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(05/07/14 4:11pm)
Affirmative action doesn’t work and it’s unconstitutional. The state cannot change destructive culture that inhibits black success. Those who benefit from affirmative action are unqualified.
Do you believe these statements, dear reader? Despite the often cited election of President Obama and the de jure de-segregation of American society, racial minorities still navigate structural and institutional racism today. In this context, affirmative action is necessary to correct for past discrimination, prevent further discrimination and create opportunities that were previously denied to people of color and women. However, the most recent Supreme Court decision (Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action) upheld the right of Michigan citizens to bar the state from using affirmative action in university admissions, which adds Michigan to eight other states that have outlawed affirmative action. In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argues for affirmative action and asserts the importance of dialogue around race. “We ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society,” she writes. “It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.” This ruling comes within a year of Shelby County v. Holder, the decision that gutted a key part of the Voting Rights Act. These decisions represent an attack on policies meant to correct for past barriers to social mobility and opportunity. Still, most opponents instead see affirmative action as discrimination against white people.
The rhetoric of anti-affirmative action arguments is disconcerting. Phrases like “they’re taking our spots” use language of entitlement and displacement. By naming the spots for college admission as “ours,” affirmative action opponents suggest that those spots should be in their possession and that minority students who benefit from affirmative action are displacing those who really deserve admission. Although until the 20th century, college seats were primarily available only to white, wealthy men, it is in part for this reason that affirmative action exists: to open up college admission to historically marginalized groups and avoid the continued practice of saving those spots for the privileged.
Anti-affirmative action rhetoric of who “deserves” the “spot” is also prevalent at Middlebury. Although Middlebury pledged its support for affirmative action, several faculty and students continue to contest it. According to a number of students of color at Middlebury, two beliefs — that affirmative action threatens existing privilege and that students of color are not qualified for admission — are commonly heard. One writer of this piece, Maya Doig-Acuña, shared that after she was admitted to Middlebury, many of her friends complained, saying: “you’re so lucky — being black makes it so much easier to get into college,” and “affirmative action makes it harder for white people to get into school.” After attending the presentation of “Race, Sex and the Constitution,” another writer, Lily Andrews, has repeatedly heard that “all views deserve to be shared” and that arguments against affirmative action simply represent one benign side in an intellectual debate. If this is true, then racist statements like “students of color are unqualified” are legitimized. When a policy affects real people’s lives, it should not be debated in this way.
Writer Alex Jackman contributes another experience: during a class discussion on affirmative action in the fall, Professor Dry presented an unfair dichotomy to his class: he asked, would you prefer to be a single black student in a classroom at a college that does not practice affirmative action and thereby not be questioned on your admission? Or to be one of several minority students in a classroom at an affirmative action college where white peers were empowered to make assumptions about your intellectual aptitude and how you were accepted? To limit the question of affirmative action in this way is restrictive and dangerous and obscures other possibilities that exist for minority students, what they can offer and how they should be treated. We cannot equate affirmative action with academic ineptitude or create environments where some students are empowered to question their peers’ worthiness. All students work hard to get into colleges and we need a paradigm shift so that we can begin to appreciate this and the value all students bring to the classroom.
Students at Middlebury also tend to overlook ex-nominated forms of affirmative action, namely athletics and legacy. Preference for athletes manifests as coaches choose the students they recruit to be admitted; when it comes to many sports on campus, athletes from white, wealthy schools are privileged. When it comes to legacy, we must remember that Middlebury was exclusively open to white men and although Middlebury is now need-blind for U.S. students, remains most accessible to wealthy, white families with legacies of higher education. One national activist group, Angry White Guys for Affirmative Action, writes, “it is hypocritical and profoundly wrong to call affirmative action for minorities “racism in reverse,” while treating affirmative action for bankers, farmers, white men of power, as entitlements.” It is also ironic that white women — the largest beneficiaries of affirmative action — are at the forefront of protesting this policy.
We support affirmative action because we recognize the ongoing prevalence of hiring and admittance prejudices, the lasting effects of historical barriers to opportunity and the need to take active steps to redress these effects and create greater equity. We need affirmative action because we do not all have the same opportunities. Rather, unequal historical advantage and access to social mobility structure our admissions into elite colleges and obscure the talent and worth of students who cannot put name-brand schools and programs on their applications. Class-based affirmative action is also necessary, but we cannot replace race-based policies because that ignores intersectionality. We value racial diversity in the classroom; however, arguments that defend affirmative action solely because it provides diverse classroom experiences for white students are troubling. There is a progress narrative we have bought into about race: the laws are signed, we elected a black president, so race is no longer an issue. But when we live in a country where the rights of people of color are constantly contested and their lives constantly reexamined, there is still work to do. Affirmative action is not up for debate.
Signed by Alex Jackman ’14 , Lily Andrews ’14, Maya Doig-Acuña ’16, Afi Yellow-Duke ’15, Kya Adetoro ’13, Kate McCreary ’15, Cooper Redpath ’14, Katie Linder ’15, Molly Stuart ’15.5, Jasmine Ross ’16, Marcella Maki ’14, Greta Neubauer ‘14.5, Brita Fisher ’15, Joanna Georgakas ’14, Feliz Baca ’14, Alice Oshima ’15, Katie Willis ’13, Molly McShane ’16.5, Philip Williams ’15, Josh Swartz ’14.5, Elizabeth Dunn, Ally Yanson ’14, Maddie Dai ’14, Ashley Guzman ’13, Jackie Park ’15, Alexander Chaballier ’16.5, Cooper Couch ’14.5.
(04/30/14 6:37pm)
Here in idyllic rural Vermont, Middlebury College is a bastion of beauty, tradition, stewardship, and of course — safety. In order to foster elite learning, we have a multitude of mechanisms to protect us from any possible interference from danger outside our marble walls. But according to the Community Council, surveillance cameras may be an added necessity to campus security. As one member of the council said, “While we live in a tight-knit community, we are part of a larger scary world.” Apart from this, there has been no explanation about how surveillance cameras might keep us safer. Many of us are left questioning, are we a tight-knit community? What is implied by “larger scary world?” In the conversation around surveillance on campus, many “common sense’ ideologies and markers of race, class, gender and sexuality are being evoked. We want to both deconstruct this logic and name the assumptions used to justify new cameras.
The construction of an internal Middlebury community — with its highly selected members — as being safe, and those in the larger world being scary, creates a fallacy that violence is enacted by “strangers,” and we are not complicit in it. Moreover, fear of criminal strangers has notoriously been mobilized at a cultural level to increase control over certain people. In other words, at Middlebury and in the larger world, we are not all surveilled equally. Cameras aren’t neutral. Adding new ones will not keep us safer. Certain bodies are already marked as scary and criminal before they have been “caught” committing a crime: black and Latino bodies have historically been watched on this campus, mirroring how they are hyper-policed in the “outside” world. This is also true for gender non-conforming, trans and visibly queer people. The following are a few examples of the discriminatory results of surveillance and policing on this campus.
Recently, a non-white, non-gender conforming individual was confronted by public safety primarily for breaking the overnight guest rule. An anonymous author, writing for beyond the green, argued that her girlfriend was watched, confronted and treated more harshly because of her marginalized identity: she was viewed as having “something to hide,” while other violators of the guest rule are regularly treated with more leniency and given the benefit of the doubt. Surveillance reinforces normative identities by making deviance ever visible. Given that Middlebury has historically regulated and stigmatized non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality — permitting threats of violence against gay and lesbian identifying students to go unchallenged — widespread visibility is not associated with safety for marginalized identities.
Three years ago, a guest that an FYC brought to campus was forcibly removed by public safety. The details of this event are complicated; however, arguments were made then that still hold up now that factors such as the age, race and radical identity of this man likely had something to do with making the students feel “unsafe” and causing public safety to not just ask him to leave, but to (effectively) arrest him. Language of unsafe, stranger and scary is not neutral; rather, these terms are code words for certain bodies and certain practices; and in our society — as well as in the starkly white community of Middlebury — the black (male) body is marked as the most unwanted and unsafe stranger, continuously hyper-criminalized.
In questioning the politics of putting even more power into the hands of the administration, we should ask, why the panic? Middlebury already has multiple systems of surveillance and control: key cards track who has entered into buildings at what time, Public Safety reads our emails, and we have two surveillance cameras (one outside of Parton and one in the MCA). So far — again highlighting how surveillance is not neutral — these technologies have been used to punish acts of civil disobedience on this campus. Through surveillance, Middlebury’s administration arrogates power to itself by gaining exclusive access to the personal information of all who inhabit its campus, disciplining people by rendering deviance constantly visible, and normalizing punitive measures for handling conflict. For instance, just a year ago, one student — notably, a trans student with radical politics — was punished for her protest against anti-gay Red Cross policies. She was found out via key card technology and then suspended for a year. This instance represents a practice of discriminatory surveillance that seeks out acts of deviance and then reinforces punitive frameworks.
Looking beyond our campus we can also find examples of how surveillance has different effects on different people, depending on whether their communities have historically been deemed necessary to criminalize or to protect. Expanding on the notion about “which crimes will be punished,” and the idea that surveillance will only increase existing power structures, we turn to the case of Oscar Grant, a black man shot and killed by a police officer in 2009. The murder of Grant was caught on camera and the prosecutor attempted to use the footage to convict the white officer. However, the footage must have been disregarded as evidence, since the officer was not convicted of first degree murder and only served two years in jail before being released. Within a justice system in which carceral punishment is our only mechanism for dealing with this type of crime, this inconsistent sentencing, upheld by systemic racism, completely devalues the life of Oscar Grant. The use of video footage to solve crimes must be considered within the racism that still haunts our criminal justice system. Which “crimes” do cameras call attention to, or have the ability to see? The guise of neutrality, so clearly not in evidence, has contributed to a long history of devaluing certain identities. This type of evidence is used when it holds up current power systems, disregarded when it does not.
You might be asking, “I’m not doing anything wrong, so why should I care?” The NYPD’s stop and frisk policy shows us why this should matter to all of us. While it didn’t use surveillance cameras per se, it was a widespread surveillance program that had a devastating effect on thousands of people. Out of over 4 million stops in ten years, only one tenth of percent yielded illegal firearms — the purported reason for this policy. 90 percent of the stops yielded no evidence of criminal activity but the idea that people can be stopped for no reason has far-reaching consequences for all of us. Similarly, surveillance cameras assume guilt and require one to “prove” their innocence. Do you want to trade your rights for such low returns?
Surveillance has an acute effect on the way crime or rule breaking is dealt with on campus, favoring punitive over transformative justice. This can be illustrated in another interview with Director of Public Safety Lisa Bouchard, who states that the surveillance cameras’ purpose is “to keep people safe and solve crimes,” (The Middlebury Campus, 2008). The masculinist logic of objective technological evidence encourages punitive measures and works to obscure the social context underlying an incident on campus through its guise of objectivity. Although the watching claims to be neutral, it is not; the results of surveillance (who is caught, who is punished) are up to those doing the surveilling. We don’t view visual images neutrally, so when exclusive access to video footage is in the hands of administration, it can be employed as “neutral evidence” despite the continued functioning of power.
These technologies cannot be objective because they take on and reflect values from the context of their use, reproducing the unequal social orders in which they are grounded. They do not represent an opportunity for community-based transformation. That surveillance cameras can supposedly solve crimes makes assumptions about what kinds of crimes are committed and where. For instance, we could never hope to “solve” the crime of sexual assault, when the vast majority of this violence occurs behind dorm room doors.
This week a few renowned scholar-activists discussed these issues in light of the larger state-sponsored violence embedded in the prison industrial complex at a panel: Critical Queer Perspectives on the Carceral State. They argued that Middlebury’s surveillance cameras cannot be seen outside of the overall neoliberal state (the U.S.), which repeatedly criminalizes the survival strategies of marginalized people. Therefore, integrating the transformative critiques of these panelists, we must see how surveillance becomes complicit in oppression and find better methods of security. The panelists invited us to consider alternative ways of creating justice and building communities that truly transform our current social conditions; this may enable us to actually become “tight-knit.” One idea is to work on building community and mutual accountability, while developing restorative justice frameworks.
Just like the Prison Industrial Complex and systems of policing and criminalization, surveillance cameras do not make us safe. Rather, they centralize power, strengthen punitive frameworks, criminalize already marked, marginalized, “deviant” bodies and politics. They perpetuate myths of “neutrality” and “objective” technology, which actually stems from patriarchal logics and modes of being and acts unequally on a diverse social body. We should endeavour to be critical of the supposed beneficial effects of expanded surveillance, as it has primarily served to silence resistance, strengthen punishment and target those individuals already marginalized. For more information, visit beyond the green’s blog at go/btg.
MOLLY STUART ’15.5 is from Santa Cruz, Calif. LILY ANDREWS ’14 is from Minneapolis, Minn. ALLY YANSON ’14 is from Naples, Fla. KATIE WILLIS ’12 is from Birmingham, Ala. JACKIE PARK ’15 is from Los Angeles, Calif. ALEX STROTT ’14.5 is from Baltimore, Md. and ALEXANDER CHABALLIER ’16.5 is from Paris, France. Artwork by JENA RITCHEY.
(04/16/14 4:00pm)
We hope that you are enjoying your visit to Middlebury, and that you can take some time out to educate yourselves about activism happening on campus and how you can support it. In presenting the following demands (which are in response to major issues students have identified), we ask you to use your buying power to change the structural policies of this college.
Before presenting our demands and asking you to sign on to them, we want to tell you who we are. We are a coalition of students who have come together to build sustained political community on our campus. As members of this community engaged in multiple initiatives for institutional change, we seek to challenge systems of marginalization and oppression that are currently operating at Middlebury. We are committed to working for a more just, inclusive, safe, and supportive environment. Part of this work requires drawing attention to structural issues that negatively impact our academic pursuits, well-being, and safety in our time here. We are committed to combining critique with action to ensure that the administration is accountable to the broader community, and that students are active participants in shaping this institution. We make all decisions in a democratic process, and our demands are dynamic and responsive to the current conditions. The following are our current demands (for more details and citations see beyondthegreenmidd.wordpress.org):
1. AAL TO ALL:
The Coalition demands that the College change its Culture and Civilizations requirements to reflect a more inclusive and less eurocentric approach to studying the world (as proposed by Midd Included).
Under the current requirements, the college seems to place an emphasis on the study of Western cultures and civilizations, while minimizing the importance of all other cultures and civilizations of the world by lumping them together into one category. Not only are these requirements failing to reflect our college’s belief about the importance of the study of different cultures and civilizations, but they are also limiting educational opportunities for students.
Under the new requirements, students would be required to take:
1. Two courses, each of which focuses on the cultures and civilization of: a. AFR: Africa; b. ASI: Asia; c. LAC: Latin America and the Caribbean; d. MDE: Middle East; e. EUR: Europe; f. OCE: Oceania
2. NOR: one course that focus on some aspect of the cultures and civilizations of northern America (United States, Canada and Mexico)
3. CMP: one course that focuses on the process of comparison between and among cultures and civilizations, or a course that focus on the identity and experience of separable groups within cultures and civilizations.
Making the EUR credit an option rather than a requirement does not mean that students will never be exposed to European thought. Rather, even in classes that are not explicitly region focused, such as literature, science, theater, and economics, the material taught usually comes from the European tradition. Changing the EUR credit into an option only means that students who wish to study other regions of the world will have a greater opportunity to do so, while students who wish to pursue the study of Europe can still do so. We therefore demand that this change be made by no later than fall semester of 2016.
2. CREATION OF A MULTICULTURAL CENTER:
The Coalition demands that the administration provide funding and other necessary support for a Multicultural Center. We, as MANY students before us have, demand a space that visually represents the students it seeks to serve, that is equipped with qualified staff to serve students seeking multicultural resources and services otherwise unavailable on campus, and that educates the entire campus community on issues of identity and privilege.
While the college has invested in initiatives to attract students from diverse backgrounds, such as Discover Middlebury, it lacks initiatives to support the students that it brings here. It is time that the College create a center that supports the students it uses to bolster its diversity statistics.
Some might argue that such spaces already exist in the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and PALANA, but these spaces do not and cannot play the role that a Multicultural Center would. The CCSRE serves as an academic resource, which has an ambiguous role on campus seeing as how having a center that studies race and ethnicity without any racial or ethnic studies programs is akin to having a basketball gym with no basketball team or basketballs. PALANA only serves as an informal residential house.
Others might argue that Dean Collado as Chief Diversity Officer exists to provide the support that we speak of. However, we find it unethical to diminish the attention diversity and multicultural affairs require by boiling it down to simply one of the many hats that Dean Collado must wear. CDO is a title that requires at least one person to allot their entire schedule to, working daily to support underrepresented students. Most other esteemed NESCACs already have CDO’s who do just that, including Williams, Amherst, Tufts and Colby, just to name a few.
Seeing that PALANA, the CCSRE, and the Chief Diversity Officer do not provide the support and resources that a Multicultural Center would, we demand the creation of such space no later than the fall of 2016.
3. BAN SODEXO:
The Coalition demands that Middlebury College puts in writing that it will not work with Sodexo Inc. because its history of violating human rights, infringing upon labor laws, and stripping away workers’ benefits threaten the livelihoods of the College’s dining hall staff and do not reflect the values of the college. Furthermore, we demand that the administration make public its current relationship and terms of contract, if any, with Sodexo.
Representatives from Sodexo Inc., a European multinational corporation that specializes in food services, were brought to campus in early October to do a two-day observation and assessment of the college’s Dining Services and Retail Food Operation. Sodexo has a long-history of workers’ right abuses. In the fall, the Vermont Fair Food Campaign wrote an open letter about Sodexo’s slash of workers’ benefits — reductions in retirement packages and healthcare, as well as elimination of paid sick leave and vacation time, a practice they have implemented at the University of Vermont with considerable faculty and student resistance. Its union-busting techniques were detailed in a 2010 Human Rights Watch report, and it has been found guilty of National Labor Relations Board violations multiple times. In 2005, thousands of African-American employees of Sodexo accused the company of racist practices for not offering promotions to people of color and segregating the work environment. Ultimately, Sodexo settled in an $80 million racial bias suit. The Sodexo Alliance is also the leading investor in private prison profiteering. It has a seventeen-percent share in Corrections Corporation of America and a nine-percent share in CCA’s sister company Prison Realty Trust, meaning the corporation is profiting off of mass incarceration. We demand that Middlebury College puts in writing that it will not work with Sodexo Inc. and that it make public its current relationship/terms of contract, if any, with Sodexo.
Preview Days and the presence of hundreds of prospective students on campus presents a unique opportunity to make effective demands to the administration and bring about institutional change. As a Coalition of Students, we ask you – prospective students – to support us (and ultimately yourselves) in the pursuit of the above goals. Please send an email, entitled “Fulfill Coalition Demands” to liebowit@middlebury.edu; please include your name as well as a note that you would like to see these changes. We thank you for your support.
Signed by the following STUDENTS: Gaby Fuentes ’16, Debanjan Roychoudhury ’16, Alex Strott ’14.5, Alice Oshima ’15, Alex Macmillan ’15, Fernando Sandoval ’15, Ally Yanson ’14, Daniela Barajas ’14.5, Kate McCreary ’15, Jackie Flores ’16, David Pesqueira ’17, Jackie Park ’15, Francys Veras ’17, Maya Doig-Acuna ’16, Nicolas Guadalupe Mendia ’16, India Huff ’15, Clair Beltran ’16, Victor Filpo ’16, Octavio Hingle-Webster ’17, Matthew Spitzer ’16.5, Lee Schlenker ’16, Molly Stuart ’15.5, Reem Rosenhaj ’16.5, Rebecca Coates-Finke ’16.5, Janiya Hubbard ’16, Angelica Segura ’16, Adriana Ortiz-Burnham ’17, Cindy Esparza ’17, Kristina Johansson ’14, Anu Biswas ’16.5, Afi Yellow-Duke ’15, Kate Hamilton ’15.5, Molly McShane ’16.5, Jenny Marks ’14, Anna Mullen ’15, Eric Hass ’15, Philip Williams ’15, Lily Andrews ’14, Levi Westerveld ’15.5, Jiya Pandya ’17, Robert Zarate-Morales ’17, Keenia Shinagawa ’17, Jeremy Stratton-Smith ’17, Klaudia Wojciechowska ’17, Greta Neubauer ’14.5, Adrian Leong ’15, Feliz Baca ’14, Josh Swartz ’14.5, Tim Garcia ’14; signed by the following ALUMNI: Adina Marx Arpadi ’13.5, Hanna Mahon ’13.5, Ashley Guzman ’13, Elma Burnham ’13, Kya Adetoro ’13, Chris De La Cruz ’13, Katie Willis ’12, Jacob Udell ’12; signed by the following ORGANIZATIONS: Alianza, Midd Included, Feminist Action at Middlebury, Juntos Migrant Outreach, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Women of Color, Umoja, JusTalks, Middlebury Student Quakers
(04/09/14 4:35pm)
We’re proud to announce beyond the green. Launching today, beyond the green is a collective of voices that will be represented in an online publication as the centralized location of our voices. beyond the green aims to provide space for voices that are not being heard on our campus. We chose the name, beyond the green, as a play on words: part of the Middlebury mission statement says that “the college also reaches far beyond the Green Mountains... [connecting] our community to other places, countries and cultures.” To us, beyond the green represents the need to express a multitude of experiences at Middlebury that transcend physical space; the need to go beyond the agenda of Middlebury Inc.; and the need to imagine a space beyond “the campus green” which symbolically embodies institutional initiatives.
We will also publish a weekly column in the Campus. We think it is important to also publish in the Campus because we want to provide a counter-narrative directly alongside opinion pieces that promote post-racial, post-feminist, neoliberal politics. While we hope to carve out a consistent column in the Campus that represents opinions aligning with our politics, we must draw support from our online publication in order to do this. the Campus continues to be an important site of engagement, but we are creating our own publication because the Campus cannot provide enough space for our opinions without taking on our politics. We are also publishing in the Campus because we want the Middlebury College archives to document our opinions. Moreover, the Campus is a good way to advertise our efforts.
beyond the green: collective of middlebury student voices is a student run publication that aims to provide space for voices that are not being heard on our campus. We are motivated to create beyond the green because we feel marginalized and silenced by the mainstream platforms available, including the student newspaper, the Campus, and the online alternative paper, Middbeat. For some of us, not being able to express ourselves without invalidation represents a double marginalization, as our voices, bodies and experiences are already simultaneously devalued and hypervisible. We want to be proactive, not reactive, and use writing as a way to support and ultimately achieve structural and institutional change. We feel as though individually our voices are often ignored in the face of the hegemonic Middlebury discourse, but collectively we will be able to engage with the Middlebury community more effectively.
As a collective, beyond the green is grounded by politics that are radical, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, anti-ableist, and anti-homophobic (as well as strongly opposed to all forms of oppression). We reject the structurally neoliberal paradigm that exists at Middlebury and also oppose the “liberal” politics often expressed in the Campus because these politics are not transformative. The reasons behind our formation are many, but the predominate one is a feeling that our politics are alienated within campus dialogue; the so-called free market of ideas on campus is an illusion, one which exists only to support one strong ideology. Within our collective, we may not always agree, and we will allow space to challenge each other; however, ultimately we share the same principles and intentions and are committed to moving forward on this ground with solidarity and purpose. Moreover, we acknowledge the potential and probability that the articles we publish may be messy and emotional because the things we write about will be so close to our lived experiences. Rather than espousing the idea that all written work in the public eye must be detached and hyper-intellectual, we welcome the fact that our articles will be written with passion, with love, with anger and overall, with purpose. Instead of engaging only with those who devalue our voices, experiences and values, we are creating our own platform, unifying in the face of this disregard and rejecting the idea that we must conform to the dominant Middlebury narrative and forum.
beyond the green will be accepting submissions on a rolling basis that align with our mission statement. If you would like to contact or submit to this publication please email us at beyondthegreen14@gmail.com. We will be accepting pieces of writing (poetry, creative non-fiction, mini-essay, rants, lists, stories, commentary on campus events or “real world” topics, etc.) as well as photographs, video blogs, artwork (if already scanned) and event submissions. Check out our website at go/beyondthegreen, which will be updated weekly with regular columns (please contact if you would like to be a regular contributor) and submissions.