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(10/27/22 10:01am)
Founded by students in 2003, Middlebury College’s educational garden, the Knoll, has become an incredibly important center of climate justice, resiliency, education and community nourishment. The Knoll is a place where people flourish as much as food, where connection between the students and the wider community becomes reciprocal, and where learning, service and transformation take place daily. The Knoll’s 20th anniversary is in 2023, and in honor of this upcoming celebration and all that has become over the past 20 years we would like to share what we love about the Knoll.
(10/08/20 9:59am)
Last week, we worked with students from all over campus to stage a protest against the Alexander Hamilton Forum’s debate, “1619 or 1776: Was America Founded on Slavery?” We protested the event because we find the mission, funding and history of the AHF — as well as the topic and title of the event — purposefully inflammatory, harmful to our BIPOC peers and a continuation of the institutional and systemic racism that Middlebury upholds. This is not the opinion of just a few students. At the time of publishing this op-ed, our open letter addressed to the Senior Leadership Group received 649 student and 110 alumni signatures. Since none of us were called on during the question and answer section of the debate, we still have a few unanswered questions:
A major financial contributor to the AHF is the Jack Miller Center, which was originally a part of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). The ISI's stated mission is to promote limited government, individual liberty, the free market economy and traditional values. The ISI also receives $8 million in funding from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and, while the Jack Miller Center became independent in 2007, it’s safe to say they are both very much part of the network of right-wing think tanks. The ISI is also an associate member of the State Policy Network, which is funded by the Koch Brothers and coordinates and supplies resources for its members to help promote a conservative policy agenda. How can we expect to have open and honest conversations about race when the organizations sponsoring them are so thoroughly implicated in the systems that perpetuate institutional racism?
Given that Professor Keegan Callanan, the director of the AHF, is a council member on the National Endowment for the Humanities — a committee that is part of the Trump Administration’s push for “pro-America” "patriotic" curricula through the 1776 Commission — doesn’t Callanan’s simultaneous involvement in this debate and the 1776 Commission present a conflict of interest?
Middlebury has a well-documented history of inflammatory speakers, many of which have been met with fierce resistance from the student body. But this summer, Middlebury publicly committed to anti-racism. Is hosting a debate that questions the very role that slavery played in this country’s founding anti-racist? Will the college ever pay more than just lip service to its BIPOC community members, or will it continue to ride its liberal reputation as it repeatedly prioritizes “freedom of speech” over the safety of our BIPOC students?
Not only did our questions go unanswered, but our ability to protest was swiftly taken away from us. Out of respect for Leslie Harris and our decision to abide by the Policy on Open Expression, our protest plan was intentionally non-disruptive. Access to chat and audio was disabled from the start of the event, and every person who used their video had it shut off in a matter of seconds. Most notably, however, students were kicked off the Zoom call and permanently banned from the forum for various attempts at non-disruptive protest. Although digital protests are a new world for all of us, the AHF would have had no grounds for removing us from the room had this event been held in person and had we attended with the same intention to protest non-disruptively. How, then, is it acceptable that we were removed from this digital event? This blatant display of censorship — coming from a group of academics who pride themselves on being crusaders for free speech — was unacceptable and entirely antithetical to Middlebury’s purported values of open expression and “the right to assemble peacefully to evince dissent and to call on others to take action,” as stated in the Policy on Open Expression.
Furthermore, this is certainly not the first time that the AHF — with the influence of right-wing money and conservative agendas — has intentionally attempted to sow divisions in the Middlebury community. We see you, AHF, and we refuse to stand by as you platform white supremacist dialogue and harm members of our community in the process. We urge you to consider the dissonance between what you claim to stand for and your actions at last Thursday’s event — after all, your claims to free speech mean nothing if you deny others the right to dissent.
If we are to move forward on envisioning an inclusive community where our BIPOC students feel that they belong, then the student body and the administration need to critically reflect on the true intentions of the AHF and how their unchecked power to silence student voices contributes to a harmful campus culture. We echo the concerns of other BIPOC student advocacy groups and the demands listed by Kaila Thomas and Rodney Adams in their recent op-ed. We look forward to future conversations between students, professors and administrators that address the deep-seated racism on this campus, including the role that the AHF plays in perpetuating it. For now, we encourage students to bring your concerns to the Open Meeting on Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion today at 7 p.m. on Zoom. We’ll see you there.
Claire Contreras ’22.5 and Divya Gudur ’21 are Co-Managers of Sunday Night Environmental Group. Madison Holland ’21 is Co-Director of the SGA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.
(04/09/20 9:59am)
Two weeks ago, Middlebury College joined thousands of other schools when it was forced to shut down on-campus operations due to the novel coronavirus. Suddenly, what seemed like an overseas crisis became our reality. Many of us were left without a safe home to return to as we packed up our lives indefinitely. Scrambling to say our goodbyes, we were gravely aware of our time lost at Middlebury and the difficult months ahead. Taking shelter across the country, we have helplessly watched this crisis disrupt our world while taking thousands of lives.
As we are writing this, the United States has the highest prevalence of Covid-19 in the world with 431,838 confirmed cases (likely a drastic underestimate due to a shortage of testing kits, healthcare disparities and asymptomatic carriers). We have seen mass layoffs disproportionately affecting low-wage workers, small businesses and at least 27.5 million uninsured Americans; nearly 40% of New Yorkers of New Yorkers are unable to pay rent and almost 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance. Government officials across the country have scrambled to take action. Seattle has enacted a rent moratorium, New York state temporarily waived foreclosures and Congress has approved a two trillion dollar economic stimulus package.
While this unprecedented resource mobilization to fight the coronavirus is certainly warranted, it is shocking compared to our inaction tackling the climate crisis. The economic restructuring and dramatic lifestyle changes we have seen in the past weeks prove the kind of large-scale action needed to address climate change has been possible this whole time. We were in a global crisis even before this pandemic. In the past year we witnessed large parts of California, the Amazon and Australia burn, and floods devastated the central United States, Brazil and Ecuador. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached 415 parts per million, far above scientifically accepted safe levels needed to maintain a livable planet. Globally, black, brown and low-income people are disproportionately impacted by toxic drinking water, industrial waste, and other forms of environmental degradation. And climate change promises a future of more pandemics, more fires, more floods and more frequent and devastating events of every kind. These crises will shut down our country (and the world) time and time again, just like Covid-19 has. Without a concerted effort, the fear, sadness and destabilization we are currently experiencing as a result of Covid-19 will define life for generations to come.
But we also cannot ignore that coronavirus is part of climate change; both are symptoms of the same capitalist system that values profit over lives. The U.S. government's response to the mounting economic crisis is to bail out airline companies and fossil fuel corporations instead of reaching out to those most vulnerable — especially undocumented and migrant workers whose needs and essential contributions are consistently overlooked. Whether it be our overwhelmed healthcare sector or the lack of supportive infrastructure for at-risk populations, this crisis has and continues to reveal the cruel inadequacies of our social and economic structures.
Right now, we have the opportunity to radically rebuild our country. And many are already trying: workers at Amazon and Instacart, for instance, are striking to demand just labor standards. General Electric employees are protesting to shift production to medical equipment. Tenants struggling to pay rent are threatening rent strikes. Politicians like Stacy Abrams are advocating for bailing out people who have been hit the hardest by the crisis, rather than large corporations. College students all around the world are building mutual aid networks to help classmates and community members facing sudden displacement. All around us, people are beginning to imagine and enact a world in which they want to live. And so as Covid-19 continues to take and change lives we have a choice: do we allow governments and corporations to profit off of the increased vulnerability of people and devastate our planet, or do we learn from this crisis and replace the broken systems that got us here? Please, choose consciously.
Sophie Chalfin-Jacobs ’22, Claire Contreras ’22.5, Divya Gudur ’21, Jaden Hill ’22, Hannah Laga Abram ’23, and Asa Skinder ’22.5 are all members of Middlebury Sunday Night Environmental Group.
(03/05/20 10:59am)
The following letter was emailed and hand-delivered to President Laurie Patton and many members of the Senior Leadership Group (SLG) on Monday, March 2. A list of SLG members is available here.
Parts of this letter have been lightly edited to comply with The Campus’ style guidelines.
To the Middlebury College Administration:
We ask that you reconsider your decision to permit Charles Murray’s visit on March 31. Murray’s third invitation to our campus illuminates the structures of oppression that have both molded and been reproduced by educational institutions like ours. Murray is a white nationalist and pseudoscientist. His presence has already harmed our community, and we are certain that his reinvitation will further this harm. As stated in a letter written by alumni in Beyond the Green in 2017, Murray’s invitation is a “message to every woman, every person of color, every first-generation student, every poor and working-class person, every disabled person, and every queer person that not only their presence at Middlebury, but also their safety, their agency, their humanity, and even their very right to exist are all up for ‘debate.’” Your passive acceptance of Murray’s return reverses attempts at community healing and demonstrates that you have learned nothing from the past three years.
We recognize that you, the administration, did not invite Charles Murray, and canceling this talk would put you in a difficult position. However, we believe that it is well within your interests and duties to refuse to extend your implicit endorsement to Murray’s bigotry on the basis that this event violates the college’s three pillars of mutual respect, academic freedom, and integrity. Our education ought to uphold these values, yet this event violates all three.
Mutual respect is necessary for creating, per the language of the handbook, “an atmosphere in which all of [the community’s] members live and work free from discrimination and harassment.” Murray’s work argues that people of color, poor people, women, trans people and disabled people are genetically less intelligent than those who are rich, white, cisgender, male or able-bodied. It is wrong to expect people whose identities are targeted by Murray’s rhetoric to “engage diligently” with Murray’s work, to “respectfully debate” claims that they are inferior (all of which the College Republicans asked us to do in their January op-ed).
Murray’s visit will also involve the presence of both law enforcement and private security, which poses a disproportionate risk to students of color. This does not encourage mutual respect; instead, it heightens fear and danger for those already most targeted by Murray’s work. And, like the Middlebury Faculty for an Inclusive Community, we question the source of the funding for this security. We find your continued lack of transparency on the matter concerning.
Academic freedom protects the essential right of students “to freely speak, hear, write, challenge, and argue.” Students involved with the planning of the event confirmed with us that many of the event tickets are reserved for members of the College Republicans and the Open Campus Initiative, with the rest left to a lottery system. If the goal of the event is truly to encourage open discourse and debate, then all students should have equal access to tickets. The reservation of tickets and the lottery system instead infringe on the right of students to challenge Murray’s claims at the event.
Integrity is “a key guard against false information and the abuse of power [that] demands honest and transparent reporting of research, observation, and experimental evidence.” Murray’s work is not peer-reviewed and has not been published in academic journals. Not all speakers here must be scholars, but those who claim to be must be held to the same standards of scholarship to which we are held as students. We must not extend academic validation to white supremacy and the many other oppressive modes of thought articulated in Murray’s work.
This event violates the values upon which we have all agreed as members of this community. Our time here must teach us how to pursue justice — starting with our own campus. We demand that you use the power of your position to work with us in building a school and, beyond that, a better world. We demand that you cancel this talk.
Sincerely,
Lily Barter ’19.5
Claire Contreras ’22.5
Cora Kircher ’20
Cara Levine ’20
Rebecca Wishnie ’20
The authors of this piece are among the over 140 student and alumni signatories who signed this letter. For a full list of signatories or to add your support, visit go/cmletters.
Authors’ note: we would like to point readers to a companion letter, “A call to strike on March 31: A letter to faculty from students,” demanding that if Murray’s visit does proceed as planned, faculty strike with us and join in a day of anti-white supremacy teach-ins. If the talk goes as planned, we refuse to be complicit in allowing business as usual to proceed.
(02/27/20 10:58am)
Dear Faculty,
On March 31, students, faculty and staff across campus will be striking in an effort to resist the white supremacy and pseudoscience that denies marginalized members of our community their dignity at Middlebury College. We are striking because everyone deserves to live and learn on a campus that does not invite speakers who invoke violence and hatred, or utilize “science” as a weapon of oppression in the service of racism, sexism, transphobia and classism.
We believe Charles Murray embodies larger structures of white supremacy that occupy Middlebury and all institutions of higher education. We refuse to allow Middlebury to continue to uphold these structures of oppression and we refuse to allow right-wing money and media to control discourse on our campus. Instead of attending our usual classes, we are planning an alternative schedule of teach-ins led by faculty. These teach-ins will be open to students, staff, and community members who wish to engage with anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, anti-xenophobic and anti-pseudoscientific material. These teach-ins will allow the members of our community to exercise agency over their own education on a day during which a racist pseudo-scholar will monopolize a powerful speech platform at our institution.
We are asking for your support and collaboration in our resistance. We urge you to join us in striking. As faculty, you contribute immense labor power to this institution. Choosing to withdraw and redirect that power on March 31 will disrupt “business as usual” and lend weight to our resistance. For those of you who choose to strike with us, we urge you to tell your students of your intent in advance and create space in your classes for discussion of this action as a mode of resistance. You can further create that space by reaching out to student organizers and offering your classroom as a teach-in location. We are immensely grateful to the faculty members who are already collaborating with us. In particular, many faculty members have contributed to a website with a tentative and developing schedule of teach-ins, along with more general information about Murray. If you are interested in getting involved, whether it be to offer support, offer your classroom space or create your own teach-in, please fill out the form on go/facultyteachin.
If you choose not to join us, please allow your students to make their own choices about whether or not they will strike and participate in the teach-ins. Recommend a talk or teach-in that you find engaging or related to your class material. Tell your students you will not take attendance that day, or offer a make-up opportunity. We ask that you please do not give exams or quizzes in class that day.
We are committed to making March 31 a day focused on learning strategies to unlearn institutional biases. We invite you to reach out to us about leading your own teach-in. You might choose to teach about the history of white supremacy, classism, racism and pseudoscience in your discipline, or lead a workshop debunking Murray’s ideas as they relate to your areas of research. Too often, the labor of supporting student activism, recognizing current on-campus social issues and incorporating those issues in the classroom falls upon certain professors. These professors are often already engaged in social justice in their programs and departments (e.g. Environmental Studies, Black Studies, Gender Studies, Sociology, etc.). By relegating these conversations to the sphere of the social justice-oriented humanities, we fail to recognize the impact that Murray’s bigoted pseudoscholarship has on students of all disciplines and the college community as a whole.
We urge you, professors across all disciplines, to engage now, as Charles Murray’s visit will inevitably have an impact on the entire college community. We envision a day of learning that is inclusive of the diverse perspectives and fields present on campus. We hope that you will help broaden our understanding of the ways in which white supremacy and related oppressive ideologies and forces manifest.
Ultimately, we are asking you to foster communities and spaces in which all students feel dignified and supported. Please reach out to us, engage us in conversation, and share your thoughts and concerns. We ask you to take this as an opportunity to encourage participation in our collective education outside of the classroom.
Note to readers: We would like to make readers aware of a companion letter written by our peers that argues that the talk should be canceled or moved off-campus. The letter was sent to administration this week. These distinct approaches stem from similar beliefs about what values our campus should uphold.
Sincerely,
Lauren Bates ’20
Claire Contreras ’22.5
Luna Gizzi ’21
Sidra Pierson ’21
The authors of this piece are four of the over 120 student signatories who signed this letter online. For a full-list of signatories or to add your support, visit go/cmletters.