why the polling data leading up to the election was out of step with the result.”
While the students had come together to watch Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, the gathering ended up being a catharsis of sorts. It was a moment for students and professors alike to try to make sense of the intense emotions they were feeling.
For the rest of the week, many students and staff at the College struggled to figure out how to move forward. Some professors canceled class or delayed tests; others attempted to keep conducting business as usual. But among many students, the overriding emotions were confusion and sadness. Some professors and staff who have worked at the College for many years compared it to the days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks; others were shocked at the depth of the emotional response from students.
“I have not seen our campus so paralyzed,” Stroup said. “Optimism and articulation were suspended. Our first years are navigating this historic moment in a new environment. Usually I can find some evidence and arguments from political science to these events, but we all got it wrong -- which requires some humility.”
Johnson perceived the same strong, passionate reaction from students. “The state of alarm on campus is something I have not seen before in my twelve years here,” he said. “I can understand why many are concerned with the result, and to be frank, I share many of their concerns.”
As a result of the election, the College organized several different opportunities later in the week for students and faculty to come together. During one such event, which took place on Friday, Nov. 11, members of the College community broke up into small groups to converse and reflect on the election and how to move forward.
In one group, the participants talked about the different ways that people might get active to make a change, the ability of faculty to take a stance against certain political rhetoric and how people might deal with the despair and hopelessness they feel. The participants agreed to be anonymous, but they all expressed an appreciation for the cathartic effect of the meetings.
For many, the willingness of students to engage in difficult and rewarding discussions at events like this was a particularly bright spot in an otherwise tough week.
“I have been surprised at and comforted by the range of conversations I have had,” Stroup said. “Yes, these are based on little sleep and half-formed thoughts, but people have reached out to discuss and deliberate.”
In response to the results, President of the College Republicans Club, Hayden Dublois ’17, emphasized the crucial importance of being there for those who are marginalized or scared by a Trump presidency.
“Even as a Republican, I’m disgusted by Donald Trump and disagree with his policies. But rather than rioting, I think there is a two-fold response that is more effective. First, be there for those who feel marginalized and scared by a Trump presidency,” said Dublois in an email to the Campus. “Second, oppose Donald Trump’s policies that you disagree with. Call your Congressman or Senator; donate to an interest group; join an advocacy organization — whatever you have to do to oppose the particular policies you disagree with.”
As the days passed, sadness and confusion transformed into anger and a desire to act. In conjunction with several students, Travis Wayne Sanderson ’19 helped plan and organize an election protest, which was held at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 13 outside Mead Memorial Chapel. Sanderson thought of the idea after taking note of similar events at different campuses. He saw it as a good method to transfer our community’s emotions into a constructive goal.
The Facebook event page, which garnered interested from over two hundred students, read: “Our presidential election has ended in terror for the lives and livelihoods of millions of marginalized people. We cannot sit still in a time of injustice. On Sunday, our Middlebury community will gather at the front steps of Mead Chapel to stand together against racism, fascism, hatred and all forms of oppression. We hope you can join us in standing up in this moment of history.”
Students eagerly gathered around the steps of Mead Chapel right at 4 p.m., with the crowd gradually growing as the protesters made their way down toward Davis Memorial Library. Many students held cardboard signs with slogans reading, “Not My President,” “Stronger Together” and “Love Trumps Hate.” The crowd, comprised of roughly 250 students, chanted as they then made their way across campus from Davis to McCardell Bicentennial Hall. Two of the chants that echoed across campus were “Immigration, Not Deportation” and “Build Bridges, Not Walls.”
Back on the steps of Mead, Sanderson took the stage first. Several speakers followed Sanderson, offering individual stories touching upon topics ranging from immigration reform to discrimination within on our own campus.
“Overall, I’m happy with how the protest went,” said Charles Rainey ’19, a student representative of Community Council, who spoke at the event. “The message is clear — we have a passionate subset of the population, a diverse group of kids that came out to really show that love trumps hate, that black lives matter, that the pussy grabs back and that we stand in solidarity with LGBTQ+ folks. I hope that this leads to a broader discussion for how these values we hold dear, and our feelings about the election, can be translated back on campus and make this campus a more inclusive one.”
As part of his speech, Rainey read two poems by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib. He emphasized the need to cultivate constructive conversation moving forward.
Moving beyond the protest, Sanderson envisions cultural organizations, as well as other student groups active in inclusivity, helping to continue the dialogue on a more permanent basis. However, he recognizes that this is a democratic effort.
“The conversations that have to be cultivated in the next months and years rely on people and organizations not only hosting them and making the spaces for them, but also on people in dining halls and other spaces making sure there isn’t a tolerance for intolerance in this place,” said Sanderson. “Even if you’re not directly involved, there’s space to be more inclusive and more of an exception to the dominant narrative of intolerance that has taken the nation since last week.”
(11/05/15 4:17am)
It is easy to discount “American Culture” as a loose, insufficient, reductionist term for the patchwork heritage of the U.S. As we all know, America is called a “melting pot” for a reason – this country is primarily composed of people who have cultural roots elsewhere, often across several continents. The resulting attempt to define a singular culture of the USA necessarily fails. American cities are microcosms of the greater state of US culture; in the space of one city block, the demographics of citizens can vary so wildly that it feels as if a visitor has stepped between two countries.
When I left home for my semester abroad at Oxford, I was expecting to feel culture shock just by virtue of the society here in England working a little differently, with different norms and customs. But they still speak English, and since America really doesn’t have an entrenched culture, I thought it would be fairly easy to get accustomed to it.
But it surprised me when I started feeling a clash of cultures on a more fundamental level than just difference in behavior. I began to feel an underlying difference between the two countries, and not just in how the ketchup tastes (slightly different) or the buses drive (aggressively with little regard for pedestrians). George Bernard Shaw’s oft-quoted statement, “The United States and Great Britain are two nations separated by a common language,” may be cliché, and it most likely sounds pretty kitschy and tourist-y for me to say so, but he’s right. I’ve felt a vague sense of detachment from the British in a way that has made me identify more with the country I’m from. And it’s made me realize that “American Culture” might be more than a general affinity for McDonald’s and automatic vehicles.
I’m not going to embark on an attempt to define U.S. culture to any significant extent, because I certainly still think that it is nebulous and constantly shifting. Nevertheless, I have observed and felt several things that have made me wonder if we give short shrift to American culture itself, and whether it’s richer than we generally give it credit for.
To start with a small-scale example of how even basic things differ: I have found very few sink faucets in the UK that have a unified hot/cold tap. Almost all have two different taps with two different spigots for hot and cold water, requiring you to take a few extra seconds to fill the basin and get warm water to wash your hands with. These sinks exist even in places that were very clearly recently built or renovated, so it can’t simply be explained away by a relative lack of updating appliances. If I can be wildly speculative here for a few moments, this phenomenon seems to me to indicate something about the two cultures. The British haven’t changed these sinks most likely because they work well enough, but those few extra seconds necessary to fill the basin have been widely eliminated in the US.
The landscape of both Oxford and England have also caused me to reassess American culture. English countryside is heavily farmed, and with a population density of more than twelves times that of the U.S., it is unlikely that you can travel more than a few miles without seeing some sort of town or city. And Oxford itself, as a medieval city, is extremely dense; thousands of people congregate on the city centre (where I happen to live at the moment), buildings stand in close proximity to one another, and the roads are narrow. A few large parks are welcome parts of Oxford’s scenery, but these are fenced-in, heavily cultivated and locked at night.
All this contrasts greatly with the United States, where cities and towns sprawl and empty space is aplenty. Driving through the western part of the US reminds you just how massive the country is, and still how much of it is wild and untamed. Swaths of prairie land bordered by massive ranges of mountains make up the American Frontier, and having visited a country now where even the woodlands of Scotland are dwarfed by the countryside of Montana, I’ve got the sense that some of that difference has made its way into our cultures. Nineteenth century America is often defined by the pioneers of the West, who made their lives on somewhat inhospitable land and managed to settle brutal terrain. The roughness and independence of these early pioneers is still apparent in the towns scattered throughout Wyoming, Montana, Nevada and even still parts of California, but I think that frontierism is still present across America. There’s an appreciation for space which manifests itself in spread-out cities and untamed urban parks (think Central Park in New York and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco). There’s also a transience apparent the American psyche — Oxford is steeped in historical tradition going back well before the US was ever founded, whereas many American cities and towns have simply appeared or drastically expanded to fit the constant and continual shift of American citizens across the country.
I’ve only been in the UK for a few weeks, and I freely admit that I do not have nearly enough evidence to back up my claim beyond just an inkling, but the truth of that assertion is almost secondary to the fact that I have been thrown off a step by it. There’s something here, even in the design of the faucets, that makes this place feel different and causes me to think about myself as a result of an American culture. There are plenty of problems with American society and I do not intend this column at all to channel American exceptionalism — but there are certain facets of British life that have started to cause me to think about how Americans are unified. Perhaps it’s not just the notorious proliferation of junk food, or a penchant for over-the-top patriotism, or even the lack of a definitive common culture, that make us American. Maybe there’s something in the still-unconquered frontiers that make us different and give us a sense of cultural unity.
(09/30/15 9:35pm)
“Oh, I’ve spent my time pondering my existence, contemplating life and death, wondering what it all means.” It’s the cliché joke about intellectuals – sitting around at a coffeeshop or a pub, discussing life’s big questions and perhaps smoking cigars and wearing tweed coats. We’ve all heard it. It’s been diffused and diluted to the point where it’s nearly meaningless.
(09/17/15 10:31pm)
The end of my second week in England is coming to a close. I have started getting into a routine. I finally know how to walk from my building to Oxford’s library. Research has dominated most of my days this week; I have buckled down and started work on my first big project during my study abroad semester here.
I have also been able to experience a lot of English culture since I arrived. My friends and I have visited a long list of different pubs, I have had tea and biscuits in the early afternoon and my program has brought me to a couple of heritage sites, such as the cathedral at Winchester and the Roman structures at Bath.
It has been a fantastic experience so far, and I have already learned a pretty shocking amount about the country, the University and myself. But over the course of my time here I have struggled with a mounting pressure: the urge to do more, see more, achieve more, fill every waking hour with something new so that I get the absolute most out of this time abroad. In other words, it is the pressure to wring as much out of this short semester so that I feel like I have not missed anything.
What I am feeling certainly is not new; it is the perpetual traveler’s curse, the monumental task of trying to fit as much in as possible into an extremely limited time period. But I did not consider that it would affect me this much. After all, I am here for three and a half months, not three days.
And yet, it still nags at me. That voice in my mind that continually compels me to go see a new church, to visit a new part of town, to try a different beer at a pub that I have never been to. As a person who relies heavily on routine and who tries to balance each day with enough downtime to keep mentally healthy, this trip has been a shock to the system. I have been exhausted each day, too busy to sit down for thirty minutes and read a book in my room by myself.
But this week I realized that I cannot just keep going like this. I will burn out if I do. So, I accepted something that is extremely difficult for any traveler to acknowledge.
It is okay if you do not do everything, and it is okay if you do nothing for an hour or two every day.
Being able to sit back and simply be at peace with not doing anything is really tough. It is hard to just let the world go by. But I have found that it is also necessary.
Because traveling and studying abroad is not that different than, say, moving homes or starting a new school. It is really similar to what the Middlebury freshmen are going through right now. You get hit by wave after wave of new experiences, new acquaintances and new routines to establish. You must find that which grounds you and reminds you that things are not so different than they used to be. You have to remember that the mental overload of going to a new place or starting a new phase in your life does not mean that you are a different person or that you have to continually force yourself to explore the entire breadth of that place or phase.
It is okay to do nothing, to sit in your room alone with a book for a few hours, because that is how to find that grounding. I have made myself step away from all the activities and that compulsion to keep moving so that I can breathe and remember that I need to give my mind and body a rest.
After all, traveling, studying abroad and starting college are not about trying to do everything. They are about doing what makes you happy. I find that I am most content when I let myself go sit in a park for a while or read a book somewhere secluded. This allows me to appreciate those places I do want to go visit even more.
I have realized that I need to stop worrying about what I am missing or what I might not get to see, and instead focus on those places and people that I do see. I have to accept that it is all right that I will probably not go to Ireland or France while I am here, just as it is all right that I might not get to try out as many restaurants or pubs as I originally thought I would. What really matters is that when I actually go somewhere with my friends, I recognize the moment and experience that moment to the fullest. I should not worry about what is next. It is not the sum of all the different things that I do here that determine the worth of my experience, just like it is not the number of people you meet or things you do at college that decide college’s value. Rather, I have to remember that my abroad semester’s value comes from simply having a few meaningful experiences and appreciating each of those individually.
(04/29/15 6:10pm)
It’s been a hard winter and a hard spring semester. We grow restless as the cold weather drags on long into April, and we’re given only a few of the most tantalizing warm days to enjoy. Project upon test upon essay upon book piles up before us, each clamoring to be completed and each weighing down on our mind. The libraries are packed until closing time every night. We sometimes are challenged to find the light when the sun itself seems to hide itself away. We sometimes lose our motivation and our thoughts move elsewhere, to greener and warmer pastures. We struggle to make sense of tragedy and heartbreak.
The year gradually draws to a close with what feels like a lethargic and worn-down approach. May is upon us. The promise of summer comes closer. At least for myself, it becomes even more difficult to want to be here on campus. Sometimes, anywhere’s better than here and the pressure and stress and anxiety that comes with it.
But as hard as it is, I can’t let myself go down that road. I can’t let my mind become even more burdened with the desire to leave. I can’t let my homesickness and my exhaustion build up any more. It’s all I can do to keep my head up and focused in class sometimes, but all I can do isn’t enough.
Instead, I have to do more. I have to find that motivation to break out of the lethargy and go make a moment of joy for myself. Even when the winter creeps into April and lingers long past when it should already have ceded to spring, I must find the places to go that make me happy. I must forge for myself those fleeting, temporary, altogether too short instances of joy that make this – all of it – worth the struggle.
I don’t know much about the mind or mental health. But I do know the feeling of mental exhaustion and the weight of stress and anxiety that can bring you down. I know how that shadow feels, and I know the pall it casts over all of your experiences. And I, at least, have managed to keep it at bay, some of the time.
It takes those infinitesimally small moments to change my outlook. They’re rarely longer than an hour at most, and the shortest are only a second. But they’re moments when the metaphorical clouds part and you feel yourself lighten a little bit. The anxiety disappears for just a little bit, but that makes all the difference.
I’ve found that it isn’t all that constructive to hope to just try to eliminate that feeling in one go. I can’t aim for “happiness” as a general state, hoping that my life will take on a quality of joy as its characteristic. Rather, I work to make a single instant joyful, or illuminating, or even just peaceful. I aim to break down my life into short flashes rather than take it as a whole. That way, each little piece I can work to change as it comes. And because it’s so small-scale, I don’t have to worry about reaching for joy in life, just for joy in the moment. As this happens, the things that make me feel happy become so much smaller. In the winter I might step outside into the cold, blowing snow, take a deep breath, and appreciate the feeling of the snow against my skin. In the spring, I could look out at the Green Mountains and just stand in wonder for a half-second at the beauty that millions of years of geological evolution have brought for me to see.
What I realized was, these weren’t new feelings. I had always appreciated the snow and the mountains. I had not, however, focused on those senses and separated them.
It’s hard. It’s still not second nature for me. I still have to consciously remind myself to notice what’s around me and to appreciate it, however small it is. But over time it has helped me, and I think now I know why.
I believe that it helps because it is such a uniquely human ability to break down each day into its individual moments and to notice those things that exist outside of a routine. We are an incredible species solely in that we can stop in the midst of our daily responsibilities, stand still, breathe and find pleasure in those short, fleeting, but beautiful events that color our lives. I’ve found that being able to find that outside of the tunnel vision of routine lets you feel more alive, and to even more fully appreciate what it means to live. After all, even when you’re feeling down, in a sense that feeling is still unbelievable in that it is a signal that you’re alive, you’re breathing and you possess a mind capable of sadness and stress, but also joy and passion.
So even when the spring isn’t as warm as we would like and even when the work piles up in front of us, let’s all just take a moment every so often and breathe. Just stop in the middle of walking to your next class and take twenty seconds to breathe in deeply and to gaze out at the land around us. Take a moment in the evening and spend a couple minutes just standing outside and looking up at the stars. I’ve found that these small escapes do a lot to help you feel a little bit better and a little more alive.
(04/22/15 1:17pm)
Alright. Four guards patrolling the room to the right, one guard in an alcove to the left. Shoot forward and they’ll all come running. But I’m standing in a bottleneck, so I should be able to get all of them. Okay, let’s do th—
Shoot. Dead again. Okay, restart. Maybe I have to shoot and back away really quickly, and get the guards as they come around the corner. Yeah, that’ll wor—
Dead. Restart. Maybe I’ll just try charging forward and possibly get to that alcove—
Dead. Restart.
This is the brutal cycle that doesn’t easily let you go. This is the magnificence and the curse of no load times so you can just restart time and time again until you get through that difficult level. This is the formula that has made Hotline Miami such a hit.
And Hotline Miami 2 is more of this brilliant gameplay loop. The game resembles its predecessor in almost every way. The story is more ridiculous, the stages more trippy and technicolored. There’s a little more diversity to the enemies and how they present themselves. New characters give a little bit of a breath of fresh air to the series, as well, injecting a modicum of variety into a game which is otherwise nearly unbelievably repetitive.
Because this game is all about playing the same sequences over, and over, and over, until you can get yourself synchronized in such a way as to kill every enemy in the level before they can kill you. It’s a tall task, considering it usually only takes one hit to kill you and to put you back at the beginning of the floor. And yet, even though it can be frustrating, it still works. Its combat puzzles still suck me in, the stages are still mesmerizing in their art and design, forcing me to think through each and every step I take and bullet I shoot.
In a sense, it becomes a stealth-action game, but even that isn’t the right word.
It’s like a dance game. A rhythm game. In Hotline Miami 2, your goal is to perfect a certain pattern that will get you safely through the level. You become a choreographer, tracking how each move will affect the AI in the game. You have to jump forward and quickly jump back, or spin around in a circle while spraying bullets, or sprint into a room with crowbar drawn and dispatch the enemies before they can shoot you in the face.
It’s a beautiful, chaotic mess that forces you to find the order in the disorder. It teaches you to take it slow and to move elegantly and efficiently, wasting no ammo or motion.
And when you eliminate every single enemy on a floor of a stage, you can advance to the next part. You’re awarded with a moment of silence and solitude — and a level fully covered in blood and gore. Bodies strewn everywhere. Glass shot out. Destruction wrought on a scale that Hotline Miami trademarked.
However much I was entranced by the dance of Hotline Miami 2, I was turned off by its brutality.
Although the characters are only pixelated sprites, the animation of bullets ripping into them is still visceral and slightly revolting. Blood sprays out of each character to the point where nearly an entire stage can be painted in crimson. When you incapacitate a guard, you can reach down and break his neck or bash his face in.
These executions are over-the-top and gruesome in a way that I had never before thought possible in a game as abstracted from the real as Hotline Miami.
Hotline Miami 2, however, is not a game to present you with ethical dilemmas. It’s a game to crush them under the weight of repetition, gamifying murder until the characters aren’t anything more than automatic, motion-sensitive robots designed to prevent your progress. There’s no humanity in this game. Life means nothing. All considerations of morality are erased and buried under scores and times and attempts.
Except it’s not even that simple. In one level, you take control of a police officer who must knock out all of the enemies. When you kneel on top of a knocked-out guard to finish the job, the execution animation is extremely slow, as if the officer is actually reluctant to kill. It’s a small technical difference, one that most players will probably not be hung up on. But I cannot get the image out of my head of the officer slowly reaching down to murder the man underneath him. I fashioned a look of horror on my character’s face. It made me not want to kill him. It made me wonder why I was killing anyone in this game. It turned me off from killing in a game that’s about massacring entire houses full of people.
If that police officer level showed me anything, it’s that the game would be so much more palatable, and so much more moving, if it used that same reluctance to violence as shown by the police officer. It would effectively be an equivalent game, but you wouldn’t have to wade through the massive amounts of blood and death to get to the brilliant combat puzzles. Additionally, it would allow the character to have some sort of moral investment in the game. Hotline Miami 2 could provide an even more moving commentary about society and games if it let you not kill. If it made you take that extra step to murder, it would provide the sort of extra level of consideration that we ought to have — that we need to have — with regards to violence.
(04/15/15 5:57pm)
Often I find myself debating against people who argue that it is impossible to know the best way to live a life, or the best moral code, or the best way to understand the universe. More often than not, I find that Middlebury students especially hold subjectivism as their method of approaching these issues. From all of these conversations, I have learned something vital: It is really, really hard to come to any sort of definitive conclusion about the problems that affect the core essence of people’s identities. But I have also come to believe that even though it is hard, that certainly does not mean that we should not try. Just because you cannot prove beyond all shadow of a doubt that a certain way is the objective way does not mean that you should give up attempting to find the best way possible.
I believe in an objective moral truth because the alternative is too permissive, too dangerous and too contradictory to what it means to be human. As moral subjectivism becomes the norm, especially among Middlebury students, we find ourselves trapped in agnosticism that prevents us from making any definitive statement against morally reprehensible acts. Sure, we can say that our own moral codes direct us to speak out against violence and human rights violations—but what happens when ritual violence is a core component of a culture? What happens when we have to confront religiously motivated mutilation, or sacrificial traditions that go back millennia, that cause harm to innocent people?
We find ourselves in a bind. On the one hand, our sensibilities are rightly hurt. We feel outraged at the horrifying abuses wrought against people. But on the other, how do we, as generally western-centric thinkers, feel justified in inhibiting a fundamental part of a culture? We are too often slowed by this indecision and by our fear that our moral code might be wrong.
This fear is not misplaced. It is terrifying to think that our western ideals might cause us to violate human rights in much the same ways as the people we are trying to stop. It is vital to understand that we do not have all the answers, and we have to respect the wishes of everyone in this world (to an extent). We do not have all the answers, and the popular western conception of morality is far from perfect.
Nonetheless, our moral agnosticism needs to give way. We, as humans, share a bond with all other humans in this world. We are of the same species. It is evolutionarily coded into our very being that we all want the safety that facilitates our survival, and the freedom to live without pain; to make our own choices, and, on a biological level, to reproduce. Just given this foundational aspect of humanity— something that stands apart from any subjectivism, that is objectively true by its very nature—we can make a declarative statement about what constitutes a moral action. A moral action is something that protects those most basic desires of all humans. You strip all of society away, all of our environmental pressures away, all of our accumulated knowledge away, and you are left with humans who just want to survive and reproduce and, given that, to live a quality life. Thus, to cast aside that moral agnosticism, all you have to do is look at the hardwiring of our DNA, those elements that are the reasons why we all still live after two billion years of biological evolution.
People occasionally respond to this by saying that I have no way of knowing that this conception of morality works for everyone. I have no way of knowing that every single individual will perceive morality in this same way. They say I cannot make a declarative statement about morality, because there is no way I know that my code is better than any other individual’s.
They are right. I cannot prove it. But I do not need to prove it. I just know that, for virtually every person who has ever existed, life and the absence of pain are the most fundamental desires they have. To infringe on those is to be immoral because you are going against the very fabric of life. I also do not need to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt because as soon as a person’s actions bring them to potentially harming another person, morality automatically reverts to a more external, worldly conception than any of the individuals’ beliefs about it. If one of the individuals truly believes that it is moral to kill or maim or otherwise harm an innocent other, in all likelihood the other person will not allow this to happen if he or she is cognizant of the consequences. Thus, the two codes are in conflict.
A universal moral code would declare the first person immoral because they attempt to infringe upon the most basic, most fundamental rights of the other person. We do not have to treat all conceptions of morality as equivalent just because we cannot prove an objective moral truth. What we can do, however, is act according to those things which define us as organic life forms. We can act knowing that we are in the right because we are acting to improve the human condition for the greatest number of people.
Further, I do not need to prove it because proving it would be impossible. The range of human life is too diverse for us to ever discover a catchall moral standard that applies to literally every situation ever. But just like how gravity will always be an extremely high probability rather than a definitive fact, so too can a moral standard be more probable, more valid, and more widely applicable than everything else. If we were to insist upon a proof to understand science, science would not exist outside of individual observations.
So why do we hold morality to that same standard? It is fully acceptable to be a moral objectivist based on probability and not fact.
We should thus learn to accept the possibility that not every moral code is equal. Not every act that someone hails as morally justifiable is actually that. We should grow to understand that just because we can never prove something to be definitive, does not mean that that lack of proof is evidence for the opposite. I cannot and will not ever be able to prove that my conception of morality is right. But at least there is evidence to show that life and liberty are not just human inventions, but are rather biologically hardwired desires in humans. At least there is evolutionary evidence to show that people want to be good to one another and want to respect these rights. This is sufficient to hold protection of these rights as an objective moral standard. If another moral code wants that title, it better give a legitimate reason why.
(03/18/15 1:41pm)
It opens with a view of sand. Dark tan and flashing in the sun’s rays — this is clearly the desert. The camera pulls up and shows heatwaves emanating from the sparkling sand, and behind a hill the large sun beats down on the land. The yellow sky is striped with clouds. The camera then pans over the landscape and comes to rest on a small figure in a brown robe, face hidden in shadow. This mysterious creature stands up from his rest in the sand, and you take control, moving him over the sand that crunches and slips under his feet. You climb a hill and on top of that hill is a view of a massive expanse of scorched land. Rising in the distance, breaking through the layer of clouds, a mountain stands imposing with a light shining out of the top. No words are said, no text or instructions are given. This is Journey. Your only goal is to reach the mountaintop.
When I first bought this game in early 2013, it was already a year old. It had received critical acclaim and had won several Game of the Year awards from different websites. But I never thought to give this small game a chance. It doesn’t have intense gameplay or a huge, breathtaking story. It doesn’t have explosions or guns. It doesn’t even have a score, or anything that could be called a “traditional” gameplay loop. It has puzzles, but even calling it a puzzle game is a little too restrictive for what Journey is. It relies on being open-ended, presenting a world to the player without context or barriers. It wants you to explore the desert, to find the hidden secrets throughout it and to forge your own path toward the mountain.
But I didn’t think I wanted that. My exposure to gaming had been almost exclusively made up of well-defined games with traditional gameplay loops. The idea of an “art game” sounded foreign and unenjoyable to me. But I gave Journey a try anyway.
And what I found was not so much a game as a canvas. Journey’s world is unbelievably beautiful, especially for a game now three years old. It is, in a lot of ways, the PlayStation 3’s crowning jewel in art. Its desert feels alive in a way that I never expected, with the wind periodically whipping up sand and the desert ruins feeling appropriately weathered and ancient. Each area you go to has a different puzzle, and as you progress, you acquire runes that grow your scarf, permitting you to jump higher and reach even more interesting places.
But there is no backstory here. You never do learn who this little creature is, or why he wishes to travel to the mountain so badly. Everything is learned from small hints in the world. Perhaps you find a painting on a wall in a ruin, and you decide that the figure is a citizen of a past civilization, left behind after a calamitous event. Or perhaps you see the flying creatures and believe that your creature and these flying animals are partners in a nomadic lifestyle, searching the desert for sustenance and purpose.
The point is that there is no limit to the number of stories Journey can tell. Its storytelling is so effective because there is no one correct plot. This game succeeds because it gives the player the tool to make the world his own, to fill it with his imagination.
Of course, the game wouldn’t have a fraction of its impact without having at least competent gameplay, and Journey goes above and beyond here as well. Its puzzles are simple but striking, and its set piece moments create awe or even fear as you guide the creature through dangerous confrontations and environments. And after you complete each puzzle, you know you are moving ever closer to your goal. The mountain, invariably visible in the distance, stands as a constant reminder of your journey.
Sometimes, when you are in the midst of a puzzle, you will hear the telltale sound of one of the creatures jumping or activating a switch. It took me completely by surprise when it happened the first time, because there is no other indication that Journey is a multiplayer game. But indeed, when I looked around the world, I found another little figure bounding along and trying to solve the same puzzle I was working on. There is no way to communicate with another player except by emitting one single sound, and you never see the other player’s name. But this player and I decided to solve this puzzle together, and soon we became makeshift friends. It was a relationship that took us all the way to the end of the game, where it enhanced one of the most moving moments I have ever experienced in video games. In a game that empowers you to fashion your own story and fill out the world with your own thoughts, this sort of relationship becomes entirely your own, and not a tool of the game. It is unique in that way, something that few other games had attempted at that time. It makes you care about your partner in a way that games rarely do. That friend isn’t just a colleague of the creature in game — he is my friend, as well.
This is a game about life and death. It’s a game about finding your own path and about defining your own way through life even when the destination seems clear. This game is about the little moments in life when you discover something incredibly special just a few steps off the beaten path. It’s a story about rebirth and coming to terms with the fact that sometimes, in spite of all your efforts, you will fail. But Journey shows you that even in failure there is success. When you walk through the deserts of Journey, looking upon the ruins and the golden hills, you realize that the mountain really doesn’t matter all that much, after all.
(03/11/15 11:14pm)
Every day we accelerate toward longer life, healthier life, fewer diseases, and better recovery from those diseases we can’t cure. Every single day our technology progresses, building on itself in all sorts of ways that we can’t imagine yet, slowly but steadily directing us toward an ultimate end point. Chances are, we will at some time in the future reach that point.
Among academics and enthusiasts studying the future, this point is referred to as a singularity. It is fully within the realm of possibility that within the not-too-distant future, we will cease to be affected by the forces of time or disease, and instead we can constantly revive our bodies indefinitely. Either by organ generation, artificial augmentation, or full mental transplantation, we might be able to transcend the natural state of human existence.
This is the goal of the transhumanism movement. And what an absolutely unbelievable achievement it would be! The goal of transhumanism plays into that most base of human instincts, the drive to survive. The conquest of death would fully absolve us of that innate, extremely powerful and primal fear of destruction. Such an achievement would grant the gift that countless religions have claimed to give, eternal life.
But we aren’t just animals. We aren’t just slaves to our innate desires. We have a huge, complicated, diverse structure of more high-level goals and dreams created by our mind. We have deep, troubling conflicts within ourselves not about the fact of survival, but rather about the spirit of living—we are the only living creatures to experience existential crises and to wonder about our place in the universe. Innumerable books have tackled how to live meaningfully and to extract every ounce of happiness and satisfaction out of the life we’ve been given. We know no other way to live, than to live respecting the inherent limits of our lives. To take down those limits would be to undermine the very fabric of our society and to throw into turmoil the decisions that we make every day. What does if mean to lead a “meaningful” life when that life is endless? How do you approach your career when you’ll be working for 400 years, instead of 40? How do you entertain yourself when you have more than enough time to do anything you’ve ever wanted, and to make the money to enable yourself to do all those things?
Transhumanism sounds ridiculous on face value, but the fact of the matter is, technology is creeping toward this point. It’s not too early to start really considering what will happen when our elders consist not of 80 and 90 year olds, but of bi- and tri-centenarians. And it’s never too early to start wondering if our currently accepted way of living needs a new coat of paint, or even an entirely new foundation.The pervading life philosophies all have something to do with striving to reach some greater goal. Whether that be happiness, joy, spiritual enlightenment, mental liberation, love, or anything else, the focus is almost always on the necessity of a journey toward some sort of awakening. We all have to strive for something. And even if the focus isn’t on the destination, import still weighs on the journey. After all, the oft-quoted statements does suggest that “it’s the journey, and not the destination, that matters.” This gets at a crucial element of truth: we must recognize the value in the present, in our current state of affairs, rather than always look down the road to our goals.
But the problem with this, and the reason why we often fear the transhumanist singularity, is that even this suggestion puts undue focus on the motion. No one ever tells us that’s okay to not even go on the journey in the first place. We rarely, if ever, get the acknowledgement that where we are, right this instant, without any regard to future goals or moving towards anything, is good and worthwhile for its own sake. We are uncomfortable with the notion of doing nothing. The idea of being, in a sense, sedentary—not physically, but rather mentally and emotionally—never receives its deserved consideration. There is something so beautiful and transcendental about the art of not moving. It represents contentment. Too often we forget to find and acknowledge when we are content. Too often we preclude ourselves from ever even feeling that emotion at all. To use an analogy: hiking is one of my favorite activities because it affords me breathtaking views and a rejuvenating exposure to nature, but I have found more joy and more peace during days when I allow myself to simply sit in a chair in nature, with no destination or even motion. I firmly believe that the ability to metaphorically sit motionless and be content is conducive to greater happiness and greater satisfaction with all of life. And life brings us countless moments for us to forget the goal and forget the motion and simply be. It takes an effort to pull the mind back down to the lowest level, to focus on the immediate and not the far-off, and to break day down into each individual moment, instead of allowing it to flow together and escape.
This is how we solve those moral quandaries of transhumanism. This is how we approach a world in which we live longer and healthier lives and where the specter of meaninglessness grows. It takes a refocusing of life onto what it means to be during each second, rather than what it means to strive toward something. But this doesn’t have to wait for scientists to develop the technology for us to live indefinitely. These existential problems are not unique to transhumanism, but are simply scaled up to fit the longer time frame. We face these issues every day. But we solve the issues of boredom and aimlessness by acknowledging the fact that we don’t have to aim anywhere. We don’t even have to move anywhere. We can just be present, comfortable in our situation, content with the world we make for ourselves.
(02/26/15 1:52am)
Most of us probably came to Middlebury in order to have our beliefs challenged. We wanted to confront situations that would make us think and take on problems from different perspectives. We wanted to expand our ability to consider critically and to learn from the people and places around us.
But we are also young. There’s a self-confidence among the student body the occurs naturally as the result of us having lived so few years, having yet to confront the more brutal responsibilities of adulthood.
This is not the same as ignorance — I have long felt that young people are often unfairly maligned, given no real voice in the matters that concern them and passed over because of a perceived lack of experience-born wisdom. We are all extremely intelligent individuals who have the right to be heard.
But this also does not immunize us from arrogance. Overt, in-your-face arrogance is rare, as having an air of superiority has rightly been shoved away and stigmatized for being destructive and harmful. But under the surface of our interactions and activities simmers a more subtle, more subdued arrogance that can harm just as easily as snobby pretentiousness. It manifests itself in convictions solidified not by rationality but by emotion and in a feeling of invulnerability.
Those who read my columns last year may remember my discussion of student protest movements on campus. I feel that many of these fail to take into consideration the full range of impacts that would arise from their proposed change. This, I believe, is a result of that subtle over-confidence. When we find a matter that interests and inspires us, naturally we wrap ourselves up in it. It becomes a driving force in our day-to-day lives, guiding our actions and giving us the fuel to work harder and longer for the purpose of achieving some change for good. This, however, can lead to an emotional investment in a problem that requires measured rationality.
Everyone emotionally buys into the movements they support. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. But when the emotion comes first, when the rhetoric changes to “Of course I’m right, because this thing is just so clearly wrong,” that’s when the movement shifts. It takes on the burden of being an identity rather than an interest. For struggles that involve our identities, this is often necessary. For more abstract movements, this might be counterproductive. It makes us terrified to be wrong. It takes our ability to accept criticism and dampens it, dissuading us from shifting to seeking a compromise and not an outright destruction of the system we oppose. This is the arrogance of conviction, of allowing emotion to override reason. It’s the arrogance of “I feel that this thing is wrong, so of course it’s wrong, and it should be overthrown.”
The next type of arrogance causes us to think, or at least project the image, that we’re invulnerable. Each weekend, it is common to drink or smoke. And each weekend, it is not unusual to observe students stumbling back to their dorm rooms or throwing up outside of a party, and even less uncommon to simply see people acting in ways that they would never otherwise behave. Each weekend, students elect to imbibe substances that literally change, dampen, enhance or break apart the way the brain works in a simple desire to feel something different. Each weekend, students choose to drink something that is immediately and noticeably poisonous to our bodies in order to feel and act a little differently.
Imagine explaining alcohol someone who has never heard of it before: It’s something that virtually eliminates your social caution, that decreases your balance, that negatively affects your hearing, sight, and speech, will make you throw up and feel awful later if you drink too much, and will destroy some of your organs if you drink a lot for too many months or years. I’m not above drinking at all, and I believe strongly that it can be used fun to do in moderation. But so often students seem convinced that they are invulnerable, that they won’t feel the negative effects of this. Too often do students go into the night with the desire to gamble on their well-being, not fully internalizing that drinking like this can, and does, harm our bodies. And too often do we use alcohol and other substances to hide our vulnerabilities, to avoid the possibility of having to confront true, fully present interactions with other people or the things that weigh down our minds.
I, too, have been subject to both of these arrogances. I am not above them at all. But continually I struggle with the question of why we do these things. Why do we get on the emotional bandwagon of movements? Why are we afraid to consider the possibility of our movement being wrong or not feasible? Why do we put our bodies through pain to reach some ephemeral mental liberation and alteration? Too often do we shy away from these questions. Too often, we allow ourselves to be cloaked in self-confidence, to believe that our way is the right way. Giving students the freedom to do what they want to do is vitally important. But this in no way precludes the ability to challenge overriding social trends. We don’t have to go along with a drinking culture because “students have the right to choose.” We don’t have to let our social movements become fads of emotional bandwagoning. We can push for greater moderation, greater consideration and greater rationality. In our classes we open our minds and accept the fact that we’re not always right. It’s not so different to do the same thing in the rest of our life.
(02/18/15 11:03pm)
How do you confront the unthinkable? How do you persevere in the darkest situation imaginable, when everything familiar and comforting is warped and erased? How do you face the destruction of the human race? Like so many other works of fiction, The Last of Us tackles these questions and tries to present some spark of hope in the hopelessness of the apocalypse.
From the shattered highways to the roving bands of cannibals to the dynamic, intense love story between a child and a fatherly figure, The Last of Us exudes the influence of the novelist Cormac McCarthy. But although it shares a lineage with The Road, The Last of Us goes even deeper, impacting the very foundation of what it means to be human, by making the player take control of a violent, ruthless, but wildly protective and compassionate protagonist.
This game is a descent into the deepest areas of the human mind, where actions swing suddenly from the tender and caring to the brutal and animalistic. It is, put simply, a masterpiece. It transcends what it means to be a game, giving the player an experience that rivals the most moving novels and the most profound films.
The Last of Us chronicles the journey of a grizzled, rough man named Joel and his companion, a young girl named Ellie. The vast majority of humans have been infected by a fungus that hijacks their minds and renders them husks hell-bent on spreading the infection. The game follows Joel and Ellie as they travel across the United States, meeting others along the way who both help and hurt them in their quest to elude the infected.
But this is not simply a zombie story. Between bouts of tense and heart-wrenching violence, lulls in the game provide opportunities for touching and emotional vignettes about both Ellie and Joel. Ellie’s soft exclamation of “Look! Fireflies!” belies an otherwise tough and weathered exterior of a girl grown old beyond her years. Tracing notes throughout a sewer system uncovers the story of a man and his quest for survival and acceptance. Graffiti on the walls hints at an underground insurgency dedicated to overthrowing the dictatorial military state in power. And throughout the game, Joel’s brutality softens into something nearing love as his relationship with Ellie becomes stronger.
When you’re not wandering the world and looking for supplies, you will be fighting the infected. The fighting is punctuated by brutal executions and an excess of blood and gore, but rather than glamorizing the fighting, the extreme bodily destruction emphasizes the dark, anarchic world. It’s not fun — but it’s effective. It makes you think about your actions, it makes you feel for the victims and it makes you disgusted with the necessity of the violence.
And with every moment in the game, the most perfect music swells to fit the scene. The Last of Us has the best soundtrack I have ever heard. Its eerie percussive beats and lethargic guitar melodies exactly fit the atmosphere of the game, and I still cannot listen to the opening piece without shivering a little as I remember how it felt to first enter that world and confront the monumental task of survival.
On a psychological level, this game is hard to play. The combat sequences are suspenseful and I found myself approaching each one extremely tentatively. Encounters with the infected often bordered on terrifying, and I became jumpy whenever I heard the telltale scratchy shrieks of the Clickers, the most menacing of the infected. But fortunately, there are lulls in the combat. The most striking moments in the game come between fights, when the world goes silent and you have free reign to wander the abandoned houses, to read journals left by children sent to quarantine and to wonder what happened in each new region you explore. And ultimately, the game concludes at its highest point: nostalgic, intense, full of flawed love, and with a great exhale of stress as you realize that your journey across the country has finally come to a close.
The Last of Us is a game, but it is also an interactive novel and a huge, rich, realistic world. This is the story of a destroyed America just as it is the tale of a man’s relationship with a girl, and how, between the two, some small part of the emotional, irrational and magnificent side of humanity survives. It is sad, it is bleak, it is desperate, but The Last of Us captures a piece of the human experience more perfectly than the vast majority of fiction before it. This is one of the best games ever, and it follows well in the legacy of The Road as one of the best pieces of post-apocalyptic literature ever created.
(02/11/15 11:14pm)
Recently I’ve found myself describing my life as a runaway freight train. At some point in the last year, it began changing so rapidly and in so many ways that I basically threw up my hands, gave up trying to make sense of it and simply went with the current of my life. New experiences presented themselves almost weekly. In a blur, I found myself living in San Francisco on my own, working at a job I loved but, in all honesty, didn’t know how I had landed. I developed new relationships almost without realizing how they came to be. There was no room to breathe; the winds of change whipped at me so fast that I couldn’t stop to rest.
I’m sure that we all feel this way at some point in our lives. It’s common. We go through changes; we experience new things. But that does not mean that these times are easy. In fact, they’re probably some of the most challenging stretches of time we will ever face. There’s a reason why phrases like “the winds of change” have been created. Change is a whirlwind, and it is often hard to find anything to ground you. I’ve certainly had this trouble over the past year.
But during these periods of time, more than ever, we have to find those constants. We latch onto those familiar things, not letting them go, refusing to acknowledge that certain aspects of our lives might be over. I am still struggling to find my constant, that thing to pull myself down and allow myself time to breathe and recover. But how do you hold onto something like this without living in the past? How do you slow down that rapidly accelerating train to help yourself deal with change?
Perhaps we need to do something different. Maybe, instead of latching onto time at home or high school friends, which are generally fading away, we need to embrace familiar things and senses. I’ve found mental comfort in the snow, something I’ve grown up with all my life. I’ve connected the snow with the feeling of being at home, or even just my home state, and so every time I look outside and see it snowing, I feel familiarity grow within me. In a sense, it’s a lesser version of the experience of seeing an old friend after months apart. However, in this case, it happens more often. Snow is a signal for me to take a break, to put my mind to rest and to sit still and calmly for a few minutes.
I have found this feeling elsewhere, as well. Hikes, skiing, going on walks with friends, the way the sun shines over the mountains in the morning—all of these things can help me feel a little more in control. They are signals. Small, frequent occurrences that cause me to pause and be embraced by comfortable familiarity. They allow me to place myself in the world. So often my mind races beyond the edges of my immediate life. Having that sense of place, that sense that things really haven’t changed that much, has given me the ability to continue on with this life of revolutionary change.
It’s the little things that matter. We try not to worry about the little things, but so often it’s the small, insignificant moments every day that can change a person’s perception dramatically. Although I still have immense trouble achieving this, finding those small signals decreases the mind’s focus. It brings one’s perspective so much closer and more immediate that those large, overarching thoughts are left behind. It replaces the frantic chaos of our lives with a grounded, comfortable feeling. As far as I can tell, it is the feeling of knowing that not all is different—that even as life seems to hurtle onward without my input, each moment is not all that different from what I know and love.
(01/15/15 3:09am)
Each horrifying act of violence that occurs in the world cuts at us. Each example of cruelty takes our conceptions of security and turns them around. Violence makes us question those places where we feel comfortable, our ideas about the world and our values. We often wonder how it is possible for such terrible evil to exist in the hearts of humans, and sometimes we think about just how precarious our own grasp on life is.
But, by and large, these acts make communities band together. Instead of tearing apart, they unify. Instead of sowing discord, they bring forth compassion.
However, these events also incite anger. Acts of violence seem to rarely stimulate the sort of cowering, debilitating fear that antagonizing forces want. Instead, they bring forth a seething, red-hot pool of anger in many people. Civilians occasionally retaliate with warped and closed-minded ideas of vigilante justice, harming even more innocent people in the process. The familiar term “xenophobia” appears in news programs, social media feeds and speeches, as more level-headed individuals remind the populace that the vast, vast majority of world citizens condemn such senseless violence. From the destruction, from the grief and from the anger, the constructive maxim inevitably arises: do not hate your neighbor for his beliefs and do not fear those beliefs; resist those who would spread evil in this world.
We must be tolerant. We must allow the anger to dissipate, and we must accept everyone as equal in this world. Each and every person alive deserves dignity and respect until they prove otherwise, and their belief of choice does not make them connected to other evil done elsewhere which invoked that faith. To fight back against violence, we must remain inclusive. That is how a people stands up to cruelty. By remaining strong, by not bowing to the pressure of the human tendency to retaliate, we help break down such systems, which produce evil in the first place.
But tolerance is only one element of a humanistic society. We have often shown the strength and ability to move beyond anger and to accept those who are different from us. In our pursuit of peace, however, we must recognize the inconvenient, often incendiary truth that nothing is above criticism. The possibility exists for a tolerant society to fall into relativist traps and to ignore the difficult questions that such violence can present. No community, belief, creed, set of values, philosophy or group is perfect, and each has its own problems and its own capacity for producing unsavory results.
And so, as educated citizens of the world community, these events serve as catalysts for reassessing our own beliefs and our ideas about the beliefs of others. Philosophies and faiths, even though they are so inherently linked to some people’s lives, cannot be immune to the sort of inspection and reworking that is necessary for a community to prosper and progress. We need to return to those mental spaces where we feel most comfortable, because those spaces have bumps and cracks that can lead us astray. Ultimately, if a belief, creed, philosophy, teaching or set of values is linked to destructive activity, we as a society must take the step to investigate. It is not enough to simply investigate the criminals; rather, we have to question why such criminals might build their decisions to destroy on the basis of beliefs they share.
Every single person in this world deserves respect. A good society cannot function unless it is built on tolerance. Discrimination and bigotry harm not just those who are targeted but the entire community, threatening to undermine the cohesive threads which tie us together. But respecting everyone does not preclude the questioning of values. We cannot lose sight of social improvement and progress. We cannot forget to try to fix the holes in our society. We cannot get complacent. Challenging a belief is not challenging a person’s value, it is not insulting a person’s intelligence and it is not even extending some form of institutional racism. Rather, criticizing a set of values sets us up to advance. Criticism shows us what is broken, and it presents what we can do to make our beliefs even more effective and more worthy of our adherence.
Nothing is above reproach. Each and every one of us needs to be challenged to move forward. Too often, people do not question each other’s deepest and most strongly held beliefs because of a fear of offending or demeaning. But these are the beliefs that most need questioning. As citizens seeking a more liberal, inclusive, peaceful society, we need to ask ourselves if toleration of individuals must equate to acceptance of every aspect of every belief. It is time to move forward and to have the courage to ask those difficult questions. Beliefs, creeds, philosophies and sets of values have the power to incite people to action. As such, each of these should be subject to inspection and review. We need to look at our set of beliefs and investigate what we can do differently, and if these beliefs might have some capacity to warp collective action in a certain way. If so, we can work to fix those holes and move toward a more peaceful future.
(01/15/15 2:17am)
I’ve experienced my share of existential crises in my life, not surprisingly. But rarely have I had to confront questions of my own physical and mental existence. This is my body, and I’m inhabiting it. My mind controls my body, my consciousness is a part of my mind. Thus, I, my mind and my body are more or less one. But The Swapper challenges all of that. Like a punch to the metaphysical gut, this game forces you to confront your own vulnerability and the disconnect between your consciousness and your body. It’s not just a cleverly designed, visually appealing puzzle game. The Swapper is a journey down the deepest wells of existential turmoil, challenging the Descartesian maxim, “I think, therefore I am.”
The game begins in an abandoned excavation station on an alien planet, ambient sound echoing off the metal walls and the light flickering over damp and dusty rock corridors. Controlling a spaceman named Theseus, you are tasked with the exploration of this site and the discovery of why the crew suddenly disappeared.
Framed around platformer mechanics, The Swapper shines most in its increasingly challenging puzzles, which start at the mundane and end at the almost frustratingly complex. But what makes the game and its story special is the tool you use to complete the puzzles: the Swapper device.
The little machine gives this game its impact. Allowing you to clone yourself up to four times and to transfer control to one of the clones, the device becomes the foundational mechanic of the puzzles you have to solve. Some require you to fling a clone across a chasm. Others force you to press on several levers at the same time. Since all the clones move and jump simultaneously, coordinating them all is a challenge that quickly becomes a part of the puzzle itself. Thankfully, time slows down when you’re aiming to swap to another clone. This caused some of the most satisfying moments of the game for me – I would jump off an edge, plummeting to certain death, but before my character died, I would slow down time and fling a clone up onto a higher ledge, reaching an otherwise inaccessible place. My original clone died in the process, but the sacrifice allowed me to finish the puzzle.
Over time, however, these puzzles slowly started to gnaw at my sense of justice. As the story gradually colored the world, fed by dialogue, environmental clues, and logs scattered throughout the game, each death of one of my clones became that much harder to stomach. The Swapper device becomes a method for storytelling that I did not expect. At the end of the game, I became attached to the clones my device was fabricating which I had previously created and killed carelessly and unthinkingly.
And this is because the game made me think. As the number of different clones I had controlled climbed into the hundreds, I began to think about consciousness. The story encourages this line of thought, making you question if each clone is actually a mindless automaton, and making you wonder if you can still be intact after having switched between so many bodies.
All of this wouldn’t work if it didn’t play so well. But it does. And for the four to five hours it took me to complete The Swapper, I was engrossed. The game made me want to explore its gloomy, sinister depths, and I dove deep into the heart of the excavation site to discover the game’s secrets. Although I had to turn to the Internet once or twice, the puzzles never grew frustrating or stale, and the diversity of the environments was such that I never grew bored looking at it.
And what a beautiful game it is, too. The art uses something similar to “found” objects, and in the background you might see what looks like a block of wood, or a cloth-covered wall, or a piece of metal. It all gives the excavation site a cobbled-together look, making it even more alien and more intriguing than it otherwise would be.
What this game becomes, then, is a strong example for the potential of games to tell stories. It isn’t a cinema-style game that tells you a narrative with clear dialogue and cutscenes. Rather, it presents you with a world and a mechanic that make you think. It causes you to question your life and to wonder about the truths we hold so self-evident every day. It is too bad that so much of the best story is hidden away in secret logs, because this game tackles philosophy in a way few other games have done before. It demonstrates the power of storytelling when you are the actor – because of your role in the game, and because of your actions with the device, you become a part of how the story unfolds. This is one of the best games of the past few years. Few other experiences have captured the existential struggle as perfectly as The Swapper. Available on the PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Wii U, this is a game that everyone should play.
(11/19/14 11:54pm)
The cold has finally arrived. Snow has carpeted the grass and framed the buildings with a border of white. Temperatures are dropping and freezing drizzles make walks to class ordeals. Those poor unfortunate souls who have to make the trek to Twilight or the Mahaney Center for the Arts know the pain of biting wind and icy rain. It’s almost winter here, and it’s that time when we break out the hot chocolate, throw on some sweaters, and insulate our rooms from the cold outside. Why brave the cold when our warm rooms have Netflix, good books, and food? This is, indeed, that time of year when the Ross J-term Challenge starts to make a little bit of sense. When it gets to January and the temperatures tumble down below zero, it’s hard to find a reason to ever leave the building.
I often want nothing more than to just lie in bed with a mug of cider and a good book and forget about the wintry weather outside. But I’ve come to believe that it is the winter, more than any other time of the year, when getting outside and away is most important. No other time during the year is movement more limited, and no other time of year is movement more vital to our mental health.
We need to get out. Often we hear of so-called “cabin fever,” which suggests that people go a little insane when cooped up in one building due to inclement weather. This is real, and it’s particularly bad in a dorm environment. All of us have small rooms, for one thing. We also live in extreme proximity to dozens of other students, who we see every day. So many people kept inside for a long period of time will naturally cause conflicts to arise. Diversification of scenery and people, then, is important to keep our minds and our communities peaceful.
I’m not just suggesting the typical method of walking to another Middlebury building to hang out, however. I believe that what we really need during those short, bitterly cold winter days is a complete change of location. At the very least, a trip into town can prove to be immensely valuable. Bundling up to brave the negative temperatures probably doesn’t sound all that appealing, but if you can survive the ten-minute walk to a cafe in town, I’ve found that the mental liberation brings relief. That metaphorical gray cloud that hangs over many of us during the winter isn’t so much a result of the cold itself, but rather a consequence of long stretches of stagnation. We need to move. It is essential to see something else besides the college, to break the monotony, to bring some form of change to our everyday lives. The skies are stagnant enough; when we aren’t going anywhere either, it makes sense that we feel depressed and gloomy. Seeing the same thing every day will have that effect.
Last year, I found my respite in skiing. Almost every afternoon I took the trip up to the Snow Bowl and skied for a couple hours. They were short trips, but they made a world of difference — I never felt trapped or affected by the cold. Even just the ride up into the mountains allowed me to get somewhere different. The trees and mountains were welcome changes to the gray buildings of the college.
It seems, then, that the main effect of the winter weather is to reduce our worlds down to small boxes. Bitter coldness traps us indoors, makes us unwilling to change our scenery and compels us to seek warmth and avoid the weather. Entire days become contained within one or two buildings, with only the shortest of walks between them. This does not happen during any other season. It’s a unique effect of winter, and it makes us feel imprisoned. In effect, it imprisons us. It is up to each of us to break out of that box. We need to get out, to walk around, to sit and be in a place that’s entirely separate of the college. You can see the weight of Seasonal Affective Disorder on students all throughout campus, but I strongly believe that we are not at the mercy of the cold weather. In my experience, the depressing stagnation of winter can be combated with only a short walk and a change of scenery.
Artwork by VAASU TANEJA