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(10/27/22 10:01am)
Founded by students in 2003, Middlebury College’s educational garden, the Knoll, has become an incredibly important center of climate justice, resiliency, education and community nourishment. The Knoll is a place where people flourish as much as food, where connection between the students and the wider community becomes reciprocal, and where learning, service and transformation take place daily. The Knoll’s 20th anniversary is in 2023, and in honor of this upcoming celebration and all that has become over the past 20 years we would like to share what we love about the Knoll.
(05/14/20 10:39am)
Two weeks ago, we witnessed the faculty vote to maintain the opt-in credit/no credit grading system for this semester. The vote proved that even in a time of crisis, Middlebury College continues to conduct itself in a neoliberal manner, emphasizing “financial-sustainability” over the well-being of its students, staff and community. Arguments surrounding graduate school requirements, individuals’ “right to choose” and sustained academic rigor exhausted themselves against a virtual student movement calling for empathy and equity — and won. What does that say about us? In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, this grading decision offers us a painfully poignant lense to examine who we — as a college, student body and community — are.
We do not wish to revive an old debate, but rather to contextualize its result in order to answer the question many students have been asking themselves: how did this happen?
We believe that Middlebury, by upholding an opt-in grading system this semester, has demonstrated that it is a business first and a college second, caring more about its reputation than its ability to educate. The story we tell ourselves — of a close-knit community striving for academic excellence together — has been supplanted by an incessant drive to progress as marketable individuals, rather than as an educated community.
Welcome to the neoliberal arts.
We are well aware that “neoliberalism” is a loaded word with more definitions than there are students at Middlebury.
For the purpose of our understanding, however, neoliberalism is an ideology – one with resulting policies and praxes – that reorders social interactions not around a polis, or a community, but around the market. When Margaret Thatcher said “there’s no such thing as society” she meant it literally; under neoliberal logic, there are only rational, individual actors.
It is difficult to imagine prioritizing community over the individual when we’ve been fed a culture of competition since we could stack toy rings on a pole or kick a soccer ball (or, for that matter, get into a college with an acceptance rate under 20%). So although it was disappointing to see our faculty and administration bow to the forces of competition and individuality, we should have expected it.
But the question we’ve been asking ourselves is “why?” In our capitalist economy, the dominant story of success includes attending graduate school and securing a high-paying job. These markers of “success” profoundly shape our education. Liberal arts schools like Middlebury tend to pride themselves on the diversity and interrelation of their disciplines, claiming to holistically educate students and create well-rounded individuals who are “good people” as well as good additions to the labor force.
Despite this, we opted for a grading system that aligns with the core priorities of neoliberalism and its narrative of success. By prioritizing letter grades, we have proven that we value competition over cooperation. By arguing that the current grading model affords every student freedom of choice, we have again overlooked the question of who is able to choose. This again disadvantages those in our community who are in situations where they have no choice, making it clear that we value the rights of the individual over those of the collective.
In this way, we perpetuate the inequalities within our community by continuing to privilege the privileged and disadvantage the disadvantaged. By choosing the option that maintains the status quo, we have chosen to continue preparing students to participate in, instead of resist, the system that is now falling apart around us.
It can seem like Middlebury is too small, and we are too powerless, to make any practical stabs at creating an education not beholden to neoliberal beliefs. However, we strongly believe that any choice to shift outside these narratives is a necessary step toward action. We had an opportunity to change our narrative, and unlike comparable institutions — Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth and Yale — we failed.
We do not want to trivialize the concerns expressed by our fellow students, nor imply that our faculty and administration have acted with anything but the best of intentions. We also want to recognize that spending these weeks online has proven to us over and again the aspects of community that supersede our hyper-individualized education — the daily acts of friendship, kindness and love that we are missing so often right now.
Yet it is in crises like these that communities must reimagine and renegotiate their underlying values and internalized narratives. As we do so, it is becoming clear that Middlebury is still stubbornly stuck in the ideology of neoliberal arts. We have the capacity to change, and the obligation to do so when members of our community are suffering.
We love Middlebury. As students who call this place home, we hope it can take this moment of crisis to change in powerful and lasting ways.
Connor Wertz is a member of the class of 2022. Hannah Laga Abram is a member of the class of 2023.
(04/09/20 9:59am)
Two weeks ago, Middlebury College joined thousands of other schools when it was forced to shut down on-campus operations due to the novel coronavirus. Suddenly, what seemed like an overseas crisis became our reality. Many of us were left without a safe home to return to as we packed up our lives indefinitely. Scrambling to say our goodbyes, we were gravely aware of our time lost at Middlebury and the difficult months ahead. Taking shelter across the country, we have helplessly watched this crisis disrupt our world while taking thousands of lives.
As we are writing this, the United States has the highest prevalence of Covid-19 in the world with 431,838 confirmed cases (likely a drastic underestimate due to a shortage of testing kits, healthcare disparities and asymptomatic carriers). We have seen mass layoffs disproportionately affecting low-wage workers, small businesses and at least 27.5 million uninsured Americans; nearly 40% of New Yorkers of New Yorkers are unable to pay rent and almost 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance. Government officials across the country have scrambled to take action. Seattle has enacted a rent moratorium, New York state temporarily waived foreclosures and Congress has approved a two trillion dollar economic stimulus package.
While this unprecedented resource mobilization to fight the coronavirus is certainly warranted, it is shocking compared to our inaction tackling the climate crisis. The economic restructuring and dramatic lifestyle changes we have seen in the past weeks prove the kind of large-scale action needed to address climate change has been possible this whole time. We were in a global crisis even before this pandemic. In the past year we witnessed large parts of California, the Amazon and Australia burn, and floods devastated the central United States, Brazil and Ecuador. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached 415 parts per million, far above scientifically accepted safe levels needed to maintain a livable planet. Globally, black, brown and low-income people are disproportionately impacted by toxic drinking water, industrial waste, and other forms of environmental degradation. And climate change promises a future of more pandemics, more fires, more floods and more frequent and devastating events of every kind. These crises will shut down our country (and the world) time and time again, just like Covid-19 has. Without a concerted effort, the fear, sadness and destabilization we are currently experiencing as a result of Covid-19 will define life for generations to come.
But we also cannot ignore that coronavirus is part of climate change; both are symptoms of the same capitalist system that values profit over lives. The U.S. government's response to the mounting economic crisis is to bail out airline companies and fossil fuel corporations instead of reaching out to those most vulnerable — especially undocumented and migrant workers whose needs and essential contributions are consistently overlooked. Whether it be our overwhelmed healthcare sector or the lack of supportive infrastructure for at-risk populations, this crisis has and continues to reveal the cruel inadequacies of our social and economic structures.
Right now, we have the opportunity to radically rebuild our country. And many are already trying: workers at Amazon and Instacart, for instance, are striking to demand just labor standards. General Electric employees are protesting to shift production to medical equipment. Tenants struggling to pay rent are threatening rent strikes. Politicians like Stacy Abrams are advocating for bailing out people who have been hit the hardest by the crisis, rather than large corporations. College students all around the world are building mutual aid networks to help classmates and community members facing sudden displacement. All around us, people are beginning to imagine and enact a world in which they want to live. And so as Covid-19 continues to take and change lives we have a choice: do we allow governments and corporations to profit off of the increased vulnerability of people and devastate our planet, or do we learn from this crisis and replace the broken systems that got us here? Please, choose consciously.
Sophie Chalfin-Jacobs ’22, Claire Contreras ’22.5, Divya Gudur ’21, Jaden Hill ’22, Hannah Laga Abram ’23, and Asa Skinder ’22.5 are all members of Middlebury Sunday Night Environmental Group.