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(12/03/15 2:30am)
The College has welcomed seven new science and math professors in the last two years.
This year’s new professors are Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Amanda Crocker, Assistant Professor of Biology Jill Mikucki and Assistant Professor of Mathematics Albert Kim. Professors who came to Middlebury in the 2014-15 school year include Assistant Professor of Physics Michael Durst, Assistant Professors of Psychology Mike Dash and Robert Moeller and Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Lesley-Ann Giddings.
The hiring spree reflects a growing student interest in the sciences. Science enrollment increased by 6.9 percent between 2001 and 2012, and has continued to grow since then.
These new professors bring their unique research interests to the College, which include everything from medical technology to advanced ice drills.
Durst is developing the use of two photon lasers for biomedical imagery. This technique, which he describes as a much more advanced microscope, can produce extremely high resolution 3D images of tissue in real time. In a demonstration, he produced a real time 3D image of brain activity in a live mouse’s brain at a depth of one millimeter. Though the device is currently limited to depths on the order of a few millimeters, Durst hopes to improve the depth penetration through changing the shape of the lasers’ pulse and through incorporating nonlinear optics.
His use of light and lasers for biomedical imaging follows in the vein of the team who won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, who used a different technique, called “super-resolved fluorescence microscopy,” to perform biomedical imaging. Durst says that he is able to get a deeper and better resolution image with his technique than the Nobel Prize winners, but that each one of his images takes a considerable period of time to produce. He is therefore working on combining his research with a novel technique called temporal focus-setting, which he hopes will greatly reduce the time needed per image. Instead of capturing point images, this technique would allow the device to record activity in slices of tissue. As a long term goal, Durst and his team of student researchers aim to miniaturize their device (which currently takes up a several square meter table) to the size of a probe that can be inserted into the body. Colin Laurence ’17, who worked in Durst’s lab during the summer of 2015, asserts claims that this would be a “revolutionary” advance in imaging technology.
His research is extremely interdisciplinary, both within physics and with other sciences. Within physics, his work combines elements of optics, electromagnetism and quantum physics. He also brings in chemistry, biology and genetics. According to Laurence, most of this interdisciplinary collaboration will “happen later on, as right now [Durst] is just creating the tool.” He also draws on disciplines outside of the liberal arts, particularly engineering and computer programming. He and his research team build much of their equipment themselves, mainly for cost saving reasons.
Mikucki’s research is in the field of microbiology, with special focus on microbiology in bodies of water underneath Antarctic ice-sheets (called subglacial environments). She has spent 12 field seasons in Antarctica. This includes multiple years on the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project, the first project to confirm the existence of active microbial life underneath the Antarctic ice sheets.
In addition, she was the first to cleanly sample a sub-glacial lake (to sample a lake without introducing biological or chemical contaminants), a feat also achieved in the WISSARD project. Mikucki and her teams have devoted a great deal of their effort to avoiding contaminating the Antarctic environments that they work in.
“We want to collect our samples in a mindful way, as we know that we can potentially change the ecosystem just by sampling, so we want to figure out how we can be the most mindful, minimize our impact and make our impact transient,” Mikucki said. “I really want to know what is happening under the ice sheets and I do not want to accidentally see something that came from under my fingernail. So we spend a lot of time figuring out best practices for cleaning our instruments and samples.”
Though her drive to avoid contamination is partially to do with needs directly relevant to her research, it also relates to her long-term goals, namely to find life beyond Earth. Many researchers, including Mikucki, see Antarctic research as a staging ground for extraterrestrial research. The applicability of Antarctic research to the search for extraterrestrial microbial life in the solar system was what first got Mikucki interested in her field of research.
“I think this work lends itself to the search for life on other planets, as Antarctica is an analogue in some important ways for places like Enceladus, Europa and even the ice caps of Mars in that they are cold and potentially really salty,” Mikucki said. “The other thing is that the mindfulness approach [to avoiding contamination of the local ecosystem] is even more important on other planets, as NASA recognizes. My belief is that we have to be able to pull off clean sampling in Antarctica before we can send a probe or especially a manned mission to these other places.”
She also hopes that understanding what enables microbes to live in the cold, dark and often salty environments of subglacial waters will help space agencies narrow their searches for extraterrestrial life. However, she is careful to note that we may be surprised by the adaptability of extraterrestrial microbes to live in situations that Earthly microbes could not tolerate.
“We’d like to figure out how these microbes are able to deal with these extreme conditions, because that will help us inform our search for extraterrestrial life in ice-covered oceans,” Mikucki said. “It would be nice to have some clue of what we might be looking for so we can narrow our search.”
Indeed, Mikucki has personally collaborated directly with numerous space agencies. Her graduate work was funded by NASA, and she continues to work closely with NASA, including by working with some of their scientists in the field. She has also used ice drills designed by the German space agency, in large part to test their designs before they are deployed on extraterrestrial probes.
She has worked in several other projects across Antarctica, including at Blood Falls in the McMurdo Dry Valleys (so named because of the iron oxide that colors the waterfall bright red) and on the Antarctic Peninsula. She stresses that Antarctica is an extremely diverse continent, very much unlike the stereotype of it being a homogenous frozen wasteland.
“Antarctica’s a big continent; it is the size of the U.S. and Mexico combined,“ Mukucki said. “And there’s not just one type of lake in America, so we should expect a diversity of water systems below the ice sheets. For example, Blood Falls is really salty, and the water there is -7° Celsius, while Whillans is closer to fresh water.”
Not all of the new professors come from the traditional professorial backgrounds of academia and scientific research. Kim, for example, was a data scientist at Google before entering academia. He worked in Google’s ads department, analyzing which types of ad campaigns and ads worked most effectively. Working with Google’s data presented unique statistical problems, as Google’s datasets are far larger than datasets that most statisticians work with.
“Google’s data set is so big that you cannot fit it on one set of servers; you have multiple sets of servers spread out all over the place,” Kim said. “So that definitely led to challenges to analyzing our data; we had to modify traditional statistical methods to work on multiple servers.”
He continues to apply statistics and data science knowledge similar to what he used at Google in his research. His research is in the field of spatial epidemiology – the study of disease across geography – and he is devising methods to detect cancer clusters (locations with abnormally high cancer rates), including using advanced statistical techniques like Bayesian modeling.
However, he cautions that one should not infer from his research that certain locations are more cancer-prone because of geographical factors like contaminated water supply or proximity to power lines. A confounding variable, such as low socio-economic class and inaccessibility to health care, could be influencing cancer rates.
“There’s two valid ways we can interpret these data,” Kim said. “We could use this as a way to target public health interventions. Or we could control for the things that we already know cause spikes in the cancer rate and see if we maybe find some new unexplained trend that we can investigate.”
Professors have many different reasons for choosing to come to Middlebury. Both Durst and Kim emphasized the teaching-centric nature of positions at the College as the main factor in their decisions to teach here.
“When I was a grad student I really enjoyed teaching; I taught my own class even though that wasn’t a requirement of grad students,” Kim said. “My plan was to work for a little while to get a little experience then to come back and teach. I was always aiming for a liberal arts college, not some big research institution.”
Professors are also excited by Middlebury’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research and collaboration. Durst, whose research is inherently interdisciplinary, is one example of this. Mikucki was also particularly excited by the prospect of interdisciplinary collaboration, citing it as a main reason for choosing to come to Middlebury.
“I found myself in my research working across disciplines; and the more diverse and farther reaching the collaboration was, and the more difficult it was, the more rewarding it has always been,” Mikucki said. “Being new to Middlebury, my outward impression is that this is a place that really works on interdisciplinary collaboration. I felt like Middlebury was a place where you could really press the limits of conventional interdisciplinary studies, and really reach out beyond the sciences and also do some creative and risky science.”
(11/19/15 1:07am)
Because of our remote location, Middlebury students do not often get to directly interact with organizations that they study, especially for majors who study those who currently hold great power. Members of the Environmental Studies and Food Studies curriculums enjoyed an exception to this last Tuesday, Nov. 10, in the form of a lecture titled “A Growing World Population and Creating Sustainable Communities: What role is crop biotechnology playing?”
In the lecture, two representatives from the agribusiness giant Monsanto spoke to students, faculty and community members about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture. Monsanto is the leading American producer of genetically modified (GM) seeds, which makes up the bulk of its revenue, and is also a huge pesticide manufacturer, giving it one of the most directly relevant perspectives on issues of biotechnology in agriculture. The talk was given by Dr. Phillip Eckert, an academic engagement lead and former dairy scientist at the company. He was supported by Monsanto scientist Michael Spenzer.
The talk was primarily sponsored by the Environmental Studies curriculum and in particular by William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Food Studies Molly Anderson. Anderson is strongly opposed to many of Monsanto’s practices and beliefs about GMOs, but she sponsored the talk on the basis that “it is important for students to understand both sides of the genetically modified crops argument.” She wanted to present Middlebury students with Monsanto’s side of the GMOs argument, and plans to follow this lecture with other talks addressing the controversy over biotechnology in food from other perspectives.
As the title of the talk made clear, Monsanto’s side of the issue is that GM crops are necessary for feeding a growing population. They also argued that biotechnology would help make agriculture sustainable, citing studies arguing that GM crops reduce land use and carbon dioxide emissions. Eckert argued that this reduction in emissions is made possible primarily because of how some GM crops do not require tilling (which releases carbon sequestered in the soil) and also because they “decrease the number of cultivation passes” that pollution-emitting farm vehicles need to make to spray crops with pesticides and herbicides.
Finally, Eckert argued that biotechnology could help agriculture adapt to climate change. Climate change has decreased the arable land available per person, increased the range of pests and made crops vulnerable to hostile weather, increased drought and natural disasters. In Monsanto’s vision, crops should be selectively modified to increase yields, promote better nutrition and adapt to changing conditions.
The presenters were careful to acknowledge that biotechnology cannot solve food insecurity on its own. Eckert noted that a huge amount of food waste in developing countries comes from a lack of infrastructure, saying that “the solution is not always to just double crop yield.” Poor transportation infrastructure and inadequate storage infrastructure and techniques prevent many crops from getting to market and the failure to sync markets with harvests prevents food from reaching the table.
Eckert also took great pains to portray crop biotechnology as safe. He did not make a blanket statement that all GM crops are necessarily safe for human consumption, but that they are “safe when proven to be.” He contended that the long vetting process that new biotechnology is subjected to by both Monsanto and governmental regulators, which takes an average of 13 years and $136 million per product, ensures that no unsafe products reach the market. This argument drew considerable ire from the audience, who raised concerns about research linking pesticides that are used with pesticide-resistant crops (namely Monsanto’s Roundup and other glyphosate-based pesticides) with cancer, hormone issues, and danger to wildlife.
The presentation met with a deluge of questions from the audience, enough that Eckert was only able to finish two-thirds of his talk. One of the most important questions the audience had about the talk was also the most basic: what was Monsanto even doing at Middlebury, a tiny college that also happens to be a bastion of the environmental movement? Both Anderson and Eckert argued that they were in the business of repairing Monsanto’s reputation. The presenters, two jovial scientists, were not what one usually associates with Monsanto, a name that conjures up images of a shadowy megacorporation manipulating policy through an army of lobbyists. But the choice of representatives seemed aimed to recast Monsanto as a progressive, scientific company instead of a self-interested agribusiness giant.
“Their charge was clearly to get people to feel better about Monsanto,” Anderson said. “They were very carefully not argumentative up there.”
Both presenters and audience members played fast and loose with the various types of GM crops and their many purposes. Audience members and Monsanto representatives were sometimes talking about different GM crops with different purposes or about entirely different applications of biotechnology. For example, in response to claims that GM crops were important for addressing global hunger, an audience member questioned how for aesthetic purposes, like apples that do not brown, helps promote food security. Some audience members were particularly critical of how the presenters never explicitly broke down the distribution of uses of GM crops. Anderson and one audience member accused the presenters of not adequately addressing the fact that most GM crops are engineered for pesticide resistance instead of to adapt to a changing climate or a growing demand for food.
“I didn’t like how they evaded some topics,” Anderson said. “Something like 95 percent of crops that are being used around the world that are being genetically engineered are pesticide-resistant crops, not pest-resistant crops; they aren’t being engineered for the things that [Eckert] talked about.”
The fact that many GM crops are engineered specifically to be pesticide and herbicide resistant was displayed briefly on a slide but not explained by the presenters.
Additionally, there was confusion of Monsanto with the broader GM crops industry, with presenters and audience members implicitly or explicitly attributing the ills or benefits of biotechnology in general to Monsanto specifically. Spenzer pointed out that the aforementioned genetically modified apple is not made by Monsanto, for instance. As he noted, “most genetically modified seeds are not made by Monsanto, but [Monsanto] became a byword for the issue.”
Anderson also criticized what she saw as deliberate obfuscation of the definition of genetically modified crops by the presenters. She argued that they confused hybridization (also known as crossbreeding), which is credited with producing high-yield and drought-resistant crops that enabled an explosion in agricultural productivity in the 20th century, with biotechnology, or the direct insertion of a small piece of DNA into an organism.
“In many ways they tried to make [what] biotechnology [is] less clear,” Anderson said. “For example their assertion that we’ve been genetically engineering crops for ages is a little bit of a red herring. We have been genetically modifying only if you think of crossbreeding things that can naturally cross in nature as genetic engineering, but we certainly haven’t been taking a gene from a fish and putting it in a tomato for ages.”
(10/14/15 11:49pm)
Every single seat in the lecture hall was taken. A huge cluster of students stood in the back. The lecturer even jokingly offered to let people sit on the floor next to his podium. Unlike most other popular talks on campus, this lecture was not about a pressing social or political issue, nor was the speaker famous outside his field. Instead, it was about sleep, which, judging from the chorus of yawns before the lecture, was on many students’ minds.
The talk, titled “Vitamin ‘S’ Deficiency: An Introduction to Normal Sleep and Sleep Disorders,” was given by Associate Professor of Psychiatry Wilfred Pigeon, the Director of the Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Lab at the University of Rochester Medical Center. As the talk’s title suggests, Pigeon introduced students to current research on sleep and sleep disorders while making a plea for students to lengthen and improve their sleep.
Pigeon began by explaining the biology and neuroscience of sleep. Sleep is regulated by the suprachiasmatic nucleus and the pineal gland in the brain, both of which are influenced by sunlight, but are not tied to any biological clock. Sleep is divided into four stages, which the body cycles through every 80 to 100 minutes: two stages of lighter sleep, one stage of deep sleep and one stage of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when dreams occurs. Observing someone in REM sleep for the first time was what made Pigeon interested in studying sleep.
“The first time I saw [someone enter REM sleep], that is where I got hooked on doing sleep stuff,” Pigeon said. “I thought, ‘that is so cool!’ I am watching that guy dream!”
He is more interested, however, in the dangers of sleep loss. He brought up an influential 2003 study titled “Ethanol and Sleep Loss,” which compared the effects of sleep deprivation with the effects of alcohol consumption and estimated the equivalent blood alcohol content (BAC) of getting less than eight hours of sleep. Six hours of sleep impairs reaction time and memory in a way that resembles having a .045% BAC, or two to three drinks. Four hours puts one at the equivalent of a .095% BAC, over the legal limit to drive.
He then referenced a laundry list of studies and examples showing the often severe effects of sleep deprivation. One study showed that medical students in residency programs who had normal amounts of sleep made 30 percent fewer errors than students who worked overnight shifts. Other studies found that insomnia made people more susceptible to depression and suicidal thoughts or that sleep deprivation reduced people’s response rate to the Avian Flu vaccine.
But the example that resonated the most with the audience was about the effect of sleep on students. Recognizing research showing that adolescents need more sleep than adults, the Minneapolis Public School District did a controlled study from 1997 to 2001 by starting school later for some, but not all, of its high schools. The study found that students who got got more sleep were allowed to spend more time on homework, and more sleep increased attendance for students of all grades and ethnicities.
Consistent but moderate sleep deprivation is also dangerous. Pigeon referenced a study that recorded how long subjects took to fall asleep during daytime naps after getting variable amounts of sleep the night before and pointed out its implication for drivers.
“After one week of sleep, for five hours a night, [one becomes a] danger on the road, in terms of how sleepy one is during the day,” Pigeon said.
Contrary to popular thought, he mentioned that it is possible to make up a sleep debt by sleeping in on the weekend. But he cautions that making up sleep works by “equal exchange” (a loss of one hour of sleep has to be made up for by an extra hour of sleep), so at some point it becomes impractical: getting six hours of sleep a night for a week can only be canceled out by sleeping for 20 hours on a weekend night.
He finished by dispensing advice on improving sleep. To not feel tired after napping, he recommended limiting naps to no more than 30-45 minutes to avoid going into REM sleep. He recommended waking up to sunlight if one’s circadian rhythm is off, because of jet lag or an unusual sleeping schedule, but said that that would not help with general insomnia. However, he was most outspoken on apps like Sleep Cycle and SleepTime+ that purport to keep track of one’s sleep cycle and then set an alarm that will not interrupt deep sleep or REM sleep, which he dismissed with a b-word that cannot be printed in this paper.
“Please don’t use those apps, they suck,” Pigeon said. “They have no way to really measure your sleep cycle.”
In addition to being well attended, Pigeon’s talk was well received.
“People seemed fascinated by the material of his talk,” Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Martin Seehuus, whose research specializes in sleep disruptions, said. “He was great at integrating research findings with people’s real life experiences.”
(02/25/15 11:46pm)
Middlebury College launched its first fully online class, “Years of Upheaval: Diplomacy, War & Social Change, 1919–1945,” on February 13. The class, which is taught by James Jermain Professor Emeritus of Political Economy and International Law Russ Leng, is the latest in a series of technology-based courses at Middlebury, Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), and the language schools.
The class is free of charge and is open to “alumni, parents, and friends of Middlebury.” Invitations to the course were sent out to alumni and parents via email, though anyone who these invites were forwarded to (the “friends of Middlebury”), including a number of current students, are also able to take the course. According to Leng, the decision to limit the class to these groups was done because of copyright issues.
“We use a lot of copyrighted material under the “fair use” provision that allows us to use it for educational purposes for limited audiences,” Leng said in an email. “If the course were simply open to the world, as with a MOOC [Massive Open Online Course], we could have run into legal copyright issues. The copyright holders feel that they completely lose control when their product is suddenly available to everyone in the world online.”
According to Provost Susan Baldridge, who directly oversees the class and who was largely responsible for its creation, the administration initially planned to only offer the class to alumni. The decision to expand the course to parents and friends of Middlebury was made after initial trials of the class met with positive reception. The decision to open up the class to a somewhat broader but still controlled audience was also influenced by a desire to test the college’s technology.
“Alumni were an obvious place to start for us,” Baldridge said. “The class is a sort of online version of the alumni college, an event for alumni at Bread Loaf where alumni can come and take short versions of Middlebury classes. Alums loved that experience, but it is not always easy for alumni to come up to Vermont.”
Because it is fully online, the class is largely lecture-based. However, unlike many MOOCs, the class has an integrated discussion section. In the discussion sections, Leng and alum Frank Sesno ’77 will hold “informal conversations” about the class material. They will also respond to questions from the students that are submitted in an online text-based discussion forum both before and during the discussion sections.
One aspect of the class that makes it unique from more traditional classes at Middlebury is the heavy and seamless integration of numerous types of media, ranging from news clips and battle footage to films and poetry. The diverse nature of course materials has led Leng to say that the class “has enabled me to be a true liberal arts professor.”
“You can begin to deliver content, in a really engaging way by using this kind of original, embedded footage,” Director of Assessment Adela Langrock, the project manager and quality evaluator for the class, said. “For example, when Professor Leng is talking about Churchill [and a speech he delivered], and then we can cut right into watching that speech in the House of Commons. And then Professor Leng comes back and explains how it was received and then we can cut to to news clips of talking to reporters outside the House.”
Another difference between this class and similar classes at the College is the lack of required reading. According to Langrock, this is done to accommodate the students, most of whom are professionals, graduate students, and parents who do not have time to do intensive reading. However, the class includes suggested readings.
“A lot of people, when they get older, start reading certain types of things, they pick up the mysteries and put away the scholarly work,” Langrock said. “The suggested readings may not be the most scholarly work, but they’re well written and good, and students are actually seeking out these resources and reading them.”
The course is an experiment for the College in providing online classes. As Baldridge put it, “part of this is to experiment with these [online learning] technologies and to see how well they will do in the future.” According to Baldridge, the course is one of the first steps in a broader “digital liberal arts initiative” so that any professor who wants to teach an online course or have Middlebury students collaborate with MIIS, Bread Loaf, or language school students will be able to do so.
The experimental nature of the class also contributed to the decision to limit the enrollment in the class. The class’ high current enrollment, over 1000 students, has already caused multiple crashes, according to Langrock and Baldridge.
The college is devoting considerable resources towards overcoming these issues and has made significant improvements since Fall 2014 (when his “Policy Analysis” course was offered), including purchasing equipment and dedicating bandwidth at the college to online classes, according to Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Orion Lewis. However, he notes that some of the technical problems are insurmountable not because of a lack of resources or commitment but because of the “the fragmented and siloed institutional structure that is the historical legacy of two separate institutions, Middlebury and MIIS.”
The initiative for Leng’s class and other partially online classes has largely come from the administration, not from professors. According to Baldridge, the class was proposed by the administration and Leng offered to teach it and developed the curriculum over the past year and through a 2015 J-term course on a similar topic. The initiative for Lewis’ “Policy Analysis” course came from the administration, and while he had more of a role in proposing the Insurgency and Security Policy course, he noted that the hybrid nature of the class stems from the fact that his contract of employment with Middlebury stipulates that he has to teach one hybrid class per year.
(01/21/15 7:51pm)
Alumni gathered on campus last weekend for the first Alumni of Color Weekend in almost 10 years. Students and alumni socialized and discussed the history of student-of-color organizations on campus, as well as the future of students of color on campus.
They shared similar grievances about the persistence of micro-aggressions towards minorities and the failure of many students to recognize their privilege.
The event, which was previously organized by the administration, this year was the responsibility of Director of Alumni and Parent Programs Ian McCray.
The events for the weekend included several social events such as receptions, meals, a movie screening and a party.
One concern raised frequently over the course of the weekend was the perception of the administration’s ignorance of discrimination on campus. Attendees said that the administration has and continues to “sweep discrimination under the rug” to keep up the College’s image by pretending that racism is not an issue on campus.
“I don’t personally think that things are getting better [for students of color], as a lot of incidents have happened this year, and the administration isn’t even trying to address them,” Shuba Maniram ’17 said.
Another concern raised was the absence of consequences for discrimination beyond a stern talking-to from resident assistants or commons deans. An unregistered “white privilege party” that was held on campus in 2014 drew consistent negative responses from students and alumni, not just because of its racist theme but also because the organizers of the party received no punishment from the administration.
“Students need to learn that there are consequences to discrimination in the real world,” alumna Shantá Lindo ’10 said. “I remember that even when the administration tried to do something, so many kids would talk to their parents, and things would get dropped.”
Discussions surrounding the future of students of color at the College centered largely on the Intercultural Center in Carr Hall. The center is intended to provide a place for academic programming, student-group collaboration, activism and awareness. Alumni and students particularly emphasized the need for students of color to have a space that is not just a forum for discussion about race and discrimination on campus but also a space for students of color to socialize and bond.
Roberto Lint Sagarena, current director of the CCSRE and future director of the Intercultural Center and Associate Professor of American Studies, said, “There is a tendency to over-purpose space because [students of color] are so used to having to fight to justify having spaces. There is value in the social.”
Alumni expressed fondness for the former bicultural center, which despite technically also serving as a center for programming, was remembered primarily by alumni as a social space. Although PALANA house is supposed to provide this function, there is concern that students are just using PALANA as a living space while not being active in race-related discussions and activism on campus.
“Some people are treating PALANA as just a living space, as just a bed and a nice room to sleep in,” a former PALANA resident said at the meeting held to discuss the new Intercultural Center. “Many students are sick of race discussions, as they don’t see any benefit to themselves in them.”
Others emphasized that any social space needs to be open to all members of the community.
“It needs to be stressed that intercultural doesn’t just mean people of color, it means every culture,” Maniram said. “The Intercultural Center needs to stress inclusiveness to avoid intimidating people.”
Alumni also discussed the importance of the College’s admissions policies at the discussion about the Intercultural Center, with one alumnus arguing that, “if we can’t get enough people, none of what we’re doing will mean anything.” To this, Director of Admissions Manuel Carballo stressed the importance of making the school’s reputation known. However, he did note that progress has been made in admissions, as the number of applicants who are people of color doubled during his tenure.
“The problem for attracting students of color isn’t money, it is that these applicants are the best and the brightest and they have many other good options. Recognition [of the College], not money, is the issue,” Carballo said.
(11/13/14 4:58am)
There has been considerable confusion and debate among students about Middlebury’s party registration policies following the Nov. 2 forum on social issues hosted by the administration.
The policies, which can be found at go/party, distinguish between three types of parties: licensed parties, registered parties, and informal gatherings. Licensed parties can be open (i.e. they do not need a guest list), charge for alcohol, catered, and large. However, the fact that they are open means that they have to get a liquor license from the State of Vermont. Informal gatherings refer to small gatherings of students over age 21, and only have to be registered if they use a keg, and even then do not need to abide by as stringent regulations as licensed or registered parties. Registered parties were created to provide a middle ground between state-regulated licensed parties and small informal gatherings.
Middlebury began requiring party registration to help comply with Vermont state liquor law. Associate Dean of Students for Residential and Student Life Douglas Adams, who is the main overseer of party registration, notes that the actions of the state’s Attorney General and particularly of the liquor inspector, not state legislation, are primarily responsible for registration policies.
“The impetus for the original registration policies really came from the state coming to small house parties on campus and other events where the liquor inspector really had an active presence on campus which we don’t see as much any more,” Adams said. “If you follow these registration requirements, and do a good job, you’re probably not going to have very many problems with the state.”
Party registration aims to allow students to have large parties without having to deal with state regulations, as well as to educate students on party safety and Vermont state law.
“Having a process that educates party hosts, emphasizes safety and compliance, and is managed internally reduces the need for outside enforcement agencies to become involved in these matters,” said Associate Director of Public Safety Dan Gaiotti.
Though the policy is officially in place because of state law, aspects of the policy have other motivations, including student health, transparency and ease of enforcement for Public Safety and the Vermont government. Restrictions on hard alcohol and drinking games are in place because of health concerns, for example.
“It’s a good indicator to Public Safety and the town [of Middlebury] about where parties are taking place,” Adams said. “There’s limited resources and staff in Public Safety. [Registered parties] tend to be the large parties, and therefore they tend to take on more resources.”
One concern that students have raised about registered parties being shut down. According to Gaiotti, 27 of the 69 registered parties held in the past two years have been ended early, although 22 of these were ended at the request of the host. Gaiotti notes further that “Illegal or unregistered parties get shut down much more frequently.”
(10/09/14 2:42am)
Middlebury is on track to become carbon neutral by 2016, although it will have to rely heavily on the controversial Addison-Rutland natural gas pipeline to do so.
According to Director of Sustainability Integration Jack Byrne, the College has reduced its carbon footprint by 55 percent since 2008. Most of this reduction in carbon footprint has come from the use of the campus’ biomass gasification plant for electricity and heating.
“The reduction in carbon comes primarily from our switch to using wood chips as a fuel in the biomass gasification plant,” Byrne said.
Byrne expects most of the rest of the reduction in carbon emissions by 2016 to come from switching from burning petroleum fuel oil to burning methane in the biomass plant. The replacement of the fuel oil used in the biomass plant with methane (i.e. renewable natural gas) captured from cattle manure is planned to reduce the College’s carbon footprint not only by eliminating the need to burn fuel oil in the biomass plant but also by preventing the captured methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is 20 times as effective as carbon dioxide at trapping heat from escaping into the atmosphere.
“If you look at our current footprint, about three-quarters of it comes from the oil we still burn [in the biomass plant], since on the coldest days the wood chips are not capable of providing enough steam so we have to burn oil,” Byrne said.
“We’re anticipating in about a year that we’ll begin receiving renewable natural gas from a manure digester in about a year. The manure digester project will be the key way in which we achieve carbon neutrality.”
The reason why the pipeline is so critical for the carbon neutrality effort is because it provides a storage space for unused methane, which Byrne estimates would be too expensive for the College to consider building.
“One of the options we looked at before was a pipeline coming directly to the College,” Byrne said. “One of the problems with that is that we wouldn’t be burning all the gas as it came in, so we would need someplace to store it, since the biomass is often sufficient for what we need. The only option for storage before the pipeline became possible was to build an underground storage facility, which was economically unfeasible. The gas pipeline that’s coming down to Middlebury provided a way to solve that problem.”
The pipeline, which will carry natural gas obtained through fracking, in addition to the natural methane that the college will use, has been controversial, including on the College campus. Despite this, the decision to support the natural gas pipeline was made after consulting with a number of students.
“The administration has been listening, but they’re not producing the response that all students want with the pipeline,” said Lindsay Warne ’15, a member of the SGA’s Environmental Committee. “The administration asks for student input, and there’s a lot of ways for students to get involved.”
If the gas pipeline falls through, the college plans to replace the oil used in the biomass plant with renewable diesel fuel.
“We can burn renewable diesel oil, which is our backup plan if the manure digester project plan failed: we would switch from the fuel oil to the renewable diesel, which is carbon neutral,” Byrne said. “That would present some other problems, since we wouldn’t get credits from the avoided methane emissions, but it would still get us very close to our goal.”
The biggest challenge in the future is expected to be staying carbon neutral after 2016, especially in the face of growth in the size of the college. Byrne expects this challenge to be addressed through promoting energy conservation and making college buildings carbon neutral.
“I think that for us the challenge will be once we achieve carbon neutrality, how do we stay there, because we will probably grow, we will probably add another dormitory at some point down the road, so we will have to pay more attention to the energy efficiency of our buildings.”
Because of the importance of energy efficiency to the commitment to achieving carbon neutrality, the College has commissioned several studies on how to best promote environmentally friendly behavior and reduce energy usage, including a senior thesis by Abigail Karp ’14, which tested to see whether posting energy conservation tips and installing iPads that displayed a hall’s electricity usage in some halls in Hadley led to lower electricity consumption.
Karp’s thesis showed a significant reduction in electricity usage in the halls that had the iPads relative to other similar halls in the same building that did not.
“All participants increased their pro-environmental behavior over the course of the project and that the iPad feedback/reminder had no meaningful effect on this increase,” Karp wrote. “The iPads did, however, lead to a significant reduction in the experimental group’s energy consumption compared to the control group that did not have the iPad feedback/reminders.”
(09/17/14 10:49pm)
The Presidential Search Committee has reviewed more than 50 applicants for the soon-to-be vacant position of president of the Middlebury College, and is now starting to interview candidates in person.
“We’ve been narrowing down candidates and now we are in the process of interviewing the applicants in New York,” said Professor of Spanish Miguel Fernández .
The committee features people from numerous parts of the College’s community, including trustees, students, faculty, and members of the administration.
Despite this diversity, committee members feel that all involved groups are contributing equally to the process.
“I’ve been very impressed with how this search committee has worked together,” said Fernández.
According to committee members, the candidates being reviewed most closely have diverse backgrounds, and share little besides past experience in academia.
“The committee had a sense of what we’re looking for,” continued Fernández.
“A traditional kind of candidate with an academic background, academic experience, and administrative experience, but we cast the net wide, so that we would not only see people like that.
Nathan Beman Professor of Mathematics Priscilla Bresmer added that “they all have a deep experience and interest in higher education. The form of that experience varies, but there is a lot of interest in this position.”
The committee is looking for candidates who it feels would excel in the numerous roles that the president has to fill.
“We’re looking for someone who can do a good job as president of Middlebury,” Bresmer said. “We want someone who can relate to students, can work with the faculty, and who can convince us that he can raise money for the institution.”
However, these criteria are not set in stone.
“I’d say that the search committee in general sort of wanted to follow these parameters but also wanted see what else was out there,” said Fernández.
The presence of trustees on the committee, whose goal is to eventually forward a recommendation to the Board of Trustees, has led to concern from some that the trustees will have undue influence on the committee. However, committee members have found such concerns unfounded.
“They certainly have influence, but their interest is in Middlebury College as well,” Bresmer said. “They have the same goal as we do, which is to find a good leader for Middlebury.”
(04/17/14 12:08am)
The faculty rejected internships for credit by a 53-48 vote on Monday, April 7. A more general “Summer Study Proposal” was passed at the same meeting, however. The internships for credit segment of the bill was not approved by faculty due to the passing of an amendment that sought to counter internship-related policies within the bill.
When the bill was first brought to the faculty on March 3, Math Professor Priscilla Bremser introduced a resolution seeking to prevent the Educational Affairs Committee (EAC) from introducing anything regarding internships for credit. Bremser’s resolution then became an amendment to “remove the option of academic credit for summer internships.” In keeping with faculty meeting bylaws, during the crucial April 7 meeting, the amendment was voted on before the larger proposal.
Once Bremser’s amendment was passed, the amended version of the EAC bill was voted on and passed by the faculty, with the wording “while an internship can be a valuable experience, in no case does it warrant notation on a student’s transcript from Middlebury College.”
The EAC proposal divided internships into three distinct classifications, two of which would provide credit. Transcript notations, which are currently available to students, are not credit-bearing but take the form of a note on a student’s academic transcript that he or she completed an internship.
Credit-bearing clustered internships would involve a group of students with similar internships working with a faculty mentor and completing a series of readings or assignments. The faculty mentor would receive a summer stipend for mentoring 15 or more students, or a fraction of the larger, fixed stipend if he or she worked with fewer students.
Course-connected internships would also earn students academic credit, requiring either a prerequisite course or a predetermined course to be taken after the completion of the internship that relates to the student’s major. For example, a Political Science major who spent time working on a political campaign would have to enroll in U.S. National Elections the following fall in order to receive credit for his or her summer internship. Faculty advisors would receive a stipend for offering supplemental assignments to those completing course-connected internships.
In order to receive credit for a summer internship, the internship would have to be directly linked with a specific academic department in which the student has taken a number of courses.
Dean of Faculty Andi Lloyd noted that among faculty, “there didn’t seem to be a question of whether they [internships] could be valuable [for many did acknowledge the importance of internships], it was whether or not they should be awarded academic credit.”
“The question of how all of you navigate from your education to a career is front and center,” Lloyd said. “The faculty vote was about how internships fit into your overall academic experience. I don’t think it should be seen as in any way an end to that broader conversation about the pathway from education to career.”
The faculty vote stirred a range of reactions from across campus.
“In my opinion, this vote symbolizes our inability to acknowledge the real value and promise of a 21st century liberal arts education,” said Dean of the College Shirley Collado. “Our students are asking us to recognize how multi-faceted and rich their learning experiences can be … It is unfortunate that the vote did not support these kinds of teaching and learning opportunities for both our faculty and students.”
But Political Science Professor Murray Dry, a longtime vocal critic of internships for credit, applauded Bremser’s amendment.
“Internships are not liberal education. They’re something that may be practical and useful, but they are not governed by what I think the standards should be for what should be studied here,” Dry said. “We’re not a vocational school.”
“It’s not just a matter of work, it’s a matter of what it is that we’re about and that we the faculty are responsible for determining the content of a liberal education,” Dry continued. “We don’t all agree [on what should be in the curriculum], that’s true, but that doesn’t just mean that we should allow others, the people who run internships, to decide what should count for credit.”
SGA President Rachel Liddell said she was frustrated by the vote.
“From my perspective, the legislation presented by EAC provided a huge amount of flexibility and gave authority to professors,” she wrote in an email. “Professors had the option to offer for-credit internships, they were not required to do so. Nor would students be required to participate in a for-credit internship. The legislation simply created options for professors and students who wanted to offer these opportunities for their students. Ultimately, the vote reflects a distrust amongst faculty members. Those who voted to prevent for-credit internships communicated that they do not believe in that their colleagues’ teaching methods.”
Several faculty pointed out that many of the arguments made in support of the amendment, especially the arguments about how promoting internships for credit goes against the core principles of a liberal arts education, also apply to the existing policy of allowing students to do internships in the winter term for credit.
“The first thing that I thought of when the proposal came up is that aren’t we being hypocritical, by providing credit in the winter term but not in the summer, and so I think that we shouldn’t provide credit for J-term either,” said Assistant Professor of Economics Racha Moussa.
However, Moussa stressed that students will still be able to take internships for credit in J-term.
“I didn’t get the sense that the faculty wanted to end the J-term program,” Moussa said. “The voting was so close, so that’s not something I predict that will happen in future. But I think that definitely the conversation led into thinking about J-term a little bit more.“
One of the major criticisms of the vote was the lack of faculty attendance. The meeting barely roused the 94 votes needed for quorum.
“To those professors who did not attend the vote but held an opinion on the issue, I hope they regret their decisions,” wrote Liddell. “I also hope that students learn from their mistakes and remember to vote in SGA, local, state, and national elections.”
But Lloyd said that low faculty attendance at meetings and votes is nothing new.
“We’ve been grappling with an issue of relatively low attendance for a couple of years now,” Lloyd said, noting that the April 7 attendance of 101 voting faculty was about normal.
When asked why she thought internships for credit was amended out of the proposal, Lloyd pointed to the role that student experiences played in shaping her own support of internships for credit.
“I had the opportunity this past fall to hear the students in the Foodworks program talk about their experience. it was extraordinary for me to hear from students how much their academic work had been enriched by the experience. It changed my attitude towards internships,” she said. “I think it would be valuable for us to think about how to create more opportunities for faculty and students to come together to talk about your perspectives on internships — and the broader discussion of how your education prepares you for what comes next.”
It is hard to predict when the idea of internships for credit may come up for another vote, but Math Professor and longtime faculty member Mike Olinick said that once issues have been voted on, “faculty committees accept the verdict and move onto other questions as least for a few years.”
While dead now, the future of internships for credit at the College may not be over.
“Students did internships before this vote, and I assume you will continue to do them after the vote. I don’t think the conversation between students and faculty about what you learn from internships, or how you can best integrate your learning from internships with your classroom pursuits, is over.”
Additional Reporting by EMILY SINGER, ELLIE REINHARDT and KYLE FINCK