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(02/28/18 11:49pm)
We’re all tired of talking about gun violence at this point, maybe because the shooting in Parkland, Florida a few weeks ago marked the sixth time that The Onion has published its morbidly titled article, ‘‘‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The statistics are as familiar as they are terrifying. Among developed countries, the United States is the site of the most gun-related homicides. On average, this country sees more than one mass shooting per day, with mass shooting defined as an event in which four or more people are killed or injured. In our cultish devotion to the Second Amendment, the right to own firearms translates to far more deaths by gun violence than by terrorism.
We’ve all encountered the myth of the “lone wolf,” the misunderstood and unassuming white-male-shooter-who-is-definitely-not-a-domestic-terrorist. Too often, media reports are quick to emphasize the guy’s backstory, as if the fact that he likes to play video games or spent a lot of time alone as a child is supposed to soften the image of this white-male-shooter-who-is-definitely-not-a-domestic-terrorist. And almost always, there is a reference to mental illness — even if it is just to say that the shooter has no history of diagnosis.
Why is this? To note the absence of anything is to imply that one expected to find it somewhere. So when reporters casually note that there were no signs of mental illness in the killer, the unspoken assumption is that mentally ill people are more prone to carry out acts of violence.
This is blatantly untrue: Individuals diagnosed as mentally ill are responsible for less than five percent of shootings, according to the book “Gun Violence and Mental Illness.” A 2016 study by Health Affairs found that members of this demographic are more likely to kill themselves with a gun than to carry out mass murders. Why, then, does mainstream media seem intent on equating mental disorders with violent behavior?
To answer this question, we must begin with another: What do we mean by “mental disorder” in the first place? The label has long been tossed around, frantically and carelessly, like a hot potato — forced as a badge of shame upon the social misfits of a given time and place. Those who fulfill the norms of a particular era are granted the status of mental wellness. Those who diverge from these arbitrary standards are stigmatized as insane or ill.
Let’s remember, for instance, that “female hysteria,” homosexuality and “gender identity disorder” (“a strong and persistent cross-gender identification”) were once listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). These so-called conditions were all considered mental illnesses, insofar as they diverged from the heteronormativity and traditional gender roles of the twentieth century.
This quick jaunt through American history suggests that categories of mental pathology are rooted far more in politics than in science. There is no universal definition of “disorder,” but rather a wide range of interpretations of the human experience, some more oppressive than others. More often than not, when we call someone mentally ill, what we are saying is that they do not belong; we isolate and dismiss them as outcasts.
What does this have to do with gun violence? Well, it is trendy and convenient to blame mental illness — a term whose stigma has survived the ages, even as its criteria have fluctuated wildly — because people with mental disorders have long been regarded as social deviants with questionable moral standards anyway. To suggest that the Parkland shooter acted out as a result of “mental health issues” is to provide a believable explanation for his behavior, while ignoring the possibility that the problem could reside anywhere beyond his brain.
Yet the shockingly steady stream of mass shootings hints at a pathology that is social, rather than psychological, in nature. The majority of American mass shooters are white males — 54 percent, according to 1982 statistics by Mother Jones. Overall, men commit 98 percent of all mass shootings and 90 percent of murders. This is not a coincidence.
Toxic masculinity — and in particular, toxic white masculinity — has long been socially permissible, so ingrained within our cultural psyche that it goes by largely unnoticed. It is by virtue of white men’s institutional power that this condition has never descended to the status of mental pathology. (The line between normalcy and disorder does not exist, after all; it is drawn, erased, and redrawn over time by parties in power.) Yet if we were to envision a world in which “toxic white masculinity disorder” made its way into the DSM, it would not be much of a mental leap to imagine the following symptoms: an aggressive sense of entitlement, the suppression of emotions and the need for dominance, among others. The believability of such a diagnosis would certainly be on par with that of “female hysteria,” which was apparently the result of “wandering wombs.”
The link between social conditioning and violent behavior is clear. So why has mental illness become the scapegoat for our staggering rates of domestic terrorism? Because to identify toxic masculinity as the root of gun violence (besides the actual guns, of course) is to accept that we inhabit a society more deeply damaged than we are prepared to navigate. Violence does not exist in a vacuum: Sexist, racist, ableist, classist and heterosexist ideologies entitle the most privileged among us to exercise control over others, culminating in the deadly power of the straight, cisgender white male. It is not a handful of “mentally ill” people who are the problem, whatever “mentally ill” is supposed to mean; it is the entire system that is ailing.
In drawing parallels between pathology and toxic masculinity, I do not mean to disempower those who identify strongly with clinical diagnoses, or to trivialize the very real suffering associated with many of the conditions we refer to as mental illness. Rather, I wish to recognize that we operate within a highly confusing and imperfect system, in which everyday aspects of the human experience — anxiety, depression and hearing voices, among others — are treated as deficiencies and invitations for moral judgment, whereas white supremacy and toxic masculinity are accepted without a second thought.
When news of the next mass shooting comes out, take note of the killer’s identity. That person will probably be white, and will almost certainly be male. Observe how major news outlets frame his story, and remember that the questions they pose are as important as the answers they seek. Acknowledge that while it may be tempting to identify the problem as a “mental illness” within the individual, labels are often more reflective of the system than the self. This is not so much a matter of “broken brains” as of a broken society.
(02/22/18 2:38am)
This interview took place on Jan. 31. The transcript was lightly edited and includes clarifications made by President Patton, which The Campus agreed to as part of the terms of the interview.
ELIZABETH ZHOU: We thought we’d dive in by asking you to revisit the moment when you became the 17th president of Middlebury College. If you could travel back to that moment, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give yourself?
LAURIE PATTON: I would say a couple things. The first is that I would make sure that when you think you know a community, you really know a community. Make sure you listen carefully to the ways in which your assumptions about a community might be different than reality. I think that’s just good advice for any college president or any new leader.
I also think being a dean of a larger institution is 80 percent the same as being the president of a smaller one. But there are ways in which being a president has a bigger scope of a job. You are accountable to more constituencies. So I have seven constituencies I’m accountable to — students, staff, faculty, alums, parents, trustees and donors. The town and the state are also key constituents.
I think being accountable and balancing to all of those constituencies given (a) how complex higher education is, and (b) how wide-ranging those investments are, is an important thing to know. When you’re a dean, you’re slightly differently configured. You don’t have all those constituencies.
Deans also don’t have what many people call the “internal-external” problem, which all presidents have. How you think about and connect with people on the inside is different than how you think about and connect with people on the outside. And, often, the needs of the inside community are very different than those of the outside community. Every president has that challenge in some way or another.
Another thing I would say, not so much in the spirit of advice as appreciation, is that the students are even more amazing than you think they are. There was a moment when I was in the receiving line [after the presidential announcement in 2015] and I met two students. One was a literature major and the other was a chemistry major. I didn’t know which was which. I said, “Oh, how do you like studying literature?” And the person — the woman — started talking about how great literature was, and I said, “Well, it sounds like you love being a literature major.” And she said, “Actually, I’m the chemistry major.” And I thought, “Wow, these are fantastic students.” Then I turned to the other student and said, “Well now can you say as much about the chemistry major, given that you’re the literature major?” And he proceeded to talk about the chemistry major. These are the kind of students that I came for.
AMELIA POLLARD: How do you see the relationship of the College to the town?
PATTON: We are deeply connected to the community in a number of different ways. I think that there is only one question the president of Middlebury has to ask the community: “What do you need and how can we help?” and, very particularly, “How can we help on projects of common educational purpose?”
The relationship has been exciting, because we are now working on five or six major projects where we share common educational purpose. For example, we’re we’ve created year-long internships at the Town Hall Theatre, the Sheldon Museum, and the community music school.
I am pleased about new things that we’re doing to support the Addison Central School District in creating the International Baccalaureate curriculum. Several students are working in the community to help train teachers on what the student experience of the International Baccalaureate will be like.
Finally, we have a project underway with Habitat for Humanity, which is a perfect Middlebury project. We are working on a plan to donate land to build Habitat houses. The Art and Architecture faculty are interested in creating courses to help design these houses in an advanced, environmentally sensitive way. These are ways in which the partnership with the community has been highly productive. And it’s energizing for all of us. It’s what a good college should be doing.
ZHOU: Knowing that you occupy a unique position with a lot of responsibilities, to whom do you look for professional guidance?
PATTON: I have network of people I speak with. There’s a group of women presidents who talk to each other, call each other when things are tense or when they need to think through problems. And there are several male college presidents whose advice I value.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about the executive coaching industry. CEOs and leaders of colleges frequently have coaches who they can talk to about different challenges and issues. This can be really helpful. For instance, I work closely with members of the Senior Leadership Group. They are great people. But with supervising a team you have to be careful. You know you’d probably be friends with them in other contexts, but no matter how easygoing and accessible you are, you’re their boss. And that’s something you have to be mindful of. That’s one reason a coach can be helpful: they have some distance from the day-to-day work and that perspective is important.
I talk to my coach frequently, and it’s a good relationship.
Family’s always great, because you know they have your best interests at heart. It’s also very important to me that I maintain my long-term friendships. Every day I get up and write to two or three friends, just as a form of gratitude. I also frequently just check in with them and see where they are. So every day I have a conversation with one or two friends that are completely unrelated to Middlebury.
ZHOU: Thinking about your role as president, and going back to the Town Hall Meeting last fall, there was a little bit of pushback or confusion around the idea that there might be some conflict between your personal opinions and your opinions as a president. Knowing that that was a really limited format for everyone to engage with the idea, is there anything you would like to clarify regarding your role?
PATTON: Yes. I wouldn’t have come to Middlebury if I didn’t believe that my values were not aligned with the institution’s values. Every day I think about Middlebury’s values, articulate Middlebury’s values, promote them and talk about them. I do so because I’m committed to them personally. So that’s the most important clarification that I would make.
ETHAN BRADY: Last January, The New York Times wrote an article that was widely distributed on social media, showing a ranking of schools that have a lot of students from the top one percent, compared to the number of students from the bottom 60 percent. This was data from the class of 2013, so it could be a bit out of date. But Middlebury ranked ninth on that list. What is the college doing to address socioeconomic disparity, in terms of both numbers and impacts on campus culture?
PATTON: I think that the larger question that this article raises has to do with economic inequality in our society, which is one of the major issues of our time. Let me offer a couple thoughts about that.
One of the most interesting moments at the PEN America convening [in January] was our answer to the question of what was the biggest issue on campus for us right now. It was interesting because the number one issue was not race, even though that’s a big issue for us right now. It was class. That’s a signal for us that we need to continue to talk about that issue.
I think there are two different ways you can address those issues. The first is increasing financial aid. As you know, financial aid remains my number one priority for fundraising over the next ten years. I think is essential that we increase the number — slowly — of people on Pell Grants, and that we increase the number of people on financial aid. That’s the kind of work that I do—and love to do—every day.
But we have to do this sustainably. As you all know, I’m committed to balancing our budget. That’s crucial. And that’s why I want to keep pushing on fundraising for financial aid. I’d like to continue to grow that percentage in a way that’s financially sustainable. I don’t want to create a deficit problem five to ten years from now. I’d rather do it in a way that is truly sustainable.
The second thing we need to do relates to campus culture. It’s essential that we start having conversations across class difference, the way that we have started to do around questions of race, LGBTQI, religious difference and so on. I think we need to embrace it fully. I would welcome student proposals on how we do that.
Third, I think there are also generational differences between professor and students, things that might have been said in class in previous eras that are received the same way now. For example, when a professor says, “Do this assignment while you’re all sitting on the beach on spring break,” and many students in the class cannot afford to go to the beach on spring break, that’s a concern. So I think those three things are far more important for us to focus on than the small percentage differences between one college and another.
Obviously, our financial model is such that right now, in order for us to provide the education that we do provide, full-paying students play a role. But the more we can create greater access through all the ways that we just talked about, in both getting into Middlebury, and then studying at Middlebury, the better off we’ll be. And we need student leadership to help with that. Because the student experience at the everyday level is where we can get better.
POLLARD: What niche do you think Middlebury occupies amongst the other NESCAC schools and in the larger scope of higher education? How are we going to continue to differentiate ourselves moving forward?
PATTON: On certain days — when I’m feeling like having a sense of humor — I think there are days when we can’t decide whether we’re Amherst or Hampshire. We’re in between those two places. But if you actually look at us, we are an elite liberal arts college with fantastic graduate programs. That is what we are.
We’ve had all these metaphors in the strategic planning process. We’ve talked about a constellation. We’ve talked about an ecosystem. And all those are great metaphors. But none of those are going to be the sort of “heart” language that people land on. And a fantastic liberal arts college with great and vibrant graduate programs is the right description, and it also is something that people recognize.
In terms of the NESCAC schools: We’re the only one in Vermont, so that’s kind of interesting. Second, I think we have a combination of intellectual intensity, first-rate athletic programs, focus on language-learning, environmental leadership, and a globally networked curriculum. Those are also the directions we’re moving, the areas where we want to keep improving, and where students, faculty, and staff are enthusiastic about moving. Those should be the kinds of things that continue to distinguish us.
But what I really would like to see in the NESCAC schools is more collaboration. What are the ways in which we could collaborate more, not just on the athletic field? For example, Colby has a first-rate museum of art, and wouldn’t it be interesting for them to collaborate with our museum, which is growing and changing and doing interesting things — and has a new pink sign, right?
Or if there is a NESCAC school which has a great physics department, and another has a great biology department, then why not have exchanges between both? And so forth. I think we could get so much more done if we collaborated and exchanged more in academic ways. But that takes a lot of coordination and effort, and everyone’s so busy running their own colleges, that that may not come to fruition so quickly.
BRADY: It seems that in the wake of Charles Murray, a lot of people now have a certain association with this school. So as an ambassador of the institution, when you’re traveling around, across the globe, how do you defend the institution, and what do you talk about in those interactions?
PATTON: These are questions that are good for everybody, because at a certain level we all are ambassadors for Middlebury.
But as the person for whom that’s a primary job, I would say several things. First—and this is from my inaugural address—I would say that we are actually good at having arguments for the sake of heaven. Sometimes it’s painful and messy and hard, and breaks us apart and breaks us open. People may not land exactly where other people want them to land. They may not land where they intended to land. There are all sorts of tough distances between intentions and effects that happen in these hard conversations. What people communicate may not have the positive effect they intend, and that is always hard.
In all of the pain that the community and students felt last year, I have two strong memories. One was right after the event, when I spent an hour in a kind of “mini-seminar” with students to talk about what had just happened. The second was the student-sponsored debate that occurred a couple weeks later. All of the same issues were there, and it was remarkable to see students, once again, leading in this difficult space, and doing so respectfully and rigorously. I found both of those occasions to be very moving events. That’s the first thing I’d say: we’re good at that.
The second thing I can say now is that we have had a record number of applicants this year, which is a wonderful fact. That includes a record number of students of color, as well as a record number of international student applicants. Who knows why that is the case. Last spring we did a study of admitted students, and one of the interesting findings was that students were still intending to enroll at Midd because it was perceived as a place where real issues are talked about in really hard ways by real people. I was impressed by that, and that’s something I speak about when I’m traveling around the globe.
The third thing I would say is that it’s a deeply difficult national moment. Our challenge at Middlebury is that we need to embrace the difficulty of that moment and live through it.
It’s a challenge, but it also is an opportunity to figure out some new ways of living together, and to figure out some new ways of speaking together, and to figure out whether, as we move forward into the future, we can find a way to live across difference and to talk across difference. I actually have appreciated the opportunity to be an ambassador and speak about Middlebury in those ways.
BRADY: In the internet age, when people are able to communicate across the globe in seconds, and publish an article or an essay and post it online, how do you think that affects this idea of speech, or the public sphere?
PATTON: I think it makes a huge difference in every minute of our days. I would say to students: you exist in a public sphere that nobody else has existed in, ever. And I can’t imagine some days what that must feel like.
At any moment, you don’t know whether you’re going to be a public person or not. Before, when you decided you were going to give a speech, you would prepare, and that was the public moment, and there was a transition into the public moment. Now, there is no transition.
I think that makes it very difficult to figure out in any given moment whether something is a public conversation or whether it’s a private conversation. And that boundary is constantly oscillating. So that’s the first thing that would be deeply challenging for students today. And I think it’s one of the reasons why the public sphere and participation in the public sphere takes more courage today. And it’s why it is essential that we continue to challenge everyone at Middlebury to have that courage today, no matter what.
The second thing is that this relationship between intentions and effects that I mentioned earlier is an interesting one. You can burn a Qur’an in Florida and there can be physical violence and protest about that action somewhere halfway across the globe. Or you could think about burning a Qur’an and write about it online, and there can be physical protest to that somewhere in Afghanistan. So whether it’s in debates about policy, whether it’s in other intellectual work, whatever it is, in online work you don’t know what the effects are going to be. And those effects are exponentially magnified. That means that being a public person is a totally different experience than it was even 30 years ago.
The third thing is, actually, a real opportunity. This is related to the question of online learning in the context of the liberal arts. Our Associate Provost for Digital Learning Amy Collier talks about creativity, connection, and community as the key components of online learning in a liberal arts context. If there ever was a community that could figure that out, it’s Middlebury. So even with all the challenges that I just noted, because we have different campuses, because we have so many well-established schools abroad, we can do online learning differently.
The way I think about Middlebury now is not so much a noun, but a verb. We are travelers. In that way, we always have to learn how to travel well. We travel across campuses, both digitally as well as actually. There are ways in which we have a real interesting opportunity to make sure that that this instantaneous quality of online life, as well as that hyper-connected quality of online life, can be in service of liberal education. I think we need to continue to reflect on that. Of course, every institution of higher education has that, but I think we have a particular opportunity to do that differently.
POLLARD: My next question is about how Monterey has been incorporated into Middlebury’s vision, and whether you see it as an outlier or a new direction moving forward. David Provost noted how Monterey was actually going to need to make seven percent budget cuts moving forward. In furthering Monterey as an institution, how are you going to try to navigate the budget?
PATTON: I’ll begin by saying I think Monterey is of real value, both to Middlebury and to the world. We need only turn to the example of how much it has helped in the last three or four months on the issue of North Korea.
So many of the scholars at Monterey, particularly in the area of nuclear nonproliferation, have helped to do what good journalists should also do, which is say, “Well, wait a second, what they’re claiming isn’t true,” or “Let’s look exactly at what those Korean capabilities might be.”
I also would point to the fact that the number of Peace Corps volunteers who go from Monterey and then back to Monterey is among the highest in the country for educational institutions. They are a leading institution in areas of public service and international development.
The third thing that comes immediately to mind in terms of the value of the Institute is the number of interpreters who graduate from Monterey who go on to work for the UN and other institution across the globe. What we increasingly see is that, even in an age of machine-learning in language, more and more language experts are needed in order to work with that artificial intelligence to make sure that the language learning tools are as accurate as possible.
In terms of the history of Monterey’s value to Middlebury, I think we’re seeing a couple of things. This semester a number of faculty are going to be traveling to Monterey from the college, including many who haven’t had a lot of connection to Monterey, and I think that’s a good development.
We also have many faculty who travel from Monterey to Middlebury, and that has had a positive effect, too. We’ve had people come help us think about changing ways of learning. For instance, given the importance we place on immersive learning in Middlebury’s new mission statement, it’s natural that we would look to the interesting things they are doing with immersive learning at Monterey. I think we can learn from those initiatives.
The president’s course that I taught last spring on water was also a good opportunity to engage across different intellectual cultures of the College and the Institute. We had some wonderful conversations about, for instance, plastics in our oceans, and how you could take a literary approach, a business approach, a policy approach, or a scientific approach to that issue. Everyone in the room was talking about these issues, and that could only have happened with faculty and students from both Monterey and the College there. I think that we are continuing to deepen the relationship in encouraging ways.
Middlebury as a whole needs to achieve financial sustainability. And I’m pleased that, as David Provost said, we’re not only meeting our goals, but are surpassing them slightly. Monterey has actually surpassed its own goals for budget sustainability at a greater percentage than the College has. I’m proud of my colleagues at Monterey for that.
Do they still have a hill to climb? Definitely. But so far, I’ve been impressed by how well they’ve done. So I expect that Monterey will continue to create a very clear path towards financial sustainability. I hope that all of the units will meet financial sustainability in the next three years.
The main thing I want to say about Monterey is that every part of Middlebury should wish for its success. Part of what it means to be a great liberal arts college with fantastic graduate programs is that every unit should wish for the success of every other unit. That’s our only way forward. If a unit does well, either intellectually or financially, that helps everybody: all boats rise with that tide. That’s the perspective I want to make sure people embrace.
BRADY: The master plan was a document produced in 2008, which is similar to Envisioning Middlebury. Does the college plan in the future to follow that document? In what ways can we balance the vision that we have with financial realities?
PATTON: There are three things I would say about that. The first is that any institution that is responsible to a master plan is going to revisit it every five years and ask, “Are we going in the right direction?” I have known institutions who ignored their master plan, and then ten years later went back and said, “Oops, that plan doesn’t look anything like what we’ve done.” Last year, we did a thoughtful update to the master plan to recognize changes in our thinking.
We have a Buildings, Grounds and Lands Subcommittee of the Board of Trustees that is vigilant about this. A perfect example of the need to update a master plan would be the temporary building that we will begin work on in the next several months. That was an important moment for Middlebury, because it’s exactly related to your question, which is how you figure out a way to respond to needs that you didn’t anticipate.
Think of Bicentennial Hall, which is a beautiful building with wonderful views and, seemingly, all this space. But in a much shorter time than anyone thought possible, it became clear we needed more space for the programs that Bicentennial Hall contained because the number of students who wanted to major in the sciences grew. And so, the question became, what do we do?
We looked at a number of different options. We looked at buildings in the community, we looked at moving and shifting departments, and so on. And the number one thing that drove this change was student interest, and being able to deliver to our students the opportunity to be science majors in fields of their choice. It was that simple.
When you think about space and the master plan, you’re always thinking about what is the best and most effective way that we can fulfill our educational mission.
That’s the second thing that I wanted to talk about: the way the College and larger Middlebury is governed. Any changes to the master plan need to be talked about with the Buildings, Grounds and Lands Subcommittee of the board. We had several meetings with that committee over the last few months. We reviewed what the building might look like and we interviewed architects. It’s actually an exciting process, especially if you know the building is truly meeting a real need and that it will further Middlebury’s educational mission.
The third thing I would say around the vision for the master plan is that we need to think carefully about how we’re using space. For example, inclusivity as an everyday ethic is something that’s important to me. I think a lot about the fact that this campus was not built for students from underrepresented backgrounds. It was built for students, usually white students, who lived in the 1800s. They were not necessarily wealthy, but they were certainly middle class, and were going to go into very traditional male vocations.
How do we think about changing that space? We can’t afford to tear down all the buildings and create new spaces, but I think there are ways that we can continually think about space utilization in different eras, and 2018 looks different than even 1998 did.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the spaces between buildings and inside buildings, or even on buildings. What can we do with those spaces? The Committee on Art in Public Places has begun to discuss an initiative that would focus on art that would welcome, and be authored by, and contributed by, students from underrepresented backgrounds—exactly in those kinds of spaces.
Consider the wonderful murals that have been done in the Anderson Freeman Center. Why not do several murals around campus like that? Why not think about the next ten years as a place where art can occupy a new role on campus, and create a different kind of space utilization that could be more welcoming, and make our campus more welcoming?
Lastly, the new building will provide what we call swing space, which will allow for the renovation of Warner, Johnson and Munroe over the next several years. Those three buildings are not ADA compliant, and don’t meet standards for universal design. That just feels unacceptable to me. We live in a world where people with disabilities should be welcomed and able to thrive on our campus.
A number of aspects of universal design will be built into the new temporary building. That’s a big priority. It’s not sexy in any way, it’s not a huge thing, but it’s long-term. In the end the effect will be a much more welcoming campus, and that’s what matters.
POLLARD: You mentioned before that there are needs we don’t anticipate as a college campus. And as of recently, the Me Too movement was brought to the fore by what’s commonly been referred to as “The List” being released the week before we went onto winter break. To what extent do you think the college is able or responsible for addressing this issue moving forward?
PATTON: The first thing I’ll say is that our Title IX office has grown substantially over the last ten years. We’ve added HROs, we’ve added JAOs; we’ve added a director and more staff. And that has been in response to the needs on campus. And if history is any indication, I expect and have confidence that the Title IX office will continue to respond to the needs of students.
I think that the number-one priority for the Title IX office, and for Middlebury more broadly, is to make sure that we are a place where students feel that they can report crimes of bias, crimes of sexual assault, and all of the other areas that fall under Title IX. That has to be our number-one priority.
Another top priority has to be for fairness for all students. Those two things are what we’re committed to and what our Middlebury values demand. So moving forward, what I expect, and know we can and should do, is to make sure that we live up to those values even in changing situations. The Me Too movement opened up all sorts of difficult issues for everyone around questions of sexual assault, around questions of reporting, and so forth.
I put a lot of confidence in the student group that is advising the Title IX office, and helping them continue to get better. We need to make sure that we continue to respond to the changing needs, as we have done in the past.
POLLARD: Do you see any kind of educational element moving forward? Any kind of blanket, almost required-for-all-students portion? I know that the Vermont executive branch has required an in-course training for all government officials on sexual assault training.
PATTON: We do have training as part of orientation. I think it’s great that all first-year students have that training and we put that in place in the last couple of years. And I think we should continue it. That’s absolutely essential.
Let’s also continue to make sure that that training is relevant to the kinds of constantly changing situations that we’re seeing. And I think that conversation should be had on a regular basis. And if we need to expand or change what we’re doing given the situations that we find ourselves in, then I expect and have confidence that we’ll be able to do that. The educational element is key. The Title IX office is eager to embrace that, and deepen that as an opportunity, and I support it 100 percent.
BRADY: The Title IX office is sort of like a justice system. Thinking of the campus as almost a small society, what is justice on this campus? And what does that mean for the students who go here?
PATTON: The first thing your question reminds me of is that the Dean of Students’ office is going to be embarking on a series of focused conversations with students on the question, “How do we live together?” That’s a central question for all of us that’s related to that question of justice.
Second, I’ve been pleased with and want to continue the conversations between faculty, administration and students on how we continue to evolve and address questions through our judicial system.
On any college campus, judicial systems should be fair and they should be open. They also should reflect the sense that the conversation about what is justice is always evolving. I think Middlebury is committed to that.
In my training in conflict mediation, we talk about three different kinds of justice. It’s important to remember that there are three different kinds of justice that are part and parcel of our world. There are many more, but certainly three major ones.
The first is the idea of justice as a system of equality, where ideas about fairness take center stage.
The second is the question of justice as equity: how much I put in is what I would get out of any given social engagement. That’s where I would expect something equitable, but not necessarily absolutely equal. A lot of times when you discuss some of these questions, people say, “Well, I’m not necessarily going to have an absolutely equal conversation about this issue, or an absolutely equal solution to this problem, but I would hope that we could all work towards an equitable conversation and an equitable solution.”
The third kind of justice is a moral one. This has to do with righting historical wrongs and acknowledging where society does not fully recognize of some of its citizens, or does not fully represent them, or does not take care of some of its most vulnerable people.
All of those three ideas of justice should be at play in the mini-society that is Middlebury. And the number-one thing we have to do as a society of learners and teachers is to reflect on those three ideas of justice and what their relationship is with one another. Can we design a system that makes sure that those three ideas of justice are part and parcel of how we live together?
I am enthusiastic about the introduction of restorative practices. About 50 people have been trained in that area. The primary application will be in student life. Part of my answer to the question of how we live together is making sure that we not only continue to work on and evolve a fair and just student conduct process, but also, as a supplement to that, have the cultural habit of restorative practices.
We’re going to be rolling restorative practices out over the next couple of years, and students and student life will be leading that effort. I remember talking about that in December of 2015, and stating how transformative it could be for Middlebury, so it’s delightful to see that moving forward.
Amelia Pollard and Elizabeth Zhou transcribed this interview.
The following questions were answered by email on Feb. 14.
CAMPUS: Should a private college treat speech the same way the U.S. government does — under a First Amendment framework? Or, since it is a place of learning where many people develop their answers to moral questions, does it occupy a "third space" in our society?
PATTON: Whereas public universities are obligated by law host even the most controversial, divisive, and in some cases repugnant speakers; as a private institution, Middlebury does not carry this burden. I remain, and Middlebury remains, committed to the First Amendment principles of free speech and by extension, academic freedom. That’s part of who we are as an American institution.
I also believe that with that right — as with any right — we have responsibilities. At Middlebury, it is our responsibility to cultivate in our students active and critical inquiry which means exposing them to ideas that may be uncomfortable. At the same time, we also have the responsibility to reflect on and incorporate the principles and values of our community. My goal is, was, and continues to be an inclusive public sphere where a richness and diversity of voices are heard and, importantly, respected.
CAMPUS: What did you learn from Charles Murray's visit to campus? Is there anything you would have done differently?
PATTON: It was an incredibly painful and difficult situation. I have learned from and been forever changed by the degree to which people were hurt by the events that occurred — both on our campus and beyond. I think we could have turned inward sooner, to collectively ask ourselves, “What just happened?” I’m also pleased that over the past year we have done a lot of work around our speaker safety guidelines to ensure that we have the time and the input to fully prepare for speaker applications. Likewise, the work done by the Committee on Speech and Inclusion Middlebury College is a really important step as we learn how to listen differently and better. While the community is still healing, I believe that we are in a very different place than we were a year ago in how we are thinking about speakers and our priorities and values.
CAMPUS: Female leadership is consistently held to a double standard in our society. Are there moments in your Middlebury career in which your gender has felt particularly prominent?
PATTON: When I am asked this question, I respond by saying that that Middlebury has been ready for a woman leader for a while. Faculty, staff, and students all have been quite welcoming of my own particular collaborative style of leadership. And we’ve got some impressively strong women leaders in other positions at Middlebury as well. So overall, it’s been easy and productive.
I think difference of note is in people’s expectations. My staff and I note the disappointment that people — students, faculty, staff, alumni, and more — express when my schedule prevents me from responding to them immediately. There is a greater degree of expectation overall that I will always be available. Studies show that female professors who devote the same amount of time (sometimes even more time) to their students as male professors, are paradoxically thought of as less accessible than men. That is because the expectations of women’s availability is so much higher.
But these kinds of things go with the territory, and my view is that you just politely and skillfully point out to people that they need to shift their view.
CAMPUS: In light of the emphasis being given to mindfulness on campus, how do you personally de-stress?
PATTON: Three different ways: First, I practice vipassana, or insight, meditation. In December I spent time at a small retreat with my niece in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Second, I write. I find scholarly and literary pursuits a powerful way of cultivating mindfulness. There’s nothing like the focus of mind that comes from creating a persuasive paragraph in a scholarly argument, or building the best stanza for a poem. Third, I walk the dogs with family and friends. Dogs keep you completely grounded. They don’t care about their image or reputation; they care about staying connected. And that’s a great lesson for all of us.
CAMPUS: Do you find time for scholarship while doing all the functions of the presidency?
PATTON: Yes. I pursue scholarship for an hour a day, no matter what. I can’t do much more than that, but that is a non-negotiable. I have a book coming out in 2019 on controversies in the study of religion, and a third book of poems coming out this spring. Writing is a basic part of who I am and it helps me be a better intellectual and institutional leader. Middlebury has been welcoming and supportive of that commitment. I have been privileged to be a guest teacher in faculty classes several times a semester. People seek each other out to talk about their ideas, including their president. That’s Middlebury at its absolute best, and it’s a fantastic part of the job. And it helps because faculty and students and staff can connect with you as a fellow thinker.
CAMPUS: What is one item on your bucket list for your time at Middlebury?
PATTON: Institutionally, I hope we can create more art in public spaces that are inclusive of all of Middlebury’s communities. The personal item is dog-sledding. I ventured out to do that last winter, and I hope to do it regularly.
CAMPUS: What is the strength of the hills, to you?
PATTON: I’ll never forget the moment in November of 2014, when I was walking up to Mead Chapel to be introduced to the community. Someone shouted out a variation of the psalm written over its doors, “The strength of the hills is hers also!” That moment caused me to ask the very same question that you have asked. The strength of the hills to me has three different aspects. First, the mountains are all about staying power. They persist. And we should too. Gary Snyder writes about them as “streams of power.” Second, mountains remind us that we are small. Emily Dickinson ended one of her poems about mountains with the line, “I’m kneeling—still—“. She wasn’t kneeling out of false reverence, but a sense that there was always something bigger surrounding her, and that gives us a profound perspective on our daily distractions. Third, mountains can also bestow a sense of contemplative peace. The poet Li Bai puts it the following way: “You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain;/I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care.” I hope for those moments for all our students.
CAMPUS: Where do you see the institution in 10 years?
PATTON: Here’s where I want to go: in 2028, Middlebury should be a place where we have taken advantage of our global network of offerings to enrich our curriculum in all of our units. I hope we will have made significant progress on access and affordability. We should have named and be close to achieving a new environmental goal. I’d like Middlebury to be a place where faculty, staff and students see themselves as drivers of innovation. In particular, there should be a clear place to incubate curricular innovation, where people can make changes and keep traditions.
I hope in 2028 we have built a more inclusive community — through increasing team based approaches to the classroom, experiential learning, and restorative practices. I hope we will have an improved residential experience with more diverse staff, and an ongoing artistic initiative to make more inclusive spaces on campus. In 2028, I also hope we have a sense of empowerment and alliance between administration, staff, and faculty. Our final goal should be that, in 2028, Middlebury community members share a clearly articulated sense of values and that we remind ourselves of them often.
(11/30/17 12:07am)
Designed by Erin Kelly
It is near impossible to talk about stress on college campuses without also encountering the term “mindfulness.” Among the biggest buzzwords circulating mainstream media and higher education these days, mindfulness refers to a state of mind, a mode of interacting with the world and with our own thoughts. This nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment is typically achieved through contemplative practices that draw from major world religions and spiritual traditions. For many, mindfulness is a vehicle for well-being.
“Mindfulness is being present to the activities of our days by checking in with the purest manifestation of them: the here and the now,” Mark Orten, Dean of Spiritual and Religious Life at the College, explained. “It is not a time out or an absence from them. While mindfulness practices may be experienced as a relief, it is not like going on vacation and then coming back to all the same stuff. Rather, it is clarifying our vision and our power in a way that engages everything else more effectively and more truly.”
“Mindfulness is a way of relating to the world that leads to wellbeing. Mindfulness isn’t always pretty,” Brian Tobin, a Graduate Counseling Intern at Parton Health Center, added. “It makes you more aware of what your life experiences are. That increase of presence, in some ways, slows the process down. It takes the frenetic, rushing, stressed way that academia condones or expects, almost, and slows it down. It gives the individual a little bit more space to really feel what’s going on, to be with the good, the bad, the challenging.”
So, what does mindfulness – this abstract and often misunderstood concept – actually look like in practice? For some, mindfulness may consist of structured activities, such as guided meditation or yoga classes. Others may engage in a few minutes of silence each day, without commitment to a particular technique or religious practice.
Embracing the concept of mindfulness does not necessarily require a drastic makeover of our own lives. We can bring mindful attention to typically “mindless” activities, such as brushing our teeth, drinking coffee or taking a shower. Rather than turning automatically to our phone screens while stuck in line, we can take the opportunity of a few unstructured minutes to notice our surroundings and connect with our own breath.
“It’s a posture toward the world which I suppose everybody has the capacity for, but you have to cultivate it,” Tim Spears, Vice President for Academic Development, explained. “You have to pay attention.”
MINDFULNESS INITIATIVES AT MIDDLEBURY
Middlebury’s institutional engagement with mindfulness began in the spring of 2015, as grant proposals had showed widespread interest in the concept. That summer, Spears appointed 16 colleagues and students across Middlebury’s institutions to form the Mindfulness Steering Committee. Erin Quinn, Director of Athletics, and Michelle McCauley, Professor of Psychology, served as co-chairs of the committee. Additionally, an In-House Advisory Committee, composed of 21 faculty and administrative members with a vested interest in mindfulness, assisted the Steering Committee in framing inquiries and synthesizing information.
“There was some suspicion, I think, about why the administration was now interested in mindfulness,” Spears noted. “There had been a number of stress-related issues that had come up over the course of the year, and now all of sudden, the administration was grasping for answers, and mindfulness was the latest and greatest solution.”
Over the 2015-2016 school year, members of the Mindfulness Steering Committee met regularly to examine Middlebury’s broad approach to mindfulness and to discuss areas of potential growth. Their formal report, submitted in the fall of 2016, identified venues and structures supporting mindfulness within the institution, as well as opportunities to expand on education and resources in the future.
“The need to provide students and colleagues with tools to be less reactive and more contemplative has never been clearer than in the past 18 months,” the report stated, “as we have dealt with concerns of student stress and the need to fully embrace and manifest our commitment as an inclusive institution.”
Spears acknowledges that the announcement of mindfulness initiatives two years ago may have been a cause for confusion or skepticism.
“Here at Middlebury, when you call something an initiative and you say you’re going to focus on it, well, you’ve raised the stakes,” he said. “So people were making jokes like, ‘Now we’re going to go out and crush mindfulness.’ Which, of course, is an attitude that is sort of at odds with mindfulness.”
So, how has institutional support for mindfulness translated into actual changes on campus? First and foremost, the institutional call for mindfulness in 2015 set up funding for 1) the development of contemplative practices within the college’s curriculum, 2) opportunities for students to engage with mindfulness outside the classroom, 3) health and wellness programs for staff and faculty and 4) initiatives at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
In terms of a long-standing, perhaps implicit commitment to mindfulness on campus, the Middlebury Steering Committee’s 2016 report highlighted the existence of yoga and meditation classes, spaces designed for restoration and contemplation (such as the Knoll and the “Unplug” and Recharge rooms in the college’s libraries), faculty research and courses centered on mindfulness and over three-dozen academic colleagues who incorporate contemplative pedagogy into classes.
“There was lots of stuff, depending on how willing you were to have a broad definition of mindfulness or contemplative practices,” co-chair Quinn explained. “Maybe there was a bigger need of making sure people knew that they existed.”
The Middlebury Steering Committee offered one overarching recommendation to promote mindfulness on campus: the creation of the Middlebury Center for Well-Being, an entity that would organize and support contemplative initiatives at the college. The report acknowledged the financial challenges of designating an independent, physical space for such a center, and so emphasized the possibility first utilizing on a digital platform, as well as coordinating efforts with similarly oriented programs and departments on campus.
Additionally, members listed 31 small-scale suggestions to further enhance mindfulness at the college. Topics included 1) mindful pedagogy in the classroom, 2) expanded support for personal practices, 3) mindfulness in leadership, 4) outreach on Middlebury’s successful initiatives, 5) reevaluation of physical infrastructure and time usage and 6) related well-being opportunities. Suggestions included: “Consider adding five minutes between classes at the Vermont campus to increase community bonding and reduce a hectic arrival when students need to travel across campus”; “Begin explicit discussions about the amount of time students are expected to devote to their job on a weekly basis (on average),” and “Create areas in dining halls at the College and for the schools that are set aside for silent eating (at least at breakfast).”
The 2016 report was presented to the Senior Leadership Group and submitted to the Envisioning Middlebury process as a framework for the future. A copy of the report is available at go/mindfulness/. Insights gained through the original 2015-2016 committee now inform the work of the Well-being Steering Committee, which launched this past fall. Composed of seven administrative, faculty, and staff members, this group continues to draw on the inquiries and expertise gathered in the first institutional call to mindfulness two years ago. The Well-being Steering Committee’s compilation of knowledge, which covers everything from nutrition to spirituality to the development of meaningful relationships, can be found at go/well-being/. As the concept of mindfulness continues to gain legitimacy within higher education, instructors have increasingly adopted contemplative practices into their classroom pedagogy.
Rebecca Gould, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and a member of the original In-House Advisory Committee, is one such example. In one class, she set up a contemplative conversation in lieu of a typical discussion.
“Instead of traditional argument and analysis, all of which I value highly, I thought an Emerson reading already would lend itself to a different mode,” she recounted.
She dimmed the lights, asked everybody to close their eyes and introduced a shift away from the usual, high-paced discourse. For the next hour, a contemplative conversation unfolded. Students sat in thoughtful silence for a while, and then somebody spoke. After another stretch of silence, somebody else spoke. And so it went for the rest of the class period.
“It was less a discussion than a kind of seeding of ideas in a slow way,” Gould said. “And then in the last ten minutes or so I wove together what it was I was hearing. It was a way for people to engage with the material in a very different way.”
This type of contemplative conversation, which Gould tries to incorporate into at least one class session per semester, eases the burden of having to respond quickly and articulately to the last comment spoken aloud in the room. The constant flow of conversation that characterizes most classroom discourse makes way instead for large stretches of thoughtful silence. In this sense, less is more: Incessant talking for the sake of talking is eliminated. In the absence of structured discussion, students are given the opportunity to deeply listen to what their peers have to say.
“Because we had our eyes closed, I think people felt safer to experiment with their ideas or say something that they weren’t so sure of,” Gould said. “Sometimes students will tell me, ‘Well, I wanted to say X, but my thought was half-formed, I wasn’t sure I could express it correctly.’ And I always say, ‘Well, it’s fine to have half-formed thoughts.’ So I think doing it in this contemplative way, with eyes closed, just allows people to think about Emerson and not about themselves or how they’re performing.”
Cultivating mindfulness among students extends beyond explicitly contemplative practices in the classroom. Existing barriers to mindfulness within academia must also be addressed. As such, it is important to acknowledge the inverse relationship between heavy workloads and students’ ability to engage mindfully with assigned texts.
“I think everyone recognizes that workload is a barrier, not just for students, but for faculty and staff,” Spears said. “Philosophically it’s not a barrier, because despite the work that we all do, we can still approach the work mindfully.”
Within the time constraints of a fast-paced, twelve-week semester, however, Gould recognizes the importance of balancing the quality of academic inquiry with the quantity of material covered.
“I have cut down on my reading in almost all of my classes, to be able to sink in more deeply – so it’s not explicitly contemplative, but it’s in the same spirit,” she said. “Rather than someone saying, ‘I’m speed-reading Thoreau so then I can go on and speedread this book about race and the environment.’ Why are we all here if we’re all speed reading?”
Does college compete with mindfulness?
There is a dissonance between students’ attitudes toward mindfulness – a potentially alienating concept – and the benefits that mindfulness might bring to their lives. Yet perhaps it is precisely the intense pressure that accompanies college life – the exhausting norm of “performing” our happiness on social media platforms and in everyday interactions, the burden to constantly be doing something “productive,” and the eerie feeling that our work follows us wherever we go – that makes mindfulness such a powerful idea.
Maybe learning to live with more intention and less judgment, with a heightened awareness of how we feel and where we are, is what it would take to transition from simply surviving to thriving in college.
As Spears explained, “If you have a better understanding of where you are in the moment, you are better able to navigate what’s in front of you.”
“At a certain point, that frantic energy becomes wasted energy,” Tobin added. “When the mind is too much on auto-pilot, we stop sleeping well, we stop nourishing our bodies the right way, all the classic things that go wrong in college in terms of wellness. And what mindfulness and meditation practices allow us to do is actually to be more effective. So even if you look at your calendar and the whole day is blocked, if mindfulness begins to be integrated into the way you move in the world, you can actually get more done. You canbe more effective, you can be more creative, you can be more connected.”
Tobin offered an example in terms of social interaction – a sphere of college life that can be both an escape from stress and a cause for FOMO (fear of missing out).
“You could spend an hour socializing, but you’re not there,” he said. “With mindfulness integrated into that experience, you could spend ten minutes and have that whole hour worth of true connection.”
For some, the premise of mindfulness – that is, the practice of becoming intimately acquainted with our inner world – clashes with the expectations that college encourages, even demands, of students. In many cases, to engage in mindfulness is to temporarily inhabit a space of solitude, perhaps one more silent or empty than we are used to.
It can be challenging to imagine mindfulness, in all its quietude and self-reflection, as an appealing alternative to the endless social opportunities that the college experience offers. When we all live within walking distance of our closest friends, and when connecting with others is as simple as checking our Snapchat notifications or scrolling through our Facebook feed, the idea of intentional solitude may seem absurd, if not terrifying.
Yet perhaps it would be a mistake to conflate mindfulness with isolation, or solitude with loneliness.
“The collective expectation of a college campus, we can form it as a question: is it getting us what we want?” Tobin stated. “Are we actually becoming happy? Are all of our external doings actually bringing us closer to understanding ourselves and knowing a peaceful and happy experience within? The practices of mindfulness are inherently introverted – we go in and we look and we get quiet and still. But as you go in, you’re actually more free to go out. The more that we take the time to set that foundation of quietness and that internal content, then we get to choose how we externally move, instead of being ruled by our mind. When we’re ruled by our mind and we’re always out, doing, then we need to be validated externally. These practices allow a bit more freedom within. We have to challenge the presumption that the way that we’re externally motivated on campus and in the world is actually getting us the results that we want.”
In contrast to the extraversion that is implicitly promoted in college, mindfulness encourages a tendency toward introversion – a willingness to look inward and to be okay with silence. That is not to say that extraverted people are inherently unmindful, or that introverts would not benefit from mindfulness techniques. Rather, if we are to take the concept of mindfulness seriously, perhaps it is time that we re-evaluate the standards by which we define the ideal college experience or the successful college student. Do we feel present in the spaces we inhabit, or do we show up for the sake of saying that we were there? When was the last time we asked ourselves, ‘how am I feeling right now?’ and listened to the answer? As we rush from one place to another, with screens in front of our faces for most the day, are we mindful, or are our minds full?
Now what?
From the intense academic workload to the constant distractions of living in a tiny bubble of a community to the fear of missing out, the nature of college seems antithetical to the concept of mindfulness at times. For some, formal opportunities to practice mindfulness may seem insufficient or irrelevant within an inherently un-mindful campus structure. After all, who has time to attend a yoga class or a guided meditation when balancing friendships, schoolwork and extracurriculars is difficult enough already? What is the point of focusing on our breath when staying afloat is a challenge in and of itself?
In our fast-paced and hyper-scheduled campus community, the prospect of “structured mindfulness” seems impossible, perhaps laughably ironic. And when we have been trained to constantly consume, perform and produce, simply sitting with our thoughts may feel oppositional to our purpose as students. For this reason, mindfulness can be challenging, even painful, to execute.
Given the lives we have been taught to lead, in what ways can we still practice and benefit from contemplative practices?
“The techniques themselves can be quite simple and brief, while yet having immediate and profound effect,” Orten explained. “Something as simple as ringing a bell after sitting down to study. As with all things, they are what we give to them and make of them.”
Within the constraints of time and energy to which we are all bound, there is value in taking that first, uncertain step.
“This is what I would say that is a break from the ‘just make time’ kind of attitude, which is just: set the intention,” Tobin said. “How can we take five minutes at the beginning of the day and relegate it to the state of presence? Just five minutes. That will increase because it starts to draw its own energy, because we see the benefits, so we do more of it.”
The structure of higher education promotes a “go, go, go” mentality – a constant displacement from the present moment and a perpetual worry for the future – that challenges our collective ability to be mindful. We look back each semester and wonder where the time went. This sense of disorientation is by no means unique to the college experience, but perhaps it is in the particularly fast-paced chaos of these formative years that the benefits of mindfulness can be most acutely felt.
“Let’s agree that mindfulness is good for Middlebury students,” Spears said. “How do you then do we bring students to that moment? It’s difficult. I’ve come to believe that you address the opportunity almost on a one-to-one basis. You have to be willing to stop and pause and consider the invitation. You can’t force it.”
Quinn echoed this sentiment, stating, “Nobody’s interested in making mindfulness mandatory, but rather making it available in orientation or having it pop up in class. The more you get exposed to mindfulness practices, the more they may seem like tangible modalities that are helpful.”
In adopting mindfulness as an everyday ethic, we can change the way we experience our lives without changing a single material detail of our lives. And perhaps along the way, the structures that limit us may begin to shift.
“I would love for us, as a community, to do some serious thinking about whether and how we can change some of the deep structures of how we work,” Gould said. “So, on the one hand, small practices of mindfulness can help us negotiate academic stress. But then a deeper question is, are there ways to actually change the structures themselves, to bring in different ways of learning that don’t feel like they’re a constraint on living a mindful life? Is there a way to actually rethink how we do what we do here?”
Designed by Erin Kelly
(10/18/17 11:12pm)
The word “veganism” has the power to elicit eye-rolls, approving nods, or looks of utter confusion. Some view the vegan lifestyle as a pretentious fad, an overly ambitious and misguided attempt to save the world. Others admire the morality of it all, but consider the elimination of animal products from one’s diet to be an impossible undertaking, particularly in light of the college’s limited dining hall options.
Those who identify as vegan on this campus, however, show that this lifestyle endeavor is perhaps not as difficult, irrelevant or inaccessible as one might think.
People arrive at veganism from a variety of entry points. Some are motivated largely by ethical reasons, citing the mistreatment of animals and humans in the creation of non-vegan products. Others are driven primarily by environmental or personal health concerns. Most, if not all, vegans recognize the multiplicity of factors that underlie the significance of their dietary choices.
“The mistreatment of animals is not something I want to be part of at all,” said Finne Murphy ’19, who became vegan five years ago with the encouragement of her mother. “And the meat industry as a whole is really damaging in a lot of different ways. And then it’s just not very good for you health-wise.”
In the context of human and animal rights, veganism can be understood as a form of social justice.
“I kind of felt like I was a hypocrite by saying that I don’t support institutionalized racism and poor treatment of minorities if I continue to support industries that systematically do that, especially with dairy farms,” said Eva Bod ’20, who became vegan this past summer. “If I draw a line at human rights, what about animal rights? If I don’t believe one human life is worth more or less than another human life, how can I do that about species?”
Lee Garcia Jimenez ’19 echoed this sentiment.
“For me, veganism is about fighting oppression,” Garcia Jimenez said. “When people typically fight against oppression, they fight on behalf of themselves. If you’re queer, you express to people to stop homophobia, and I recognize that allies exist, but you don’t find as many straight people actively engaging in rhetoric about why ending homophobia is important, just like you don’t get as many men talking about the importance of ending the patriarchy. But with veganism, people are advocating explicitly for victims that are not them and that are not people they are talking to.”
Simon Willig ’18 sees veganism as a means of acting on his knowledge as Environmental Policy major.
“A vegan diet is a manifestation of me knowing that 99 percent, or 99.999 percent, of the animal products out there, I really don’t agree with how they’re raised and how they’re impacting the environment,” Willig said. “Your ideas and your practices should evolve over time with what you learn. I don’t know that I’m going to be vegan for the rest of my life. It’s just the best manifestation of my current ideas and how I understand these issues, so I would consider myself always trying to be open-minded about these things.”
The continuous and persistent inquiry that guides veganism lends itself to a range of interpretations of what, exactly, a vegan lifestyle looks like. Students expressed that there is not a right or wrong way to be vegan; rather, one’s ability to make this decision for themselves is contingent on their life context and the resources available to them.
For instance, Ami Furgang ’20, who became vegan two years after discovering that they were allergic to dairy, calls themselves a “free-gan.”
“My personal interpretation of what that means for me is I’ll eat anything as long as I personally judge that it’ll go to waste if I don’t eat it,” they explained, adding that, unlike some vegans, they do consume honey and gelatin.
Others also acknowledged the difficulty of abiding by a “perfect” vegan lifestyle.
“I feel like I’ve been vegan in my ethics the whole time. It’s just my efforts have gone off and on,” said Garcia Jimenez, who began practicing veganism five years ago.
“I am not a perfect vegan,” Bod added. “First of all, it takes a lot of privilege to make that decision. You have to have resources to be educated about it. You have to have the privilege to afford decent eating and a decent diet in the first place. I think implementing it is not just about a diet, it’s a lifestyle. Which sounds awful because that’s one of those cheesy one-liners, but do I think it’s ethical to buy from stores that use child labor to make clothes? Of course not, no. But also I can’t afford handmade fine Italian clothing in my entire wardrobe. So to that extent, when it comes to practicing that lifestyle it has to do with choices and lines, and it just depends on where you draw those lines.”
Willig echoed this idea, pointing out the inapplicability of veganism in certain cultural contexts.
“I think people get confused about what exactly I mean by veganism,” he said. “People think I think everyone in the world should be vegan. I obviously understand that people in developing countries who rely on animal agriculture for their livelihood need that. But I think that anybody who can should reduce their consumption of conventionally raised animal products.”
For many, the ability to practice veganism is hindered by social stigma and a lack of structural support for this lifestyle choice. Many struggle with the sparse number of vegan-friendly options at the dining halls, a problem that could be remedied by offering cheese and butter as sides to pasta and vegetable dishes, rather than making dairy products an inherent part of the meal.
“For lunch and dinner, it can really be a hit or miss. Because you can go and there can be three vegan sides and they’re tasty, or the vegetables don’t have butter, and that’s a great day,” Garcia Jimenez said. “But then you can go and there’s one vegan option and it’s something that I happen to not like, and I have to make my own food, and sometimes you just get tired of eating sandwiches.”
“I find every day I each pretty much the same thing, which is pasta and rice, apples and peanut butter, and whatever vegetables they have,” Murphy said. She expressed enthusiasm for the newly introduced lemon sorbet and coconut milk ice cream in the dining halls, adding, “For the past two years I’ve never had any dessert, but this year has been better.”
Despite systemic challenges to following a nutritious and varied vegan diet, people expressed gratitude toward the dining hall staff for their willingness and ability to accommodate for vegan dietary needs when requested. For instance, students can ask for eggplant parm (a vegan dish with a dairy-free cheese substitute) when chicken parm is offered on certain evenings.
“I never felt like I was inconveniencing the dining hall staff by asking for vegan alternatives,” Bod said. “Within the limited choices that the dining hall offers, I still feel welcomed as a vegan.”
As the ethical, environmental, and health-related implications of veganism have become more widely understood and adopted by the student body, demand for vegan options has increased. As a result, dairy-free fridges, which offer a variety of vegan-friendly milks, cheeses, yogurts, butter, ice cream, and cheesecakes, became an installment in the dining halls this year.
Dan Detora, director of food services, notes that the dining services budget, combined with the limited size and layout of the college’s dining halls, presents challenges in serving the entire student body.
“When it comes down to it, we still need to accommodate the needs of all students within our budgetary requirements,” Detora said. “Some vegan items can certainly be pricey. However, so can the grass-fed and grass-finished beef we serve. So in the end it balances out fairly well.”
If the impassioned spirit and well-informed arguments of those who identify as vegan have anything to show, it is that the choice to avoid animal products is far more than just a trend. Veganism is a lifestyle, an often challenging and misunderstood one whose relevance spans across the realms of morality, environmentalism, and personal health. To engage in this practice is to recognize the ways in which our capitalist food systems have fundamentally failed us and our planet.
“I’m by no means a perfect vegan. I think no one is, and I struggled immensely in the past with maintaining a vegan lifestyle,” Garcia Jimenez said. “But it’s because we’re all socialized into being accepting of the cruelty that we pay for. And me trying to get other people to go vegan isn’t about calling them a bad person. It’s about sharing information that, if we all were raised with, we would live our lives very differently. But because we’ve become indoctrinated to carnism, we want to maintain that. And I wish people could view vegan activism as re-socializing as opposed to name-calling.”
(09/27/17 11:12pm)
This year’s Clifford Symposium, which took place from Sept. 21 to 23, centered on a topic of historical significance and, amid the turbulence of our present-day political landscape, renewed relevance. Entitled “The Soviet Century: 100 Years of the Russian Revolution,” the symposium consisted of panel discussions, screenings, and art performances across three days, allowing attendees to engage with material across a variety of mediums.
To celebrate the beginning of a weekend of inquiry and reflection, students, alumni and faculty enjoyed a Soviet Union-style dinner in Atwater dining hall, playfully renamed “Stolovaya No. 6” for the evening of Sept. 21.
In commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the Middlebury School in the Soviet Union, Thomas Beyer, professor of Russian and East European Studies, shared stories about Middlebury students who traveled to Russia during the Soviet era.
“The first thing that happened and happened every year for the next 12 years and ruined my August and summer vacations was that of the 15 students, only nine of them received visas,” Beyer stated.
Students who studied abroad in Moscow in the fall of 1977 witnessed the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution, a Bolshevik uprising led by Vladimir Lenin that constituted the second part of the Russian Revolution and which was instrumental in dismantling the tsarist autocracy.
Kevin Moss, professor of Russian, reflected on his time spent at the Pushkin Institute, a public education center in Moscow, from 1981 to 1982. There, Middlebury students studied alongside students from all across Eastern Europe who were training to become Russian teachers in their home countries.
Amid the general animosity of the era, residential life allowed for considerable intercultural exchange. Students from each country presented performances at celebrations hosted by the institution, though they often suspected that their dorms were under government surveillance.
“In many ways, the capitalists and the socialists were kept apart at the institute. The directors from the capitalist countries would meet separately from the directors from the socialist countries,” Moss recalled.
“There were also some ideological clashes, particularly in ’85 and ’86 and ’88 and ’89 when the Soviet Union was already beginning to publish some people like Pasternak and thinking about Solzhenitsyn. In the early years, when the students would say that they had read in their literature courses Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn, the teachers would say, ‘Surely you don’t think they will become part of the history of Russian Literature.’”
Nevertheless, students did not hesitate to make their opinions known by defacing posters of leaders of the Soviet Union or hanging the posters upside-down.
Besides a constant brewing of tension, the Soviet era was characterized by a sense of rigid uniformity. Moss recounted that stores were all operated by the state and labelled with generic names such as “meat” or “fish.” Aisles contained singular products, and on the rare occasions that a unique product ended up on the shelves, customers would flock to buy it.
The rest of the symposium shifted from reflections on lived experiences to analyses of political and sociocultural frameworks. Panels throughout the weekend offered insights and interpretations of events leading up to and surrounding the Soviet era.
In the opening remarks of a lecture entitled “The Russian Revolution as a Utopian Leap,” President Patton offered a framework in which to appreciate the significance of the Soviet era.
“While discussion of the events of a century ago is far less burdened than it was during the Cold War era, it remains inherently political,” Patton stated. “There is not, after all this time, a single accepted narrative of the revolution and its meaning, and that itself is a fascinating thing to study. The interpretations have ranged and continue to range drastically depending on the individual’s political and philosophical views, nationality, social background and moment in time.”
President Patton then welcomed the keynote speaker, Mark Steinberg. A professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Steinberg specializes in the intellectual and social history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He showed the audience an image of “Angel of History,” a 1920 monoprint by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, which would come to symbolize the rise of the Soviet regime.
“For a lot of people who experienced the Russian Revolution, this seemed like a time of absolutely unbelievable possibility, like nothing anybody could expect with outcomes nobody could imagine,” Steinberg stated. “This was the possibility that one could overcome oppression. That one could overcome violence, in particular the oppressions and violence of an autocratic monarchy. One could overcome the inequities of the socioeconomic system, capitalism as some would call it.”
The Russian Revolution marked a moment in history when wreckage was replaced by the construction of something completely new. A sense of rebirth permeated the cultural landscape.
“This is why I think we find so many angels in the Russian Revolution,” Steinberg said.
During the question-and-answer session, students and faculty members pushed back against the concept of the Russian Revolution as a “leap” into utopia, suggesting instead that the political shift constituted a “fall” into problematic ideals.
The far-reaching effects of Soviet ideology were further explored in a panel entitled “The Revolution Abroad,” in which four historians gathered to discuss the reception of communist ideas in Japan, East Germany and France.
Max Ward, Assistant Professor of History at the college, explained the impact of the Russian Revolution on ideas of communism in Japan. The October Revolution led to a phenomenon dubbed “dangerous thought.”
“Communism was a crime of an ideological foreign threat,” Ward said.
Andrew Demshuk, assistant professor of history at American University, analyzed influences of the October Revolution in East Germany. Following that, Nicholas Clifford, Professor Emeritus of History, covered the obsession with Maoist thought in France from 1966 through 1980. During these years, many looked to Mao Zedong as a figure of communism more dominant than Khrushchev in the USSR. The largest of the Maoist groupings called themselves the gauche proletarians.
The Soviet era cannot be understood solely through its communist ideology, however. Political rhetoric and creative expression informed and at times challenged one another amid the turbulence of the times. Moving beyond a purely political analysis of the Cold War era, a panel entitled “Art in Revolution” explored the manifestation of Soviet thought in Russian music and literature.
Steven Richmond, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and former student at the Middlebury School of Russian, framed the discussion by outlining the role of censorship before and during the Soviet era. During the tsarist regime, Soviet leaders, whom he described as “creatures of censorship,” were involved in the underground press. In 1922, after the conclusion of the civil war, Soviet leadership created an official censorship bureau known as Glavlit. This new, centralized paradigm of censorship lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Next, Matthew Bengtson, Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, analyzed the role of Russian music from the mid-nineteenth to twentieth century. Drawing from his expertise in piano literature, he described the artistic landscape in nineteenth-century Russia as a “tug of war between cosmopolitans and nationalists” – those who looked to the West for inspiration and those who remained invested in local traditions. Tchaikovsky and Brothers Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein figured among the cosmopolitans, while the Mighty Five, Mili Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin represented nationalist interests.
German philosophy, particularly the works of Nietzsche, strongly influenced the public’s perception of music as an artistic medium. During an era in which an apocalypse felt imminent, artists were positioned as prophets and seers, and the ability of music to transcend mere representation rendered it as the highest art form.
“Music was abstract, and thus it could claim to be spiritual,” Bengtson explained.
He acknowledged the subjectivity of historical accounts, describing this era as “the most difficult period for us to relate to these days because the experience of the World Wars has informed our way of understanding the world. Of course, history is not written by the losers.”
The role of art in response to a shifting political landscape was a central theme of the panel discussion. Bengtson noted that the abstract idealism of music challenged the premise of a Marxian society, in which everything is supposed to be concrete. Reflecting on this contradiction, he posed an inquiry to the audience: “What happens to communist groups when they are forced to reject the notion of art?”
The rhetorical nature of this question mirrored the sense of open-ended exploration and multifaceted interpretation that characterizes the annual Clifford Symposium. Marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this year’s series of discussions, screenings, and exhibits probed deep into past to reflect on questions that continue to bear relevance in the twenty-first century. The Cold War era may be behind us, receding further and further into our collective historical memory, but the art, cultures, politics and economics of Soviet times have left behind a legacy whose multiple meanings we are still trying to unravel today. In highlighting the significance of the historical rupture of 1917, this year’s Clifford Symposium served as a reminder to us all that the history books are never fully closed; that there is always more to remember, to interpret, and to boldly and rigorously question.
(09/20/17 11:55pm)
The Jewish community on campus and in town will observe Rosh Hashanah, a two-day celebration of the Jewish New Year from Sept. 20 to 22. Rosh Hashanah falls on the first day of Tishrei, which is a month in the Jewish calendar, and, like all Jewish holidays, it falls on a different day on the secular calendar each year.
Rabbi Danielle Stillman, the college’s new associate chaplain at the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, will lead services in collaboration with Aaron Mendelsohn ’95. This fall marks the twenty-fifth year that Mendelsohn has traveled to the college to sing during the ceremony. In her first Rosh Hashanah as the college rabbi, Stillman will guide community members through prayer-leading and intention-setting.
The holiday began at sundown on Wednesday, Sept. 20, and will continue until sundown on Friday, Sept. 22. Services will be held Wednesday night at 6:30 and throughout the day on Thursday.
Stillman described Rosh Hashanah as “a time of year where there’s a lot of reflection over what the past year was like for you, what you want to carry forward with you into the new year, and what you’d like to change for the new year.”
This year, the overlap of Rosh Hashanah and the add-drop period may create logistical complications for those seeking to attend to both academic and religious commitments. Some students take time out of their hectic back-to-school schedules to attend all or part of the services.
“Everyone does it differently depending on what their practice is and how they’re feeling about their classes,” Stillman said. “Students should feel free to come and go if they need to. Of course I’d love to see someone there for the whole time, but I’d rather see someone come for an hour than not at all if they have a class.”
Ben Dohan ’20, the rituals chair of the college’s Jewish organization, Hillel, commented on the implications of the college’s academic calendar on the observance of Rosh Hashanah.
“Overall, it’s not too difficult to balance religious life and school,” he said. “This is the one period of time where it is [hard], because the only really big celebrations we have are the High Holidays and Passover in the spring. Passover is at night, so it’s really just now that it becomes difficult.”
The activities fair is scheduled later than usual this year, which may make it harder for the Hillel board to reach out to Jewish first years and make them aware of the service schedule. Hillel board members conducted outreach over last week, including posting fliers in dining halls and tabling outside of Proctor.
Elana Feldman ’17.5, who will observe her fourth Rosh Hashanah at the college this fall, is used to navigating the conflicting schedules of school and the High Holiday period.
“I’ll get out of class a little early and go to Mead Chapel really quick and stay at the service for half an hour and go to another class,” she explained. “You can tell that there are people walking in and out and doing that all day, so it makes for not necessarily the most fluid service, but I think that if people are not that observant, they’re okay with doing that and it caters to that need.”
In addition to services, Rosh Hashanah is celebrated through rituals such as dipping apples in honey to usher in a sweet new year; blowing the shofar, a ram’s horn, to wake up individuals to the possibility of change; and consuming round challahs, a braided bread, to symbolize the calendar cycle.
As the Jewish community celebrates a new year, Stillman is also looking ahead to her first ceremony as the college rabbi and her role within the context of Middlebury.
“My vision is a really open and inclusive community where everyone, including non-Jewish students, feel like they can come and celebrate and learn about Judaism, but where Jewish students feel that they can get the particular experience of being Jewish and they have a space to explore their Jewish identity,” Stillman said. “It’s actually good for everyone, because I found in other campuses where I worked, when students who aren’t familiar with Jewish traditions come, then the Jewish students have to think, why do we do this? And that’s good for everyone, to ask those questions.”
(11/25/16 12:39am)
What is the link between rural spaces and urban communities, and what relevance does this hold for social justice and sustainability work today? As globalization takes hold in ever more remote corners of the world, the relationship between people and places once perceived as wholly separate entities has become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. On Friday, Nov. 18, students, faculty, staff and community members gathered for a lecture and discussion aimed at unpacking this issue. Entitled “Land Trust Innovation in Service to Changing Urban Community Needs,” the talk was a part of the Franklin Environmental Center’s year-long exploration of urban innovations and sustainable solutions.
The event began with an overview by law professor and conservation attorney Jessica Jay, who works to protect environmentally significant lands in Colorado and the Rock Mountain West. She explained that the land trust community is engaged in a new, dynamic vision: to better understand community dynamics and more effectively serve diverse populations. The goal of this evolving, innovative work is to be responsive, reactive and proactive to the unique needs of each community.
“We are taking on roles that may not have typically been viewed as our roles in the land trust administration,” Jay stated. “But it’s an opportunity to take on a challenge and social obligation.”
Land trusts can enhance public good by increasing access to clean air, shelter and green spaces for everyone. Often referred to as the “new frontier” of conservation, the vision described by Jay requires that land trust administrators look at old property through new lens and innovate in response to changing community needs, particularly in urban areas. This involves the re-development or un-development of certain parcels of land.
For instance, administrators evaluating polluted properties may identity an eco-friendly way to reuse a building, or relocate it to a place where it will be better utilized. A unique form of social entrepreneurship, this transformation within the land trust community is an obligation that state and national administrations have not yet taken on.
“The work is incumbent on cities, states, nonprofits, institutions of higher educations and individuals more than ever,” Jay explained.
Following Jay’s introduction, Gil Livingston, President of the Vermont Land Trust, grounded the issue in a local story. He began his speech with a candid observation.
“Frankly, I think it’s kind of ironic that a white guy is here to talk about an urban story in a state that is 97 percent Caucasian,” Livingston said.
Yet it is precisely the unexpected intersection of the rural and the urban that makes land trust innovation an issue relevant to all, even to residents of a small college town in Vermont.
A non-profit environmental organization with a huge stake in local affairs, the Vermont Land Trust impacts over 10 percent of the state through conservation holdings. As its mission statement articulates, “Whether these places are dairy or vegetable farms, forests or wetlands, sledding hills or swimming spots, the Vermont Land Trust is working to protect the land that gives Vermont its rural character and makes our state so special.”
As part of the broader, pioneering movement within land trust administration, the Vermont Land Trust is actively engaged in communities where they hold land, fighting for social justice at a time when residents need it most. To demonstrate this, Livingston pointed to the case of Pine Island Farm, a Vermont Land Trust holding that began as a conventional dairy and has since evolved into a goat and vegetable farm operated by and for the refugee community.
How did this transformation come about? The Burlington Refugee Settlement Program has concentrated hundreds of people into one small area of Vermont. When Pine Island Farm, a traditional dairy operation with highly productive soil and a variety of wetland features, went up for auction in 2012, the Vermont Land Trust purchased it with the intention to “serve people who are not ordinarily beneficiaries — namely, individuals who fled violence or lives of exile to seek integration within the United States.
Now, through a six-year agreement, the farm is leased at no cost to the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, and managed by a multicultural group of residents from the Burlington and Winooski area. Multigenerational families raise goats, chickens and garden crops on the land, representing countries including Bhutan, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Congo and Burma. Additionally, in a model driven by affordability rather than by commercial profits, approximately 350 goats are sold to refugee families in the area each year.
The primary focus of this land trust project is a sense of food security and permanency for new Americans, in contrast to the uncertainty and displacement that these individuals have experienced throughout their lives. Judging by the growth in production on Pine Island Farm (for instance, the number of goats has jumped from 60 to 400), the partnership between the Vermont Land Trust and the Association of Africans Living in Vermont has been successful. That is not to say that the transition from a commercial to a community-managed system has been devoid of challenges, however.
Navigating the power dynamics within a large organization, as well as the various cultural perspectives that influence business styles, has been a work in progress for all parties involved. Additionally, while the land trust administration is accustomed to overseeing up to 80 conservation projects per year, such a high-speed cycle would not support local leadership. As a result, the organization has had to adopt a slower pace of management, which better supports its mission of community-based operations.
To address the challenges that have arisen thus far, plans are in the works to hire a long-term intercultural coordinator, evaluate if the current model of access and affordability is sufficient and potentially grant direct ownership of Pine Island Farm to the refugees.
Livingston emphasized that within the continuously evolving movement of land trust innovation, mistakes are inevitable, and difficulties are to be expected. In light of the recent presidential election, however, an unwavering commitment to social justice is crucial.
In his closing lines, Livingston articulated three questions that have and will continue to inform decisions concerning the Pine Island Farm community: How is history manifested in current ownership patterns? How is structural privilege embedded in the land conservation community? And how do race, power and privilege dynamics influence the places where we work?
The challenges accompanying the transformation of Pine Island Farm show that there are no easy answers to these questions. Through small but purposeful steps, however, the work of social justice-oriented land trust organizations may begin to make sense of these complexities, creating public good and opportunities for all.
(11/11/16 12:50am)
Among the attendees of the first ever Feminist Alumnx Retreat this weekend was Melian Radu ’13, a former English and American Literatures major with a focus in Creative Writing and a Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies and Sociology minor. A recent MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Radu has been featured in Vetch, the first literary journal devoted to poetry by transgender writers. The mission statement of Vetch is to “help bring into the world trans poetry that does not feel the need to translate itself for a cis audience.”
On Friday, Nov. 4, Radu performed in an intimate poetry reading, which included such works as “Premortuary School,” “How Much Google Will You Do, Gull?” and “The Part of the Penal Code Which Applied to Drag Queens Was Section 240.35, Subsection 4.” Her work offers commentary on technology, intimacy and surveillance. She is currently working on her debut manuscript at her new home in L.A.
The Middlebury Campus had the opportunity to speak with Radu on her experiences at the College, the inspiration behind her poetry and her recent publication in Vetch.
How did you start writing poetry?
I was interested in writing as long as I could remember, but I figured I could do novels. I wanted to write fantasy novels – I still want to write fantasy novels – but my junior year of high school, I was like, “I want to improve the descriptive writing in my fiction. All the imagery is very bland, and poetry is about cool images, so I’ll write some poems to practice.” And from there I tried poetry and never went back.
The most serious-ish poem I can remember writing that year was inspired by the movie The Brave One with Jodi Foster, which at the time I didn’t have much of a political-ish, theoretical sense of. But now that I look back, it speaks deeper. It’s a vigilante justice sort of movie, where her husband’s long-term partner is mugged and the system fails to do anything about it, so she sort of takes it into her own hands. It’s sort of this somewhat feminist-y, action-y, dark, intense thriller. So I felt compelled, I guess, to write a poem about that and explore sort of what her motivations were.
What did you study at Middlebury?
I was an English and American Literatures major with a Creative Writing focus. It’s a very unofficial-ish sort of thing, but it does mean you take some extra creative writing classes and you get to do a creative writing thesis instead of a big long paper – which is why I picked the major, really, initially. It was still a very new thing when I got to Middlebury. My main intellectual pursuits were in my minors, which were Gender Studies and Sociology.
How did those two fields of academia intersect with your writing?
The more I got into critical theory and whatnot, the more it kind of came into my poetry. And my undergraduate thesis was about true incidents, mostly, of people attacking or in some way damaging works of art – even though I do have rather a suspicion of poetry. I’ve seen lots of poetry that wants to be political and therefore ends up not being very interesting or poetic.
That’s not the case in a broader sense. I mean, Claudia Rankine is part of the most famous at the moment. You know, incredible books she’s put out in the past few years that just electrified people in the sense of what people can and should be doing in terms of our larger culture and society. But I’ve also seen the other side, where it’s just very hand-fisted, schlocky and not interesting. So I want to avoid that. But I am, of course, drawn to these concerns. So yeah, that thesis, whenever I mention it to people, I guess the contrast was pretty immediate. People were like, “Oh my gosh, someone would blow up the statue or they would splash acid on this famous painting or punch a hole in a Monet? Like, that’s disgusting, how horrible. That’s worse than, like, beating somebody up. They should be in prison for that.” That, to me, is horrifying.
So I guess the concern at the center of it was, of course I like art. I love these classic works. But at the same time, I also, in the end, place a lot of value, more value, I can come right out and say it, on human life. So when I see people being actually in prison for long periods of time or whatnot for these things, it immediately unsettles me. I was interested in exploring that sort of contradiction in those poems. Like, different ways of looking at these incidents.
Do you see your poetry as a form of activism?
I don’t know how much of it is known at Middlebury anymore, but I certainly did some things when I was here. I mean, all-gender housing, all-gender restrooms, whatnot. I believe deeply in that kind of work, and I sort of believe deeply in the artistic work that I do. So somehow there’s definitely the overlaps to it, and I’m cool with those. But also for me, I draw some line in the sense of, I want to write poetry that’s interesting and effecting change or affecting a person. But I do have a distrust of people who want to see their poetry as the first and foremost activist thing they do.
I mean, I see ways in which it’s worked, and I guess it relates to my own work a lot, but there was a particular discussion a few years ago of drone poetics. Like, we have this dislike of this uprising drone usage, drone warfare, so we’re gonna write these poems in the sense of, we’re gonna look back at the state, we’re gonna surveil them. Our poems will be like little drones watching over the government or something. I don’t know, you can hear my skepticism – like, are these poems gonna be read to people in the government? Are they gonna suddenly be like, “President Obama’s gonna realize what terrible thing drones are and stop using them to bomb small children”? I doubt it.
The people who write these poems probably do other things as well, but I guess I would be skeptical of anyone who thought that was the first and foremost way we’re gonna have impact. As one tool in a toolbox, great, I guess that’s the bottom line of it. But I like concrete action for sure. I like very much that I was able to write poems that said interesting, cool things while I was at Middlebury, and I also did other things that would have concrete effects.
Your work will be featured in the newest issue of Vetch. Can you speak more on nature of this publication?
It’s the first publication primarily of trans-authored poetry, at least on an ongoing basis. [The editors] are very much interested in the idea of what is it like to write poetry from a trans perspective. Every issue seems to have a great theme they bring up to anyone who’s submitting, with a broader concern that’s also rooted in a trans experience. This new one that’s coming out, they gave us “ekphrasis” – literal Greek – which is looking at something, describing something, in the oldest classical sense. The perfect ekphrasis sense is, you look at a statue, describe it in words, and then someone who saw those words would have the exact same experience as the person who looked at the statue. Now, that perfect description is kind of tough to pull off, but it’s the idea of work that responds to something that you see.
A lot of my own thesis was ekphrasis in terms of reacting to the work as I was seeing it, to a photo that was being damaged, or reacting to the site of somebody damaging it. So that was the theme of the issue, but they made it like, “We think transness is often involving rewriting one's experience in a certain sense. How can you rewrite as you also reinterpret something you see visually?”
What inspires your poetry?
What I do like about Vetch in their mission is a way to engage a trans identity in a way that is not totalizing. It’s not all about that. It is nice to be able to expand outward. Like, yes, we’re trans, we’re writing from that experience, but also there’s a lot more than that going on. It’s very rare for me to write a poem anymore that is about my gender dysphoria or something, but certainly it’s in there. I mean, I do write a lot about sex and nudes and whatnot. So it’s really shot through with a lot of queer sexuality. But technology is really the driving force.
What is one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring poet?
This may be overly prescriptive, but I know it worked well for me and I’ve given it to a lot of people: to very aggressively pursue change or avoid sameness in their writing. Very much my Middlebury writing career was gradually trying a new thing in every poem. If the last two poems were first person, this one's gonna be third person. I haven’t written a formal one in a while, so I'm gonna do a villanelle [a 19-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains]. This one’s from my own perspective about my life, but now I'm gonna do a persona poem from somebody else's poem.
Avoid getting caught up in a “this is my style” if you want to develop a voice. That’s a concern that people have and I very much had at one point – and did I really develop a voice? I don’t know. I guess people say, “That sounds like you, that’s unique, so that’s a voice” – but what is, anyway?
What would you say to anyone interested in your work?
That they should feel free to jump at the chance to critique it. ’Cause it is very much in constant flux, and I am always more than ready to have somebody say, like, “No. Not working. On any number of levels.” Which can be creative or, like, “No, I think the way that you engage with surveillance is overly informed by this particular idea you have that is inaccurate. ’Cause there are other aspects to how technology shapes people’s lives in ways you’re not considering.” Because poetry is very much informed by one’s perspective and mine has those limitations. I’m always interested in exploring and plugging holes in, but also expanding in different ways.
PEER REVIEW
Your dog dies and you give him to
Science. You do this with all your things.
On a hook on the wall of the study
glints Journal of Microbiotics: Science
saw fat content in the rate your ice
cream melted. His study has reduced
obesity and was widely hailed in Europe.
Winter was hard, with Science taking
up the whole couch. Poor St. Nicholas—
your parakeet whose body you gave
to Science who gave it back: Husk is
husk, he said. There is nothing to learn from this.
When the ice thaws you think you will sink
Nick to Belize. Science is getting a PhD
in psychoanalysis and asks: Who are the men
in your life? What else will you give me?
I am hungry and could eat nine cigars.
Your dog has died but his stem cells
cure your SAD. Science will save you yet.
(11/02/16 11:30pm)
Anyone who has ever taken a sociology class is all too familiar with the idea of social constructs. Conversely, anyone enrolled in a science class has likely encountered their fair share of “objective truths” -- facts so ingrained in the public consciousness that they do not even warrant questioning. These competing frameworks of knowledge collide in discourses on drug policy, forcing us to reexamine the ways in which we define “drugs” and “addiction.”
Associate Professor of Sociology Rebecca Tiger, the final speaker at the 2016 International Politics and Economics Symposium on The Global Illicit Drug Trade, explored these ideas in her speech “(Re) Imagining Drugs and Addiction: The Past, Present and Possible Future of Drug Policy” on Friday, Oct. 28.
Tiger, whose research centers on punishment, social control and critical addiction studies, began by asking, “What ideas animate drug policy?”
She challenged the audience to rethink hegemonic concepts of drugs and addiction -- that is, to unpack the human-made concepts that we have come to accept as scientific truths.
“There’s no such thing as drug in nature,” Tiger stated. “Drug is created.”
Likewise, the scientific “discovery” of addiction can be more accurately described as the invention of the idea of addiction. After all, it is no coincidence that the emergence of addiction theories coincided with growing public concerns over people’s problematic relationship with alcohol in the mid 1700s to late 1800s. The constructed definition of a “chronic relapsing brain disease” was repeated over and over again until it was simply accepted as fact. Physicians and psychiatrists adopted the addict as their newest subject, determining the standards for a “healthy” and “unhealthy” mind.
Challenging the “scientific” claims that undergird modern theories of addiction, Tiger pushed the audience to consider how “harm” is constructed. She highlighted the historical shift of the “dangers” of marijuana -- a drug once portrayed as lethal and now widely accepted as harmless -- to exemplify the social and temporal subjectivity of harm.
“An idea that we think of as natural is actually negotiated,” Tiger pointed out.
Through the pathologization of human behavior, she reasoned, the concept of the “addict” became a justification for state control. Policymakers decided that a regulatory regime was needed to reform these “fundamentally flawed” members of society. This demonization of drugs was codified into law by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration.
Yet, as Tiger emphasized, these regulatory measures did not stem entirely from a genuine concern over individuals’ well-being. Rather, the criminalization of drug use served to disproportionately target communities of color, as public narratives linked drugs to the socially ostracized “other.” African-Americans became the face of the national crack epidemic, in much the same way that Chinese laborers in the U.S. were associated with opium in the late 19th century. The “junkie” -- a word that conjures up the same, stereotyped image in most of our minds -- spread through skewed media coverage, creating the foundation for the disastrous, deeply racialized War on Drugs.
Bringing nuance to an issue that is often conceptualized in black-and-white terms, Tiger offered a critical analysis of the bifurcated model of addiction, a framework that dominates current public discourse on drug use. She pointed out the perceived distinction between “good” and “bad” junkies: those who become dependent through no fault of their own (such as Adderall users) versus those seen as “irredeemably deviant” and “dysfunctional to the core.”
This unfair and entirely constructed binary is perhaps best exemplified by Tiger’s humorous observation that “good” junkies “get to write New York Times articles, articulate their subjectivity.” Meanwhile, “bad” junkies fall victim to the criminal justice system.
“Jail has become a treatment tool to remind addict of commitment to sobriety,” Tiger said. “Coercion is framed as enticement.”
Having broken down the ways in which the media, policymakers and the medical field create and capitulate ideas of drugs, addiction and appropriate treatment, Tiger switched to a more hopeful tone. In search of “promising avenues of disruption” to the status quo, she proposed a more expansive definition of the title “expert” to include individuals with lived experience on the topic. The Urban Survivor’s Union -- a coalition of drug users who advocate for respect, dignity and social justice for themselves and their peers -- is one such group. Noting the absence of this unique expertise on Friday’s panel, Tiger recognized the limitations of the symposium itself.
Furthermore, she suggested a reconceptualization of drug usage as a new kind of consciousness rather than as a mental degradation. This call for radical open-mindedness resonated with some audience members and perhaps disquieted others. But the purpose of Tiger’s talk was likely not to indoctrinate everyone into a new worldview; it was to spark discourse on a topic riddled with misconceptions and stigma. This dilemma is best encapsulated by a poignant analysis that Tiger offered in the heart of her speech.
“Drug is the effect, not the cause, of a regulatory regime,” she stated. “The problem of drugs is actually the failure of drug policy.”
(09/28/16 11:59pm)
What is mindfulness, and why does everyone keep talking about it? These two basic questions served as the focal point of this year’s Clifford Symposium, entitled “Fully Present: The Art and Science of Mindful Engagement.” Last Thursday, Sep. 22, the College hosted Amishi Jha, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami, as the keynote speaker, who provided context to a weekend packed with mindfulness-based events.
In a talk that filled the Mahaney Center of the Arts Concert Hall with faculty, staff, students and community members, Jha examined the effects of mindfulness training on the brain’s attention system to answer the underlying question of this year’s symposium: why does mindfulness matter?
“The human brain is exquisite in mental time travel,” Jha stated. To offer a metaphor, she explained the parallels between the mind and an MP3 player. Rumination on the past is represented by the reverse button, while the tendency to worry and plan ahead is likened to the fast forward button. Meanwhile, the play button symbolizes the ability to pay attention to the present moment experience. According to mindfulness studies, this is the foundation upon which our mental wellbeing rests.
Any fear that the lecture would consist of rambling, jargon-filled prose was quickly dispelled by Jha’s engaging demeanor and accessible language. She offered a simple definition for the often misunderstood concept of mindfulness: a “mental mode characterized by attention to present moment experience, without conceptual elaboration or emotional reactivity.” Contrary to popular belief, mindfulness does not entail shutting down all thoughts, deep breathing or relaxation techniques. Nor does one need to practice mindfulness for hours or years in order to see results.
Assuring the audience that mindfulness is not an “esoteric, mystical way to achieve a special state of being” like levitation, Jha joked, “I’ve never had anyone hit the ceiling. It’s been very safe.”
While stress degrades the brain, mindfulness leads to mental enhancement. Why does this happen? Because, as Jha aptly put it, “A stressed mind is a wandering mind.” Within the field of psychology, mind-wandering is defined as having off-task thoughts during an ongoing task or activity. The process is both unproductive and unintentional. As high stress compromises our ability to pay attention, mindfulness training seeks to dissuade harmful mind-wandering, such as by focusing on the sensation of breathing within one’s own body. If the mind strays to other topics, thoughts, memories or sensations during a mindfulness exercise, the individual must attempt to guide it back to the practice at hand – be it breathing, observing or even eating – with gentleness and intentionality. This is, of course, easier said than done, but the benefits can be profound.
For any audience members who remained unconvinced, Jha provided a neurological explanation for the power of mindfulness to combat mind-wandering. Different brain networks become activated when we engage in different activities: the salience network controls the act of noticing, the central executive network selects and maintains and the default mode is connected to mind-wandering. These three parts are antagonistic, working against each other and competing for the limited resources of the mind. Without mindfulness training during periods of high stress, the consequences of mind-wandering become pronounced, causing attention and performance to decline.
Jha put this theory to test in her own psychology lab at the University of Miami, in which researchers sought to simulate mind-wandering by asking subjects to participate in a sustained attention response task. The 18-minute task was specifically designed to provoke boredom and thus mind-wandering in subjects. Results found that poor performance correlated with mental disorders and poor sleeping patterns. In other words, increased levels of mind-wandering correlated with poor psychological fitness.
Previously, humans have attempted to tame the brain through medications, psychotherapy and computer-based training. Mindfulness differs from these treatments in its low-tech, self-guided nature: this is a form of psychological fitness that requires no doctor’s note or hefty paycheck. A 2014 study cited by Jha found that the impact of mindfulness training was equivalent to the impact of antidepressants, without the toxic side effects. Overall, research has pointed to the beneficial results of mindfulness on the body, mind and social relationships, touching on everything from chronic pain to depression to workplace dynamics.
Popular media has helped to fuel the mindfulness movement, as major corporations, politicians, veterans and athletes have publicly advocated for its positive effects. However, Jha was quick to note that in order to be responsible consumers of science, we must acknowledge the limits of existing research on the topic.
“The power of positive thinking skews mindfulness studies,” she stated. In other words, the growing mainstream popularity of mindfulness has created an echo chamber in which positive news articles are sensationalized and inconclusive studies are ignored rather than examined.
Over 300,000 articles were needed to establish the cultural understanding that daily physical exercise is good. Currently, only 2,000-3,000 such articles exist for mindfulness. What is more, researchers have engaged mostly in reverse inference about functional brain changes in relation to mindfulness – which means that they cannot say with certainty that causation occurred; they simply observed something and assumed the cause. This ambiguousness suggests that much more research is necessary before we can arrive to any sweeping conclusions on the topic.
Speaking clearly and concisely, Jha provided a perspective on mindfulness that managed to acknowledge both its status as an uncertain newcomer to the scientific field and its potential to radically transform the way we take care of ourselves. For many audience members, perhaps the gift that had been bestowed to them as they filtered into the hall earlier in the evening – a small, smooth gray with the words “fully present” etched onto the surface – attained a newfound clarity.
As Jha made her closing remarks – “To end, thank you for your attention” – and the hall burst into applause, a spell seemed to break over the audience. The contemplative silence that had permeated the air only seconds before dissolved. People began rising from their seats, waving hi to friends and teachers from a few aisles over and – in an automatic, ironic reaction to a presentation on the importance of grounding oneself in the present moment – checking their phones for new notifications. But as individuals dispersed slowly into the night, perhaps it was with a more thoughtful awareness that they noticed the weight of their bags on their shoulders, the feeling of their shoes against the concrete and the sight of the stars shining overhead.
(05/12/16 10:58pm)
Partygoers passing through the Chromatic social house last Saturday night may have been met by a surprising sight: four individuals, in varying states of undress, standing by the entryway with purple handprints painted over their abdomens and cardboard signs in their hands. Student bodyguards stood beside them, handing out informational slips, interacting with passersby and making sure that the performers remained untouched.
“Not asking for it,” the first sign in the lineup read.
“Still not asking for it,” the next two read.
And finally: “Sexual assault leaves a mark.”
This was the fifth public installation of the art activism group Stares on Stairs. The main organizers of the movement are Chi Chi Chang ’18 Elizabeth Dunn ’18, Katie Mayopoulos ’18, Morgan Grady-Benson ’18 and Nell Sather ’19. Their activism is open to anyone who is interested in the cause, and each performance thus far has been composed by a slightly different group of 12-15 individuals.
“It feels different every place we perform,” Sather said. “Chromatic felt very intense for a lot of reasons: the close physical proximity, the level of drunkenness, the noise and a much wider and larger audience than before.”
The idea for a radical campaign for sexual assault awareness was launched in “Radical Humanity: Performance and Social Activism,” a 2016 J-Term course taught by visiting filmmaker, choreographer and activist Tiffany Rhynard. Since then, the group has evolved and expanded into the public consciousness, implementing their first three installations in the stairwells of the Atwater suites, a notorious party scene on campus. Each performer stood on a platform, as two students serving as bodyguards stood on either side of them.
Meanwhile, the fourth performance took place in the hallway outside Kenyon Arena Center before the BØRNS concert a few weeks ago. Signs for alternative routes were present at all venues, alerting passersby of the upcoming scene and allowing them to avoid it as they wished.
The potential to cause unintentional harm to viewers, particularly to survivors or people who may be triggered by the performance, is an issue that the group continues to navigate. As a statement on their blog articulates, “We recognize that performance art activism should be disruptive, and discomfort is a natural and intended reaction to something challenging the status quo. However, we also want to be careful not to harm the people we are trying to advocate for. [...] We are continuing to think of ways that we can evolve the installation to prepare for the potential impact it could have on survivors.”
Because alcohol consumption, party spaces and rape culture are so intimately connected, the purpose of bringing the movement to various areas on campus is to make sexual assault visible in places beyond neutral discussion venues. The group acknowledges the importance of extending the conversation beyond a self-selected audience.
“People who are motivated by the cause will show up to certain things,” Dunn said. “But there’s a pretty large group of people who actively avoid these conversations, not because they don’t have the time but because they don’t want to.”
However, Dunn also acknowledged the intensely sensitive nature of the topic for many individuals on campus.
“Of course, we understand if your own personal experiences have been negative or you don’t have the mental energy. That’s understandable for us, and that’s always been very difficult for us, because we don’t want to trigger people or make people really uncomfortable,” they said. “But at the same time, there’s a different kind of discomfort on this campus that just leads to silencing. That’s something we’ve been trying to address – that culture of silence, pretending that this isn’t an issue.”
Student responses to this radical activism have varied widely. Negative feedback has stemmed largely from male-identifying individuals, with such reactions as, “F**k you guys,” “Why are you targeting us?” “I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone!” “Get out, we’re just trying to have fun!” “I’m gay, so I could never sexually assault anyone!” “Bitch!” and “This isn’t art. Have you seen the Sistine Chapel? That’s art.” One of the most disturbing comments was, “She thinks sexual assault is a problem? I’ll sexually assault her.”
During one of the Atwater installations, a group of men carrying solo cups stood in line with their backs to one of the performers, forming a human wall.
“The goal was to block us from view, to limit our power, to say, ‘You’re not welcome here,’” Grady-Benson said.
Amid the annoyance, denial and hostility of passersby, an informal – and alarming – body of research is emerging.
“We’re getting people to say things to us that they’re thinking or saying behind closed doors, and we’re trying to make that public,” Grady-Benson explained.
Despite the negativity, there has also been an outpouring of support from other observers. Comments have included “Thank you so much for doing this,” “This is so important,” “You are all so brave,” “I can’t believe nobody has done anything like this before,” “As a survivor, this really speaks to me” and “How can I get involved?”
In a process filled with political strife, some individuals have expressed discomfort with the radical nature of the movement. As such, participation in Stares on Stairs has shifted throughout the past few months.
“We really want to emphasize that everyone has agency in this project,” Grady-Benson stated. “There is no shame or judgment if this is not for you.”
“I never want to push people on that, because I think an individual is the best person to evaluate the level of risk that they are ready to accept,” Dunn added. “But it’s sort of a tradeoff, because in order to get something accomplished, you do have to put yourself out there in some kind of a way and take a risk. I wish that people who are able to – mentally healthy enough and in a good enough place – would open themselves up to that risk. There’s a difference between ‘I don’t want to be triggered’ or ‘I’ve had a really bad week so I can’t do this right now’ and ‘I’m nervous about what people will think if they realize that I am involved in this kind of radical action.’”
Each role in the performance comes with its own set of difficulties. The performer, half-naked and marked by handprints, must stand silently as they become the subject of stares, some hostile, some curious and some at an indiscernible point in between.
“It’s really informed my experience to be a performer and not speak to people. There’s so much I want to speak to people as they’re walking by,” Sather said.
“It’s not that we are silent,” Chang said. “I would say that our body is the message.”
Meanwhile, the bodyguards must be attuned to the mood of the space as partygoers – most of them intoxicated – stream past them, occasionally interacting with the performance.
“People have said the craziest things, like, ‘I’m an art history major. This isn’t art,’” Sather said. “You have to evaluate – is this something I should engage in, or simply something to remark on later?”
“Perhaps we bother some people by bringing such a serious topic to party spaces that are meant to be overflowing with good music, laughing and dancing,” Mayopoulos said. “But the truth is, I’d much rather receive a charged comment from a partier who doesn't want to engage with our performance because it ruins the good vibes of their partying than not do this performance and see the number of sexual assaults increase.”
The group performs in short stretches, reconvening every 10 minutes or so to check where everyone is at emotionally, physically and mentally. As a show of solidarity, they stay as a group and leave as a group, with the entire performance lasting from one to two hours. Afterward, people may go their separate ways to rest, or debrief if there is something pressing to address. The group always offers an open discussion to the campus a couple of days after the event, but so far, no one beyond the immediate circle of participants has shown up.
“Getting people to care on campus is really hard for any activist movement,” Grady-Benson explained. “It’s easy for people to either say ‘fuck you’ or ‘love you’ and not really care the next day.”
“If you care about this issue, maybe you don’t have to come to our event, but do you want to write something? Do you want to help us make posters or art? There are a lot of ways to support our group besides physically participating in protest,” Dunn said.
In spite of all the barriers that Stares on Stairs has encountered – from administrative hesitation to student apathy to outright aggression – these activists are determined to awaken the dialogue on sexual assault, to shift the culture of victim-blaming that has ravaged colleges across the nation. As one exhausting and informative semester draws to a close, they are already brainstorming ways to expand their mission, from posting photographs to bringing the movement to other campuses to diversifying the group to include more genders and sexual identities. All the while, however, these students acknowledge the limitations and risks inherent in their work.
“This is not a finished thing. We don’t have a formula. There’s still a lot of room for growth. This is not just high risk for ourselves, but for our community, and we want to recognize that us doing a disruptive action can have a harmful impact, even it that’s not our intention, particularly on survivors of sexual assault,” Chang said. “Continuing to be in conversation with MiddSafe advocates and other people not in the group has been really important. We are learning each time. This is by no means the right way. It’s just us trying to do the work as intentionally and mindfully as possible.”
Visit go/stares or go/stairs to learn more about their mission.
(05/12/16 9:50pm)
What does it mean to combine laughter and healing? To be the “perfect” survivor? And what do clowns and “panda puppies” have anything to do with it? Trying to explain the Post Traumatic Super Delightful (PTSD) play to those who did not watch the show was challenging at best. Performed in Hepburn Zoo on Thursday, May 5, Post Traumatic Super Delightful is most simply described as a one-woman show about a community trying to heal after a sexual assault. In practice, it is a heartbreaking, hilarious and nuanced tale of survivors, perpetrators and bystanders – and the impacts of a system that has not done anyone any favors.
Post Traumatic Super Delightful is written and performed by Antonia Lassar, directed by Angela Dumlao, stage-managed by Olivia Hull and further supported by a large team of women with varying backgrounds and skill sets. The fictionalized content stems from interviews with survivors, perpetrators, administrators, faculty and staff within the judicial system, and contains only two moments from Lassar’s real life. Director of Health and Wellness Education Barbara McCall, Molly McShane ’16 and Rebecca Coates-Finke ’16.5 worked to bring the play to campus through the Department of Justice Grant.
First, we meet the clown – a woman dressed in typical clothing who dons a red nose and performs ridiculous antics against the backdrop of voiceovers and music. Each interlude featuring this nameless, smiling character is infused with humor and stark realizations. At one point, the clown walks out with a pile of placards and begins to dance to the pulsing beat of “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child. One by one, she shows the front side of each placard: “I’m pretty.” “I’m white.” “I’m a girl.” “I’m the perfect survivor.” (She pauses after “I’m white” to show off her most awkward and invigorating dance move yet, before pointing to the sign again in a hilarious, self-deprecating recognition of her own whiteness.) Flipping the cards to the opposite side, she continues: “I’m not like the angry ones.” “I cry but I’m not a mess.” “I hate my rapist.” “None of you know him so none of you doubt me.” “I’m also perfect.” “At rolling my tongue.”
The clown proceeds to roll her tongue repeatedly with impressive dexterity, causing the audience to laugh in bewilderment. The contrast between this hysterical demonstration and the difficult truths conveyed by the placards is strategic and intentional. Society has constructed the narrative of the “perfect survivor” of sexual assault – white, female, pretty and not too teary-eyed, among other characteristics – to the detriment of anyone who does not fit this elusive mold. The clown highlights these identity politics by presenting the situation in the most straightforward manner possible.
“The play takes the trauma and pain that may be associated with being a survivor and doesn’t try to define it, which is the purpose of the clown,” Coates-Finke explained. “It’s responding to the myth of the perfect survivor, the narrative of what one should do and how one should be. The clown takes away identity in some ways, and just gives space.”
Lassar, who drew on her own training as a clown to create Post Traumatic Super Delightful, sees great potential in healing through laughter.
“Clowning has been used in sacred rituals in some cultural contexts. The sacred clown can be a presence that reflects back the truth of the community to the community, and mimics what you are doing,” she said. “The laughter is a recognition that we do act like that, people do talk that way. Getting a group of people to laugh about anything is to acknowledge that it exists. This is very powerful in a society that often invalidates survivors’ experiences.”
Though Post Traumatic Super Delightful was written largely for and by survivors, “Julia” – the fictional college student who was sexually assaulted by “Bryan” – never makes an appearance. Instead, her name comes up only in heated conversations featuring Lina, the school’s Title IX Coordinator, faculty member Dr. Margaret Roach and Bryan himself. Because it is a one-woman show, however, these conversations are enacted in a one-sided manner by the ever-evolving actress Lassar. Responses are implied rather than uttered aloud – and due to prominent changes in vocal and physical expressions, there is never a doubt as to which character is speaking at any given moment.
Lina uses brash language cloaked in a thick Russian accent, with inflammatory statements such as, “But I push her [Julia]! You know, I can file complaint myself, but if she won’t let me use her name, it won’t go anywhere. I’m not upset. I am upset. I shouldn’t be upset, but this is my first case. I want justice!” In contrast, Margaret speaks with a stiff, high-strung formality, while Bryan’s light Texan drawl marks all of his confused, frustrated and painfully honest musings.
In featuring a variety of voices, Post Traumatic Super Delightful is a reflection of how sexual assault is perceived by – and therefore affects – an entire community.
“Instead of hearing a story from a very singular perspective – which is a really important perspective of a survivor, but which can be limiting in terms of a full understanding of sexual assault and the ripple effect – we get a context and a way to process the pain,” Coates-Finke said.
“It allows us to think bigger about what the possibilities for awareness and activism are – the way that sexual assault affects people beyond the two or more people involved in one encounter,” McShane added. “It’s exciting both for people who are new to this conversation and for people who have been having this conversation for a long time.”
Through the dialogue, the audience becomes aware of the ways in which harmful narratives are reproduced.
“Bryan is not capable of rape. He is not a monster,” Margaret, his faculty advisor, says at one point.
“Julia does not look like a rape victim, okay? I had her in class. I know her.”
In response to the question “Do you think she was making it up?” Margaret states, “When you’re a drinker, there’s always the possibility you misremembered.”
Bryan’s pain and misconceptions also come to light through his interactions with Lina, the Title IX Coordinator who is adamantly advocating for Julia.
“I’m a freaking 21-year-old-boy! I’m going to have sex!” Bryan exclaims. “Rape is about power, it’s not about sex. What if this was just about sex?”
“I knew a guy in high school who got raped, real raped. And it’s really different. It’s like, I mean, he was bleeding. It was like on a walk home from a bar, and someone just appeared on the street. That’s rape. When you have to fight.”
Faced with these faulty assumptions – that drunk sex does not ever count as rape, that only monsters are capable of rape and that rape victims must look and act a certain way – it becomes clear why sexual assault has become such a blurry and complicated issue, particularly on college campuses. Post Traumatic Super Delightful addresses this complexity partly by stating these misconceptions aloud in the first place, and partly by emphasizing the humanness inherent in everyone involved.
For instance, though Lina demonstrates care and compassion, she is not always great at her job. She pressures Julia to file a Title IX complaint in the name of “justice,” but then realizes, “What is point of justice, if survivor will still be hurt?”
Meanwhile, Bryan is an accused perpetrator – yet his goofy demeanor and adoration for baby animal videos defy the common expectation that rapists cannot possibly be human. According to an anonymous feedback form submitted by an audience member, “It was tough to watch/hear from the perpetrator, because he was so nice… Ugh. I guess it’s easier to think of perpetrators as horrible evil people.”
Amid the stress of the judicial process, Bryan explains that all he can handle at this point is watching videos of “panda puppies” – a confession that drew huge, perhaps empathetic laughs from the crowd. Combined with his genuine, pleading questions – “I don’t know what I did! How could you not know if you raped someone? What’s non-consensual? What’s consensual?” – Bryan’s confusion becomes obvious. And in some ways, his actions become understandable. Like everyone else, Bryan is the product of a system, his thoughts shaped by a flawed education and harmful media messaging. All of these factors have led him to misunderstand what it takes to hurt another individual, or what it means to be a “good” or a “bad” person.
If certain lines from the play resonated with you in a strange or uncomfortable way, it may help to remember that we are all products of a system. Through our words, actions and willingness to listen to those around us, however, we can all play a part in dismantling rape culture.
“Even if you think you don’t know a survivor and you think you don’t know a perpetrator, everyone is so connected and complicit and responsible and in a positon to do something about sexual violence,” Coates-Finke said, “because you definitely know a survivor and you definitely know a perpetrator on this campus. Especially on one as small as ours.”
The multifaceted characterization within Post Traumatic Super Delightful proves that nothing and no one exists in black-and-white terms. Through its nuanced telling, the story becomes more real, and thus more relatable. Above all, it shows that laughter can, indeed, serve as an unexpected catalyst for healing.
Perhaps the anonymous feedback from the audience phrased it best: “I am feeling heavy and light simultaneously,” a 21-year-old female stated. “Trauma and sexual assault is not an easy topic to face, but I feel the load is always a bit lighter with the aid of the community and new tools.”
“As a survivor, I thought it was healing to see this performed in a serious and comedic way,” a 19-year-old male wrote. “I feel hopeful.”
(05/05/16 10:48pm)
Beneath the layers of bulky winter clothing that they don for most of the year, Middlebury College students know a thing or two about fashion. Their eclectic array of styles was on full display last Friday night, April 29, at an intimate fashion gala hosted by the International Students’ Organization (ISO) at Wilson Hall. Any semblance of homogeneity among the student body seemed to dissolve that evening, replaced by an intense flurry of colors, textures, and patterns reigning from nearly every corner of the world and landing on the brightly lit runway.
Previously, the gala has been a short segment featured in the middle of the fall ISO show. This year, however, the board wanted to throw a longer event dedicated solely to fashion – with the agreement that it would be anything but mainstream.
“We were not looking for a specific type of model or a specific type of clothes,” Danilo Herrera ’18, the producer and MC of the show and the president of ISO, explained. “We allowed [the models] the chance to choose how they wanted to be on the catwalk. We had a basic set up for the runway, and we said to them, ‘Go and shine.’”
The front half of the Wilson Hall auditorium floor was marked off as a makeshift catwalk, with two rows of chairs set up at the edge for cheering spectators. A banquet of food stood in the back half of Wilson Hall, where some audience members gathered around tall tables to eat, drink and observe the show from afar. As the pulsing beats of electronic music filled the air, student models entered from the left side of the hall, posed at the center amid flashing cameras and applause, and followed a semi-circle path to ascend the stairs to the right side of the stage. There, they struck a final pose or two before disappearing through the curtains.
Angel Jin ’18, Mariam Khan ’16, Mika Wysocki ’18, Minori Fryer ’18 and Olena Ostasheva ’16 served as stylists for the twenty or so student models. Meanwhile, Hala Kassem ’19, Maya Woser ’18, Selena Ling ’19 and Weiru Ye ’19 worked alongside Herrera as associate producers of the show. The organizing group decided to veer away from the highly commercialized atmosphere of mainstream fashion shows by featuring an MC. Charming and enthusiastic, Herrera delivered brief remarks between each segment to connect the audience to the collections.
“Fashion design is a recent phenomenon. The first pieces of clothing with a designer’s name were designed only two centuries ago. Fashion, on the other hand, has been around for a lot longer,” Herrera stated in his opening remarks. “And even though fashion has often been restricted by the standards of society which privilege money over social and artistic values, tonight, what you are going to see is a lot different from mainstream fashion shows. No standards, no idealizations, nothing is holding us back. We’re here for the genuine value of fashion.”
In this unconventional gala, the classic runway strut was replaced by a wide array of physical and facial expressions, from sassy to stoic to syrupy sweet. Some models twirled around gracefully, a few blew kisses to the crowd and others stared straight ahead with their hands on their hips, bold and assertive. Ranging in everything from height to hairstyle to ethnicity, Friday night’s lineup was a welcome change from the white, cardboard-cutout congruity of mainstream Western fashion.
Students modelled clothing from their own closets, making each collection a meaningful personal statement. Many had traditional outfits waiting in their wardrobes, a stunning reminder of home that they had simply never had the occasion to wear. Though many of the collections held cultural ties to particular areas of the world – covering a wide section of the Americas, Europe and Asia – the organizers were intentional in not geographically segregating the show.
“Fashion doesn’t have a nationality, except the traditional part. Everyone should feel welcome,” stylist Jin said. “That’s why they chose to have collections based not on their locations, but rather on artistic concepts.”
The show was split into four distinct themes: Red Carpet, Fusion, Spring and Traditions. As Herrera explained, these categorizations were “artistically broad enough to encompass different looks and also give [models] the chance to wear the clothes that they had.” Red Carpet featured formal, elegant outfits, while Fusion works evoked the metropolitan vibes of places like Hong Kong, Barcelona, São Paulo, Tel Aviv and New York. Vibrant colors filled the Spring collections, with Herrera noting that, “whether [spring] is here or not, we still celebrate it.” Finally, Traditions showed off the colors, textures and patterns that characterize cultural rituals all across the globe.
Jin, who styled the Red Carpet looks, acknowledged the power of highlighting aspects of the student body that might normally go unnoticed.
“[The fashion gala] gives people hope that other than NorthFace and Canada Goose, we have some beautiful things on campus that we just never have the chance to put on and show people,” she said. “After an ugly winter where everyone was dressed the same, I think that we seriously need some color, some beauty on campus, however people interpret it.”
Many students wore clothes from their home country, though there was one noticeable exception. In a charming switch-up, Razan Jabari ’18 and Ana Sanchez Chico ’18 – who come from Palestine and Spain, respectively – wore each other’s outfits. Sanchez Chico showed off a festive, black-and-red embroidered dress, while Jabari wrapped herself in white shawl with a matching white fan in her hand and a red flower in her hair. Hand in hand, they walked down the runway together, their colors complementary and their smiles wide.
Proving that even the most polished of shows often take place against a spontaneous backdrop, another fashion duo came together by accident that night. Morgan Ingenthron ’19 and Zahrrah Ahmed ’19 arrived to the venue in unintentionally matching outfits: backwards baseball caps and casual, comfortable clothing. Upon realizing this, they decided to walk the runway together, entertaining the audience with their well-coordinated, back-to-back poses.
In a further defiance of stereotypical fashion show standards, the night featured a few stunning displays of gender nonconformity. Chris Boutelle ’18 drew loud cheers from the crowd with the opening ensemble of the gala: a white button-down shirt, a black bowtie, black suspenders, form-fitting black plants and shining black stilettos. Meanwhile, in another standout performance, Derek Ding ’18 donned a lacy white shirt, a flowing grey skirt and intensely high heels, showcasing an unconventional elegance amid the other Red Carpet collections.
(04/21/16 10:40pm)
During your daily trek to classes, the library, or your favorite dining hall last week, you may have encountered an unusual sight – people making interpretive movements while donning headphones and walking around a public space. If you stayed for long enough, you might have noticed that the ordeal seemed entirely unplanned: over the course of an hour or so, random passersby would occasionally enter the space, receive a pair of wireless headphones and a written prompt, participate in a spontaneous, improvised performance for several minutes and then continue on with their day. Some people simply stood by and watched, while others walked past the scene without a second glance.
Also known as drop-in dance performances, these informal, audience-based productions popped up twice last week, once in the Great Hall of Bicentennial Hall and once on the patio outside Ross Dining Hall during the lunch rush. The heavy foot traffic around these venues allowed for a large number of students to observe and potentially engage with the performance.
A third art installation took place within the Warner Hall Greenhouse on Wednesday evening, April 13, though this one did not involve audience participation. Students and trained performers danced around inside as random passersby observed through the glass.
These improvisational performances came as part of the Movement Matters program, a two-year residency through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Middlebury College Dance Program that uses movement to explore the intersectionality across disciplines. The team consists of choreographer and performer Maree ReMalia; sound designer David Bernabo; choreographer, dancer and educator Jil Stifel; and visual artist Blaine Siegel. Based in Pittsburgh, they are melding their different artistic fields together through participatory events.
“The very nature of these drop-in events is that it’s not necessarily a viewer who is sitting and being danced at,” Stifel said. “It’s something that you happen upon the same way you happen upon a flower. It’s something to be engaged with and interested in before moving on.”
Rod-based installation pieces were prominent in both performance venues. Constructed by Siegel and placed artistically throughout the space, these flexible physical structures were available for participants to interact with, destroy and rebuild.
Each drop-in performance was set against a score that sourced sounds from the organic farm and select locations on campus. Created by Bernabo and audible only to the headphone-wearing participants, the score served as both the ambience and inspiration for physical expression. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as “silent disco” – the experience of dancing to music that only one person can hear.
To initiate the self-improvised performances, each participant was offered a written prompt. These statements ranged from straightforward (“Yell at the space,” “Start a movement and repeat it with growing intensity” or “Swirl”) to silly (“Find a happy dance in your feet and get groovy”) to abstract (“Decorate the air with your movement” or “Respond to the architecture with textured movement”).
The Movement Matters team recognized that the significance of interpretive dance may not be immediately apparent to the viewer – or to the performer, for that matter. However, they expressed hope that participants benefited from the spontaneous, non-verbal expression of the self.
“During our event at BiHall, we were asked by a student why what we are doing is important. It’s a good question – especially in an environment that runs on assignments, discourse and evaluation,” Stifel said. “Through research, we know some of the ways that we can foster resiliency in our brains are through mindfulness, exercise and social connection. By taking time to move our bodies with other people following specific prompts, we are engaging all of those practices at the same time. In this way, the act of dropping into a movement exploration is an artful way of strengthening our powers of resiliency.”
That is not to say that everyone felt quite ready to engage, however. Some people turned around and walked the other way when they saw the installation, as they did not want to cross through the space. Others talked to the facilitators of the event as they walked by, but did not participate. This hesitancy speaks to the perceived inaccessibility of dance – a non-verbal medium of expression that often leaves viewers feeling more confused than enlightened.
As such, ReMalia acknowledged the importance of meeting individuals where they are and not pushing them too far past their comfort zones.
“It’s a process,” she explained. “For someone who doesn’t encounter dance or move in a certain way very often, even coming upon it can be the first step.”
Indeed, the post-performance reflections of some participants expressed appreciation for the spontaneous exercise.
“Freeing and I smiled the whole time. It didn't matter what others were doing, just what I felt moving through,” one person wrote.
“It was interesting seeing all around me and being fully visible yet having physical constraints,” another said.
And finally: “I had a baby 4 months ago and all throughout pregnancy and early infancy, my body was a principle factor in day to day life. Not so much recently. Finding a ‘happy place in my feet and getting groovy’ felt really good. Thank you.”
(04/14/16 11:18pm)
It is no secret that the computer science field – at Middlebury and beyond – is dominated largely by males. Restrictive gender norms throughout history have permeated into modern academia, resulting in spaces that do not always feel comfortable for traditionally underrepresented groups. An initiative spearheaded by Hannah Beach ’18 and Anna Parker ’17.5 is seeking to change this culture. Known as WiCs++ (pronounced as “wicks”), the newly formed Women in Computer Science Club is open to all female-identifying individuals in the department.
The idea for the group stemmed from an e-mail that Academic Department Coordinator Amy Rose and Professor of Computer Science Amy Briggs sent out to all female majors and minors this past fall. Noticing a lack of community among this ever-growing demographic within the department, they proposed the creation of an official club. Now, the two professors – the only women within the eight-member computer science faculty team – serve as advisors to WiCs++.
Alongside a group of ten or so peers, co-presidents Beach and Parker have dedicated the past several weeks to informal logistical meetings and bonding sessions over lunch. Their goal is to forge connections within a field that has traditionally consisted of male-centric spaces.
For Beach, alienation within the computer science world has been a problem since her high school years.
“My experience in senior year was that everyone was talking about Stars Wars all the time. I didn’t watch Star Wars,” she explained. “So I thought that I enjoyed computer science, but if the people I work with can only talk about Star Wars and I don’t like Star Wars, is this the job for me?”
For many females, this type of isolation has persisted into the scene of higher education.
“I don’t want to speak for everyone’s experience, but I’ve found that boys in computer science tend to find their communities in computer science,” Parker said. “Girls who major in computer science tend to take the classes but find their community elsewhere.”
Last Wednesday, April 6, marked the first official WiCs++ gathering, which centered on tech prep and was designed to attract a larger group of any interested parties. Soon to become a regular installation of WiCs++, tech prep sessions offer a practical overview to participants hoping to enter the professional world of computer science.
“For many CS jobs, the interview process is very technical. Intro-level classes cover this, but if you take them your freshman or sophomore year, it’s easy to lose that information later,” Parker said. “Tech prep meetings seek to help review these concepts.”
The club also seeks to instill a sense of excitement for the real-life applications of coding. Last Friday, WiCs++ hosted a game night open to anyone of any experience level in computer science. Students had the opportunity to try on virtual reality goggles while bonding with other tech enthusiasts.
The next project in the works is a conference linked to Girl Develop It, an organization that sets up tech meet-ups for women at various meeting points around the country. Scheduled for April 23, the event will feature a panel of guest speakers and computer science faculty members, as well as a robotic controller workshop.
“The goal of the workshop is to be as welcoming and unintimidating as possible,” Parker said. These are things that are generally lacking from the computer science department, and we think it’s one of the reasons why there are fewer women and fewer underrepresented groups in the field. It’s hard for people to come in and see themselves breaking into that demographic.”
The efforts of WiCs++ to empower traditionally marginalized identities come as part of an important larger-scale movement. All across the United States, chapters of Women in Computer Science have been cropping up at institutions like Dartmouth College and Columbia University. The impact of WiCs++ extends far beyond the college years as well: diversity initiatives at the higher education level will provide tech companies with a larger pool of qualified candidates to choose from once these students graduate. In the meantime, females with a passion for coding will experience greater comfort and accessibility both inside and outside the classroom.
“We’re building a community in a department where that has never existed,” Beach explained. “Joining this club now, I feel I have so many more connections that I did not have before. It’s made my classes a lot less intimidating.”
(03/23/16 3:19pm)
This Monday, Mar. 21 marked the launch of SensusAccess, an application that allows Middlebury users to automatically convert documents into a variety of accessible formats. Now free to all students, faculty and staff members at both the College and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, the web-based service supports learning, teaching and research in innovative ways. Anyone with a working College or MIIS e-mail account has unlimited, free access to the service.
Users have the option to convert a wide array of formats (including Word and PDF) into an mp3, e-book, Braille document or DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) or an audio book, among other selections. The complete list of supported file types includes .DOC, .DOCX, .PDF, .PPT, .PPTX, .TXT, .XML, .HTML, .HTM, .RTF, .EPUB, .MOBI, .TIFF, .TIF, .GIF, .JPG, .JPEG, .BMP, .PCX, .DCX, .J2K, .JP2, .JPX, .DJV and .ASC. In a straightforward, user-friendly process, individuals can either upload the file, enter the URL or type the text of the document they wish to convert. Next, they select the output format, specify options and enter their e-mail address. Depending on the size and complexity of the file type, users will receive the results in their inbox within a few minutes to a few hours.
SensusAccess is capable of transforming a photocopy or a photograph of text into a format that can be edited in Word or read aloud by high-quality voice software. The audio conversion feature of this self-service supports a wide variety of languages, including Arabic, Bulgarian, British and American English, Danish, Dutch, German, Greenlandic, French, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian and Castilian and Latin American Spanish. There are limits to the application, however: SensusAccess cannot convert audio files into written texts; it also does not translate from one language to another. The company is currently working on these issues.
In an e-mail sent out to the entire Middlebury community on Monday morning, Director of Academic Technology Bill Koulopoulos emphasized the everyday utility of SensusAccess. “Different formats create greater opportunities to learn and to engage,” he wrote. “For example, when you’re traveling, taking a walk or working in a dimly lit space, an audio version of an article might be more accessible than a print version.”
Based in Denmark and powered by the award-winning RoboBraille service, SensusAccess markets itself as “a self-service solution for print-impaired students, faculty and alumni at universities and colleges.” The movement to bring its services to the Middlebury community stems from the collaborative efforts of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Research (CTLR), the Academic Technology Group and the Advisory Group on Disability, Access and Inclusion (AGDAI). AGDAI was formed a few months ago as part of President of the College Laurie L. Patton’s vision for a more inclusive and accessible Middlebury.
In Patton’s inaugural address last fall, she stated that “diversity is an everyday ethic to be cultivated, made richer and more vibrant.” By supporting a wide range of learning contexts, SensusAccess is a step in this direction.
As Susan Burch, AGDAI member and Associate Professor of American Studies, explained, “Each source format has inherent assets and limits. Flexibility is key. For certain situations, a Word document format may work best for an individual, but in a different context an audio file may be more accessible. Having different source formats readily available enables support for our diverse learning community.”
To learn more, visit go/sensusaccess.
(03/17/16 1:26am)
Only in a show entitled Sexpectations would it make sense to utter the words “biddy,” “Atwater” and “Grindr” within mere minutes of each other. Last weekend (March 11-12), students flooded the Hepburn Zoo to watch the first ever play based on Middlebury hookup culture. Written and directed by Mary Baillie ’18 and Roxy Adviento ’18, Sexpectations was born from 57 anonymously submitted stories and brought to life by 10 students: Haroon Ashraf ’18, Sam Boudreau ’19, Stella Boye-Doe ’19, Emily Cipriani ’19.5, Ian Driscoll ’18.5, Lucie Heerman ’19, Ojaswi Pandey ’18, Madelyn O’Kelley-Bangsberg ’19.5, Omar Valencia ’19 and Elizabeth Warfel ’19. Following a mere two weeks of rehearsals, the cast danced, delivered monologues and occasionally donned scanty outfits in a humorous and at times uncomfortable reflection of life at the College.
Describing the show as “a series of depictions of the stupid stories that everyone has to go through every day at this place,” Baillie was intentional in portraying as many experiences as possible.
“We wanted to represent a diverse range of people, because hooking up can mean so many different things to different people,” she said. “We tried to use all the definitions.”
The play opens with a scene that is likely all too familiar (and cringe-worthy) to many: A swarm of sweaty bodies moves to a pulsing beat in an Atwater suite. The room smells of cheap alcohol, and an eager male student, played by Valencia, is in search of a hookup for the night. His inner monologue blares through the speakers as he surveys the room: “Okay, Matty. This is it. This is the night when you finally finally get some legit, real-life pussy. Do not f*ck this up.” When he finally finds Lisa, played by Cipriani, on the dance floor, awkwardness immediately ensues – from the moment he utters the phrase “Yeah, baby” in a misguided attempt at sexiness to a run-in with Lisa’s roommate that prevents the two of them from ever getting past first base.
The disastrous night ends with the roommate, portrayed by Boye-Doe, saying to Matty, “Umm....can you get the f*ck out now?” Overwhelming sympathy seemed to be the sentiment in the room, as the scene likely prompted audience members to relive their own awkward hookup experiences, be it untimely boners or a “cock-blocking” roommate.
A sense of goofy self-awareness pervaded much of the show, particularly in scenes centered on Tinder, the popular dating app, and Grindr, its gay-male equivalent. Tia, played by O’Kelley-Bangsberg, smiled and waved to the audience while an invisible narrator read her profile out loud in a tone so exaggeratedly serious, it could have fit right into a National Geographic documentary.
“Tia is a sex-positive gal looking to have fun. Sunglass emoji,” the narrator stated. “Ergo, she wants to weed out the creepers. Her pictures consist of one mysterious selfie, one sexy group with her friends, one smiling and one full body pic. Tia doesn’t want to work on her profile much because she is not THAT desperate.”
In acknowledging the ridiculous amount of thought that goes behind any online dating profile, Sexpectations perhaps validated many audience members’ own self-doubt.
Meanwhile, the Grindr skit featured a wide range of gay males, from an anonymous lurker to a toned, 6’1 guy who likes long walks on the beach, to the boldly named user “BottomBoy248.” Portrayed hilariously by Driscoll, this final character states with an unabashed eagerness that he enjoys “choking on cock, getting pounded hard, hands tied, rough stuff.” The crowd watched on curiously as the males attempted to navigate this provocative, complex and at times frustrating platform, where users may block other users upon receiving an unflattering face pic, have their boundaries pushed to uncomfortable extremes or arrange for a sexual interaction within minutes of virtually meeting one another.
Grindr can be a strange and scary place, but it can also lead to lighthearted fun between individuals who would not have otherwise connected. Sexpectations sought to shed light on both of these aspects. Baillie and Adviento consulted with members of the cast who were familiar with app to ensure that the scene was representative of Grindr culture. They explained that the characters they chose to spotlight did not stem from common stereotypes of gay males (although that may have seemed to be the case), but rather from real-life accounts of stereotypical Grindr profiles.
Amid the silly reenactments, the show gave way to several moments of somber reflection concerning inequity within heterosexual relationships. In a tense interaction between a male and female student, played respectively by Boudreau and Warfel, the boy demands a blow job from the girl on the false assumption that she will “want it again.” When she refuses, he responds, “What the f*ck?! Okay fine bitch, whatever.”
The emotional monologue that Warfel delivers in the next scene recognizes the “strange barbed wire of careful sexuality” that females must walk if they want to participate in college hookup culture.
“I like to have sex, have fun and be liberated. But there can only be so much, ya know?” Warfel states. “They see my body, I see theirs. But when they don’t even know my f*cking name, I literally become just a f*ckable body.”
Another point of concern arises during the Atwater scene, as bodies bump and shake against one another in the semi-darkness.
“Stop touching me!” one girl exclaims.
“Well, f*ck you then!” the random guy who is trying to grind on her responds.
In our world of structural gender inequality, women are simultaneously shamed for their sexuality and expected to go out of their way to please their male partners, regardless of their own desires. Meanwhile, consent exists as a blurry concept rather than as the bare minimum for all interactions. Sexism and double standards are not a problem of the past – and in refusing to shy away from the painful, lived experiences of individuals all around us, Sexpectations offered a powerful contribution to a dialogue that deserves far more attention than it currently receives on our campus.
Beyond the acknowledgement of harmful patriarchal norms, the show also brought to light subtle, but equally concerning, issues concerning race and gender. At one point, the characters all describe their “type.” Their answers include “smart athletes,” “Ben Wyatt,” “the slightly geeky but still coordinated music enthusiast,” “high IQ” and “someone who stops when I say ‘no’” – but some mention racial and ethnic stereotypes, such as “half Asian, half white guys,” “Jewish guys,” “black guys,” “Hispanics,” “Scandinavians” and “girls from Russia.” The fact that these phrases came from real-life submissions is concerning, as they reflect society’s tendency to fetishize members of different identity groups based on racist generalizations. Even worse, the problematic nature of these preferences often goes unchecked, since they are perceived as compliments rather than as objectification.
During the scene in which a girl makes out with her Atwater hookup, her “sexiled” roommate says angrily, “Wait, what?! I swear this is the third time!” to which she responds, “I’m no slut.” The culture of slut-shaming – that is, the sense of inferiority that society instills in young women whose sexual expression clashes with traditionally rigid, patriarchal norms – rings painfully clear in this exchange. Whether intentionally or not, Sexpectations brought this unfair double standard to light, and in doing so, hopefully pushed some audience members to think twice about their own choice of words.
It is unclear how aware the playwrights were of the implications behind these subtly problematic scenes. After all, the purpose of the show was to portray hookup culture on campus as it currently exists, not as how it ought to be. In terms of entertainment value, Sexpectations was a success, bringing laughter to every corner of the room and reminding us just how endearingly awkward young love can be when it is not taking place on the Atwater dance floor. On a more uncomfortable note, it also revealed the ways in which we, as a campus community and as products of large-scale media messaging, may not be nearly as progressive as we consider ourselves to be.
(03/10/16 12:26am)
Hepburn Zoo has always been known as a venue for unconventional art performances, but last weekend’s performance may have topped them all: On Friday, March 3 and Saturday, March 4, the doors opened, free of charge, for Middlebury Discount Comedy’s second ever show, Much Love in this Air.
Founded last fall by Shannon Gibbs ’18, the campus’s first sketch comedy group is comprised of 11 students: President Gibbs, Vice President Isabella Alonzo ’18, Producer Liana Barron ’18, Head Writer Greg Swartz ’17.5, Head Director Alexander Herdmann ’17, Faraz Ahmad ’19, Dan Fulham ’18, Sebastian LaPointe ’18, Peter Lindholm ’17.5, Jack Ralph ’18 and Marney Kline ’17.5. Coming from a wide range of experience levels and majors – from computer science to theatre to English, with no discipline in the clear majority – the company produces all of its sketches through a collaborative round-table format.
Posters for the show featured all members of the company lying in a sea of roses, completely nude save for a few petals photoshopped strategically over their private parts. According to Gibbs, the provocative, creepy and vaguely romantic vibe behind these promotional pieces was completely intentional and particularly accentuated by the fact that Much Love in this Air premiered nearly three weeks after Valentine’s Day. ‘Who says the season of love is over?’ the posters seemed to ask, foreshadowing the unconventional sense of humor that lay behind the entirely student-run production.
Gibbs opened the show with a list of trigger warnings for sexually explicit material, violence, abortion and other inflammatory topics. In the 24 sketches that followed, ranging in length from a mere 30 seconds to several minutes, these themes were escalated, decontextualized, satirized, broken apart, muddled up and in some instances, oddly mishandled. Puzzling at some moments and shocking at others, Much Love in this Air proved to be far more unsettling a performance than even its posters could suggest.
Sexual content was pervasive throughout the show, beginning with a three-part series of sketches in which a male student, played by Swartz, is taken hostage and forced into a sexual bondage by a female Public Safety officer, played by Alonzo. Another student, played by Barron, watches on in helpless horror. The premise for this story is understandable enough: two students are caught drinking underage, and the officer must confiscate their alcohol. However, the situation quickly escalates into a bizarre commentary on the tense relationship between Public Safety and the general student body. As Barron appeals to the administrator to release her boyfriend, she ends up screaming hysterically into the phone, “Right, you’re trained, but who the fuck are you helping?” followed by, “Why do I voluntarily go into this bureaucratic shit hole?” She is eventually transferred to the Department of Existential Crises, where a soothing voice on the other end, performed by Ahmad, instructs her to “imagine yourself running through a field of puppies with a middle-aged, robust Public Safety Officer” and to “gently breathe in and lock your fingers underneath your cheeks.”
“Now, if you have a tight little asshole, press two and you will be transferred back to Public Safety,” Ahmad says in the final line of the sketch, leaving the audience to pause and then giggle in bewilderment.
Such was the nature of most of the night’s performances: Shameless in their absurdity, the sketches were often cloaked in dark humor and met with relative silence, as the viewers struggled to process what they had witnessed onstage. For the most part, MDC’s outlandish approach to comedy seemed incongruent with the audience’s taste – but this did not seem to faze the actors, whose emphatic voices and humorously exaggerated facial expressions remained as strong as ever from beginning to end.
Another sexually explicit scene, innocently titled “Science Class,” featured a teacher offering his students a “more hands-on experiences” through a new form of “dirty work.” This euphemistic language quickly gives way to the crude question, “How many of you have been f**ked in the ass before?” The class proceeds to split into pairs to carry out this activity, with one student’s clear discomfort becoming the focal point of the lesson. Perhaps surprisingly, the blatant ridiculousness and obscenity of the sketch drew considerable laughter from the crowd, though many audience members were undoubtedly left asking themselves what exactly they were laughing at – and what message the outrageous script was trying to convey.
The line between outlandish humor and incomprehensible absurdity was crossed at a few points throughout the night. For several uncomfortable minutes, the audience watched as Winston and Lydia, a dysfunctional young couple as portrayed by Gibbs and Fulham, broke out into a fight at a night club, dancing feverishly together the entire time. The juxtaposition between their volatile words and cheery, perfectly synchronized choreography was clever, though their enunciation was often obscured by their quick movements, making it difficult to follow the conversation. The parts that were audible, however, were often too over-the-top and intentionally lewd for the audience to feel comfortable laughing.
“You mean you’ve been using condoms this whole f**king time?” Lydia shrieks at one point.
“Maybe if you weren’t such a f**king slut c**t we would think twice about it, Lydia,” Winston responds.
The tendency to veer too far into unsettling extremes escalated into outright violence during “Faraz’s Final Rose,” a scene based on the wildly popular reality show The Bachelor, as well as during a couple of abortion sketches. Firstly, the final rose ceremony – in which the bachelor selects one of three beautiful girls to be his wife – concludes with Chris Harrison, the host of The Bachelor as portrayed by Lindholm, chasing down and shooting the first runner-up, played by Gibbs. “I’m still alive, asshole,” are her final words in this unnecessarily grotesque scene. What had begun as an entertaining commentary on the problematic premise of The Bachelor devolved into an unwarranted display of violence.
Next, in what was likely the most disconcerting performance of the night, a pharmaceutical clinic offers a list of painful options to women seeking an abortion, including but not limited to hypothermia, being thrown down a flight of stairs and a series of punches to the gut, courtesy of a creepy man named Lucifer. In this jarring satire of the current health care system, lines like “I think sluts like you deserve a 50-50 shot” and “My father took me hostage so I wouldn’t murder the child we made” are delivered with a sort of bluntness, a blatant desire to provoke, that comes across as inappropriate. When the first woman to request an abortion emerged blood-stained from behind the curtain, followed by a stab to the torso that took the life of the second patient, the disapproving silence from the crowd seemed to be directed not at the real-life issues that inspired the sketch, but rather at the wildly disturbing content of the sketch itself.
Recognizing that their self-identified “Freudian” style can be more than a little odd, Middlebury Discount Comedy (MDC) writes all of their sketches with the hopes of highlighting the severity of real-world problems.
“We take an issue that’s pertinent to us as Middlebury students or as citizens of the world and we blow it up to an extent that it’s so decontextualized that people can see the satire we’re trying to go for,” Barron explained. “We’ll heighten it and heighten it and heighten it until finally, it’s violence.”
“This show tackles issue that are a bit more sensitive and takes them to a darker place,” Swartz added.
Not all moments in Much Love in this Air were completely off the mark, however. A 30-second public service announcement, delivered by Fulham, brought the crowd to a roaring laughter with its sheer, deadpan simplicity: “Now, remember, kids,” he said. “Drugs. One day, you just start doin’ em.” In contrast, a cult-like sing-along of the phrase “Prepare the way of the Lord” in “Trump’s Inauguration” introduced an eerie sense of hysteria to the room. This creepy take on the political storm that has ravaged the United States was met with a positive reception, as disgust toward the Trump campaign is a common sentiment amongst the overwhelming majority of Middlebury College students.
Meanwhile, in terms of prevalent on-campus issues, a sketch entitled “Atwater Speed Dating” resonated with many. In this well-executed performance, a female student meets one unappealing candidate after another – from the insensitive and dull to a guy who refers to himself exclusively as “Jaboi” – during a night out. Taking place amidst blaring music in a shadowy suite, it is an apt interpretation of a social scene that many students have described as stifling, unsatisfactory and frustratingly cyclical.
“People like it when you talk about things that are relevant and happening right here, in here, in this bubble,” Barron explained. “We have a tone to us that’s very idiosyncratic and dark.”
Following a whirlwind perusal of relevant issues both on campus and in the real world, a stand-out sketch of the night centered on the group’s round-table sessions. All 11 members of the company gathered onstage to parody the process of pitching ideas and writing scripts, with one major plot twist: the actors were all topless (save for 3-D heart attachments covering the girls’ nipples). As the scene progressed, the inexplicable half-nudity began to make more sense. Gibbs proposes that they all be topless together for their next show, to which Alonzo responds, “I don’t think that’s really tasteful, Shannon; not all of us are comfortable with our bodies like that.” A heated debate ensues – “What’s the joke?” “What’s the context?” – and as the audience stared at the bare-chested group of people before them, the irony became suddenly clear. Infused with a strong dose of Freudianism, the scene ends on an abrupt and meta note.
Comedy has long served as a vehicle for powerful social commentary, bringing humankind’s ills under the most revealing of lights and inviting all to observe. However, the humor behind Much Love in this Air hinged largely on a brash insensitivity that alienated audience members more than it challenged them to explore the difficult issues at hand. Though there were certainly moments of clever satire sprinkled throughout the night, if the uncomfortable silences were any indication, the show was deeply perplexing and perhaps too heavy to bear at times. Whether in moments of laughter or quiet unease, MDC pushed the audience to consider why they were or were not laughing, as their shotgun-firing, belly-bleeding sketches blurred the line between what is appropriate to convey and what is not.
(03/02/16 11:59pm)
Were the Paris climate talks of 2015 a success or a failure, and where do we go from there? These were the central questions in a talk entitled “Adequacy and Equity under Neoliberal Climate Governance: Assessing the Paris Moment” on Thursday, Feb 25. Co-sponsored by the Geography Department and the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs as part of the Howard E. Woodin ES Colloquium Series, the presentation featured Timmons Roberts, Ittleson Professor of Environmental Studies and Professor of Sociology at Brown University.
Standing before a packed room of ES majors, faculty members and curious students looking to expand their knowledge on a deeply relevant issue, Roberts opened his speech with a few stark statistics. Due to the nature of global climate governance, people in the least developed countries – including Myanmar, Nepal and Bangladesh – are five times more likely than anyone else to die from natural disasters. Comprising only 11 percent of the total population, the most disadvantaged civilians of the world live in areas that experience 21 percent of climate-related disasters and witness 51 percent of climate-related deaths.
These disproportionate numbers stem from what researchers have dubbed “the climate paradox,” in which the least responsible parties – those that have contributed least to carbon dioxide emissions – are the most vulnerable to climate change. Lacking the proper infrastructure to respond to environmental damage caused by global warming, these lesser developed countries pay dearly for the climate policies instated by and for their wealthier, more powerful neighbors.
So did the United Nations Climate Change Conference of 2015 – also known as the 21st Conference of the Parties, COP 21 or the Paris climate talks – address this inequity? Roberts, who brings the students in his climate and development lab to the event each year, unpacked the details of last December’s Paris agreement, a plan to reduce climate change as negotiated by the 195 participating countries, and its long-term implications for the world. Because countries had not settled on many concrete measures before the 2015 conference, nearly every single issue – from peaking emissions to net reductions – was on the table.
A major goal outlined in the 12-page document is to “hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” Roberts cast a wary eye on this clause, however, explaining that researchers do not know if the 1.5°C limit is even enough to maintain a safe long-term environment. Besides, with human activity already elevating the global temperature by 1°C, the 1.5°C threshold may turn out to be more difficult to uphold than researchers imagine.
Roberts provided a historical context for the Paris talks by explaining the evolution of global policies across the past few decades. In 1972, representatives convened in Stockholm to piece together a pre-cautionary approach to climate change. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the cost of conservation entered the international dialogue. Five years later, the Kyoto Protocol institutionalized liberal environmentalism, and certain wealthy countries became subject to binding limits on emissions.
More recently, the Copenhagen conference in 2009 marked a significant turning point in global climate governance, as officials ushered in a new process of pledge and review entitled the “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDC). The United States and China, the two largest emitters, made initial announcements of their national pledges in 2013, creating a domino effect throughout the international community. In total, 189 national pledges were submitted, all of which reflected a general willingness to make meaningful and pragmatic changes to their climate policies. With these INDCs in effect, the global average temperature went down slightly, from 3.6°C to 2.7°C.
“It wasn’t enough, but it was something,” Roberts said, before quoting the following line from George Monbiot in The Guardian: “By comparison to what it could’ve been, it was a success. By comparison to what it should’ve been, it was a disaster.”
According to Roberts, the shift from top-down command to a completely flexible and voluntary approach gave birth to a system of “shared irresponsibility.” Plagued by a lack of accountability, the policy enacted in Copenhagen has been criticized as inequitable and undemocratic.
“The pledges are not binding,” Roberts stated. “Logically, wouldn’t a better way of solving this problem have been figuring out a budget and dividing it up by a fair burden-sharing formula? If I were king of the world, that’s what I would do. That’s the rational management approach. We tried that for 15 years, but countries simply didn’t sign up [at the Kyoto Protocol].”
The Paris talks strived to incorporate all present parties at the conference in a long-term plan for environmental conservation. However, the lack of binding commitments and enforcement measures make some experts doubt the efficacy of the agreement. Countries are expected to sign the document and implement it in their own legal systems between April 22, 2016 (Earth Day) and April 21, 2017, but there is no established consequenc if they fail to do so. Furthermore, each nation will determine their own goals of emission reduction. The Paris agreement operates on an unofficial “name and shame” system, also known as the mantra of “name and encourage.” The proposed measures will not go into effect until the 55 parties who produce over 55 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas have signed.
Roberts pointed out that the flexibility granted to participating countries is entirely strategic.
“Countries worried about their sovereignty don’t want to be told what to do, but they may go beyond what they are asked to do,” he explained.
For instance, knowing that the appearance of coercion might lead to a political blockade, President Obama purposefully used the word “should” instead of “shall” throughout the U.S. treaty. 66 senators must agree to the proposed measures, which may be difficult given the nature of the people occupying those seats.
Based on the new book Power in a Warming World, which Roberts co-authored alongside David Siplet, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Mizan Khan, Professor of Environmental Science and Management at North South University in Bangladesh, the speech emphasized the importance of a neo-liberal climate governance that exemplifies both efficacy and equity. Deemed by Roberts as the “holy grail of climate justice,” this approach is partially lacking from the Paris agreement.
Because the voluntary aspect of the Paris agreement is a far cry from the hard-hitting conservation policies that the world so desperately needs, Roberts urged the audience to spring to action. Now is an opportunity for citizens to hold their governments accountable, particularly as the opportunities to enact radical change become fewer and farther between.
“The kinds of solutions to our climate problems that we can put forward now in 2016 are really limited. We used to be able to bring out state regulations or strong international agreements,” Roberts stated, referencing the binding 1987 protocol to address the hole in the ozone, as well as the extra decade once allotted to developing countries like China and India to reduce their carbon emissions.
In light of the recent presidential primaries, perhaps it was fitting that the first question posed after the presentation concerned Donald Trump. The controversial Republican candidate has expressed the intention to back out of the Paris agreement should he assume office.
“I feel like I have to ask – what effect would Trump have on U.S. agreements with other countries?” a student asked.
“It’s hard to imagine Trump being very multilateral,” Roberts responded, his understatement prompting laughter from the crowd. “This problem needs a global solution, and the U.S. acting unilaterally is not a good approach. A lot is on the line.”
The moral of the story? Elections matter – and the full implications of the Paris talks will continue to come to light as countries choose whether or not to opt into these national pledges.
(01/28/16 12:48am)
Last Thursday, Jan. 21, above the faint hustle and bustle of Crossroads Café, students, faculty and staff took the stage to take part in a night of poetry and spoken word performances. Organized by MOSAIC, Middlebury’s Interfaith Programming Board, and co-sponsored by the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, the one-hour event centered on the theme of gratitude. Attendees, who floated in and out of the space throughout the evening, were asked to bring a non-perishable food items for donation to the HOPE Food Pantry.
MOSAIC was founded last year by Eli Susman ’18.5, Alex Freedman ’18 and Mariam Khan ’16.5, who met at a religious life leader retreat hosted by the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life during spring break. The following summer, the three went on a trip, also sponsored by the Scott Center, to learn how to participate in interfaith dialogue and create events on college campuses that unify people from all religious and non-religious backgrounds. This past fall, MOSAIC celebrated its launch with an Atwater dinner, featuring Laurie Patton as a keynote speaker. The current board members – Henry Burnett ’18.5, Mariam Khan and Alex Freedman – are looking to gain recognition as an official student organization in the near future.
Thursday’s poetry night, dubbed “GRAT-I-TUDE,” was MOSAIC’s second public event. Burnett emphasized the importance of the theme in his opening remarks to the audience.
“Gratitude is not just to the benefit of the person feeling grateful,” he stated. “For instance, I think I tend to smile at people when I am having a good day. There might be someone that I pass who is having a very difficult day for some reason. I can’t see how they’re feeling on the inside. But when I practice gratitude in my own life and I smile at that person, maybe I remind them that not everything in the world is a dark storm. As we raise our own gratitude, we are able to propagate that through the campus in a ripple effect.”
The program included Director of Parton Counseling Ximena Mejia, Writer-in-Residence Julia Alvarez, David Dennis ’18, Hamza Kiyani ’17, Executive Director of College Mental Health Services Gary Margolis, Laurie Jordan, Izzy Cass ’19, Hasher Nisar ’16.5, Professor of American Literature Brett Millier, Associate Chaplain Rabbi Ira Schiffer, Maryam Mahboob ’18, Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Orian Zakai, and Bilal Khan ’18. The final act featured a poem written by President Laurie Patton, who was unable to attend but submitted a piece to be read aloud.
From “Help, Wow, Thanks: The Original Prayer” to “Flat: Sentences from the Prefaces of Fourteen Science Books,” the thirteen performances of the evening reflected a wide array of beliefs, practices and worldviews. One by one, students, faculty and staff recited such sentiments as, “I am thankful for the mess to clean up after a party because it means I have been surrounded by friends,” “There are a million invisible muscles I never took the time to thank” and “Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will sink deep into your life.”
Mejia and Alvarez collaborated in their presentation of “Gracias a la Vida,” with one reading the song aloud in English while the other recited the Spanish version. Often considered the Bob Dylan of Latin America, Chilean composer Violeta Parra originally wrote the song as a suicide note.
“Thanks to life, which has given me so much,” Mejia read at the end. “It gave me laughter and it gave me tears/With them I distinguish happiness from pain.”
Despite the serious nature of many of the presented works, the evening still gave way to a few moments of humor. Before presenting the two versions of his poem, Khan joked that he was not sure if his translation was entirely accurate, as he had hastily jotted it down on a paper fifteen minutes prior.
“I will do the translation first and then the English version. I will not mix the two, because that is sinful,” he added, making a jab at a previous student presenter’s decision to switch to the Indonesian translation after each English line.
Other highlights from GRAT-I-TUDE included a piece about an overnight bus ride from rural Nova Scotia to Boston in the 1940s and Patton’s Hebrew poem, “When You Go Forth.” Freedman read the work aloud to close the evening, beginning with the biblical verse, “When you reap your harvest in the field, you shall not go back to catch it.”
Another memorable moment came from Cass’s recitation of “Flat: Sentences from the Prefaces of Fourteen Science Books”: “However, Chapter 7 was written in a relatively self-contained fashion, so the serious student may skip Chapter 6 and delve directly into the theory,” one line read, prompting chuckles from the audience.
The purpose of the event was to play on a commonality amongst all religious traditions: gratitude. Likewise, the fall Atwater dinner was inspired by the universality of food as a socialization tool across cultures. MOSAIC is intentional in its programming, as it strives to attract not only people across all religions, but also those without faith backgrounds. The organization is actively looking for new members.
“The sound of interfaith can sound exclusive to people who come from a non-faith background,” Burnett stated. “In reality, interfaith means all faith and non-faith identities.”