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(11/27/16 10:39pm)
Several incidents of bias and hate rhetoric have been reported to administration following the Nov. 8 presidential election, two administrators confirmed to the Campus in an interview on Monday, Nov. 14.
The College’s Community Bias Response Team sent an initial email to students, faculty and staff on Nov. 10 that said “messages of intolerance are being written and spoken on campus since the election” without details of specific acts.
Katy Smith Abbott, dean of the College, and Miguel Fernandez, chief diversity officer, were the two members of the response team who confirmed the incidents.
Since that email, which did not specify what the messages said, rumors have circulated on campus as to the nature of the messages. Smith Abbott confirmed that one student returned to her dorm room to find “F**k Muslims #Trump2016” written on her door’s whiteboard. That student requested full anonymity when she reported the incident, which is the primary reason why the CBRT email was so vague.
“The bias response team addresses things to the community when it feels it’s needed,” Fernandez said. “In this case, some didn’t want to wait for the investigation, yet at the same time [felt] a need to get something out to say something happened. Because the individual did not want to be identified or have anything identify who it was — even location — that’s why the Community Bias Response Team wasn’t as specific as some people would have liked.”
Fernandez said he had heard frustrations from both students and faculty about the nature of the community email.
“The reason was predominantly to protect the student,” he said.
In addition to the episode on the student’s white board, the Hillel Jewish student group forwarded to its members an email from Rabbi Ira Schiffer on Tuesday, Nov. 15 after the discovery of a swastika on the door of the Havurah Jewish congregation in the town of Middlebury.
Schiffer called on students to support one another and not stand by if they witness acts of hate.
“We all need to be concerned and aware that when one minority group is targeted in America, all minority groups are vulnerable, and we need to stand together in mutual support and solidarity,” he said in the email. “Please stand up against bigotry and hate whenever and wherever you see it.”
Smith Abbott said other incidents have been reported to administration in addition to the white board message, however “some of them are so recent that I can’t even comment on them. I hesitate to comment before things are even verified,” she said.
She added that although the administration aims to treat every incident report quickly and seriously, certain institutional procedures can prevent the College from notifying the community right away when bias or hate speech occur on campus.
“If students are talking about something but none of us have a report of it, either through a Commons Dean or a Residential Life staff member or something, (a) we can’t act on it, and (b) we don’t have any accurate assessment of whether that particular incident has occurred in the way it’s being described. That doesn’t mean that we don’t take it very seriously,” she said.
Considering the institutional requirements the College faces when addressing reports of bias, Smith Abbott, like Schiffer, called on students to take responsibility for the campus and address hate or bias when they see it happen.
“I think the administration has an important role to play when students bring serious, distressing complaints to us. And we will take action in the appropriate way given whatever the complaint might be,” Smith Abbott said.
She added: “I feel like we’re also in a moment where students have a unique ability and the most impact in terms of determining what the campus ethos is going to feel like, how all students are going to be made to feel as though they are safe here, that their voice matters here, that they belong here. I hope that we can push on that ownership in responsibility as much as we’re pushing on the administration.”
(03/23/16 8:33pm)
Students such as Joey Button ’18 and Leo McElroy ’18 demonstrate just how creative Middkids can be. Over the past several months, the two sophomores have worked tirelessly to establish a Middlebury “Makerspace,” a design lab-type space where students can realize projects with power tools on campus. Despite several setbacks, including a proposal denial by the College’s Fund for Innovation, Button and McElroy continue to champion a Makerspace and receive growing support.
“A friend and I have spent a portion of our free time building a laser sensor system that tracks and updates how crowded the dining halls are, so students can make more informed decisions about how to spend time and avoid meal rushes,” McElroy said. “What’s made the project hard is that it’s extremely difficult to get access to tools. There is no open, accessible and welcoming space on campus where one can make something. So last fall some friends and I set about to change this.”
“I realized opening up some of the shops [such as the ceramics studio] will only give people who know what they’re doing the opportunity to make. That doesn’t help many people. We need an open, communal space,” he added. “Recently, Middlebury’s reputation as an innovative institution has grown more prominent. However, we’re still missing an essential piece of the puzzle. A Makerspace would equip the Middlebury population with the tools of creation – tools for metalworking, woodworking, fabric working, electronic integration and digital fabrication.”
Vice President for Academic Development and Professor of American Studies Tim Spears helped consider the proposal when it came before the Fund for Innovation.
“The proposal was turned down, not because the project was ‘too entrepreneurial,’” he said in an email, “but because the Fund Advisory Board saw the proposal as a request for infrastructure that the College as a whole – not the Board – needed to engage. The proposals that we’ve funded through the FFI have tended to be for innovative projects, not spaces or equipment that support such projects.”
Although the Board denied the proposal, Spears said he has encouraged Button and McElroy to keep working to establish a makerspace.
“I believe the College has a great need for a space like the one Joey and Leo have proposed. Students currently have no place to go on campus to build a bookshelf, weld a piece of machinery or work with high-tech equipment, like a 3-D printer,” Spears added.
Even with the support of administrators such as Spears, the two students face numerous challenges before they can make the Makerspace a reality.
“We’ve gotten a lot of support, but we haven’t found that person who can say, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’ I’m not sure that exists in a single person,” McElroy said. “It takes a lot of us saying, ‘This is something we want and this is something we’re willing to work for.’”
“Assuming we did move forward with such a project – and we do not currently have a plan to do so – there are practical elements we would have to consider,” Spears added. “What building it would go in, what sort of renovations would be necessary to support it, HVAC, etc. and how it would be staffed – there are safety issues to keep in mind.”
No matter what obstacles arise, Button and McElroy will keep fighting for a Makerspace on campus.
“We know this is something that Middlebury can do. It’s something most people would really like and that many people would use, so that makes us think it’s something Middlebury should do,” McElroy said.
(03/09/16 10:54pm)
Christian students, faculty, staff and alumni gathered on March 5 in Axinn 229 to discuss how to find communities of faith and meaningful work after graduation. The all-day workshop, titled “Living Faith: Christian Leadership on Campus and Beyond,” featured a morning prayer and panel discussions with alumni who graduated as early as the Class of 2005.
For Gilbert Kipkorir ’16, the weekend provided an invaluable forum to network and meet alumni several steps ahead of him on lives driven by faith in God.
“If my experience this weekend is anything to go by, such events are definitely vital,” Kipkori said. “Not only was this event encouraging to me, but it also gave me a picture of what life might look like after graduation. Being a senior, this could not have come at a better time.”
Chaplain of the College Laurie Jordan ’79 described the event as helpful for students who hope to incorporate Christian values into life after graduation.
“The weekend was supposed to be a chance for people to talk about these things that I think they really do think about,” Jordan said. “Often, the faith dimension, the religious values dimension isn’t always pulled in and so it was fabulous to have these alumni talk because they were very willing to be transparent and open to talk about what kind of journey they’ve been on.”
She said that the use of “God language” varies among people. “Compared to your average conversation around work and talent and passion, this was a time when people could really freely use their God language.”
Armel Nibasumba ’16, who sits on the leadership team for Middlebury Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, said he enjoyed the event because it stressed that there is “no model path” for Christian life after college.
“This past weekend’s event raised questions I never considered,” Nimbasumba said. “The different experiences that the speakers voiced showed the various paths taken but importantly the importance of keeping Christ at the forefront of their careers. It is possible to prioritize one’s Christianity in non-religious careers.”
He added that alumni of faith bring a different wisdom and breath of experience that current Middlebury students can benefit from. “It’s always great to hear perspectives of people who have been in your shoes and can now look at it from a different angle.”
Jordan organized a workshop similar to this one in 2006, when she hosted alumni who returned to the College to share their working experiences with students curious about Christian life after graduation. The event focused on vocational and cross-cultural aspects of the Christian faith.
Jordan said that the term “vocation” is now seen through a secular lens, but that it has historical roots in Christianity.
“In the Christian tradition, the word ‘vocation’ comes from the Latin for ‘to call.’ So both vocational and talking about your ‘calling’ were originally theological concepts,” she said. “Many of these theological concepts have obviously and easily been secularized. So now, vocational sometimes as a track in high school means that you’re learning some kind of trade or skill.”
Jordan explained that for some of the alums who returned Saturday, their vocation is both their calling and their day-job work. For others, the work they do pays for their passion, or their true vocation.
“Sometimes you get really lucky, and you feel, ‘God has given me the brain, the skills, the talents to be a really good doctor, social worker, whatever.’ Then your paid work and what feels like your mission and life are the same,” Jordan said. “Sometimes it might be that computer coding you’re remarkably excellent at it, but that actually is just going to help you fund what you feel is your passion in life, which might be completely unrelated.”
“Of course, it could be that computer coding is also your passion and you’re going to figure out a way for that to be grounded in your values and you won’t choose to work for certain kinds of companies and so on,” she added.
For alumnus Devon Parish ’05, the faithful foundation she laid at the College served her during the move to working life.
“I think my undergraduate years were kind of a huge growth time in terms of my faith. I was also a religion major, studying it and experiencing it at the same time. I think since then it’s been about how to fit faith with experience of the real world. If it hadn’t had that strong of a foundation, there wouldn’t be that much left,” Parish said.
“Having the community of people that you can come back to even when you’re in a period of transition or you don’t have a church, you don’t have a body to relate to, I still have my Middlebury people to relate to. This was the place where I understood my faith and these were people with whom I could be my true self.”
(03/03/16 2:35am)
On Wednesday, Feb. 24, several biochemistry students performed a magic show using science for local children of Addison County. This event, held in McCardell BiCentennial Hall, is an ongoing tradition of the department, spearheaded by Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Roger Sandwick.
The show was inspired by the experiments that had captured Sandwick’s imagination as a child. “We used to have this one guy — we called him Mr. Chemistry — who would come to our class and do all these magic tricks using chemistry,” he said. “It’s the one thing I really remember from that particular third-grade class.”
Photos by Eliot Van Valkenberg
(02/25/16 3:37am)
During Winter Term, the dining halls welcomed a new brew at the beverage station: coffee by local roaster Vermont Coffee Company. Based in Middlebury Vermont, coffee from the Vermont Coffee Company is fair-trade and certified organic. The move to serve it in the dining halls has allowed the College to meet its promise to serve 30 percent Real Food in the dining halls by 2016.
The switch from New England Coffee, served in dining halls previously, to Vermont Coffee Company, is receiving hearty approval from the student body.
In an online survey conducted by The Campus, 81 percent of the 105 students surveyed said they noticed a change in the dining hall coffee. Seventy percent of students said they “like” or “love” the new coffee, whereas only four percent of students reported liking the New England Coffee and 64 percent said they “disliked” or “detested” it. None of the students surveyed said they “loved” the old coffee.
The majority of students said that they like the new coffee because they think it has a better taste than a cup of the New England Coffee.
The Decision to Switch
Executive Director of Food Service Operations Dan Detora was the driving force behind the move to Vermont Coffee Company. Detora explained to The Campus that refreshing the College’s coffee inventory has been on his radar since at least fall 2014 after Dining Services received multiple complaints.
“I don’t think it was anything specific, just the fact that we received a lot of [comments like], ‘The coffee is terrible,’” Detora said. “It just wasn’t a high-quality coffee.”
Detora considered a switch to Vermont Coffee Company’s locally-roasted, fair-trade organic coffee after the business moved to its new headquarters on Exchange Street. Last summer, VCC helped the College to secure specially sourced brews for the Language Schools’ 100 Year Celebration.
“We were trying to do desserts and coffees from different countries, and they helped us with that,” Detora explained.
Since then, Detora said the College has a “great relationship” with the Vermont Coffee Company. When Dining Services, in partnership with the SGA, decided to upgrade coffee in the dining halls, they chose Vermont Coffee Company to increase the College’s use of Real Food. Real Food is food that meets certain criteria such as ‘local- and community-based,’ ‘fair,’ ‘ecologically sound’ and ‘humane.’
“When President Leibowitz committed to 30 percent Real Food, we were at roughly 23-27 percent when he signed that agreement last year,” Detora said. “[Vermont Coffee Company] came in, and we did some tasting, but the big thing was that they met our Real Food criteria. That was about $125,000 [of the dining budget] switched over to Real Food, which got us over that 30 percent to meet our goal. So we got a better product and better Real Food, and it was basically awash in terms of funding.”
The increased expense, however, encouraged Dining Services to economize. SGA President Ilana Gratch ’16 was collaborating with Detora to establish 10 O’clock Ross when Dining Services considered the coffee change. They decided to open Ross Dining Hall later on weekends, from 7:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. This minimized food waste and reduced labor costs, and helped shrink the expense of high-quality coffee.
Eat Real Weighs In
Eat Real, the student group which encouraged the College to sign the Real Food agreement in 2014, published an op-ed entitled “Wake Up and Smell the (Fair-Trade, Organic) Coffee!” in The Campus in January, applauding the switch to the Vermont Coffee Company.
“We are excited by Dining Service’s commitment to supporting real food and the values real food represents,” said Eat Real Co-Presidents Sarah Koenigsberg ’17 and Elaine Forbush ’17 in their op-ed.
Eat Real has been collaborating with the College for the past three years by helping them identify foods served in the dining hall that could be switched to Real Foods without too much extra cost. In the past, Eat Real assisted Dining Services in their switch to local beef for hamburgers and local, organic tofu.
While Eat Real celebrates the improvements that the dining halls have embraced thus far, the group is far from satisfied. Eat Real research interns are currently examining other food options that could be switched to Real Foods like buying whole chickens as opposed to chicken breasts. Moreover, the interns are also working on collecting data to help encourage the College to bump up their Real Food agreement to 50 percent Real Food.
Eat Real urges the College and students to become cognizant of the changes they can provoke with their food choices.
“We encourage the Middlebury community to recognize the purchasing power we have as a residential college that feeds thousands of people multiple meals a day,” Koenigsberg and Forbush wrote. “It’s easy to forget the flaws inherent in our modern food system when we only see the food that magically appears in our buffets every day.”
Coffee Sales Around Campus
According to our survey, 39 percent of students report that they buy less coffee now than they did when New England Coffee was served in the dining halls.
How is this change affecting coffee sales at vendors around campus?
Detora said it’s too early to know. Vermont Coffee Company was available at Crossroads and Wilson Cafés before the upgrade inside the dining halls.
Birgitta Cheng ’17, one of four student managers of Crossroads Café, reports that coffee sales at Crossroads have remained consistent despite the new coffee in the dining halls.
“We cater to students on specialty drinks more [than drip coffee],” said Cheng. “Our drip coffee sales usually come from faculty and staff who come to get a drink between work shifts so they are not going to the dining hall anyways.”
Cheng estimates that Crossroads sells approximately 200 cups of coffee per day.
Still, even if sales at some College vendors do decline slightly, buying more coffee from the same vendor will lower costs for the College. Previously, College vendors bought coffee from 14 different coffee companies; Crossroads alone served three different companies’ coffee.
Now Vermont Coffee Company is the only coffee served anywhere at the College.
“Because we went to Vermont [Coffee Company], we increased our purchasing power with them,” Detora said. “They decreased the price of the product pretty considerably so we feel that any sales loss would be picked up by the price savings we have overall.”
(02/25/16 3:24am)
In response to a Feb. 15 email in which the SGA announced a new online textbook exchange, The Campus decided to investigate how less expensive textbooks came to top the student government agenda. Last fall Neha Sharma ’18.5 and Maya Woser ’18, co-directors for the SGA Educational Affairs Committee, conducted an all-student poll that found a high demand for cheaper textbooks.
“Last year when we came together as a committee, we brainstormed ideas that we had ourselves of what could be improved in the community and when what we had been hearing from other people,” Woser said. “The cost of textbooks was a major one that a lot of us in the committee had personally faced. The problem was so universal that we immediately knew that was something we wanted to focus on. We kind of just went from there.”
In the email, the student EAC introduced Texts.com as “an online campus-wide student textbook exchange website where students can post details about the textbooks they want to see.” The site allows users to search for specific textbooks and compare prices with other sellers, including Amazon and AbeBooks. Texts.com charges no fees for students to join or schools to use, and it functions like a marketplace where college students can buy and sell used textbooks.
The Texts.com website references a study stating textbook prices have increased much faster than other consumer goods. According to a 2012 study by the American Enterprise Institute, the average price of a college textbook has gone up 812 percent since 1978, and has doubled in the past decade alone.
Much of that increase, the website says, is ironically linked to used textbook exchanges such as Amazon and Chegg. Publishers earn revenue only from the initial sale of new books, and as new book sales have declined as used books become more available, publishers have increased prices and released new editions with minimal changes from year to year.
To combat the cost of new editions, the SGA Educational Affairs Committee met with Dean of the Faculty and VP for Academic Affairs Andrea Lloyd, Dean of the Library Michael Roy, and the chairs of several academic departments. They have encouraged departments across campus to agree to use one edition of a textbook for five years at a time. That way, students would be able to resell their books to other students rather than purchasing new books from the campus bookstore each year. The student EAC is also encouraging the library to buy more copies of textbooks for students to use while on reserve.
“One of the main reasons the library doesn’t buy textbooks right now is because the textbook editions keep changing so often,” Sharma said. “Especially language textbooks, were you don’t really need the latest edition because it’s the same thing you’re teaching every year.”
“They would be able to invest in a larger number of copies so more students would be able to access it,” Woser added. “Also, if they agree on a certain edition for a number of years, then students’ resale values are also easier. Otherwise you might by a book, then nobody needs it next year because everyone needs the latest edition so you can’t really sell it back.”
As SGA EAC co-directors, Sharma and Woser chose Texts.com after looking at what steps peer schools have taken to reduce student textbook costs.
Sharma said that Texts.com is currently being used at Bates, Bowdoin and Yale. She and Woser contacted their student governments to gauge their satisfaction with the site, which was positive. They then contacted a company representative for Texts.com, who provided information about which schools were using it and what their feedback had been.
So far, about 200 books are on sale at the College website, middlebury.texts.com. Sharma and Woser hope to launch a campaign near the end of the semester to let students know they can resell their books online.
In the meantime, the student EAC is considering several other funding plans to make textbooks cheaper at Middlebury. Sharma said these possibilities are all “very preliminary,” but they will all be independent of financial aid.
For more information, please visit middlebury.texts.com. The SGA can be reached at sga@middlebury.edu.
(01/21/16 1:07am)
Sixty pounds of ground turkey. Seventy pounds of yellow potatoes. Elevenpounds of salted butter. Fifteen boxes of spice cake mix. These are just a few of the ingredients it took a corps of about 20 students plus the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life faculty and staff to cook up 210 plates of food for hungry members of the town of Middlebury on Friday, Jan. 15. Ellen McKay, head chef and Scott Center Administrative Program Coordinator, described the annual service project held at Middlebury Congregational Church as a success.
“We went through absolutely everything that we had: every piece of meatloaf, every piece of cake,” McKay said. “We served fewer people tonight than we typically do, but every one of them had a real meal and every one of them walked out of here feeling a little more cared for than they did when they walked in.”
The Charter House Coalition community supper has run every Friday in the basement of 2 Main Street since March 2005. The weekly meal has grown in attendance from 22 guests the first night to over 250 plates served in recent months, said Dottie Neuberger, community supper coordinator. She said different local organizations take turns cooking the free meal.
“We have faith groups, we have businesses, we have service organizations, Middlebury College groups and we have some individuals like book clubs or groups of friends who get together and do it,” Neuberger said. “If you give, you get back a lot, and we like to give people the gift of giving.”
“It’s also a concrete gift,” she added. “I work in the mental health field and that’s very abstract. So when you do something concrete [for someone], it’s a different feeling.”
Neuberger said National Honor Society members from Middlebury Union High School as well as students from the College who volunteer at the suppers often come back again and again.
Some students, such as Matei Epure ’16, were at the charity meal for the first time on Friday. Epure played piano for guests on Friday and said volunteering at the meals could help other College students to refresh their perspective of campus life.
“Coming into America, I saw a sort of America. This is not something I thought Addison Country would look like in any place,” he said. “Middlebury is a bubble that showed last year that we can get very stressed and concentrate a lot on the problems happening on campus. You come here, and you realize that the campus is not the world.”
McKay also said that when students get off campus and partner with volunteer organizations such as Charter House, they remember that many people around the world struggle for resources the College provides to students with ease each day.
“All of our needs are provided for on campus: our heat, our meals. So sometimes, it might be easy to take stuff for granted,” she said. “This gives the students the sense that they might be feeling a little grateful for having their creature comforts met so effortlessly.”
When students do become involved in the local community, McKay said they often make connections to the town that last throughout their undergraduate years.
“Sometimes people just help out for one night, but sometimes it turns into a four-year relationship. That’s happened a lot, actually. And that feeds their souls in a way, to come downtown and do some good,” she said.
For Spencer Egan ’15.5, the past two years spent serving guests almost every Friday night have helped him to connect to a Middlebury beyond than the College.
“I came from a smaller town where I knew a lot of the community members, and in terms of feeling at home in a place, it’s been really crucial,” he said. “Even when I was a little, I’ve always enjoyed talking and hanging out with people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and older. It’s just a different perspective.”
Like Epure, Egan said college students often feel isolated from the rest of town, and that volunteering with townspeople fosters mutual respect.
“I think every person has their own mental blocks as to how they view the rest of the community,” he said. “It’s about seeing them as people and thinking about their lives, where they’re coming from.”
No matter how long students volunteer, whether for four years or just one night, volunteer Jane Steele said students can expand their education if they choose to do something different on a Friday night.
“[Students] shouldn’t be afraid to come join us,” she said. “We can use help on any Friday – you don’t have to be a lifer. Even to just sit with a group of people at a table. There’s so much that they could do to just be part of the community, a whole different learning experience.”
More information about the Charter House Community Suppers can be found online at http://www.charterhousecoalition.org/.
(11/18/15 9:22pm)
The College has opened the Anderson Freeman Resource Center (AFC) to support minority students in an institutional effort to take new steps to better serve an increasingly diverse campus. Director Roberto Lint Sagarena said the AFC, located in Carr Hall, will house cultural organizations, a study library and drop-in counseling and advising, among other resources.
“The goals of the Anderson Freeman Center include addressing the unique social and cultural concerns specific to students of color, students who are the first in their families to attend college, students from low-income backgrounds, LGBTQ students and others that have been historically underrepresented or marginalized in American higher education,” Lint Sagarena said.
So far, the AFC has hosted events related to orientation, Homecoming and a Halloween gathering at Carr Hall. A grand opening is planned to coincide with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January.
AFC fellow Gaby Fuentes ’16 said the Halloween event was part of the center’s larger push to initiate conversations on cultural appropriation that resulted in a campus-wide video about respectful costumes for the holiday.
Debanjan Roychoudhury ’16, another fellow, said the AFC has dually advocated for underrepresented students and provided them a place to feel welcome and safe.
“Halloween was definitely huge,” Roychoudhury said. “We spearheaded most of the initiative to rid our campus of racist costumes. It’s become quite an epidemic in the last few years.”
“On one hand we were advocating for students, we were pushing administration, we were raising awareness,” he added. “On the other hand we were providing a space here for students who maybe felt Halloween wasn’t a safe space outside this center.”
According to Roychoudhury, the fact that cultural insensitivity makes some students feel unsafe on campus shows how the College advertises for a diverse student body but has allowed minority students to fall through the cracks.
“Students have fought for this center for a very long time,” added Social Media and Marketing Fellow Diku Rogers ’16.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work that institutionally is supposed to be provided for us,” Roychoudhury said. “We were told we would be supported in these ways. We have Discover Middlebury. We have Prospective Students day. We have particular ways that this school markets itself to be a particular institution. We were not told the whole truth.”
What’s in a name?
As part of its marketing, the College claims a legacy of inclusion because it graduated the nation’s first black student, Alexander Twilight, in 1823. But Twilight’s ancestry was not rediscovered until 1971, when elite schools were fighting to claim the first black American graduate, Conor Grant ’15 wrote for the Campus last year.
“When Twilight was admitted, Middlebury administrators did not know that he was black,” Grant wrote. “In fact, most who knew him assumed Twilight was white.”
“That was a diversity effort, not an effort to say who was actually best serving black students,” Roychoudhury said. “Middlebury won.”
When choosing a name for the new center, the AFC team decided to honor two alums of color whose blackness was known during their time at the College.
“The first known black student at Middlebury was Martin Henry Freeman,” Roychoudhury said.
“He was the first black president of a college in the entire United States. The fact that that man went to this school and that so many students of color don’t know about it is a shame.”
The other honoree, Mary Annette Anderson, was the first black woman to attend the College and the first black female Phi Beta Kappa inductee.
“Both of them led lives of academic excellence,” Roychoudhury said. “They were both pioneers and they both very much gave back in their time after Middlebury. We thought that dedicating the center in their name would be important in terms of cultivating a sense of pride and a sense of history among students of color, who for a lot of us feel like we’re the first people of color to ever come here.”
That isolation exists in part because many students of color have never met their predecessors.
Roychoudhury said the College had not hosted an Alumni of Color weekend for ten years until this fall.
“Coming to a school like Middlebury, the alumni network is really one of the most important things,” he said. ”Think about it. For ten years, there were students who spent their whole time here and didn’t have an Alumni of Color weekend. That’s a disservice. When we’re talking about these things, these aren’t just accidents. These are institutional disservices to students of color. We are in the business of reversing and correcting some of those disservices.”
Problems that persisted
According to the fellows, historically underrepresented students have struggled in the past because the College is still designed for its legacy of wealthy white students.
“When you have an institution that was historically based to serve only one demographic and then you try to diversify it without providing the necessary resources and support, you have students not succeeding not because they aren’t capable, but because the institution isn’t serving their needs,” Fuentes said.
Roychoudhury said many faculty members at the College are unprepared to encourage students of color, students for whom English is not their first language and other historically underrepresented students, and that some faculty were instead the source of the microagressions that made those students feel unsafe.
Students who face racial prejudice or discrimination are often referred for counseling rather than helped to handle the situation directly.
“Instead of addressing racism, what has happened in the past is students have been sent to the counseling center,” said Cindy Esparza ’17, AFC fellow and Alianza member. “There, they still haven’t been met with the means to really unpack what happened on campus.”
Even when referred for mental health services, some students met a staff that was as equally homogenous as the student body.
“The first counselor of color on staff at this school was Ximena [Mejia] in 2008,” Roychoudhury said. “Students of color didn’t just get here in 2008. They’ve been here for a long time.”
According to Esperanza, when the College didn’t help minority students, campus leaders did their best to step in.
“Before the center, cultural organizations had to wear a really big hat,” she said. “As a board member, you had to be there for your membership, which is part of the point, but you were solving problems that really weren’t your place as a student to have to deal with.”
“The upperclassmen were happy to help, but at the end of the day, it was really draining on them to have to help students,” she added. “I came here to learn, not to teach, and so being able to have a center where we have people that are trained and there are resources for the students, that’s really important.”
Steps to a solution
The fellows said Anderson Freeman Resource Center and its various systems of support have helped many students so far, but that much work remains to make the College a truly inclusive institution.
“I think we’ve been very successful if you look at the numbers of people we’ve had coming in and out,” Roychoudhury said. “We’ve had entire workshops held here on cultural competency for faculty. More than 1,200 visits were logged at the AFC in October.
“Now, when a student comes in and for the first time in class they’re told, ‘I can’t understand you. You have an accent,’ we can say, ‘Listen, we’re going to report this. We are going to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen on a regular basis,’” he added.
Esparza said having dedicated faculty and staff to support minority students has shifted the burden off cultural organizations and renewed communication with Old Chapel.
“Having [Associate Director] Jennifer Herrera and Roberto all in one space, I think that’s a huge thing to acknowledge,” she said. “Because before, it was like we would reinvent the wheel every year. You would have [student] leadership changing and you would have students facing the same issues and the administration would never reach out a hand. Now, there is a path for us to talk more directly to administration and for the administration to be more receptive.”
Rogers said that previously students who asked for dedicated resources were told, “The whole campus is a safe space.” Now, she said, students have more of the resources they need.
“Talking to the faculty here, they can say, “Oh, this is a project you’re think of? Talk to this person. Oh, this is something that happened to you? Okay, talk to the Dean of Students,” she said. “When things happen and I’m affected by it, there are people I can go to. We as students feel a lot that we have to work for Middlebury, but we also have to make Middlebury work for us.”
Roychoudhury added that when students visit the Anderson Freeman Center, for whatever reason, they will be met with acceptance and understanding.
“We don’t treat students that come into this center as if there’s a problem with them,” he said. “We treat students that come into this center as, ‘You are gifted. You are talented. And you are looking for a space where that brightness is going to be encouraged. We are working on less stigma and more assistance.”
Combined with a lack of resources, that stigma when seeking support is often what holds minority students back from getting the help they need. Roychoudhury added that the AFC aims to support students by treating them like valued members of the College and giving them a place to feel like a part of the campus.
“Someone who graduated last year was visiting this weekend,” Esparza said. “They said to me, ‘Man, if a space like this would have existed, I’d easily have a 3.8 GPA. Because I’d have had a place to work were I felt comfortable.’ It’s amazing how much better you perform when you’re comfortable in a space and when you feel like you belong.”
“Students of color are not the weakness of the campus, and that’s very much how we’ve been viewed,” Roychoudhury said. “Low retention rates. That we need academic services. That we’re here on handouts. That we don’t deserve to be here. These are the things we get told every single day. We’re fighting for diversity to not be something that is just part of this campus, but is a central strength of this campus.”
(10/21/15 8:24pm)
The College’s endowment yielded a 6.9 percent return on investment during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2015, beating national averages. Despite the $19.1 million increase, the endowment grew less than last year’s 16.5 percent rate of return.
Vice President for Finance and Treasurer of the College, Patrick Norton, said the endowment performed better than the MCSI All Country World Index, a global equities benchmark, which increased only 1.2 percent in the same period.
“The 6.9 percent return was actually a strong annual return given the performance of the global markets,” said Norton. “Our active management has outperformed the passive benchmark by 180 basis points (bps) a year over ten years. That is substantial outperformance.”
The endowment increased by $19.1 million during the fiscal year, rising to $1.10 billion on June 30. Explaining this growth, Norton cited the net increase in endowment from investment return, new gifts to the endowment and annual endowment spending for Middlebury’s operating and capital expenditures. Last year, the endowment grew 16.5 percent and increased by $113 million.
The College uses a passive benchmark to see how a portfolio would have done if it only invested ‘passively’ in broad equity and fixed income. “If we had invested according to our passive index our fiscal year ’15 return would have been 1.9 percent rather than our actual 6.9 percent,” said Norton.
The benchmark assumes 75 percent is invested in the MSCI ACWI Index and 25 percent in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch US Treasury 7-10 Year Index.
Each year, the endowment funds faculty compensation, programming costs and financial aid, among other College expenses.
Norton said, “The budgeted endowment draw into operations for fiscal year 2016 of $60.1 million which will support 23 percent of the operating costs of Middlebury College, two percent of the operating costs of the Middlebury Institute, and 16 percent of the operating costs of the Middlebury Schools.”
He added the endowment is globally diversified across a number of asset classes: 33 percent global equity, 29 percent alternative equity, 32 percent private equity, five percent fixed income, [and] one percent cash.
When deciding how to manage the endowment, the administration has considered student initiatives such as the call for divestment from fossil fuels.
“The College has worked very closely with our investment office, Investure, and several other clients to invest a portion of our endowments with managers who utilize Environmental, Social and Governance criteria into their investment process,” said Norton. “We estimate that as of June 30, 14 percent of the endowment is invested with such managers.”
While students are taken seriously, the College cannot accommodate all such requests. In an August 2013 Statement on Divestment, then-President Ronald D. Liebowitz said most financial managers like Investure as it provides flexibility to maximize return on the investment. In 2013, the College’s five-year return was “second only to Columbia,” he wrote.
“Investure invests money in large funds run by independent managers, whom Investure selects based on the strategies and performances of those managers over time. It is unlikely that any of the 150 fund managers who today invest Middlebury’s endowment in their commingled funds would adopt a policy of fossil-free investing,” Liebowitz wrote.
He added, “This is the answer to the often-asked question of why Middlebury, or any institution with a large endowment, cannot easily divest an endowment of fossil-fuel stocks. In Middlebury’s case, Investure would have to reinvest more than half of its portfolio. And it would have to gain the agreement of the other 12 institutions it represents to do so.”
As for the current investment scheme, Norton said in a news release that the College “continues to be pleased with the performance of our endowment under Investure’s management. As always, we’re grateful for the critical support from Middlebury alumni, parents and friends. Thanks in part to their generosity, the endowment has continued to grow.”
(10/07/15 2:30pm)
The week of Sep. 29 officially launched Green Dot, the College’s new program to prevent violence and promote student safety on campus. Director of Physical Education Noreen Pecsok, who helped implement the program, said the response from students has been overwhelmingly positive.
“It’s very empowering to watch [the students] put it into action and think ‘Yeah, I could do this on a Friday night,’” Pecsok said. “People love to come up and tell us that they’ve done a Green Dot or that they’ve seen a Green Dot. It’s spreading fast.”
Barbara McCall, Director of Health and Wellness Education, said she and other wellness staff have been working to establish Green Dot since summer 2014. According to McCall, Green Dot makes the College safer for all students.
“Last December we brought trainers to Middlebury and a team of 27 faculty and staff went through the four-day trainer certification. We spent probably a year and a half planning for the launch of Green Dot. Green Dot Week is signifying the campus wide launch,” McCall said. “The goal of Green Dot nationally and the goal of Green Dot on the Middlebury campus is to see the numbers of people affected by violence go down.”
Orientations Coordinator Amanda Reinhardt said the program is a new approach to violence prevention at the College.
“Green Dot is important for the wider Middlebury campus because Green Dot widens the focus of sexual violence from being on the victim and the perpetrator to focusing on all of
us bystanders,” Reinhardt said. According to the program website, Green Dot aims to “mobilize a force of engaged and proactive bystanders.” Pecsok said that Green Dot teaches students to use their words, choices or behaviors to stop a potential harmful situation and turn it into a healthy one. Example Green Dots listed on the website include spilling a drink on a friend if she is being pressured to drink too much, then taking her home to change or interrupting an arguing couple by pretending you lost your ID card, and asking one of them to let you in.
Katie Mayopoulos '18 completed the Green Dot training last winter and now works with the program as an intern. She said Green Dot’s approach makes bystander intervention accessible to all students.
“It was a nice training because they weren’t trying to change you. They were like, ‘You’re fine just the way you are. We can work with you,’” she said. “Green Dot tells me that wearing my Green Dot shirt makes all the difference. It’s the very tiny things that make it happen and Middlebury is a tiny place, so it all adds up.”
Terry Goguen, ’16, said the Green Dot training gave him a new perspective of campus violence. One of three captains of the Men’s Ice Hockey team, Goguen said most people in his training two weeks ago were athletes.
“I definitely get the stereotype a lot of, ‘Oh, it’s just a dumb jock’ or, ‘Obviously [the party] is at Atwater because all the athletes live there.’ But it is interesting, because if you looked around the room at the Green Dot training, I’d say 80 percent of those people play a sport,” he said. “As athletes, we have a vehicle to reach a lot of people. Now I get to go to my team and they’re all like, ‘What’s Green Dot? What was the training like?’”
A bigger picture
Green Dot teaches students how to prevent violence, but students and staff said the work hard, play hard culture at the College contributes to “Red Dots.”
“Green Dot sort of takes the approach of, ‘You’re not going to stop people from drinking and partying,’ but it allows everyone at that party to be able to stop that potential Red Dot,” said Goguen. “I think it comes down to people learning what is acceptable and what isn’t and taking responsibility for their actions. You can’t just wake up and say, ‘Oh, I was drunk.’”
Mayopoulos, who also works as a First-Year Counselor, said she has felt the harmful effects of the College’s drinking culture.
“I can say for myself, there are certain places on this campus where I know I need to have an extra awareness of my surroundings for who’s pouring my drinks or where I’m getting my alcohol,” she said. “As an FYC I’ve had freshman come up to me already with accounts of, ‘This was super creepy that someone did this to me.’”
Ellen McKay, Administrative Program Coordinator for the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, participated in the staff training last December. She said there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problems of student stress and sexual assault.
“We sort of leap to an easy conclusion when we’re trying to get at why something bad happens, and there’s not an easy conclusion to most of these things,” McKay said. “Green Dot is just addressing one symptom of a much larger problem.”
But McKay added many students come to the College already struggling with a variety of outside issues.
“Is there too much stress on campus? Yes, I believe there is. There is absolutely no one silver bullet that is going to take away stress from this campus,” she said. “A lot of stuff is coming to campus. The campus certainly isn’t causing all these problems.”
Towards the future
No matter the cause of violence on campus, staff and students are confident Green Dot will make the College safer for all. McCall said while culture is important, Green Dot’s first focus is stopping the violence that could happen today.
“The short-term goal is to give people actionable tools and confidence, said McCall. “[The] long-term goal: create a campus community that’s inhospitable to violence.” Reinhardt said one part of the long-term solution is introducing Green Dot to students when they first arrive on campus.
“We started implementing Green Dot into Orientation last February with the class of 2018.5. As part of welcoming the class of 2019, Green Dot developed an introduction video, created by Zac Lounsbury ’15.5, to share with incoming students what Green Dot is and how they can be a part of it,” Reinhardt said. “For me, sharing Green Dot with the newest members of our community is a way that they can feel empowered to help us create a safer community.”
Mayopoulos has also helped introduce the Green Dot Program to First-Years.
“The freshman don’t have any perception of what happens on our campus, they haven’t lived here,” said Mayopoulos. “So if we right up front say, ‘We don’t tolerate Power-Based Personal Violence. You will not commit domestic violence, you will not stalk, you will not rape or sexual assault,’ I do think it kind of jolts a few people.”
She added, "I think a mindset happens, a kind of entitlement that I can do this to somebody. And I think that by us very forwardly saying, ‘We don’t tolerate this,’ it makes it a lot easier as a community to put pressure on those people who might feel entitled previously.”
McCall and Pecsok said the conversation about college culture is evolving, but for now, Green Dot relies on individual members of the campus deciding together to stop Red Dots before they occur.
“This is not the college fixing anything,” Pecsok said. “This is the community getting together and saying, ‘This is what we want’.”
“That’s at the core of this,” added McCall. “If we aren’t connecting as a community, we can’t work to make it safer.”
More information can be found online at go/greendot
(09/24/15 3:07am)
There was scarecely room to stand Friday, Sept. 18 during the Fourth Anunal International Politics and Economics (IPE) Program Symposium, where three guest professors presented different per- spectives on inequality at the Robert A. Jones ’59 House.
According to IPE Program Director nd Frederick C. Dirks Professor of International Economics William Pyle, the event was a success.
“The attendance for the three panels was excellent. And the speakers’ presentations were fantastic,” Pyle said.
"They all talked about inequality, but from very different, yet complementary, perspectives. And a number of the best questions came from students," added Pyle.
Allison Stanger, the Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics, said the program balanced economics with political analysis and attracted a wide variety of students.
“We try to do it at the beginning of the year, on one day, with both economists and political scientists together. The idea is to try and do something really engaging right up front before students have a ton of work thrown at them,” Stranger said. “It’s a beautiful day today, so I’m delighted to see we’ve had a full house every session. To me that speaks really highly of Middlebury students, that they would sit inside on a day like this and talk about a pressing social issue.”
When planning the program, IPE professors wanted to discuss issues of immediate importance to the American economy and politics.
“Inequality in the United States has reached its highest level in generations. We thought that a symposium that put this trend in the US in both a historical
and comparative perspective would allow us all to better understand what [its] ramifications might be,” Pyle said.
UC Davis Distinguished Professor of Economics Peter Lindert, Oxford University Profes- sor of Comparative Politics David Rueda, and UC Berkeley John Gross Professor of Political Science Paul Pierson each presented for one hour and thirty minutes.
Pierson said he normally doesn’t see students participate in formal academic presentations as much as they did on Friday.
“One thing striking to me was having the students play a role in handling the Q and A, and it sounds like students are going to be really involved in the dinner tonight,” Pierson said. “A lot of the places I go to, you wouldn’t see that; students would be seen and not heard. It seems like they take you guys seriously.”
During the final session, Allison Stanger ceded her moderator position to IPE student Brian Rowett ’16. Rowett said the three speakers together presented a well-balanced program.
“The first guy, the economist Profes- sor Lindert, gave you economics without a lot of reasons why income inequality has changed so much,” Rowett said.
“[Paul Pierson] has a lot of conviction for why income inequality is the way it is in America especially since the 1970s.”
Bill Waldron, Professor of Religion, and Olympia D’Hauteville, ’18.5, both said the Symposium was relevant to their current academic interests.
“I grew up in the Cold War, and these are the kinds of questions I’ve been in- terested in since I was a kid,” Waldron said.
“Now it actually does have more direct connection to the kinds of research I’m interested in terms of what’s going on in contemporary Nepal.”
D’Hauteville, originally from France, added that Middlebury does a good job choosing speakers but rarely are there follow up discussion in her classes.
“I chose to go to the Symposium because I’m interested in economics and global development, but more generally to have a better understanding of the dy- namics around inequality and poverty in the country I now live in,” she said.
“The talk was a great example of how
(04/29/15 5:50pm)
The Classics department received a significant donation that will endow a lecture series, professorship, and summer programming. The department will be renamed the Eve Adler Department of Classics.
Donations such as this are normally named in honor of the donor, as with the Albert A. Mead Professorship of Biology and the John G. McCullough Professorship of Chemistry. Since the donation was made anonymously, the department chose to remember Eve Adler, an influential figure in its history.
Eve Adler worked at the College for over 25 years, and is credited with revitalizing the department during three different College presidencies. Originally appointed in 1977 to develop new programs in Latin, Greek, and Classical Hebrew, Adler chaired the Classics department for 16 of those 25 years.
“Eve was definitely outside of the box in the way she approached everything and also in the way she approached this field,” Professor of Classics Marc Witkin said. “She was somebody who had a tremendous breadth of interests and abilities. She saw that courses on Classics in translation appealing to students in all disciplines at the College held the key to the survival of the Greek and Latin programs at Middlebury. In the decades since her chairmanship, the department has flourished by continuing to follow her curricular design.”
The donation has a framework for how much of the yearly income can be used for different purposes. So far, the department has established the Eve Adler Memorial Fund for Summer Study in Classics/Classical Studies and an annual Eve Adler Memorial Lectureship.
According to the Fund for Summer Study application, “The fund is intended primarily to support students who wish, during the summer, to study Greek and Latin language, literature, and art, or to participate in archaeological fieldwork at a Classical site.”
The site says that priority will be given to Classics/Classical Studies majors and minors, but that all students with interests related to Classics may apply. Five students have already received grant funding from the department for study this summer.
With the endowment funds, the Classics Department also hopes to bring at least one named lecturer a year to Middlebury. On April 13, Harvey Mansfield, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, delivered the first Eve Adler Memorial Lecture.
When asked about whom the Department will invite to give the Memorial Lecture, Witkin said the Lecture will make Classics accessible to many disciplines.
“We’re open to having people outside the Classics,” Witkin said, “but we’re going to try as much as possible within the field of Classics to bring speakers here who are well known and who can bring Classics to a lot of different people in a lot of different fields.”
In addition to summer funding and academic-year programming, the donation will secure a second endowed professorship for the Classics Department. While Witkin said that the department’s overall enrollments and the number of Classics and Classical Studies majors are stronger than ever, administration claims that the tendency of today’s students to “shy away from text-based materials” has led some professors to worry that Classics at the College might be dismantled or defunded in the name of irrelevance.
“[The donation] means that in the future it would be harder for some administration to say, ‘Can’t afford to have a classics department,’” Witkin said.