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(05/08/13 11:15pm)
Our chosen school is pretty big on tradition. Every year, graduating Febs ski down the Snow Bowl in their gowns. Every year, when springtime hits full bloom the Adirondack chairs come out. Every year, the homecoming football game tailgate blows up, DKE throws a righteous party and everybody wins.
But one of the best traditions of all takes place in the classroom: every year, Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry teaches classrooms full of jaw-dropped students, aweing them with his erudition and the sheer vastness of his intellect. Murray Dry is one of the things that makes Middlebury so special, and it’s worthwhile to think about why his presence is so valuable.
I am currently taking my first Dry course: Modern Political Philosophy. We read Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Locke, Marx – all the goodies. Many of these books I had considered reading in my free time or even attempted to delve into, mostly without success. But reading them in a class with Murray Dry there to dive headfirst into all the intricacies, to untangle all the intellectual knots in their thought and explore the deeper questions they bring to bear is a completely invaluable experience.
The man is a teacher par excellence. He’s been teaching at Middlebury since 1968, and the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science since 1994. His curriculum vitae is 15 pages long, for Pete’s sake. Let me put it this way: when my mother came to Middlebury in 1974, Dry was already an institution. She took his class on Constitutional Law and he was the reason she went to law school.
On the first day of class, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had been told by a number of grizzled Dry veterans that I needed to be on my toes: Murray Dry teaches using the Socratic Method. He doesn’t wait for hands – he picks students out of the crowd to call on. Not “what year did Columbus sail the ocean blue” but “Mr. Cunningham, how does Montesquieu’s notion of virtue contrast with that of Machiavelli?”
You better do every page of reading for a Dry class, because if he catches you with your pants down and the reading undone, your shame will be very public and your justice swiftly dealt.
There are classes where kids don’t care about the reading, where not having done the homework is a badge of honor, a designator of too-cool-for-school-ness. None of those classes are taught by Murray Dry.
He yells, screams, laughs uproariously and makes you think. But most importantly, Dry somehow makes you care. It’s not about his formidable resume or his professorial looks (the chalk-stained tweed jacket is exactly how I pictured my college professors looking) – it’s the man’s passion for the material he teaches. He cares so incredibly much about this stuff that it’s plain impossible not to get wrapped up in it yourself. He cares more about Montesquieu than I cared when the Denver Nuggets got knocked out of the playoffs recently and more than a tearful Terrell Owens cared when the press went after Tony Romo, his quarterback.
We have an elderly auditor in our class, Jack Goodman. He has audited Dry classes for 12 years now, and the other day he told me a story that captures the essence of what I’m getting at: last year, he went to Dry’s office a little over an hour before a class and found an unkempt Dry deep in the day’s reading, his desk piled with books underlined in and scribbled on so many times in so many different colors of ink it looked more like a handwritten manuscript than a canon of literature. He was met with a terse reply when he asked how Dry was “can’t talk, I need to prepare for this class.”
After more than 40 years of teaching, reading the same book for the umpteenth time, Murray Dry didn’t have a minute to spare because his priority was preparing for class. Not researching, not private studies, but teaching.
I have had more fun reading Montesquieu with Murray Dry than I have hiking, than I have partying, than I have eating hard-earned Grille food at 1:57 a.m. on a Saturday night. Somehow your pride gets wrapped up in the work, and when Dry asks some absurd question you want to know the answer, you need to, because on some level you know that you’re never going to get as much intellectual stimulation from anything as you’re getting from the Doctor Dry.
We all go to Middlebury. Simply by getting accepted into this stupidly difficult school, we have established that we are go-getters. We solve problems. We accept challenges and we defeat them.
So I say now to every first-year, just as my mother said to me on Day 1: take a Murray Dry course. We came here to learn, so learn from the best.
(03/06/13 11:04pm)
This Saturday, Middlebury is hosting probably the coolest event of the year. Not Middlebury running of the bulls. Not Middlebury cheese-tossing. Not Middlebury cage matches (if only). Not Bill Clinton coming to speak, or Michael Jordan or Lance Armstrong (too soon?). Middlebury will have speakers, but none of them will have billion-dollar names or billion-dollar paychecks. But that’s the point, and that’s the beauty of it. This Saturday, Middlebury will be hosting its very own TEDx conference.
TEDx is a fascinating cultural phenomenon, a distinctly 21st century manifestation of contemporary man’s combination of an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a 20-minute attention span. Allow me to explain.
TED is a relatively new organization that searches for ordinary people with extraordinary stories to tell, from shark fights to squirrel-suit flights to champions of civil rights and everything in between. Presenters give 18-minute speeches, long enough to have meat on their bones but not long enough to get stale. TED Talks, the original entity, has existed for 26 years and hosted thousands of speakers. TEDx (the “x” meaning it’s independent of the larger TED brand) is a recreation of TED Talks. TEDx is an event organized by Midd students that will bring people with interesting stories to the community.
TEDx can exist because TED, the original, is such a wildly educational and incredible organization — so I’m going to pontificate a bit on why TED is so valuable. First, I’m going to tell you why we needed something like TEDx so badly.
After the Internet came about, we were inundated with stories. But there have been too many apocryphal tales of incredible virtue and goodness that fell apart like a house of cards or, perhaps more appropriately, like Greg Mortensen, the scumbag of Three Cups of Tea fame, for us to believe them any more. In a few short years, we have gone from believing all of them to believing none of them. From Mortensen to John Edwards to Lance Armstrong to Manti Te’o to Lindsay Lohan, we learn over and over again that those who we deify don’t deserve it, that they are mortal and eminently fallible; indeed, with the heaps of pressure we pile upon them, they are almost destined to fail. In the last decade, Americans have gone from trusting everyone to trusting no one.
And so every time we see a model’s picture in a magazine, we assume it is photoshopped. Every time we see an athlete on a field, we assume his blood is pumping with an avaricious combination of greed and performance-enhancing drugs. Every time we see a politician on a podium, we assume he or she wants to control people rather than to help people. The reason we feel so comfortable being jaded and cynical is that too many times, we have been proven right. We don’t know whom to believe any more. We don’t know whether we need just to choose our heroes better, or whether to dismiss the whole idea of “hero.”
Concomitant with our celebrities being brought forcibly back down to earth, normal people have been elevated. Through YouTube, blogs, Tumblr and Twitter, we can hear almost every person’s voice. But when everyone is shouting, to whom do you listen? Who can you even hear? With so many thousands of millions of billions of bytes of information out there, I always feel utterly overwhelmed and outnumbered by the cacophony, like a single lit match in a snowstorm or a non-cheater in baseball (sorry. Had to). I never know how to sort through the oodles of information out there to find the meaningful stuff. Luckily, TED came along.
TED finds special people, vets them, fact-checks them and brings their stories to us in tight, concise 18-minute talks that are free and accessible to anyone who can work a computer. We can see the best of the Internet, ostensibly reflective of the best in the world, and for the first time we don’t have to deify anyone in order to hear, respect and value their story. We don’t have to elevate them above the level of human, only to force them back down later on. We can simply listen, appreciate and enjoy.
And Middlebury has organized its own TED event, with its own interesting speakers with their own fascinating stories. I’ll avoid enumerating their virtues, as I’m sure there’s a feature on them elsewhere in the Campus — but suffice it to say that Middlebury TEDx is reflective of TED’s goals, and in my opinion should live up to them on Saturday, March 9.
Not only do we have the opportunity to hear their speeches, but from 5:30 – 7 p.m. on Friday, March 8 at Palmer we have the opportunity to meet, chat and even, to use the dreaded corporate buzzword I can’t go anywhere on campus without hearing (no, not synergy), “network” with them. Palmer House, the “Creativity and Innovation” house, is hosting a mixer with the TEDx speakers, TEDx organizers and the campus at large. You, dear reader, will have the chance to meet the TEDx speakers and bask in their infinite glory while also basking in the glory of delicious hors d’oeuvre’s and drinks for those of age.
So the night before the full show, come to Palmer House and bask away. Even bring your absolutely positively real Internet girlfriend. We’ll be waiting with the drinks.
(02/20/13 5:17pm)
This past Saturday during Winter Carnival, everybody and their mother showed up to the Snow Bowl, rowdy and retro and revved up to support the ski team. It was a sight to behold: dozens of kids tailgating in the parking lot, snagging free popcorn samples and trekking up the mountain to reach the “cheering zone.” Despite the wipeouts (myriad) and the cold (manageable), everyone present had what ze Germans refer to as a superfunthyme.
And yet, if one were to actually tally up the number of Midd Kids who showed up to the mountain, he or she would be hard pressed to break 200. Fewer than one-tenth of the Middlebury student body showed up to the races, despite the fact that the entire reason Winter Carnival exists is to celebrate the ski team’s only home race of the year.
If one takes a step back and looks at the big picture here, the issue is clear: Middlebury does a woefully negligent job promoting its athletics. The Winter Carnival races are the perfect example. In order to get fewer than one in 12 students to show up to their race, the ski team had to put up posters themselves, doing their best to plaster the walls of Proctor, McCullough etc. with pictures of racers, funny quotes and friendly reminders that yes, in fact, the ski team has a race this weekend.
After killing themselves year-round as Middlebury’s only D1 athletes (get out of here, squash), getting up at six a.m. every morning of winter term to train while the rest of campus slumbered drunkenly and traveling every weekend to ski at other schools’ home mountains, the ski team had to run around campus putting up posters of themselves. They were essentially begging people to take the time to show them a little love.
This problem is far from unique to the ski team; indeed, every athletics team on campus is forced to do their own advertising. From hanging posters to making Facebook events, it is up to the teams to let people know that “WE HAVE A GAME — PLEASE COME!” The school provides very little advertising or general support to its teams in terms of fostering fan support and school spirit or in terms of aiding the teams’ general relationship with the campus as a whole. The sports games are buried in the dense, lengthy “Campus Events” emails that nobody has taken the time to parse through since Moses was blubbing in the bulrushes.
These athletes don’t want to be advertising their own events. As a friend of mine on the ski team said, “we don’t want to be bragging about ourselves — we want the school to be bragging for us!” Humor aside, he’s right. The school doesn’t “brag” for its athletes, publicize athletic events effectively or do much of anything to promote its teams.
Middlebury is an incredible place. Our sine qua non, the quality that defines us, is our diversity — of thought, of socioeconomic and cultural background, of interests. But the flipside to that coin is that we lose out on one of the central unifying experiences for any college: fervent fanhood of a school team. One of the best parts about attending a school like the University of Colorado, Ohio State University or any of their large state-school brethren is that the butcher, the baker, the music maker and everyone in between has a powerful connection to their respective university as a result of their fanhood of the school’s sports teams. In Boulder, whole swaths of town are deserted on Saturday afternoons in the fall because you’re either watching the football game, or you’re getting a beer poured on your noggin by someone who’s mad that you’re not watching the football game.
Strong athletics programs can be an unmatched unifying force when effectively utilized by a school. And the frustrating thing is that here at Midd, our sports teams are without a doubt good enough to galvanize the community. And yet year after year, they go uncelebrated, toiling away in relative anonymity while they should be having their achievements yodeled from the mountaintops. Every year, one or two teams are NESCAC or national champions; every year one or two individual athletes are the best in their sports. Unfortunately, much of campus probably doesn’t know that.
A more aggressive stance toward championing athletics wouldn’t just help unify the school or the community — it would also surely benefit the College’s alumni relations, which in turn results in financial improvements. When alumni wish to stay up to date with their alma mater, it’s not like they say, “Oh boy, I wonder what’s going on with the economics department! Oh, they hired a new Macro Theory professor? Yippee!” Much of the time, alumni are following a sports team. If Middlebury’s current students become more involved in and pumped about sports teams, they are sure to maintain that passion in post-college life (non-life? vapid and boring existence?), and remain more involved with the school, donating more and contributing to the College in any number of ways.
I’m not here to propose a solution. I don’t know how the College should fix what I like to call its Fanhood Problem. Weekly athletic event emails, school-sponsored posters, separate poster space for athletic teams in public spaces, personal visits from Leibo to the freshman halls to play flipcup and chat about basketball — I don’t know how the school should fix the problem. I just know that the problem definitely exists.
If we don’t fix it, than Middlebury’s greatest strength — its diversity — will continue to be one of its greatest weaknesses. And I, for one, would hate to see that happen.