8 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(11/01/18 9:52am)
Hannah: My sophomore year at Middlebury, I was sitting in Proctor thinking about the 2012 election. Growing up in Virginia, I had been involved in campaigns throughout high school, including the Obama campaign in 2008, but was involved in climate organizing in college and was feeling disillusioned by the political process and its ability to truly impact the things I cared about, like climate change. Then one of my friends said, “You know, none of the things you care about will pass if Mitt Romney is president. You have to fight for a candidate like Obama who we can push to be better on our issues.” And that principle has really stuck with me. I took a semester off from college and moved to New Hampshire to organize for Obama and have continued fighting to elect candidates we can push and then pushing them to be better ever since.
Teddy: The first door I ever knocked on was because of Hannah. She wrangled some funding to bring a group of students to Derry, New Hampshire, where she organized in 2012. She filled up a van, far too early on a Saturday morning and we knocked on doors three days before Election Day in a 35 degree “wintery mix.” All signs pointed towards a bad experience — instead, it was a ton of fun, made a difference and changed the trajectory of my life.
Hannah: Through these experiences with student organizing, we realized how powerful young people are when we mobilize and turn out. After college we started working for NextGen in New Hampshire turning out young people to vote in the presidential primary. We both worked for several campaigns since then before coming back to NextGen to turn out the #youthvote in the midterms this year, using the skills and building off of the relationships we had developed organizing on campus at Middlebury.
Teddy: Young people make up a third of the electorate, but because we vote at only half the rate of older Americans, politicians ignore our needs. If we all turned out to vote on Nov. 6, politicians would have to listen to us, and we would be able to hold them accountable. The last two years have been terrible, as so many communities are under attack. We need to vote on Tuesday (and volunteer to turn out other voters) to ensure our leaders listen to us and build the future we deserve.
Editor’s note: Hannah Bristol ’14.5 is national organizing director for NextGen America, and Teddy Smyth ’15 is NextGen America’s New Hampshire state director.
(01/22/15 1:12am)
At Middlebury, we claim to prioritize balance. Students here are not only students, but also actors, journalists, artists, unicyclists, and of course, athletes. But not all of these traits are created equal, both in the admissions process and on the Atwater dance floor.
The divide between NARPs and athletes is apparent from orientation. Athletes are juggling practice with mandatory orientation events, leaving them unable to fully commit to either. In the meantime, the NARPs are hunting for their own community, building friendships around any other shared interest.
The media this fall was full of stories of athletic privilege, from the Ray Rice scandal to the horrifying tales coming out of Florida State. At Middlebury, it is easy to look down from our mountain and pretend these cultural influences don’t affect us. We are a DIII school; we hold our athletes to the same academic standards as the rest of our student body. But athletic privilege is still at play on our campus. This piece is less a reflection of the athletes as individuals, and more a matter of the culture we create surrounding athletics, both as an institution and a society, providing behavioral signaling and direct messaging that bolster athletic superiority.
First is the way financial resources are allocated. For all other student activities, student leaders apply for a budget. This money comes from the student activities fee, a separate line item that is explicitly stated in our tuition bill. Other students judge the value that the club offers the student body and allocates funding as they see fit. For athletics, this is different. Teams are given budgets through the athletics department, which all of our tuitions fund, but from which only some of us benefit. This provides state of the art facilities, coaching staff, travel, uniforms, etc. to athletes, but these students rarely need to prove their worth.
We claim to support athletics because of the community they foster, which increases quality of life for the students involved and leads to greater alumni giving after graduation. But club teams, like Rugby and Crew, apply for budgets with the Finance Committee the same way the Campus does, or the Fly Fishing Club, and still manage to create an equally tight knit community. This puts an inequitable institutional priority on the extracurricular activities of some over others. While some clubs fight tooth and nail to get money from the finance committee, athletes sail through year after year with bloated budgets and only the occasional telethon to sponsor their break training trips. In exchange, they are given staff resources that other clubs could never have, with dedicated people on payroll to support them.
We propose sports teams apply for budgets with the rest of student activities. At the end of the day, though, sports are no different — they are very important to the participants, but no more important than anything else. This doesn’t mean that these sports shouldn’t be funded at their current level, but just that they should be considered of equal value as the myriad other activities we provide. This is about the message we send to our athletes from day one.
Which brings us to our second point. We are a DIII school. Very few, if any, of our current athletes will ever seriously play their sport again after college. And yet for these four years, they are disproportionately valorized and require a tremendous time commitment. Students get tremendous enjoyment out of their sport. They have learned teamwork and leadership, made their best friends and love their varsity Middlebury experience. But let’s be honest. You can reap these benefits without dedicating most of your time to your sport. Games are given priority to class. Practice is placed above all other commitments. But nothing else in our time here is given that kind of premium. If other students want to miss class for an extracurricular commitment, they must explain themselves to their professor or just take the unexcused absence. Athletes are given an implicit pass because their professors know the ropes.
Moreover, we have people who are incredible athletes in biking, snowboarding, and a host of other non-college sponsored sports, proving that institutional support is not imperative for athletic success. We also have students who go onto to do incredible things with the skills they learn from their non-athletic extracurriculars. Some students start businesses, or volunteer or learn other valuable lessons that are honestly more applicable to the job market than the ability to chase a ball. Yet these skills are not given the same premium. Athletes also lose in this system, for they often do not have as much time to invest in other activities about which they are passionate and feel peer-pressure to stick with their teams.
While the time commitment is a problem throughout Division III sports, this is an opportunity for Middlebury to be a leader, even if we take a hit in the standings. We should further limit sports practices and hours on the road for our student-athletes, which would allow them to engage with other parts of the community by making new friends or trying a new club. Both the broader community and the athletes would benefit.
This discrepancy in how we value different skill-sets is evident especially in the admissions process. While coaches are given a voice and athletes are assigned extra points, professors are not given a seat at the table when an incredible writer submits his application or when a young scientist applies with a slew of awards under her belt. Certainly, other extracurriculars also come into play, but shouldn’t athletics be in the same category and with the same emphasis? How is it fair that an athlete can know ahead of time that they will probably be accepted while a poet is left biting their nails waiting for letters to go live at 8 a.m.?
We call on the Middlebury community to revisit the premium we give athletics on this campus. We are paying into a system that fetishizes athletics at all levels, from parents who put too much pressure on their kids in Little League to the fans who romanticize professional sports players. Society lets athletes feel like they run the show — it’s the most classic high school rom-com plot line. But we should be leaders in pushing us into a world where the kid who loves chemistry is just as celebrated as the kid who loves hockey. We should value all skill-sets and passions equally and see how the effects resonate. It could improve the body image problem that is often discussed. It could lead to a more inclusive party scene. Who knows?
But we must be the first to take the plunge, to rethink the relationship between athletics and academics, and not use alumni donations as a cop-out, because people give to schools when they love the community, not because the sports teams win. We need a cultural shift, and that will take time, but no change happens without a leader, so put us in coach. We’re ready to play.
Hannah Bristol '14.5 is from Falls Church, Va. and Isaac Baker '14.5 is from Shelborne Falls, Mass.
(12/03/14 11:10pm)
[video width="480" height="270" mp4="http://middleburycampus.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/4-Romance-Products-All-MiddKids-Need-Mobile.mp4"][/video]
As you walk through the pink saloon-style doors with “And things that buzz in the night” written overhead, you immediately find a display of colorful things that buzz in the night, unpackaged for you to try, and a wall of pleasure products, ranging from lube to vibrators to everything in between.
“Unless I’m missing something, I am Vermont’s first women-centric sex positive store,” Kris Lawson, the owner of Curve Appeal, a romance boutique on Main Street that opened this past July. “Every other store I’ve been to in the state doesn’t do any of this at all.”
Lawson began her career 10 years ago after seeing Katie Couric attend a party on the Today Show.
“I almost dropped my child. I just thought, ‘wow, Katie Couric. If she can do this, I can totally do this,’” Lawson said.
She hit the ground running two weeks later, travelling across the region for pleasure parties, eventually growing to a team of 110 trained party consultants. As she continued to host parties, she built up a loyal customer base, many of whom recommended she open a store so they could bring their friends or their partners. When a vacancy opened up in downtown Middlebury, her neighbors, the owners of Frog Alley Tattoo, called her and told her they were looking for someone to move in next door quickly. Lawson took the plunge.
“It wasn’t a big planned out thing. It was in the back of my mind and all the sudden, it just hit,” she said.
Lawson cashed in her 401k, started the build out and decorating and bought all the products before opening this summer. She styled her shop after other boutiques, aiming to make a store where people, particularly women of all sexualities, felt comfortable. In that vein, she strays from the graphic package and porn star brands that so often dominate sex shops.
“I want something where women could come in,” she said. “I didn’t want to have names like ‘the bend-me-over buttplug.’ One of the men who came back here said, ‘this ain’t no sex boutique’, and I said ‘thank you very much!’ Because that’s exactly what I was going for. I want to reach everybody.”
She has found her best-sellers vary with the demographic, with her clientele ranging from older Vermonters to students at the College, who often come for an overview of toys and other offerings.
“It’s tough for me to grasp that all kids are being taught is don’t have sex, if you do, and you really have to, use a condom, and that’s it. End of story,” she said. “I would really love if every single woman was just empowered.”
She sees a lot of women focused on the mens’ pleasure without taking care of their own, especially younger students with less experience and women in heterosexual relationships.
“I’ve met too many women over the years of all education and all backgrounds who say ‘it’s ok, it doesn’t hurt too much and sometimes we even use lube, and that’s really a lot better.’ But the missing piece is always her pleasure, and that drives me crazy.”
The front room of Curve Appeal is lingerie, with the sex toys in a more private back room. The lingerie section caters to women of all sizes. After hearing that there were not good lingerie stores for women larger than a size 12 or 14, relegating women who needed larger sizes to online shopping, Lawson decided to carry up to size 6x.
“My first sale was a 300ish pound woman who bought a corset in a size 6x, so I felt pretty justified there,” said Lawson.
This setup serves a dual function: privacy for her customers and appeasing Middlebury residents who oppose a sex shop on Main Street. She wanted to shelter people who walked in accidentally or with a child, as well as allow her customers who are shy to warm up by looking at bras before mustering the courage to walk through the swinging doors.
“I heard the same thing over and over again: no drugs, no porn, no pipes,” Lawson said. “These are big things to Middlebury, and I don’t agree with any of those, so that worked out perfect.”
Nevertheless, the store has been met with some opposition.
“The first few months of being an open store is that filtering point where people come in and give you their two cents, and that was really hard because I wasn’t prepared for people to say that out loud,” said Lawson. “Vermont is very frightened of change. People here generally want to know what this is all about before they come in, so they’re waiting for their friends.”
But Lawson’s bubbly personality makes clients immediately comfortable, despite any initial reservations.
“I’m just one of those screaming extroverts that people tell all their stuff to at hello,” she said.
She found these confessions especially skyrocketed once she started having a private order room at her parties. While originally she wanted the order room to keep all the money straight, she found that it opened the floodgates for people’s confessions.
“I think it speaks to the trust, but moreover they don’t have anyone else to talk to. This area, especially this county, is extremely small and very sheltered, so you meet people at parties who all have the same last name. They’re not going to stand up and say ‘here’s what’s going on with my husband’ because their husband is her brother, her brother, her son, her grandson, and it’s horrifying for them,” she said.
This trust has led to a loyal customer base, which, after 10 years doing parties in the area, has helped her store get off the ground.
“Once people tell you their sex abuse stories or their anal sex problems or this one time their husband tried to do this, they’re yours forever,” she said.
Carrying the weight of other people’s sex lives, however, can be a heavy burden for Lawson, particularly with stories of sexual abuse. At first, Lawson had no training to deal with these confessions, so she had to compile a resource sheet and find her own counselor to help her process other people’s stories.
“I’d go home at night and be crying on the way home,” she said. “I needed to learn some coping stuff to get rid of that and say that’s their experience, not mine, and tomorrow we’ll meet a whole bunch of new people.”
She particularly relies on mantras and hand washing to help her compartmentalize other people’s stories and not bring them into her personal life.
For anyone who is worried about running into Lawson after telling her secrets about your sex life, fear not.
“This is the whitest, most homogenous state you’ve ever lived in. It’s such a sea of faces at this point” she said, and she is committed to confidentiality.
“Others are much more worried about it than I am,” she said. “I really don’t care that you have your six children, and you just got your first toy. We all know you’re having sex, honey, you have six kids. Secret’s out.”
Lawson also finds herwself teaching men who come into her shop about female pleasure.
“I like the education piece a lot,” she said. “I like that we can joke around about it because it makes people feel a lot more comfortable than if people come at them in a serious or studious way.”
Her big piece of advice for straight men? “The average amount of foreplay a woman needs is 20 to 22 minutes,” she said. “It’s fantastic if her vagina’s wet at hello, but that’s not really saying she’s ready to go. She should be yelling put it in if she’s ready to go.”
A Japanese major in college, Lawson never could have imagined this would be where she ended up.
“This turns out to be what I’m way more passionate about. Although Japanese is a great language, it doesn’t hold a candle to orgasms or keeping couples together.”
Curve Appeal is located at 52 Main Street below Clementine’s and is open 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Lawson offers a five percent “MiddKid” discount to students.
(05/08/14 12:30am)
Sexual assault on college campuses made national news last week when Tufts University was found noncompliant with Title IX for mishandling complaints of sexual assault. In the wake of this finding, the Department of Education released a list of the 55 schools currently under investigation for such violations, including Amherst College, Harvard University and Dartmouth University.
Title IX bans gender discrimination on campuses and, along with the Cleary Act and the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SaVE) Act, dictates federal guidelines for college response to sexual assault. In the wake of a Dear Colleague Letter released by the Office of Civil Rights on April 4, 2011, colleges have been revising their sexual assault response policies to meet such regulations to respond promptly and effectively to sexual violence. The guidelines, however, are murky, and in recent weeks, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has been working to clarify what is expected of colleges.
“A lot of folks are doing their best and trying to follow the spirit of the law, but we don’t have a lot of guidance on Title IX, and we only find out what not to do when another school does that thing and gets called on it,” said Director of Health and Wellness Barbara McCall.
While a school’s appearance on the list does not mean they are not compliant, Tufts student John Kelly ’15 has seen the failures of college sexual assault policies and doubts the compliance of many schools. Kelly is the Special Projects and Events Coordinator for “Know Your IX,” a campaign that aims to educate students about their rights under Title IX.
“I’ve worked with students from about a dozen of the 55 schools at least [through “Know Your IX”], and I would not be surprised in the slightest if all of the schools I’m working with are found out of compliance as well,” he said. “In fact, I would be pretty surprised if they were found in compliance.”
At Tufts, student outrage led to a protest outside an administrative building last Thursday, May 1, when students held a rally and encircled a building in which 12 students, including Kelly and Olivia Carle ’17, met with administrators to negotiate their reentry into the Title IX voluntary resolution.
“The police officers watching over us said we hadn’t had something this big since the ’80s,” said Carle. “Someone said the protestors could ring around the administrative building three times.”
As a result of these negotiations, Tufts acknowledged the findings of non-compliance and agreed to hire a Response and Resource Coordinator. Administrators will continue to discuss the Title IX findings with the OCR in Washington, D.C. this week.
“Tufts has not looked good recently, and I think this is serving as a warning to other schools to take sexual assault seriously, to take our students seriously, and that there are real impacts when they find schools out of compliance,” said Kelly.
Kelly and Carle both think this should serve as a wake up call for other colleges.
“The idea of waiting for the government to find you compliant is such a backwards way of looking, and if a school hasn’t had that big moment yet, now is the time to really take the bull by the horns and make changes so it doesn’t come to that,” said Kelly.
“For me, this kind of noncompliance with Title IX is almost an epidemic among colleges,” said Carle. “Do I think that there’s a long way to go? I think we both [Kelly and she] do… but I think there might be more organization and more solidarity between students trying to fight this non-compliance with Title IX.”
For Middlebury, which is not under investigation, the media buzz around sexual assault provides an opportunity for reflection, although many of the College’s policies are already leading the field. One noteworthy recognition of the College’s commitment to sexual violence prevention was a $272,528 grant from the Department of Justice received this fall.
“Middlebury has been active in national conversations about best practices and legislative initiatives in this area for many years,” wrote Human Relations Officer Sue Ritter and Associate Dean for Judicial Affairs and Student Life Karen Guttentag in an email. “While we are still reviewing the fine points of the White House Task Force report, the recommendations are consistent with many of our current practices as well as the initiatives that we are pursuing with the assistance of the Office of Violence Against Women grant.”
This consistency is due to a history of thoughtful engagement on sexual assault in the administration. Even before some of the existing guidelines were in place, the College was reviewing its policy. The College’s Sexual Misconduct Policy, which was introduced in the fall of 2011, has been recognized as a model for others by national experts in the field.
“I’m really new to the community — this is only my first year — but one of the things that drew me to the community was the really thoughtful approach that the College has taken on sexual assault,” said McCall. “The institution was really working on making sure our policies and our procedures reflected best practices before national mandates started coming down the pipeline.”
A hallmark of this system is our judicial process, which uses the single investigator model, called “promising” by the White House Task Force, to eliminate in-person hearings and ensure that students do not need to tell their story more than once and to multiple people with the hope of alleviating some of the stress of this process.
“While we continue to fine-tune our policy each year, we feel confident that our approach is the most fair, compassionate and effective way for us to respond to sexual misconduct complaints,” wrote Ritter and Guttentag.
However, Sarah Boyd ’14, an organizer with It Happens Here (IHH) has qualms with the existing system.
“The investigators have already made up their minds when they present the situation, and their job is to investigate and to find the facts, but in that way, you don’t have someone rooting for both people,” she said. “That’s something that’s really lost in our system.”
But other students speak positively of this system, including Sexual Assault Oversight Committee (SAOC) chair Jordan McKinley ’14.
“I think our community judicial board and our policies are very fair,” said McKinley. “It makes an issue that is always complicated and very messy a little more cut and dry when you can say, ‘this didn’t turn out the way I wanted, but I see why because of the policy.’”
“Of course there still are a lot of problems where when you think about how many stories are submitted to IHH and how few of those go through the judicial process,” said Katie Preston ’17, a member of IHH and SAOC. “It’s not a perfect system, but Middlebury is working very hard to be there.”
One place the College could improve, as suggested by students interviewed by the Campus, is programming during first-year orientation. McCall will be working with MiddSafe advocates over the summer to develop programming about sexual assault prevention, including bystander intervention and defining consent, as well as optional programming about sexual education for the incoming first-year class.
“We plan on upping the ante on a lot of awareness in the next year,” said Jackie Voluz ’14, a MiddSafe advocate. “We’re being compliant for sure… but there’s always room for improvement and constant consideration of survivor’s needs.”
(04/16/14 4:01pm)
I was eating breakfast outside Proctor on Sunday when I got a phone call from one of my friends.
“I’m making calls for the Senior Fund, and you’re on my list of people who haven’t donated. The money goes to a scholarship fund, and if 68 percent of the class doesn’t donate, we won’t have much money for Senior Week.”
Putting aside the fact that I’m not even graduating until next February, a couple things here rub me the wrong way:
1. The fixation on percentages. I know there’s evidence that shows that if people start giving money right when they graduate, they are more likely to give money when they are older and have real sums of money to give. And I know more kids give money to their college at Amherst and Williams. And I know a high percentage of students giving back reflects where we stand in the U.S. News and World Report rankings (which merits its own oped about what goes into that formula). But if you don’t care about how much we give, just the percentage, and you’re raising money for a scholarship fund, this seems misguided. Middlebury costs almost $60k a year. Percentages alone just aren’t going to get us there. Say we all give $5 and say our class has 700 kids, then we’ve raised $3,500. We can pay for 5 percent of one student’s tuition for one year. The other goal is far less publicized: raising $10,000 for this scholarship fund. That number starts to actually put a dent in the Middlebury price tag, though still not a huge one. The percentage strategy is they are employing is all so that we can say “more than two-thirds of our senior class gave money this year” and so maybe our alumni giving will give us that extra boost from number four to duking it out at the top with Amherst and Williams.
2. The scholarships ask. Now I definitely want all money I would theoretically give to go to financial aid, and I’m glad that’s what we voted on supporting, but our ask does not reflect what we’re trying to do. See the math breakdown in point one. While we’re on it, in March, all the seniors received an email that said if 1,800 seniors and alumni donated, a board member would donate $100,000 to financial aid. Subject line: “It’s all or nothing.” That means that almost two years of Middlebury for a student who couldn’t otherwise come here is contingent on other alumni giving money. Why are we hedging bets on someone’s ability to afford college? If you have that much money and you plan on giving it to Middlebury, don’t hold it hostage until 1,800 others pay. Just give the money you want and have to give.
3. The Senior Week thing. So we spent more of our budget than planned on 100 days because we had to hire more security because so many people were hurt at 200 days. All good. I don’t need a cruise on Dumore to feel like I’m graduating from college. What bugs me here is using senior week as a pawn to get people to give to that magic “more than two-thirds.” It’s sensationalizing, especially since donating doesn’t even mean we have access to more money for Senior Week. It just means we can begin fundraising other money. The money being raised, thankfully, goes to a better cause than our pre-grad drinking, but incorporating this ask is pretty ridiculous. And the pint glasses we received for donating $20.14 before April 1? Also ridiculous. Those glasses probably cost almost as much to custom order as the amount we donate to get one. And what’s even more sad is that this works. I’ve heard that donations have jumped since Senior Week was worked into the ask. If we hit 68 percent, it does not reflect the “school spirit” the U.S. News and World Reports thinks alumni giving shows. It just shows how easy we are to bribe.
4. But what bothers me most is that giving to Middlebury is a personal choice. Maybe I don’t want to give because we haven’t divested. Maybe I’m directing my money to a nonprofit or institution that doesn’t have nearly the resources we have. Maybe money is tight because I’m about to graduate and the job market is tough. Maybe I do plan to give money to Middlebury and just haven’t gotten around to it. But these fundraising tactics lose sight of the complexity and personal decision that is philanthropy. Instead, this strategy of fundraising is manipulative and distorts the reasons we should be giving money. While it still goes to a good cause, the intentions are off. If I give money to Middlebury, it’s not for a pint glass that will soon break or an open bar that we’ll all promptly forget. It’s because of the things I’ve loved here and the opportunities I’ve had. It’s because I want others to have the same experiences. It’s because of everything I think Middlebury has to offer. And as we get ready to graduate, we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
Artwork by AMR THAMEEN
(04/16/14 3:56pm)
As editors of the Campus, we strive to make this newspaper accessible to and representative of the student body. We strive to encompass all voices on campus and give voices to those who might otherwise feel marginalized. This has been our goal from the start — just the opposite from what beyond the green wrote about the Campus in last week’s issue, saying “we are motivated to create beyond the green because we feel marginalized and silenced by the mainstream platforms available, including the student newspaper, the Campus.”
Yet, we publish every oped that is submitted as long as it is not libelous, hearsay or vulgar. We respond to all emails when students have questions or submit news tips. We constantly push ourselves to include more perspectives and make this a representative voice of student body.
We see beyond the green as filling a niche by giving a voice and a gathering space for the perspectives that are often marginalized and are glad they are writing a column in our pages to highlight these perspectives. However, we question the way they framed this need in their oped, “A Collective of Middlebury Voices.”
Yes, the Opinions section is not representative of the spectrum of opinions that exist on this campus, but we have made a conscious effort to reach out to a large swath of people all year, sitting down to lunch and chatting about how we think their voices are important and need to be reflected in these pages. Even when people do not want to submit regular columns, we have worked with them to draft opeds and let their voices be heard. While these efforts have not always panned out, we have been constantly engaging with all who want to engage with us. We also acknowledge the fact that the editorial board is not currently representative of the diversity of backgrounds and experiences here at the College. It is a problem that is on every one of our editors’ minds. In fact, we just sent out our all school email encouraging anyone to apply for editor positions for the coming year. This is an open opportunity and we hope that people who believe that the Campus is not representing their views to apply and help broaden perspectives on the board.
Given the effort we are putting in to create a much more nuanced and representative Editorial Board and Opinions section, this is a two-way street, and while we have tried to reach out, we have not seen the same engagement back. We are being accused of ignoring a spectrum of politics, yet one of the first attempts at expressing these politics in the Campus was in this oped. What we want in our paper and what beyond the green wants for this campus is not that different. We want people to feel comfortable expressing themselves. We want open and inclusive dialogue. We want to be a catalyst for change.
beyond the green also wrote that our “politics are not transformative,” but all year, we have strived to write progressive and transformative editorials. From looking for ways to bring down the comprehensive fee and make the College more accessible to decrying the normalization of proctoring and giving recommendations to strengthen the honor code to asking It Happens Here to rethink its advertising because their strategy was triggering for some rape victims, we have fought to change this campus to be more accessible and safer for everyone here.
As a student newspaper, we are community journalism in its purest sense. We can only be as strong as people chose to engage with us. We only learn about events through word of mouth and can only publish the opinions that are submitted. We want to provide a safe space for discussion on issues plaguing this campus. As facilitators, we do not suppress any of the opinions we receive. If all is done right, the Campus should be a mirror reflecting what is happening on campus. If you do not like this image, you have no one to blame but yourself. Being proactive and not reactive requires taking the reins, not only by creating your own forum but also by engaging in existing ones. At the end of the day, we are one of the most widely read and distributed publications on campus and are able to touch a diverse group of people, from students and alumni to faculty and staff. We want your opinions, but we are not mind readers. We cannot reflect what you want to see unless you participate.
Artwork by JENA RITCHEY
(03/05/14 4:57pm)
What do you want to do when you graduate? Although I only have a year left, that question is quickly joining the list of things strangers ask you when you’ve just met them and they have nothing left to say. The answer is that I have no idea. When I think about how much I have changed every year since I arrived here, the prospect of thinking that far ahead seems laughable. No matter what I say to my parents’ friends or curious professors, even by tomorrow the answer will probably have changed.
But I’ve always believed that being passionate is half the battle. And I mean real passion, for I think we often confuse it with just anything you do. I mean the passion where you will go 110 percent even when you think you’ve reached your limit.
As most people who’ve met me quickly realized, I’m passionate about climate justice. So when the opportunity to travel to D.C. this weekend to protest the Keystone Pipeline arose, I and eleven other passionate students hopped on a bus and travelled ten hours to join 1200 other young people in front of the White House. Seven of us were arrested.
Now to many people I’ve talked to, this course of action seems silly. Why would you risk arrest? Aren’t you worried about finding a job? What would do your parents think? (For the record, my parents are the best and have been totally supportive, if a little taken aback.) Putting aside the fact that my arrest was the most privileged view of our criminal system one could get — it reminded me of the programs for parents to send their troubled kids to jail for a night to scare them straight — this was a risk worth taking, regardless of the career consequences or judgment of others. I want an employer who thinks it’s cool I was arrested for civil disobedience anyways, and the potential repercussions on my life are minute compared to the effects the construction of Keystone XL will have on frontline communities from Alberta to Houston and the climate impacts we will face for generations.
But too often, we get hung up on the conveyor belt consequences, the preconceived notion of what we are supposed to be doing as students at this college. How many times have you or your friends weighed a summer opportunity you are stoked about but is off the beaten path with a boring internship that may or may not lead to future employment but will at least be a resume booster? How many times have you not taken a class because you’re afraid it will be hard and god forbid you drop your GPA? How many times have you not joined a club because you were afraid it wouldn’t be seen as “cool”?
I too am guilty. The path we’ve been set on is narrow, and deviating is scary. But not doing what you love is even scarier. With a constant barrage of metrics, from grades to standardized tests, we’re constantly subject to the hierarchy of what society decides is valuable. Some of us succeed in this — our goals align with the goals set out for us — but for many, this push and pull gnaws away as you grapple with a future of financial insecurity or societal questioning.
But you never know what will happen when you take a risk and let your passion guide you. And if I were an employer, I would hire the passionate and enthusiastic kid with a few bumps on the road than the kid with the immaculate record (not limited to criminal records). Because the vulnerability of doing what you love teaches lessons that will last far longer than that Calc class you took. Because that kid knows what it means to fail and how to recover from it.
Maybe my arrest will haunt me later, but for now, I felt the strongest sense of community among strangers that I ever have and met incredible and inspiring young activists. I’m exhausted, my head is cloudy, I’m behind in everything, and I’ve never been more content. And I wouldn’t trade this feeling for the world.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(10/03/13 12:24am)
How do we use the skills and opportunities we have to make the world a better place? Middlebury students revisit this question time and time again, from conversations in the dining hall to the “Careers for the Common Good” blog from the EIA. Hudson Cavanaugh ’14 has explored this question over the past two weeks in his column, “Warm Glow,” but his simplification of this question into pure economic terms neglects some important elements of this discussion.
The world in which we live is inherently complex and full of inequalities. Some work to better this world saves lives directly, like the expansion of medical care, and some indirectly, like working to mitigate the impacts of climate change. In the long-run, climate change will lead to extreme weather events, crop failure, and rising sea levels that will cost many lives and threaten many more, but in the short term, medical care has a greater impact.
Thus, while donations with the goal of immediate lives saved are undoubtedly important, working towards a more equitable and sustainable world requires both short and long-term investments. The benefits of these investments are difficult to measure, for they operate on a longer time frame and are therefore discounted; however, they are no less important.
Moreover, individual passions are indispensable in creating a long-term model for change. We often talk about exploring our passions, acknowledging that this love allows us to work harder than otherwise possible and sustain energy over long periods of time.
As Michelle Obama often said on the 2012 campaign trail, “real change is slow.” Perhaps the hardest lesson I’ve learned from engaging in climate activism is that real change is also exhausting. Passion spurns the determination that allows me to keep working. know I wouldn’t be able to put as much into investment banking as I can into political and environmental organizing because I wouldn’t feel the same gratification.
Cavanaugh addresses the idea of marginal utility of job decisions and accounts for morality; however, there are many nuances in this argument. While his example, Jennifer, who pushes JP Morgan toward social responsibility, may be working to push an unjust institution into socially responsible practices, her impact could still be overrun by what I would consider a net negative impact from investment banks. The Koch brothers donate money to environmental organizations like the Nature Conservancy and to cancer research; however, they make their money in the oil, gas and chemical industries and use much of it to lobby for lax environmental regulations, leading to cancer-causing contamination. They definitely do not break even on damage from their industry, despite their philanthropic habits. For an individual like Jennifer, her influence only can extend so far. Creating the large scale, systematic change required to dismantle the oppressive system reinforced by her employer requires a much greater movement with both internal and external pressure.
We see this dichotomy on our own campus with divestment. Our College educates many students who go off and do good in the world, often in environmentally friendly fields. But these efforts are hindered by the fact that our endowment invests in fossil fuels, allowing these companies to further maximize their profits by exploiting our planet’s resources with little regard for the social cost of carbon. We are not morally exonerated from investing in fossil fuels because we have a strong program in environmental studies. Indeed, that program should serve as a strong reminder for why we must divest our endowment and put our money where our mouths are.
Even if everyone were to give money in the most short-term cost effective way, paying careful attention to the ethics of their employer as well as the ethics of the organizations to which they are donating, we still need people on the ground working tirelessly to distribute malaria nets or vaccinate children. Change requires time as well as money, and in many cases, time can be more difficult to give.
Just as we cannot value the life of an American over the life of anyone else, we cannot simply treat people as numbers and base decision solely on cost-effectiveness. What is the point of saving a life if you cannot provide other basic human rights and needs like access to a livable environment free from containments? We must work together to create a safer and healthier global community, and this is a multi-faceted project. We do not want to eradicate guinea worm only to find that we have raised the global temperature beyond a salvageable threshold. Working to increase gender equality and education opportunities may not specifically save a life, but it will increase economic opportunities and quality of life for many future generations and could save children who are not yet born.
So do what you love and incorporate social responsibility into all aspects of your life. In the long run, following your passions will sustain you far longer than working in an industry for the sake of opportunity cost and will allow you to maximize your total good. We need all pieces of the puzzle — both short and long-term goals, effective and fulfilling giving practices, and time and monetary donations. Creating lasting global change takes time and effort on all fronts, and there is no single solution. We can only do the most we can in a responsible and thoughtful way to comprehensively address the injustices that surround us both abroad and at home.