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(03/17/16 2:25am)
While students learn countless lessons from their professors — often through hours absorbing lectures and taking notes of problem set solutions or discussion points — there are certain subjects that, over months and years of class, go unaddressed. Last Thursday’s installment of “It’s Not What You Think,” a new storytelling series started this January by President Patton, strived to change that.
Assistant Professor of Dance Christal Brown and Professor of Religion Larry Yarbrough gathered with a couple dozen students and faculty in the Abernethy Room in the Axinn Center to share their reflections on home and personal stories of hardship. The new “It’s Not What You Think” speaker series discussion is part of the College’s initiative to help build resilience and practice reflection on campus.
Moderated by Gaby Fuentes ’16, Thursday’s storytelling session focused on the shaping power of home. Both from the American South, Brown and Yarbrough discussed their feelings on growing up in their respective communities of Kinston, North Carolina, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Although the professors were raised in small, religious communities with similar levels of wealth, their experiences with racism growing up differed. Each speaker’s stories on the particular topic complemented the other’s in a way that made the audience wonder whether the pairing was chosen specifically because of this context.
“I thought it was really interesting that they picked Yarbrough, who grew up in the Deep South during the civil rights movement, and to contrast his experiences with Brown’s experiences,” said Richard Brach ’16.5. “It was interesting how they grew up in similar areas, but totally on the other side of the racial issue.”
Lucy Grinnan ’19.5 agreed. “It was interesting to hear their discussion of race coming from a white man and a black woman because they’re such different experiences,” she said. “I think it’s really valuable to hear people talk about their vastly different experiences with that much respect.”
Grinnan, whose family recently left her longtime home in Virginia, also added, “My views on home have just shifted and it’s something that I have really struggled with lately. It was valuable for me to hear someone struggling with the same kind of ideas about being a modern person in a place that is obsessed with the past.”
Brown and Yarbrough also shared the personal struggles they overcame and triumphs they reached in their academic and, eventually, professional endeavors.
Leila Faulstich-Hon ’19.5 left the hour feeling “... so joyful. I think part of that is just recognizing the plurality of narratives around us. It’s hard to step out of ourselves because you are your own world, but wwhen you just sit down to listen to someone — and listening is such a skill — it makes you so excited to learn more about the people around you.”
Erin Davis, an independent filmmaker in the town of Middlebury and a professor of the practice in the Film and Media Culture department, is developing a plan to turn the speaker series into an online podcast, available to students and faculty alike. Davis taught an interdisciplinary course in the fall titled Sounds of Childhood, which aimed to combine the academic study of childhood with the skills of sound production. Davis, the vocal host of the podcast, is currently producing and editing the audio content for the project.
“I’m creating a short series of pilot episodes that should be ready for launching next fall,” Davis said. “I expect it will be available online. It would be great for the college radio station. I’d love that.”
Whether heard online, over the radio or in the flesh, the stories of this series will aim to foster reflection in the community, and will remind listeners to consider each other’s personal experiences.
Brown reflected on the event’s significance.
“This is one of the rare occasions that students actually get to see their professors as people,” she said. “And I think that taking advantage of that should be a reciprocal process, because we often are in situations where one is in the position of giving knowledge and the other is in the position of taking knowledge. We need to make more opportunities to learn from one another.”
(01/28/16 12:59am)
Just as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men playing company once toured England over 400 years ago to perform the plays of William Shakespeare, the First Folios of the man regarded as the most influential writer of the English language are about to embark on a grand tour of their own. As part of this yearlong, nation-wide tour, one of them will pause for display at the Middlebury College Museum of Art from Feb. 2 to 28 in the exhibit “First Folio! The Book that Gave us Shakespeare, on Tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library.”
Shakespeare’s First Folio, published in 1623 – seven years after his death – is, to our knowledge, the first book ever to record the complete collection of his plays. Of the 750 editions published, an estimated 233 survive. 82 of these are held in a special vault at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., according to the Folger website. It is the largest collection of First Folios in the world.
This year, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Library is taking 18 of its editions out of the vault for public viewing. A copy will pass through each of the 50 states of the US, as well as Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Middlebury College will serve as the only host site in Vermont.
While the application process to be a host site involved countless people collaborating over the course of a year — notably, community partners, the Ilsley Library, the Town Hall Theater and the Vermont Humanities Council — two figures on campus were particularly involved: Professor of English and American Literatures Timothy Billings, who wrote the grant application, and the Director of Special Collections, Rebekah Irwin, who coordinated logistical and event planning.
Billings admits to being “in love with Shakespeare for over 40 years.” His admiration began from a viewing of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, which he saw with his mother at the age of six or seven. Growing up, his parents regularly took him to Shakespeare productions, often at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival at the Angus Bowmer Theater in Seattle, which Billings’s architect father helped design. Billings went on to study Shakespeare during and after college, and got the rare chance to see Folger’s collection of First Folios during a summer fellowship.
“There’s a special vault inside the vault — which is where the very, very precious things are held,” Billings said. “Most researchers never get to see that. They lay them on their sides because setting them upright puts pressure on the bindings, so the safest way is to have them all horizontal on each shelf. You see all these bindings, all different, some of them are gorgeous and ornate, some of them are really just dark and simple. All 82 of them. It’s a stunning thing to see.”
Each First Folio is unique, both in its binding and its interior, due to the printing and publishing practices of the time each was made. Billings explained that in Shakespeare’s time vendors sold books as interiors; the customer would buy the pages of one or several texts sewn together and take them to a binder, who would then create a cover for the pages, as simple or ornate as the customer could afford. Because of the stop-press correction process used by printers at the time, each Folio contains pages with features exclusive to that version.
“And so the particular one that we get has its own history and carries with it the lives — in this very tangential way, this kind of aura of the lives — it has touched along the way,” Billings said.
Irwin shared that paper produced for the Folios further distinguishes the editions and their histories. “Paper during that time and the early renaissance was made using rags. Rag pickers was a medieval term for the very poor members of a social class who would gather rags and those rags would be made into paper. So the paper from books that are really old is actually quite beautiful and in very good condition compared to the paper that was made, let’s say, in the 1870s. The paper that the First Folio’s made out of is beautiful paper and in wonderful shape,” said Irwin.
While each Folio boasts its own physical features and personal history, all of them together have contributed to the legacy of Shakespeare. Each Folio contains 36 plays. Of those, 18, including Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and even Macbeth had never been formally recorded and would have been lost had they not been printed in the Folios. The fact that the Folios were published at all, and preserved so well, has also played a role in forming Shakespeare’s place as an emblem of Western culture.
And then there is the unspoken, obvious reason why the Folios are so valuable: the stories inside are really, really good. “Even when I re-read Shakespeare I’m continually taken aback and even surprised at how good some parts are,” Billings said. “Just when I’m starting to feel blasé with overfamiliarity something smacks me, and I think, ‘This is just so damn good!’”
Because of the rarity and value of these Folios, security and safety are major priorities during this tour. Not even Irwin, who has coordinated so much of the project, knows how the book is getting to Middlebury or where it is coming from. She asked. They haven’t told her. According to Irwin, it’s coming in a sensitive, specially made box, equipped with temperature, light and humidity controls.
Once on campus, the Folio will remain in the box for about 12 hours before being handled. The museum will maintain proper temperature and light conditions, as well as humidity levels right at 50 percent, ideal for book preservation.
“Paper is like skin,” Irwin said. “Our conservation manager will often say that all of our books are organic, and they’re dying, rotting, like anything else. And so we just do everything that we can to slow the decay process. With this special book, we have to not just slow the process, but try to get as close to stopping it as we can.”
She added, “For every day that a book is kept in bad conditions, it reduces the life cycle by years. There have been scientific equations that can show that the paper will degrade faster for every temperature degree below its ideal set-point.”
The exhibit taking place at the Museum will include multi-panel displays provided by the Folger Library, in addition to digital content and activities. “The scholars at the Folger are first rate, so the material we’re getting from them is going to be superb, I have no doubt,” Billings said.
The College has collaborated with the greater Vermont community to provide as much free programming to as much of the public as possible surrounding the Folio, including visiting and resident speakers, workshops, theater performances, film screenings, a folio festival featuring live Renaissance music and more.
While none of us will ever know what it was like to hear Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy from the mouth of Richard Burbage, who played him in the work’s original productions on the Elizabethan stage, the upcoming exhibit will give college students and Vermonters alike the rare chance to read the words of that very speech on a page almost as old as Burbage himself. It’s the closest thing to time travel we’ve got.
(11/04/15 7:45pm)
If you haven’t eaten one yet, chances are you probably have seen the sweet cupcake creations of MiddCakes somewhere on campus. Perhaps you spied their icing coiffures standing sweetly in Wilson Café (their most popular selling post), or got a whiff of their sugary goodness at the Grille or Crossroads. You may have seen them at college events hosted by MCAB or For the Kids, and starting this year, you may have even come into close proximity with the delectable desserts at a friend’s birthday party or special event.
Now in their third year of production, MiddCakes, the student-run cupcake business operating through the College, seems to be everywhere. Founders Emily Fields ’16.5, Caroline Guiot ’16 and Katie Chamberlain ’16 began to see the potential of selling their cupcakes to the student body after their active baking repeatedly resulted in surplus desserts. They contacted members of the administration, saw their business idea through, and now support a team of nine student employees (eight bakers and one social media coordinator).
Recently, MiddCakes expanded to accommodate a special order service, which allows private parties to order cupcakes through the Box Office for pickup.
“For orders, we just followed the models that were already in place for the Grille, and that was a pretty easy transition, I would say,” Fields said. “It would have been a lot harder if we were doing deliveries for it, which is something we’re hoping to get into, because there’s a lot of parent interest. But at the moment it’s a big undertaking and financially it doesn’t make sense for us to do quite yet.”
Also new to MiddCakes this year is a bit of rebranding led by Fields, who manages marketing with help from Andrew Stickney of the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies; the cupcakes feature all new names, like MiddCoreo, Proctor Crush, Sunday Funday and Basic Batch.
MiddCakes’ well-deserved success comes in large part through its recognition by and cooperation with the College. The campus cafes act as retailers and the Grille — MiddCake’s staff’s official employer—coordinates its supply orders and provides kitchen space. But while MiddCakes is the only business organization of its kind on campus, it is not the only case of students wishing to sell food goods at the college. Last winter, a group of students taking the Middlebury Entrepreneurs J-Term course endeavored to sell kombucha-based energy drinks at Crossroads café, and several years ago, an underground midnight burrito service based out of Atwater was forced to shut down by college officials.
Fields and Chamberlain agree that there is a strong student interest in food service entrepreneurship.
“There have been a lot of pop-up food entrepreneurs that haven’t been able to follow through with their vision because there really isn’t a space to do it,” said Chamberlain, who is head of operations at MiddCakes. “For us it was quite a process … because there are a lot of issues with selling food and perishable goods. So there was some red tape around that. We had to do a ton of meetings.”
“You really need a certified kitchen and there aren’t very many on campus that are available at the moment,” Fields added. “The College doesn’t quite have the resources to support all these different food businesses. They would really like to but it’s tough to do that.”
What the College may lack in infrastructure, it makes up for in human resources. Fields and Chamberlain encourage students interested in food entrepreneurship on campus to seek advice and support from the administration, (like the Associate Dean of Students for Student Activities and Orientation, JJ Boggs) and groups like Midd Core, Midd Entrepreneurs, Midd Start Adventures and others that support business ideas with small grants and consultations.
“There are a lot of people here and it’s great to get in touch with them and talk to them. You could come up with a lot more ideas,” Fields encouraged.
(09/24/15 12:35am)
On Sunday morning, I watched time-lapse panoramas of rolling Utah skies and sunrises over looming, copper cliffs, before finally settling in the living room with award-winning CNN reporter Lisa Ling and Becky Jeffs, the daughter of the man who founded the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). Ling gently asked Jeffs, “When a man like that [your father] becomes a prophet, what happens?”
“He can hide his sins behind the title ‘prophet,’” Jeffs answered.
Last Sunday, a small group of students and I were lucky enough to watch the second season premiere of CNN’s investigative documentaries This is Life with Lisa Ling before it aired on national television. The episode, titled “Children of the Prophet,” gave an exclusive look behind the closely guarded doors of the FLDS through the eyes of the children of the infamous prophet and convicted felon, Warren Jeffs.
Students were given this opportunity because of Middlebury’s connection to the production team. The executive producer of “This is Life”, Amy Bucher ’87, is a Middlebury alum, along with three co-producers, Heidi Burke ’93, Jackie Hurwitz ’07 and Courtney Hutchens ’99.
“It’s remarkable to me because we spanned twenty years of Middlebury history and none of us overlapped … Now, we’re working on one of the best series in television,” said Bucher. “That is a series of happy coincidences that we all met each other.”
Initially, the series was called Our America with Lisa Ling, and it aired on Oprah Winfrey’s then-nascent network, OWN. After five seasons on OWN, the show transitioned to CNN, where its first season gained such popularity that its viewer ratings outperformed other cable shows in the same time slot. Viewers of This is Life outnumbered CNN’s then most popular programs. Last week, the first season of This is Life became available on Netflix.
“I think the heart of why people watch the show is because it’s an exciting emotional journey,” said Bucher. “[Viewers] trust Lisa to bring them into a world they might be apprehensive about and they trust that she’s going to show them something new, and it’s going to be something for sure compelling and relatable.”
Each episode of This is Life takes the audience into new sub-cultures and communities that stray from the mainstream through honest interviews and incredible video footage of exclusive societies. Among the responsibilities of Bucher’s team of Middlebury producers is researching the most compelling narratives to arrange interviews and gain as much access into the story as possible – a task Bucher says has become the defining quality of this upcoming season.
“We try to raise the bar and increase the depth of our storytelling and the depth of our access … it’s very difficult to obtain [access to these communities] and we’re especially proud of the depth of our access in the upcoming season,” said Bucher.
She credited her co-producers for the series’ depth of reporting.
“It takes a lot of passion and natural curiosity,” she said. “That is their [Burke, Hurwitz and Hutchens] talent.”
Natural curiosity is also what led all four women into the television industry after college, during which most of them did not foresee a career in television. Their majors ranged from Geography to Chinese. All four agree on the merits of a liberal arts education.
“We do take in a lot of Middlebury students and continue to do that through internships. I think a liberal arts background was an extraordinary foundation for me to get into this industry,” said Bucher. “[Working on This is Life], we become specialists on different topics every month and I think liberal arts is a great venue for that.”
To those interested in working in the television industry, these alumni recommend internships and tenacity over film school.
“I’ve seen a lot of people come in as interns and not have any experience but [they] give 110% and they’re quick learners and they work their way up the ranks,” said Burke.
Hurwitz, who went to film school prior to pursuing a career in storytelling media, does not see graduate school as the ultimate entry into the business.
“Perhaps different from some other internships is that a lot of getting jobs in the production industry is what people you’ve worked with before; personal references are huge,” Hurwitz said.
When considering potential hires, Bucher said, “The things that really stand out to us are passion, the ability to pitch in and be able to connect with people and to really have confidence and writing skills. We don’t look at a resume and look at somebody who went to film school and think of them as having an advantage.”
“Are you articulate? Can you write? Are you willing to start at the bottom? Self-motivation is a huge one – Jackie [Hurwitz] stood out because she had this incredible self-motivation,” said Bucher.
“The last seven years have been the best of my career and it’s because of the stories we tell,” said Hurwitz.
“I worked in television for a long time and it’s neat that we can work with topics that can help people open their minds,” added Burke.
Being open-minded to explore topics deeply and play with new ideas is something the liberal arts education champions as a life-long skill. For these four Middlebury alumni, it has paid off.
Tune in to CNN to watch the season two premiere of This is Life with Lisa Ling on Wednesday, Sept. 30 at 9 p.m.
(01/15/15 2:25am)
Late afternoon on Saturday, Wilson Hall erupted in cheers. The 130 students who had just participated in JusTalks, an all-day, student led discussion event that encourages social justice dialogue, were wrapping up a day of heavy exchanges with dancing, loud whoops and even a birthday ballad to one lucky partaker. To an outsider, the crowd’s enthusiasm sounded not unlike the ending ovations to an admired summer camp, an odd comparison for an event one participant described as “emotionally taxing.”
From 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., first- and second-year attendees collaborated with junior and senior facilitators and organizers in a giant think-tank of serious questions. Questions about race relations, gender, class, sexuality, ability and the effects of these influences on their Middlebury experience.
It is difficult to describe all that went on in the auditorium. One could simply say that people talked. Yet the kind of conversations JusTalks encouraged in first-years, at whom the program was primarily aimed, were big group discussions, intimate hour-long conversations one-on-one and open platforms to respond to posed prompts.
For Mandy Kimm ’17, who decided to be a JusTalks facilitator after participating as a freshman last year, the day was about building empathy.
“Confidentiality is really important,” she said. “It’s a safe space for people to open up and share things that they really wouldn’t be able to, or feel comfortable, or have the occasion to share about themselves and their situations in normal everyday life. It definitely gets very personal.”
Kimm led a talk on mental health and emotional and spiritual well-being with a group of freshman, discussing “how Middlebury is or is not a place that supports emotional well being,” she said. She added that some of the questions addressed were, “How acceptable is it to talk to people when you’re struggling? How does it feel to look around and see how everyone seems to be putting on this façade of being totally fine and being on top of it?” She later added, “That discussion was really meaningful.”
According to Kimm, in an activity called Open Spaces, students chose to join facilitated groups focusing on topics ranging from racial profiling, to athlete or non-athlete relations, to LGBTQ life at Midd, to rape culture and sexual assault. Students also got to suggest two categories of their own choosing, which resulted in one group focusing on microaggressions and language communication, and another on body image, one of the most popular groups of the hour.
For Anna Iglitzin ’17.5, Open Spaces captured the spirit of the day.
“For my first section I talked about racial profiling and race relations following Ferguson and Garner and all the judicial cases, and I just thought it was fascinating because it felt like everyone really wanted to be there and to learn something,” she said. “Everyone was sharing from a place they felt comfortable too so a lot of students talked about not knowing how to engage and a lot of students talked about the ways in which they had been personally affected by racial profiling, and it felt like a really cool balance of people who came from different viewpoints.”
A Feb Orientation leader this upcoming February, Iglitzin is already thinking about the ways Justalks will spill over to reach incoming students.
For the organizers of the event, nine upperclassmen women for whom JusTalks is a personal project, this level of engagement proves that there is a continuous need for such conversations on campus.
“[JusTalks] was basically started by a group of students who felt that our college’s curriculum doesn’t have a space to talk about inequality and power and privilege,” organizer Afi Yellow-Duke ’15 said. “We’re not living up to the mission of the college, which talks about being able to have students lead Middlebury and engage with the world. By not being able to talk about certain inequities, we’re not doing that.”
Fellow organizer Molly McShane ’16.5 added, “I think people genuinely want to have the conversations but just don’t know how, so I think by giving people the outlet, there are a lot of people who wanted to take up that opportunity.”
One of the main long-term goals of JusTalks is to make it a mandatory portion of as many first-year seminars as possible. Peer Institutions like Williams College have already mandated JustTalks-equivalent conversations across all grade levels in an event called Claiming Williams Day.
But for now, they are making strides to integrate JusTalks into classroom curriculum in first-year seminars.
“In the same way you have a discussion section to a class or a screening, that would be a once-a-week meeting, an hour long,” explained organizer Kate McCreary ’15.
So far, Justalks have gotten mostly positive feedback from first year seminar professors; six out of the seven they spoke with are considering experimenting with a Justalks discussion section. Three have already agreed to make it mandatory.
The goal of mandatory participation may sound extreme, and even like a potential dilution of the enthusiasm students like Iglitzin and Kimm enjoyed so much at Saturday’s program. Yet considering that the students who didn’t register for last week’s Justalks are likely those very same students who are less comfortable addressing the issues raised at the event, the organizers’ effort to reach those less willing or shy members of the student body makes some sense.
“I would rather someone be there even if they didn’t want to be there — and sat there the whole day like grouchy and were sitting back with their arms crossed or whatever — I’d rather that person be there to experience something like JusTalks at least once in their lifetime at Middlebury because at least they’ve registered that conversation,” Yellow-Duke said. “You could easily go through four years at Middlebury without talking about these things and that to me is worse than anything else.”
“We’re not trying to teach anyone anything, because we’re still learning,” organizer Jiya Pandya ’17 said. “The reason we keep coming back to this and we keep organizing it is because we see value in it, every time we do this. We just wish more people would be willing to go through the process with us.”
Some participants, like Iglitzin, agree on a more consistent, seminar-like model of JusTalks over a full day of the program, although for a different reason.
“It was charged,” said Iglitzin, reflecting on the atmosphere. “I would say that the problem with anything like that is that the ‘let down’ is hard too; you’re in this environment for a whole day, [it’s] super intense, and then you sort of walk out of it and you walk back into your life. I feel like I’m sort of still today on Monday feeling tired and trying to remember what it was that was so emotionally taxing and what was challenging.”
Iglitzin captures the fatigue of many of the participants of this year’s JusTalks, who tackled some of big questions about social inequality and faced their own conflicts of personal and group identity. For these students, it’s a pleasant weariness, not unlike the ache of sore muscles after an intense workout — satisfying and humming with the anticipation of growth from another day at the gym.
(04/24/14 3:02am)
Last Monday evening, sitting in the small and stuffy newspaper office in the Hepburn basement, I found myself surrounded by lounging editors, writers and photographers listening to a steady stream of bluesy, jazzy soul played by Innocent Tswamuno ’15 and Mohan Fitzgerald ’14 of the student super-band, Milk Chocolate.
The duo opened with a rendition of the Wood Brother’s “Luckiest Man” followed by Bill Withers’ emotive song, “Grandma’s Hands.” Fitzgerald played the acoustic guitar while Tswamuno simultaneously worked the drum, melodica and a tambourine he admitted to “borrowing” for the night from an unaware friend.
The pair, who met during Tswamuno’s audition for Stuck in the Middle, an acappella group at the College, hit it off immediately.
Fitzgerald recalls, “I don’t want to embarrass him because we tell this story all the time, but basically the room went crazy when he auditioned because he just had this beautiful voice.”
It is a happy miracle that the two came together at all. Tswamuno grew up in Zimbabwe, a preacher’s son, playing keyboard for his church from the age of twelve. Fitzgerald, from Canada, briefly sang in a boy’s choir and tried the alto saxophone before finally learning to play the guitar after high school.
Fitzgerald and Tswamuno began playing together (their first cover: Rocking Chair, by Eric Clapton), and soon debuted their band at 51 Main in May 2013, with help from contributing members of the “Milk Chocolate Project,” Caroline Joyner ’15 (vocals), Max Eingorn ’14 (drums) and Tito Heiderer ’14.5 (bass). This was followed by later shows in Atwater suite BCG and events in McCullough Social Space such as the 200 Days Party.
A typical Milk Chocolate show includes a medley of covers of songs by Eric Clapton, the Wood Brothers and Bill Withers. Think R&B, blues, jazz, soul and reggae. Between schoolwork and extracurriculars, Tswamuno and Fitzgerald have co-written one song called “Never Gonna Call”.
Recently, they revisited 51 Main, this time taking center stage.
“The difference could really not be more stark. I remember distinctly that after that first time we were super bummed out because we’d prepared all this stuff to play, and we thought everyone would to stop and listen to us, and no one listened to us at all! But,” said Fitzgerald, who recalled one man’s praise at the end of the night. “It was the first time anyone had given us any kind of validation.”
At the start of their collaboration, neither musician was concerned with getting attention. Only once they realized their potential and craved a bigger musical outlet did they seek performance space.
“Now that people want to listen to us, it’s a completely added bonus,” said Fitzgerald. “We didn’t care about that, but now that it’s happening, it’s amazing. It’s so much fun. He even got the attention of his own parents, who drove to Middlebury from Toronto to see him and Tswamuno play.
“My parents haven’t stayed up past 9:30 p.m., I think, since the nineties,” said Fitzgerald. “And they were there until the bitter end of that show, still cheesing. And that made me so happy.”
Milk Chocolate has come a long way from that first disappointing night at 51 Main. Two weekends ago they hit the McCullough Social Space stage with the Milk Chocolate Project, for which Fitzgerald, Tswamuno and their contributing members teamed up with rapper Dwayne Scott ’17.
Shelby Redfield ’16, who attended the show, described the band’s effect, “When I first got there, it seemed like everyone was just interested in the chocolate fountain. But as soon as the band started playing everyone just flocked to the front, near the stage, and the dance turned into a concert.”
“That show was very much intrinsically gratifying because we had the best time. I’ve never seen all of us as giddy as after that show,” Fitzgerald said.
While Tswamuno and Fitzgerald study Environmental Studies and Math respectively, they are taking their musical pursuits seriously.
“Next year [following Fitzgerald’s graduation], I’m going to be at a real loss. Mohan plays guitar and sings really well, and we’ve practiced so much, and our voices go together. At this point, we have such good rapport that when he leaves I just won’t have a band,” Tswamuno said. “Being in a band, for you to enjoy it you have to be with the right crew and they have to just click.”
While Tswamuno will continue to study and perform with Stuck in the Middle, Fitzgerald plans to attend music school after graduating. They hope to reunite Milk Chocolate once Tswamuno has graduated.
(03/06/14 2:09am)
After months of planning, the Socially Responsible Investment Club (SRI) and the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) started the spring term with an event called Socially Responsible Investing Week, a speaker series focusing on investment as a tool for social change.
“One of our major goals for this year was to have a student presence,” Alexa Beyer ’15.5, co-President of the SRI Club said. “This week in a lot of ways was designed to really give value to an average student who doesn’t know about this or doesn’t think about these issues. We want to be a student group that people go to about this stuff. We want to make ourselves known and make these issues heard.”
The week began with an Atwater dinner, followed by a workshop at the CCI. The week also featured three lectures by both local and visiting speakers: Randy Kritkausky, Visiting Scholar in Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability at the Monterey Institute of International Studies; Tom Mitchell, Managing Director of mission-related investing at Cambridge Associates, a leading investment consulting firm; and Pier LaFarge ’10.5, Co-Founder and CEO of Spark, a company that uses crowd funding to invest in energy efficiency projects.
“If I had to pick out a theme among the speakers we’ve heard so far, it was democratizing investment, and democratizing the way these decisions are made,” Beyer said.
The decision to partner with CCI derived from a desire to appeal to a larger range of students. Allie Cohen ’16.5, who worked closely on the collaboration explained, “We reached out to them [the CCI] to see if they would help us advertise — so that students could see this not only as a learning opportunity but also as a potential career opportunity.”
The effort yielded the desired effect; the Atwater dinner was filled to capacity and a large number of students who are not members of SRI or of Divest Middlebury attended other events.
“A lot of SRI members are attending, but I’m seeing a lot of new faces too, people I don’t know,” said SRI co-President Virginia Wiltshire-Gordon ’16. “That’s really exciting because it means we’re reaching more of our campus and really pulling students in to help them become educated and for them to help educate us as well.”
“For example, after Randy Kirtkausky’s talk, most of us stayed after for a solid 20 minutes talking to him about what he had said and about Middlebury and the future of socially responsible investing. It was a really great learning experience for everyone there,” she added.
During the week, the CCI hosted a workshop called “Careers and Pathways into SRI.”
“It was about giving the students some resources and tools, because it’s not always easy to find entry points into that area,” said Associate Director for Career Services Tracy Himmel-Isham. “I think they were really happy to see some of the resources, some of which were new to them.”
These resources include the USSIF Directory, a database of investment organizations based in the US and England, and the Vermont Business for Social Responsibility Conference, a local program that provides Middlebury-specific internships. Another idea from the workshop was for students to find a specific entry point into a desired industry.
“Every student on this campus is going to have to think about what they’re going to do when they leave and it’s so rewarding for us to be able to know that students want to engage some of our expertise and want to tap into us to help them find alumni or parents that have a tie here and can be real assets.”
“The two events that we directly were involved with were meant to be small events. They were very one-on-one interactions on intimate levels,” Director of the Center for Careers and Internships Don Kjelleren added. “We absolutely love and look forward to working with the student groups. It makes our work so much more enjoyable and successful when students are interested in partnering with us. That’s a really positive model and one that we want to emulate whenever possible.”
The SRI Club was also happy with the results of the partnership. “Partnering with the CCI really puts into effect our original intention of the week, which was to give value to students in a concrete way. By doing a variety of speakers and then by saying, ‘Here are some career opportunities and here’s how to find an environmental internship,’ we’re giving them concrete value, even if they’re not interested in investing specifically,” Beyer said.
“I get the impression that people have been coming to the events not just because their friends have been dragging them there but because it’s something they actually want to learn about and are interested in,” Cohen said.
(01/22/14 4:29pm)
It just so happens that every once in a while, the Middlebury community misses out on the opportunity to hear fantastic visiting speakers due to the distraction of spectacular glorious skiing conditions. This past weekend was one such opportunity.
The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs sponsored the 1st Annual Student-Led Global Conference titled “Immigration in the Neoliberal Age.” This year’s leaders featured Molly Stuart ’15.5 and Fernando Sandoval Jimenez ’15.
Last year, a competition, open to all students who wish to lead the events, invited applicants to share their visions of the future conference. Jimenez, who studies Environmental Studies and Geography, shares how it all began: “Molly was the one to have the idea. At the time, I was in Lebanon, taking a semester off, and Molly was abroad, studying neoliberalism in Mexico from the perspective of the Southern Mexican Zapatistas.”
A professor emailed Stuart, asking her to submit a proposal into the contest. Inspired by her surroundings, she formed an idea based on neoliberalism’s effect on migrants and immediately reached out to Jimenez, a friend and previous project collaborator.
One year later, Jimenez and Stuart found themselves facing their original ideas in the flesh — that is to say, they found themselves leading discussions and introducing speakers, among other organizational responsibilities.
The conference kicked off Jan. 16 with a panel discussion of the Mexican-US border, continued into Friday with a workshop presenting “Neoliberal Globalization” and a film screening of the documentary Last Train Home, and finished off on Saturday with four lectures by visiting speakers.
“I think that the lectures themselves were all fantastic and they brought a perspective to Middlebury that we usually do hear about or we read about and we study and dissect and analyze and we write papers about, but we don’t care much about [it when] down to actually connecting to the people that this is happening to,” Jimenez said. “The people that came to talk about that reality spoke in a very close up way, so you could actually feel it.”
Neoliberalism, as Jimenez admits, is a concept both simple and complex. He explains it simply.
“It’s a vision of capitalism in which the entire world needs to be connected for everything, but in general it doesn’t really work, at least not for everyone,” he said. “It facilitates a lot the accumulation of capital by some people, and it allows such people to have capital and markets everywhere. But that doesn’t mean that commonplace people have access to the global economy. They are part of it, but they are not necessarily the players. They’re not playing, they’re being played.”
By way of this capitalist endeavor, neoliberalism exploits the masses in favor of the few, often overtaking local industry and creating a huge economic gap, all of which displaces people from their homes in various ways. Thus, immigration, as Colin Rajah, International Coordinator of the Global Coalition on Migration and one of Saturday’s speakers, puts it, is one “symptom” of these global problems — as, he argues, is climate change.
“I thought that [Rajah] was going to say that the environment affects people, etc., and that we need to fight the environmental degradation, etcetera,” Jimenez said. “But he actually came to the idea that what we need to fight is the imbalance of power and that that’s what’s causing both climate change and the displacement of people. That is, people are being displaced not just because of climate change but also because of the balance of power. And I cannot do justice to the way he explained it; he put it very powerfully.”
The call to fight neoliberalism and free trades agreements was Rajah’s response when Jimenez asked what we could do to help the problem. The answer, Jimenez said, took him aback in its immensity.
When realizing the full extent of these huge issues, Jimenez confesses to feeling overwhelmed.
“Partly because, when I was away in Lebanon, I saw very closely that difference between having a lot of power and not having any power at all. I’ve always been sensitive to that topic; Lebanon made me even more so.”
“And I do feel powerless, I guess, but I also feel really angry because then we’re all here like “Oh, but what can we do about this?” And it’s like, well, could we start to live a bit of a more simple life? Like do we really need to have the library be extremely hot in winter and extremely cold in winter, you know, is that necessary? Do we really need to have lights on all night?” Jimenez said. “Coming from Mexico and having been also to places where the vast majority of people live in more modest situations, being in Middlebury does make me feel uncomfortable about all the things that we have that we don’t have to have.”
To the few who attended the events, the conference was doubtless as enriching and provocative as Jimenez describes it. The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs is currently in the process of preparing for next year’s continuation of this lecture series, which will become an annual event committed to engaging our community on global issues and, if it is anything like this year’s discussion, humble us in the process.
(01/15/14 4:37pm)
After a year of news stories about Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers, Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics Allison Stanger set the record straight on Jan. 10.
Talking about the cases of Edward Snowden, the NSA, and Wikileaks, Stanger was critical of those she defined as whistleblowers while also seeming to embrace the long-standing American tradition.
“Reverence for whistleblowing is at the heart of the American exception, and it’s one of America’s signature features,” she said. “Though not commonly perceived as such, whistleblowing is a quintessentially American activity with a long history.”
Stanger spoke to a noticeably older audience, which gathered in the sardined conference room of the Robert A. Jones ’59 House to hear the professor present her talk titled “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Leaks: The Story of Whistleblowing in America.”
One of the few students in attendance was Kate McCreary ’15. A student of political science and education, McCreary came to the talk out of pure curiosity.
“One thing I liked was that [Stanger] was really focused on legality; the law for the protection of whistleblowers includes those who revealed not only actions that are illegal but also improper,” McCreary said. “I was talking to my friends about this afterwards. It seems almost worse if there were something the government was doing that was legal but that the majority of Americans would disagree with if they knew about it.”
Stanger, who holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and has taught Political Science and Economics at Middlebury 23 years, is about to add a second book (Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Leaks) to her repertoire of contributions to the world of political science.
A main point in her discussion was the influence of technology on national security, especially in reference to the National Security Agency (NSA).
“The Fourth Amendment protects your personal home computer from illegal search and seizure,” Stanger said. “But once you post anything up in the ‘cloud,’ you lose that protection. The Fourth Amendment’s protection largely ends where virtual reality begins, since Americans are volunteering to share in this way and are not being forced to do so.”
Stanger highlighted these nuances when talking about the case of Edward Snowden, who she says is not yet declared a whistleblower and who, “if the Supreme Court were to rule that some of the NSA activities were unconstitutional… would probably morph from a traitor to a patriot.”
Another issue brought up was the conflict between democracy and security.
“Democracy demands that the people know what the government is doing…but this is what I call the paradox of whistleblowing in America. On the one hand, Americans view whistleblowing as valuable. On the other, they implicitly range security as the supreme value trumping all others. ”
Democracy, at the core of our American identity, plays an integral role in whistleblowing, and in the industrialized world, Stanger points to how the two are in some ways co-dependent.
On this point, McCreary said, “Something that I found really interesting, and refreshing too, was that [Stanger] was super critical of a lot of the ways that our country does national security, but also, at the end, seemed to really adhere to the idea of American exceptionalism in that regard. I thought that was a combination that doesn’t normally happen.”
“American democracy was not designed to serve capitalism and free markets alone – it was designed to serve the people,” Stanger said.
Stanger said the problems plaguing a world power create inaction on the part of most citizens.
“Today, plagued by financial scandals, we seem both fearful of corruption and resigned to it. We seem uncertain about whom it hurts and what difference it ultimately makes” Stanger said.
In the end, Stanger suggested, whistleblowers may have more conviction than the average American.
“The republic seems to be perpetually corrupted, but instead of being outraged, we are not sure it matters. Well, whistleblowers think it matters,” Stanger said.
The result, Stanger said, was that whistleblowers embody an American value of wanting to do more.
“Whistleblowers take things everyone views as natural or inescapable and say that they aren’t. And, in so doing, challenge all of us to dream of a better day,” Stanger said. “What can be more American than that?”
As for the older audience, McCreary explained, “There are normally more students. One reason for their absence is that people went skiing. Also the subject of this talk is more accessible and interesting to a broader audience so that probably is why more townspeople wanted to be there to hear it.”
(11/06/13 8:10pm)
Last week the Center for Careers and Internships joined forces with the Psychology and Theatre Departments to bring Dr. Tasha Eurich ’02, organizational psychologist, speaker and New York Times best-selling author, to campus. On Tuesday, Oct. 29, Eurich addressed students and professors alike in McCardell Bicentennial Hall in a lecture she called, “Two Roads Converged: How I Stumbled Upon My Dream Career.”
In her lecture, Eurich told the story of how she used subgoals, pragmatic planning and trial and error to land a career that innovatively joined her two interests: psychology and theater. “They sort of came together in a way that, frankly, I never expected, and it was really cool,” said Eurich. “It was almost like I knew all along.”
In addition to sharing her journey, she shed some insider advice on how to get ahead in the workplace, both in and outside of the field of psychology. After graduating as a Psychology and Theater Major from Middlebury, Eurich earned her PhD in industrial organizational psychology from Colorado State University. In 2008, she founded her own consulting company called The Eurich Group, allowing her to travel and do what she loves most: help people become better leaders. In her previous work, Eurich’s clients were primarily executives from Fortune 500 companies, but her new position helps her reach audiences outside the business realm, such as hospitals and even Middlebury College.
As recently as a few weeks ago, she published her first book, “Bankable Leadership: Happy People, Bottom Line Results, and the Power to Deliver Both,” which almost instantly soared to #8 on the New York Times Bestseller List as well as joining the top 100 books being sold across America, as reported by USA Today.
“When [the Theater Department] heard that she was coming, we asked to support her,” said Professor Cheryl Faraone, who attended the talk. “It’s always really helpful for students to understand that whatever they major in, it’s liable to have some kind of impact on their lives later on, but it doesn’t mean they have to follow it as a career path. Tasha was, for us, a lucky break.”
The lecture was a lucky break for students too, for whom career advice is never enough in abundance.
“I found Tasha’s point of choosing a graduate school in the area you intend to live in extremely applicable for any student planning to continue their education; every opportunity to make relevant connections should be taken,” said Rose Ardidi ’17, who plans on majoring in Neuroscience and minoring in Education Studies. “It was made evident that the opportunities Tasha was allowed arose from persistence to maintain established connections.”
Finding the right grad school in the right location, building and maintaining a network, developing writing skills, and always being pragmatic about the next small step in getting to a larger goal are just a few of the many suggestions given during the lecture.
Interesting also was Eurich’s encouragement of college students to contact working individuals in their field of study. “You can write up or call anyone and ask them to pick their brain. You can find someone famous in the field you might want to go into. Try it. They might say no. Then you go on to person B and the next person and the next person,” she said. And here’s the bull’s eye: “The reason it’s helpful to do this in college and not wait until you’ve graduated and you’re on the job market is it will be clear that you don’t want anything from them. As soon as you’re seeking a job and you ask someone, ‘Hey can I talk to you about what you do?’ They think, ‘This person is angling for something from me. They need a job and they’re using me to get it.’”
And of course, “Think about theater. The craft of getting up in front of a big group of people and figuring out a way to think straight, not be nervous, and talk in a way that other people can hear you, will serve you in literally any profession.”
One of the implicit suggestions of the talk was to consider entrepreneurial possibilities. For Eurich, her business sprang out of her self-diagnosed “bright shiny object syndrome.”
While she liked the work she had at the time, she considered taking a chance to do something that, while risky, would be a new and rewarding adventure.
“One of the things that was most impressive to me is the whole issue of self-starting. To think of yourself as an active person and use your own sense of agency,” said Faraone. “In any career in the arts, that’s absolutely essential. I also greatly appreciate the idea because people can be very employment-wary. Tasha’s admonition to dream big but dream realistically is I think both practical and gives you permission to pursue something that you might be fearful of pursuing, because maybe it’s not the most practical choice.”
As part of her visit to Middlebury, Dr. Eurich did some leadership consulting for the vice presidents and their direct reports, based on her recently published book. Vice President for Planning and Assessment and Professor of Psychology Susan Baldridge, who supervised Eurich when she was young psychology student writing her senior thesis, attended.
In an email, she wrote of her experience, “The workshop was engaging and had a very practical focus. A number of those who attended stopped me afterward to say how helpful it was, and how impressed they were by Tasha and her work. Her style is clear, funny, direct, and informed by the empirical research on management and leadership.
Having worked closely with Tasha as a student…I was not surprised by how positively people responded to the workshop. She has created a career that allows her to make use of her considerable talents as someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the research literature on organizational psychology and who is also an articulate and entertaining performer. It was a delight to have her back on campus.”