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(05/06/15 9:07pm)
I’m not quite sure what compelled me to sign up to write for the Features section one Friday in January of 2012. Maybe it was because I had not gotten very involved in a campus organization until that point. Maybe it was because I knew I wanted to improve as a writer and thought the newspaper was the best way to do it. No matter how it began, it’s hard to believe that scrawling my name on a notepad led to three-and-a-half years on the Campus team and a year as Editor-in-Chief.
Having written my fair share of articles and overseen quite a few more from my perch this year, my perspective on what it means to be a journalist/editor on a small college campus has changed. In the beginning, the goal for me as a writer and editor was to improve the newspaper in the most basic sense. ‘Are there ways I can write more effectively and explore new topics,’ I asked myself—ways to tell more so that our stories impact more people?
Now, I see the newspaper’s impact as far more broad given our audience and location. Certainly, the work of bringing news, features, opinions, reviews and sports coverage to the student body is the main priority. But there was a personal appeal to working for the paper, too. With every story I wrote, I was able to encounter a new side of campus. I could then bring my experience to the wider student body in the form of an article. Each article assignment revealed to me how much is happening on this campus once you look beneath the surface-level, Monday-to-Sunday events.
The examples are too numerous to name. For my first article, I interviewed a professor in the Philosophy department. I had never taken a Philosophy course—I don’t think I had even set foot in Twilight Hall until the day of the interview—but the article made me go out of my way to speak to someone new. In the Behind the Vest series last fall, I got to know the men and women who keep Middlebury running—whether they are coordinating grounds and maintenance or making sure the dorms have heat in the middle of winter. This year, I was able to interview our incoming and outgoing College Presidents to discuss where the College has been and to glimpse where it may be headed.
It’s easy to fall into a routine at a small, rural college. There is a flurry of activity in the first year where you meet new people at every turn and jump into a variety of new courses and student organizations. However, after a while, things settle down. One seems to be around the same people: a close group of friends, perhaps a group with similar academic interests in a major, or a sports team or extracurricular activity. The conversations can sometimes (though not always) revolve around the same set of people or experiences.
I think reading and contributing to these pages can counteract this “silo” effect. It certainly has for me. I don’t play a sport at the College, but working on the upcoming edition of the Middlebury Sports Magazine, which explores various facets of varsity athletics at Middlebury, was eye-opening. Additionally, I had never thought about the potential for Carr Hall before learning about the exciting plans for the space next year as a new Intercultural Center; I could only have guessed how the students of the 1960s were able to create an Honor Code; and before working on an article on next year’s comprehensive fee, the tuition increase cap known as “CPI+1” sounded more like a computer programming language than anything else. One of the most rewarding parts of my time on the newspaper has been the opportunity to transform my dearth of information or understanding into an effective piece of journalism that can help others learn, too.
It’s possible that hours of copy-editing in Hepburn basement have skewed my perspective to make me completely off-base on this. In any event, silo-combating or not, I have huge respect for the editors and writers who staff our team. It takes an unbelievable amount of time for even the shortest article to come to fruition, not to mention the layout and editing that goes into every edition of the paper. Despite the work required of them, I think many of my writer and editor colleagues would echo what I have written above. Once you have been bitten by the bug of wanting to get to the bottom of a story (even stories taking place on a seemingly sleepy college campus like ours), you don’t want to stop.
All this is to say that the last issue of the year is bittersweet. Although I am graduating, this newspaper doesn’t need me at the helm to keep doing what it has always done: telling it like it is and serving our readers in the College community to the best of our ability as journalists and as fellow students. There are many more stories to come. Stay tuned.
(05/06/15 8:38pm)
The Middlebury Campus previously sat down with College President Ronald D. Liebowitz in the fall to discuss his time at the College. This is the second and final installment of the conversation, which took place prior to and after the announcement of Laurie L. Patton as the College’s 17th President. In this edition, Liebowitz discusses what it takes to be a successful College President, the nature of a presidential transition, and what is next for him after July 1. You can read Part One of The Exit Interview here. Middlebury Campus (MC): Does a college president associate with other college presidents, such as at a NESCAC conference? Do you talk to them and ask about what’s working, what’s not working?Ronald D. Liebowitz (RL): Well, yes. And no. The yes is that NESCAC, which stands for the New England Small College Athletic Conference, is what is called a “presidents’” conference, meaning presidents are the ultimate deciders on the place of varsity athletics among the 11 conference institutions. Athletics, then, brings us together three or four times a year to discuss athletics policy. I love athletics and understand the benefits that come with a good athletics program. At the same time, it would be nice if the presidents got together to discuss other issues more frequently. Generally, college presidents hold things close to themselves; we don’t share much with colleagues even though we know each other pretty well—I suspect nobody likes to project any kind of weakness in his or her institution. The only time I recall in my 10-plus years as president where my fellow presidents were a lot more open to discussing things was during the financial crisis. I remember especially the 2009-10 meetings as ones where, during our breaks and lunch, we did discuss what we were doing and how well each campus was responding to the challenges. But in general, college presidents tend not to share because I think it might project institutional weakness and we all are so competitive. Not that it’s right or productive, but…MC: Did you have any input on the presidential search process or was it completely within the committee? Would they have been open to you saying, ‘I know a great provost or a great administrator at another college, why don’t you look at them?’RL: No, the tradition is that sitting presidents are kept at arm’s length from presidential searches for a whole host of reasons, all good. It is interesting that in most professions the outgoing CEO, at least the ones that are in good standing, has a lot of input into who will be his or her successor. It’s not that way in the academy.The extent of my involvement was helping to get the search committee together with faculty representation. I didn’t choose the faculty members, but worked with faculty council and the faculty at large to get those four people and it was a great group—a great mix of backgrounds, perspectives, and disciplinary expertise. I then worked with Sunder Ramaswamy at Monterey to select the staff person, Bob Cole, and the faculty member Laura Burian (both are great, too) to provide a Monterey perspective to the search. The only other thing I did in the search was to meet with the committee early on and give an overview of what I saw from my vantage point as President of where the institution is now, what issues and challenges are ahead, and what the committee ought to know as they started engaging in the process of finding the 17th president of the College.MC: Time for a little advice for your successor — if the next President of the College asked you, ‘How do I keep my finger on the pulse of what students are thinking about?’ what would you say?RL: Try to be as active in the community as possible. Pop into Proctor, Atwater, and Ross. I have found students to be very welcoming. When I find an open seat and sit down with students, always uninvited, I’ve found them to be very receptive to conversation—I’ve never been told to leave(!). We’ve been fortunate to have some great SGA leaders, at least in my time as President, and I think keeping an open communication with the head of SGA is very valuable and is something worthwhile.I would just try to stay as involved as feels natural and manage to your personality and to your strengths. Don’t try to be something you’re not.MC: How to work effectively with faculty?RL: Well, there’s a natural tendency for faculty and administrators to have some tension, and healthy tension is good. But as I mentioned earlier, the perspectives of an administrator or a president and a faculty member don’t always align. A president has a certain set of time horizons and considerations that differ from those of faculty. It can therefore look like a president is sacrificing the present for the future by holding the longer-term perspective, and so the challenge is articulating your position when it differs from the sense of the faculty and hope your colleagues understand your position.It’s hard for me as an individual to say what the next person should do. As I said, for good or bad, I’ve had a relationship with our faculty for more than three decades. A new person won’t have that history. The new president is going to have a completely clean slate, which I think can be a real benefit.Anyone coming into this job is going to have great experience in administration already and so I think they will have a good sense of how to work with faculty. However, a challenge for all new presidents is how to understand the culture of one’s new institution. That’s where I think the four faculty on the search committee come into play. Those faculty are going to have a stake in the new president’s success and they will do the institution well by helping the new president understand and navigate through some of the idiosyncrasies of our campus.MC: How to maintain a good relationship with the town of Middlebury?RL: That takes a lot of work and it depends on your partner—in our case, the chair of the town’s select board. Many college towns are fraught with contradictions, especially in rural America. In small, rural places the perceptions about a billion-dollar-endowed institution can be unfair and the institution misunderstood. Consequently, there’s a great natural tension between what appears to be a privileged, entitled student body and college on the one hand, and the town on the other. It took me a while as president to learn that that old adage, “you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t” applies quite well to the College’s involvement in town affairs. If you sit on the sidelines people think you’re aloof, you don’t care about the town, that you have all this wealth and yet you are doing nothing to help your community. And then if you do get involved, you’re accused of throwing your weight around. So, at times it seems you can’t win, at least not with everyone.I came to the conclusion early on in my presidency that it’s better to be damned for doing than for not doing. I’d much rather get involved because I believe strongly that what’s good for the College is good for the town, and vice versa. The College benefits by the town being vibrant and healthy and the town benefits from an engaged College._____________________________________________________________________________MC: The student reaction to Dr. Laurie L. Patton’s announcement as the next College President was overwhelmingly positive. Did you hear a similar reaction from alumni and other members of the Middlebury community?RL: Yes. In every case. Last week, Jessica and I hosted a large reception in San Francisco and had smaller dinner events and in all cases our alumni were very excited about Laurie’s appointment. Similarly, Laurie and I were in New York two days ago, where I introduced her to a number of foundations and donors who have supported the College in the past. The meetings were excellent with substantive discussions about Middlebury—past, present, and future.MC: What is the transition like between College Presidents? Is there a structure to the way administrative best practices for leading the College are communicated?RL: Transitions are sometimes tricky and require both attention and a lot of thought on the part of the Board of Trustees, the incoming president, and the outgoing president. Many past presidents have written on the subject, usually urging boards of trustees to take an active role in establishing clear protocols for how the incoming president engages the many constituencies of a college so as to not confuse administrators and others as to who is the decision maker! We have been so fortunate with our transition as Marna Whittington and our board have followed a well-developed plan, and Laurie and our point person on campus, Tim Spears, have followed the plan to the letter. Laurie and I have been in communication regularly, too, which helps with continuity and increases the chances of a smooth transition come July 1.MC: Did the previous College President, John McCardell, give advice to you upon your announcement as the 16th College President? RL: Well, the situation was different in that I was already on the faculty here for 20 years, and was vice president and provost for the last seven of those years. I’ve come to recognize, through my own experience, that the best preparation for the presidency is on-the-job-training.MC: What are the biggest challenges facing the College as President-elect Laurie L. Patton assumes this role?RL: The issues that all college presidents now face: the increasing cost of higher education and what that means for access; keeping a liberal arts education relevant for the students Middlebury wishes to matriculate; and managing expectations. New presidents are expected to, or hoped to be able to, come in and fix all that is perceived to be wrong at an institution. One must remember, however, there are nine major constituencies that have a stake in any one decision a college takes, and it is rare that positions on a major issue aligns with all nine. Or that all see the issues that need fixing to be the same ones. That means it takes a lot of time to pick the right issue(s) to address, and then to work with all the constituencies to arrive at a position, knowing it will be rare for all to agree on the solution.MC: Is it overstating it to say that this a momentous transition in the College, with both the Dean of the College and College President departing within six months of each other?RL: It is not an overstatement in that we have a new leader and the first woman president. That is momentous. However, that these two positions are changing within six months of each other is not likely to be all that earth-shattering. This is an incredibly resilient and strong institution. We have an engaged and talented board, which has just gone through significant governance reform, a very experienced and skilled senior administration, and a remarkable group of commons deans whose work with students and faculty often goes unheralded. And so while welcoming Laurie to Middlebury will be a momentous occasion, a change in two administrative positions should not be viewed as anything more than that: two positions changing within six months of each other.MC: Although you have probably been asked this a lot, what is next for you when you depart the College in the summer?RL: We have a long-awaited sabbatical next year and we will be in Boston. Jessica and I will be working on a project on graduate education we have been contemplating and discussing for a number of years. It will focus on Ph.D. programs today, asking two major questions: (1) how we can better bridge the apparent widening gap between the public and the academy through how our graduate students are educated; and (2) how can we better address the very different speed of demographic changes in the student body compared to those of the professoriate. That is, while the diversity of the student body has increased significantly over the past twenty years, partly as a result of demographic changes in the country and partly the result of a conscious effort on the part of institutions to create richer educational environments through a more diverse student body, the diversity of most faculties have not changed nearly as much. The result has created some previously unseen tensions or at least misunderstandings and challenges in the classroom. Part of the increased tension is due to the pedagogies that our students entering college today have experienced during their K-12 years (hybrid learning with far more technology, interactive learning, collaborative learning), which they often do not see in most liberal arts classrooms, and part is due to the cultural divide between the more rapidly changing demographics of the student body relative to their faculties.
(04/22/15 4:34am)
Duke University Dean of Arts & Sciences Laurie L. Patton was in the middle of creating an ambitious new outreach forum, the Duke Forum for Scholars and Publics, when her idea hit a roadblock.
The world-renowned historian she had appointed the director of the forum wanted a premier space on campus. The only problem? A dean of academic affairs had already promised the space to university language instructors.
“My dean of academic affairs was invested in this and had been working hard on it,” Patton said in an interview. “This new director said, ‘I really want this space.’ And, bingo: potential conflict.”
College President-elect Laurie L. Patton spoke with the Campus in a wide-ranging interview during one of her recent visits to campus. Patton has been making periodic trips from Duke University, where she is Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the Robert F. Durden Professor of Religion. She has been traveling to the College in order to meet and plan with members of the College community before she assumes office on July 1.
Her mediation between the two individuals who could have been at loggerheads says a great deal about Patton and what kind of leader she may be as the College’s 17th President.
Time, Space, Money, and Relationships
In this case, Patton examined how she could resolve it based on what she calls the key matrix of time, space, money and relationships. Instead of unilaterally moving ahead, her first step was creating the relationship to solve an issue of space.
“I said, ‘I’d like you to talk to each other about your common needs and figure out not whether you fight about the space but whether there is another space that the Dean of Academic Affairs could have for the language lab, or if there is another space for Scholars and Publics that you could talk about,” Patton said. “And I want you to talk about it first and not me, because you’re closer to the ground and you know what you need.’ And luckily they are both good people and they talked.”
After a few renovations to an existing room, the dean and the incoming director figured out a mutually agreeable solution and the Duke Forum for Scholars and Publics (FSP) was born. Patton was confident that they could figure out a solution despite what originally looked to be a deal-breaker on both sides.
“We had to spend more money to do it but that was an example where creating a relationship, forcing them to talk about their actual space needs and investing a little more money solved the problem,” Patton said.
Even though this matrix might seem rigid, she said solving problems almost always boils down to a discussion of these four areas.
“I’d like to think that even though it’s a thing that I invoke regularly, it’s capacious enough so that you could still be creative with it no matter what,” Patton said.
The Sense of the Whole
Patton’s rationale for creating FSP fits into her broader thoughts on how higher education ought to interact with the community.
“If institutions of higher learning do not become more outward-facing, then we’re in trouble,” Patton said. “I think that’s true of colleges. I think that’s true of universities. I wanted to create a space where scholars, where they live—which is creating their research—could immediately translate their research to the outer world in addition to working with members of the community who are outside the guild to co-create scholarship.”
Patton describes FSP as a “signature initiative” for her at Duke and has already met with the Middlebury selectboard to explore potential collaboration between town and College.
Patton said, “I wanted to signal early on how much I want to work with the Middlebury community.”
She also has experience with the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership. The office facilitates service learning in Durham as well as economic and community development.
Patton maintains that Middlebury’s relationship to a local community in conjunction with a global outlook is something few other colleges can claim.
“The rural and cosmopolitan is Middlebury’s unique genius,” Patton said. “There is something very profound about that combination that people got when they founded this place and it keeps getting iterated.”
The Language Schools and Middlebury’s environmental studies strength were both underway long before “going global” or “sustainability” were buzzwords, said Patton. Nevertheless, these auxiliary programs present challenges when grappling with what seems to be the zero-sum game of administrative resources.
For Patton, imagining a bigger sense of the whole is Middlebury’s biggest challenge in the next five or 10 years.
“Middlebury has grown and now we’re in this new space,” Patton said. “The College should remain at the center of everything we do but there are all these other units that have amazing trajectories—Monterey being the most recent, but also a lot of others.”
Patton, despite being a prodigious fund-raiser while at Duke, said she is not sure you can ever raise money fast enough to always “expand the pie” for every facet of the College. (At Duke, Patton and the development office, through a campaign called Duke Forward, have raised $343 million since 2011.)
She said the answer might lie in raising money while also gaining a new perspective on how the component parts of Middlebury can work together so they all benefit.
Patton explained, “I want to make sure that any decision in favor of one unit doesn’t mean that I’m therefore going to disfavor the others. That’s a hard step in an institution that is growing. We’re not growing into a university identity. We’re growing into leadership in this third space that is really interesting and really unique and really Middlebury. So, making sure as we grow and create—make Middlebury more Middlebury—how can we do that without reinforcing or creating a zero-sum game? That’s my one big concern: how we encourage all the units to have a sense of the whole from their particular perspective.”
Bridging the gaps between Middlebury and its other institutional arms will likely take effort. The College entered a new phase as a quasi-bicoastal institution with the acquisition of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (formerly Monterey). However, Patton says the College can do habitual ventures that bring together the Institute and the undergraduate College, or the College and Bread Loaf, and so on.
One of the ways Patton attempted to unite a broad institutional body at Duke was the University Course series. Faculty from across the university teach a course that is open to all students, whether they are biochemistry Ph.Ds. or sophomore philosophy majors.
While acknowledging that what will work at a university will not work at what she calls a “very unique, third-space institution like Middlebury,” Patton said that the idea has potential for the College.
“If it was hosted in Middlebury, we could have fellows from Monterey come and also have people streaming in on video who wanted to take the class,” Patton said. “If it was hosted at Monterey the next year, we could have 10 fellows from Middlebury be out there, and so forth. I think that would be a very exciting project.”
Just like a student might study abroad, Patton said, the curriculum at the College can possibly reflect the wider world as it relates to the campus in Vermont.
“That kind of constant tension between being restless and coming home is something that you learn how to think through and you learn how to be in that space,” Patton said. “So that might be how we plan curriculum: not just that one class but curriculum more broadly, which include this element where we trade places.”
In regard to a potential Middlebury Course series, Patton said her approach is iterative; in other words, the College does not have to painstakingly craft the perfect solution that can never be updated.
“Rather,” Patton said, “let’s see what happens and if we don’t like it in six months, let’s fix it. I think that’s what we could do with this class, too—let’s see if this helps us imagine a whole and if it could, then we can do it every year.”
Challenges and Changing Perceptions
Perceptions of certain issues can shift from when one is a candidate for President to the President-elect. Patton said she views diversity as an important and challenging issue that she now sees is bigger at the College than when she was first getting to know Middlebury.
“I think it’s particularly acute for many reasons: because we’re at an elite liberal arts institution that has a very unique history of global engagement which would therefore imply diversity, but then we always need to be better and to live up to what we say we are. That means to rethink and to ask the question all the time, ‘Are we living up to what we say we are?’” Patton said. “And I think diversity is the number one place where students are pushing us to ask that question in really good ways.”
Students have almost overwhelming praised Patton for the attention she has exhibited, even at this early stage as President-elect, on issues of diversity at the College. Patton said that part of the reason why there is concern over diversity may be generational differences, where the next generation is pushing on diversity while an older generation may believe that the work has already been done.
Despite challenges such as diversity facing the College, Patton said that much of her work solving problems as College President might involve lighting a match for preexisting kindling. She sees preexisting groundwork of progress on issues like framing the College’s new identity or improving its relationship with the town.
In terms of keeping her finger on the pulse of the student body, Patton said that she aims to continue at the College many of the practices she has developed at Duke as Dean of Arts & Sciences. She also sought to dispel a common negative perception about College administrations, including Old Chapel.
“The common thing that people worry about is administrators know students leave, so if they just wait it out…” Patton said. “That’s the cynical view. I don’t want to be that way. I want to say, ‘Okay students, what legacies do you want to leave to the next students?’ The student population is only here four years but it’s a long-term relationship because they’re going to be alums and they’re going to care about what the next students do.”
Inhabiting Multiple Places
Despite the aforementioned challenges, Patton said the College is a unique institution that ought to be known more for its leadership in certain areas. She praised the restructuring of the Board of Trustees as an example of how the College is gaining recognition as an institutional leader.
“My guess is I’m going to keep on discovering ways in which Middlebury really is a national and even international leader and it needs to say more that it is a leader,” Patton said.
According to her, in higher education there is the need to be self-critical while also recognizing the ways in which an institution is succeeding.
Patton said, “Middlebury is a very self-critical institution, and it pushes—it’s not complacent. I love that because I think that’s the only way institutions of higher education should be.”
At the same time, she said, Middlebury ought to feature the different ways it is successful while simultaneously being self-critical.
In this regard, Patton cites the new place where Middlebury finds itself—with the Institute of International Studies, the Language Schools, the School of the Environment, and the Schools Abroad—as an area Middlebury can examine yet still keep an eye to its strengths.
“The way I put it at Monterey is that we’ve done something really interesting,” Patton said. “We need to tell a story of success about Monterey and making it better and being self-critical all at the same time. One of the things that is very exciting about all of the schools, but I think in Monterey’s case, is we have an opportunity to create a different connection between undergraduate and graduate education that also is an opportunity to inhabit multiple places.”
Ultimately, Patton said, administration is about listening and knowing who needs to be consulted, just like in the disagreement over the space in which FSP would be housed.
“The key to really good, careful, and subtle administration that creates community is one where you figure out who needs to be the major driver of the decision,” she said. “And when you figure that out and you get that right, everyone wants to be in the community together and they feel like there’s a greater sense of home.”
(04/08/15 8:20pm)
The College suspended the social house Kappa Delta Rho (KDR) on March 24 after it concluded KDR members had violated the College’s hazing policy. KDR residential members were required to move out of the house by April 6. The house will remain unoccupied for the remainder of the semester.
A statement from the College provided to the Campus said, “From its investigation, the College determined that current KDR members had violated the College’s hazing policy in a number of areas, including verbal abuse, blindfolding, and encouraging the use of alcohol.”
Administrators in the Dean of Students office as well as the KDR leadership declined to comment on the details of the hazing allegations, citing privacy concerns and the need to keep the specifics of the investigation confidential.
The events that took place to initiate the investigation occurred during the fall semester. On Nov. 24, the College received word of a possible hazing policy violation by KDR. On Dec. 10, then-Dean of the College Shirley Collado informed KDR that the organization was officially on probation and could not hold any activities until the investigation was completed.
According to the Dean of Students office, a student brought forward the hazing allegations against KDR.
The concerns were over house activities that were a part of new member education: the activities to acquaint new members with the house that are akin to the initiation activities that take place in Greek life at other colleges and universities.
Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College Katy Smith Abbott made the determination that the hazing policy was violated after an investigation by the Department of Public Safety. The sanction, as communicated to KDR, was suspension of the student organization. KDR members are eligible for other college housing during the housing draw for next semester. KDR also cannot recruit new members and cannot hold activities until the suspension period is complete.
The College handbook states, “For purposes of this policy, hazing is defined as any act committed by a person, whether individually or in concert with others, against a student in connection with pledging, being initiated into, affiliating with, holding office in, participating in, or maintaining membership in any organization or team affiliated with Middlebury College; and which is intended to have the effect of, or should reasonably be expected to have the effect of, humiliating, intimidating or demeaning the student or endangering the mental or physical health of the student.”
KDR will have the opportunity to reapply to the Student Government Association to return as a student organization in December 2015. If criteria are met, they can petition Community Council in spring 2016 to return as a residential social house and participate in Inter-House Council (IHC) functions. If approved by Community Council, KDR can apply to occupy a social house in the fall of 2016. If KDR does not take these steps, they will remain suspended organizationally.
The KDR executive board spoke with the Campus on Monday night and provided some statements on behalf of the house as to the investigation, ruling, and plans going forward.
“We understand the administration’s ruling and though we are saddened to not live in our house anymore, this has given us a great opportunity to reevaluate what our community means to us and how we can make it an even better place in the future,” said one KDR board member.
Other board members emphasized learning from the experience of the investigation and decision and their desire to work with College President-elect Laurie Patton, Community Council, and Public Safety to improve the new member education process.
“I think it’s important to keep in mind that for every education process we go through, safety and comfort are our top priorities and we have protocols in place to ensure that new members are feeling comfortable with our process,” said a board member. “Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, there was a miscommunication that led to the investigation.”
Additionally, the KDR leadership said that other student organizations should look at their own processes in the coming months, too.
“We will be taking this time to reevaluate our education process, and we would also like to invite other organizations on campus to take a critical look at themselves and the way they recruit members,” said another board member.
The KDR suspension has parallels with previous College actions on social house misconduct. In November 2011, the College suspended all activities at KDR and Tavern, another social house, after allegations of hazing emerged after the first day of the organizations’ new member education week. Insufficient evidence was found in both KDR and Tavern’s cases. A similar pause of KDR activity took place in December 2013 to allow for an investigation into misconduct involving hazing during KDR’s new member initiation week. Like the 2011 case, it was found there was insufficient evidence to support the hazing allegation.
In a different case, where a social house was not just suspended but disbanded, on March 18, 2013, Community Council accepted the Social House Review Committee’s recommendation to disband Delta, also known as ADP, a social house occupying Prescott House. The Delta decision was largely based on dorm damage, cleanup and how the house conducted parties.
KDR is the only social house at the College that is a part of a national organization. Middlebury’s KDR chapter is credited as the first, or the Alpha chapter, of the national fraternity Kappa Delta Rho. The College chapter began in 1905 and became coeducational in 1989, unlike the rest of the nationwide chapters.
Rod Abhari ’15, vice president of the Mill and the president of the IHC, said the IHC felt they were left in the dark regarding on the specific hazing allegations and the ensuing investigation. As a result, the IHC is working to propose that they are allowed more oversight of new member education practices as well as investigations.
“For us, the main takeaway is that it seems to rob the IHC of any legitimate power if in something as integral to our governing administration as investigating hazing practices we have as little knowledge as the rest of the community,” he said.
Abhari also said that despite this being the third investigation in four years into KDR’s practices, students should not draw conclusions or presume a pattern of misconduct.
“The pattern I see is more people being comfortable going to the administration when they feel concerned and the administration taking a proactive role,” Abhari said. “The pattern is not that there is more hazing from KDR because the investigations were inconclusive prior to this one.”
Because the hazing details remain confidential, most students felt it is difficult to comment on what transpired.
“As to the allegations, we can’t speak to that because the whole process has been fairly closed-door,” said Eli Jones ’16, the president of Tavern. “We don’t really know what happened and we don’t know what they did but I think that they made a mistake and we hope they learn from it.”
Jones also said that Tavern hopes to see KDR return as a student organization because of the impact on social life in its absence.
“In a similar way to [ADP’s disbandment], KDR might not be your place to go, but it is an important part of social life for a portion of the population,” Jones said. “We’re a little bit concerned because with ADP gone and with KDR suspended, the social house system seems to be crumbling, to an extent.”
Rebecca Watson ’15, a former president of Xenia, the substance-free house on campus, echoed Abhari’s comments on IHC governance.
“It’s a bit of a blow to the IHC credibility. The school gives us the opportunity to self-govern, which I felt we as social house heads were doing well. But to have KDR suspended makes houses feel like they don’t have control,” Watson said.
According to the College’s statement, the hazing investigation has not been closed and took several months because of its complexity. “Middlebury College will advise if additional facts are forthcoming that might impact the sanctions in any way,” said the statement.
(03/18/15 5:40pm)
Novelist, poet and College writer-in-residence Julia Alvarez ’71 will deliver this year’s commencement address. Alvarez, along with four others, will receive an honorary degree at the May 24 ceremony.
Alvarez is the acclaimed author of novels, essays and books, including In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts — the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the U.S. government — by President Obama in 2013. In addition to writing, Alvarez and her husband run a sustainable coffee farm and literacy center called Alta Gracia in the Dominican Republic.
President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz said in an interview, “Julia has inspired generations. As a writer-in-residence, she has touched so many individuals in the area of creative writing and expression of one’s own self.”
Alvarez was the first Middlebury graduate to do a creative writing thesis in poetry. She credits faculty members such as C. A. Dana Professor of English & American Literatures David Price and Robert Pack, the poet, faculty member and longtime director of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, for supporting her early writing efforts.
Alvarez said in an interview that she relishes the opportunity to speak to a graduating class at an institution that means a great deal to her.
“It’s very touching to be there with a class that is about to set out on the journey that I am looking back on now,” Alvarez said. “They’re saying goodbye to a certain kind of connection to the College, but this place remains under your skin and in your bloodstream, I think.”
Alvarez and her family fled the Dominican Republic when she was 10 to escape the regime of Rafael Trujillo.
In addition to graduating from the College, Alvarez has taught at Middlebury since 1988 and in 1998 transitioned from her tenured position to become writer-in-residence. She holds a master’s in creative writing from Syracuse University. Additionally, Alvarez has frequented the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf School of English.
“The Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Bread Loaf School of English — I had been trying to get back here ever since I graduated,” Alvarez explained. “So I took the job [in 1988] and here I am.”
Liebowitz also noted Alvarez’s longtime affiliation with the College. “She is an inspiration to a whole host of creative undergraduates here at Middlebury,” he said.
Alvarez, who said she anticipates departing her writer-in-residence position within the next year, sees her address as an opportunity to say goodbye to the College.
“I’m a storyteller — I like shapely stories, and I love the idea that this is my chance to say goodbye to the place that has been my home for so long,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez will receive a Doctor of Letters degree. The other honorary degree recipients will be biologist Martin Chalfie, violinist Hilary Hahn, principal Christina Johnston and political theorist Eric Nelson. Liebowitz said that selecting educators to receive the honorary degrees was an intentional theme for the ceremony.
“All of the honorary degree recipients are educators in their own right,” Liebowitz said.
Martin Chalfie, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura, will receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree. Chalfie is a Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University and visited the College on October 16 to give two lectures on his work on green fluorescent protein.
“Chalfie is a remarkable advocate for undergraduate science education,” Liebowitz said. “He enjoys teaching undergraduates, which is highly unusual for a Nobel Prize winner.”
Violinist Hilary Hahn will receive a Doctor of Arts degree. A virtuosic musician, Hahn has performed in over 40 countries. In addition to winning three Grammys, Hahn also attended the Middlebury Language Schools, studying German, French and Japanese.
“She educates us all about raising our artistic spirits,” Liebowitz said.
Christina Johnston, the principal of Weybridge Elementary School, will receive a Doctor of Education degree. Liebowitz praised her pioneering efforts in science, language instruction, and design-based learning during her tenure leading the local school for the past 20 years.
Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard University Eric Nelson will receive a Doctor of Laws degree. Nelson visited the College to deliver the 2013 John Hamilton Fulton Lecture in the Liberal Arts, a lecture titled “The Lord Alone Shall Be King of America: Hebraism and the Republican Turn of 1776.”
Liebowitz said Nelson is “very well respected, has written three terrific books and is a marvelous political theorist today.”
The commencement ceremony will take place at 10 a.m. on May 24.
(03/12/15 2:44am)
It was a harsh Vermont winter in December 1963 and, in the midst of the subzero temperatures, a landmark student life initiative had also frozen over. “The ‘question of honor’ at Middlebury College seems to have plenty of support as an ideal and not so much as a working system,” read a December 5 front-page Campus article. The article, which included student concerns about a code’s implications, foreshadowed the proposed Honor Code’s defeat in a student vote for the second time that May.
Over the past year, the Campus has investigated the untold story of the creation of the Honor Code. Although the story of the origins of the Honor Code at Middlebury is often that of a system fashioned by students and for students, the historical picture is much murkier.
A lengthy search in the College Archives and interviews with those who witnessed the process firsthand reveal that the Honor Code had a slightly turbulent history from the start.
It was a story that dominated the early 1960s at the College: a group of students and administrators who saw the Honor Code as an important opportunity for students to take ownership over their education. And yet, they received surprisingly strong pushback from students on the language and specifics of the proposed code.
The code’s proponents even dropped a compulsory peer-reporting clause, a hallmark of honor systems at Princeton University and elsewhere, from the Middlebury Honor Code in order to ensure its passage via a student vote. Moreover, after two failed student referenda on the Honor Code, evidence found in the Archives shows that at least one administrator recommended enacting the Honor Code without a student vote of support. However, in March 1965 the Code received sufficient support in a student vote to pass. Faculty opted for a streamlined approval process to avoid sending the Honor Code back with revisions to be subject to another student referendum, which they thought could be tantamount to its defeat.
The question of student votes on the Honor Code has renewed relevance of late. On Sunday, the Student Government Association (SGA) Senate voted in favor of amending the Honor System’s Constitution to put the code to a biennial student referendum with the options to maintain, revise, or eliminate the Honor Code. The amendment now must receive 2/3 of the vote in a referendum in which 2/3 the student body votes and must also be ratified by the faculty.
Change in the Air
Middlebury’s academic Honor Code, far from a lone initiative, was the product of social changes on campus that created profound shifts in student life during the 1960s. The College of the 1930s-50s was on its way out in several ways that precipitated the creation of an Honor Code.
Historians of the College have written much about the changes that took place in the 1960s. Among these reforms were major social changes to the institutional rules surrounding student freedoms. The influential Dean of Women Elizabeth ‘Ma’ Kelly oversaw a period in the ’60s when the ground shifted under students’ feet regarding their freedoms and rights as young men and women.
In the ’60s, parietal hours — the now seemingly antediluvian rules that governed when men and women could visit opposite-sex dorms —were gradually phased out. The College began to offer help to students with questions about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. Finally, the fraternities and sororities, long the bastions of the social life of yesteryear, became less and less of a mainstay of the campus party scene.
Historian of the College David Stameshkin said the ’60s were a period of remarkable change, bar none.
“Students wanted to be treated as adults. The administration wanted to treat the students as adults in certain ways but not others,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “It was incredible how things changed in the time [James] Armstrong was President.”
These changes, taken together, amounted to a climate of dramatically increased student responsibility in social life. Naturally, this trend simultaneously made its way into the academic realm.
As discussions were underway about a potential code, the Campus polled 254 students in October 1962 and found 80 percent approved of a code in theory. The newspaper also polled students and found that 35 percent of those surveyed had experience with an honor system at their high school. However, “a majority indicated they would not speak directly to a student if they found him cheating.”
The first instance of bringing the Honor Code to a vote occurred on November 19, 1962, when it failed. Harold Freeman ’62, the Student Association (SA) President, informed the Campus that the vote to inaugurate an Honor Code was defeated, 623-512, a combination of students voting “no” as well as “No-with-Qualification.” 235 voted no, 388 voted no with qualification and 512 voted yes. The students in favor did not reach the 85 percent threshold of “Yes” to send the measure to the faculty for a vote.
However, Freeman gave hints that the fight for a code was not over. “Freeman observed that by adding together the Yes and No-with-Qualification votes, almost four-fifths of the students were in favor of at least some form of Honor Code,” reported the Campus. Nonetheless, it would not be easy to convince the students who voted No-with-Qualification.
The SA, in a postmortem, theorized that a main cause for the defeat was the clause requiring students to report observed violations. This clause was considered a hallmark of longstanding honor codes at universities, including Stanford and Princeton.
Peer-Reporting Controversy
These qualms about the code reared their head repeatedly in the next two years. Surveys revealed approximately 80 percent of students supported an honor system as an ideal, but blanched at the proposal under consideration. “The main objection was to the obligation to report an offense committed by another person,” reported this newspaper.
Helen Gordon, president of the Panhellenic Council, “agreed that an honor code would be a benefit to Middlebury, but thought reworking of the ‘obligation’ clause necessary,” according to the Campus.
Gordon said, “It’s unrealistic to assume that human nature will [report others] but I don’t think they ought to leave out entirely this kind of an idea because it denies the opportunity to a person who’s really honest.”
The peer-reporting requirement would remain an issue through the end of the 1960s and beyond. As the clause became a sticking point in the debate, those in support of the Honor Code pushed back on the idea that peer-reporting meant “tattling” or being a “rat.”
In a December 1963 issue, Campus Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey J. Joseph opined that “whenever one brings up the subject of an Honor Code, the listener politely nods, makes a disparaging grimace, and quickly manages to say something like: ‘You going to the hockey game tomorrow night?’”
For all of the social life changes happening contemporaneously with the Honor Code debate, a large number of students felt comfortable enough with the status quo to stymie any efforts at instituting an honor system. Joseph explained that many students thought of the proposed Honor Code as either a way to end fraternities or to increase social code regulations and theorized that these factors led to its defeat.
“Let’s face it,” he wrote, “if someone wants to cheat, he cheats. If someone wants to ‘tell’ on him, he should be allowed to ‘tell.’ It is important to realize that a provision for ‘telling’ on someone is not included for the main purpose of making enemies out of friends. It is there to protect every honest student by presenting to the cheater a possibility that he will be caught. If you have any qualms about ‘telling’ on your buddy, keep your head down in your paper where it belongs.”
Despite the support of students like Joseph, the SA leadership began to contemplate foregoing the peer-reporting requirement. The Vice President of the SA was reportedly “willing to drop the stipulation that students report others, adding that ‘the maturity of Middlebury students ought to be able to make an honor code successful.’”
In December 1963, the chair of the student Honor Code Committee, Michael McCann ’65, cautioned against pushing the code too vigorously without almost unanimous student support. Two months later, the SA polled students on a potential honor code in what would be the run-up to a second push to pass it via a student body vote. A point of particular emphasis in the questionnaire was intended to gauge how students would feel about peer-reporting. The article stated that “McCann stresses the importance of questions dealing with student and faculty reports of offenders.”
The survey occurred concurrently with the 1964 election of a SA President, in which candidates weighed in on an honor code. Both John Walker ’65 and Peter Delfausse ’65 made an honor code a part of their platform.
Delfausse, who would win the election, said to a Campus reporter, “We on this campus are treated as adults in everything but the integrity of our academic work. Shouldn’t this be the first area in which we should be trusted? Nothing can force the student body into accepting something which isn’t wanted, but if an honor system is desired, we will find the right words with which to express it.”
Nevertheless, concurrent discussion about combating student apathy regarding the SA gives the impression that the Honor Code was an issue important to the members of its committee, but perhaps was less relevant to the wider student body. Richard Hawley ’67 was the Editor-in-Chief of the Campus, and said other issues captured the student body’s attention more than the Honor Code, particularly parietal hours — although he nonetheless appreciated the code when it was instated.
“I remember feeling a kind of relief,” Hawley said in an interview. “What a relief it was to take your exam to the library and do it there. I remember thinking, ‘This is wonderful.’ But I don’t remember student passion about it.”
Princeton on the Otter
Within the next few months, a figure who would be pivotal to Middlebury’s history weighed in on the code. College President James Armstrong, who had stepped into the position in 1963, approved of the proposed Honor Code in a meeting with McCann.
Armstrong said in a comment to the newspaper in April 1964, “Herding of students into the fieldhouse like animals, with proctors standing over them like jailkeeps, is not in keeping with the ideals of a liberal arts education.”
The influence of the college president and other key members of his administration may have been crucial to the Honor Code’s passage. Before arriving at Middlebury, Armstrong had spent his entire academic career at Princeton, an Ivy League school with one of the nation’s oldest academic honor codes — passed in 1893, with an obligatory peer-reporting clause. Armstrong earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton and then served as a faculty member and dean until he was appointed Middlebury’s 12th President.
“When Armstrong came as president from Princeton, he started bringing people from Princeton,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “In fact, the joke on campus was it was ‘Princeton on the Otter.’ That’s what they used to call Middlebury during the ’60s because Armstrong kept bringing people there.”
Another Princeton man, Dennis O’Brien was previously an assistant dean there before arriving at Middlebury in September 1965 to serve as the Dean of Men. His experience with the honor system at Princeton impacted his view of a potential Honor Code at Middlebury.
“Because myself and Jim came from Princeton, we had lived with it and we found it comfortable,” O’Brien told the Campus in a recent interview. “It seemed to establish a different relationship between faculty and students. Faculty were not always snooping over students’ shoulders to make sure they weren’t cheating; we were more like mentors. To suddenly switch over from being the person who is teaching someone to someone who is monitoring your honest behavior seemed not to be the image the faculty wanted to have.”
On top of a Princetonian as president, Middlebury’s stature as an institution was on the rise during the ’60s. O’Brien believes the Honor Code was part of the improvements.
“I think there was clearly a kind of an upgrade in terms of the quality of the students and the quality of the faculty that we were able to attract at that time,” he said, “and so it seemed like a much more senior, adult institution than one having proctored exams.”
The desire for an upgrade to Middlebury came from both above, with the administration, and also below, from students of the ’60s, particularly those who were tired of the fraternities’ hold on campus life.
“There was a genuine feeling that there should be more seriousness at the College intellectually,” Stameshkin said. “And the same thing was happening at Williams and other schools. This idea that there should be more intellectualism and more feeling of scholarship was also happening in the early to mid-60s.”
Nonetheless, the vocal support of Armstrong and O’Brien did not help the Honor Code at the ballot box at first. The proposed code failed in May 1964 to clear the 85 percent hurdle of students voting in favor, and the referendum did not receive even half of the student body’s participation. The result was devastating for those students who had worked tirelessly on behalf of a code.
“After two full years of preparation, an academic honor code was put before the student body Monday via a yes-or-no ballot – and failed to gain the needed support,” said a front-page article in the Campus. The measure received 69 percent “yes” votes from the 45 percent of the student body that voted. The rejected code included “that the test-taker pledge that he had neither given nor received aid” and that students report those they suspected of cheating within 48 hours.
The aforementioned Honor Code Committee displayed dogged, even stubborn, persistence to pass the measure. McCann told this newspaper, “This year’s balloting was far more encouraging than last year’s and there will be another honor committee next year trying to get this thing through.”
Victory, at a Cost
Despite McCann’s optimism, the outlook was grim: two votes and two defeats for an Honor Code within three years. But finally, in March 1965, the Honor Code was approved in a landslide. With 1,000 “yes” votes to 313 “no” votes, it was a marked improvement from the previous two tries in the fall of 1962 and the spring of 1964.
However, the code approved by students contained no compulsory peer-reporting clause such as that of Princeton, due to the fact that the committee viewed the clause as the reason for previous defeats. The Middlebury code stated that students with knowledge of an infraction should confront the student and if he or she does not report themselves to the honor board within 24 hours, the observer should. In O’Brien’s words, it was a passive reporting clause, with no teeth to punish a student who observes cheating and does not report it. The code that passed, unlike the previous versions, said students “should” report those they observed cheating, not “must” or “shall” of previous drafts.
The compulsory reporting clause had also been under fire in the opinions pages of this newspaper. In a Letter to the Editor on Feb. 25, 1965, William Michaels ’66 wrote: “Under the present system of exam proctoring, the College denies us the privilege of attempting to live up to the ideals of moral responsibility … this would also be the case if an honor code were passed which possessed a mandatory student reporting clause, since the student is not thus delegated the responsibility of looking after his own morality: it is merely shifted from the proctors to the other students.”
It was also a significant change that the threshold for victory was lowered to 75 percent from a lofty 85 percent, what it had been in 1962 and 1964. Some students grumbled about the idea of voting for an Honor Code for a third time, suggesting that other factors may have been at play in its success. A joke printed in the Campus poked fun at the code’s long-awaited victory. “Did you favor the Honor System at the recent election?” a student asks. His friend replies, “I sure did. I voted for it five times.”
President Armstrong was understandably pleased following the successful vote, as it was an initiative he had supported since the past spring, and he immediately set to work assigning administrators to it. In an October 1965 letter to the four members of the new subcommittee of the Faculty Administration Committee on the Honor Code, including Dean of Men O’Brien, Armstrong said, “Although I do not think you will be called upon for heavy duty quantitatively, I know you understand how important I believe the Honor Code is for the College and that a guiding hand from the faculty will be important and possibly crucial.”
Armstrong also probably worried that a lack of faculty support might end the last chance for the Honor Code to become a reality. He was present in a meeting of the Faculty Educational Policy Committee (EPC) in March 1965, after the code had been approved by the referendum.
“The honor code statement worked out by the students and brought to us with a large supporting student vote … was discussed,” states the meeting’s minutes. “It was felt best not to subject the statement to the scrupulous kind of inspection the EPC would normally employ in surveying a faculty document, but vote on it yea or nay as it stood; some felt that return of the document for a second student consideration and vote would defeat the proposal. Vote was a unanimous pro.”
It appears the EPC’s worries about the Honor Code failing in the student body led them to streamline its approval process, despite reservations that undoubtedly existed among the faculty.
The faculty also approved a key word choice in the code in April 1965. During the faculty meeting in which they approved the code, according to the article in the Campus, the faculty “did not demand a change to ‘must’” in the reporting clause.
Students Not Sold
There is a small piece of evidence that the College may have enacted an honor code regardless of the student vote. Dean of the College Thomas H. Reynolds wrote in his annual report dated July 1, 1964:
“There is an excellent chance that an almost unanimous student vote will be achieved next year. In the event that this kind of a program does not succeed next year, I recommend the College take some action towards bringing an academic honor system into effect.”
While Reynolds never ended up having to make that recommendation, O’Brien disagreed with his premise.
“I don’t think you should impose it without a successful student vote. I think that would have been a mistake to try to do that,” O’Brien told this reporter. “I think the whole idea of an honor code, to a certain extent, is to get away from the high school syndrome of, ‘You have to be proctored and not entirely trusted.’”
The following year, as new Dean of Men, Dennis O’Brien’s first annual report was pessimistic, illuminating the reasons why Reynolds or others might have pursued an Honor Code if the student body would not.
“By the time the student reaches the last half of his college career we have pretty much either got him involved intellectually or we have lost him for good … they may be active in fraternity life, extracurricular life, athletics, they may be valuable citizens in other ways, but academically they run along on minimal requirements seeking the gut courses and paying only lip service, if that, to the intellectual community,” wrote O’Brien in his annual report in June 1965.
He went on in that report to comment on the lackluster implementation of the Honor Code.
“The Honor Code was approved by students in early March,” O’Brien wrote. “I may have missed something, but I think no further initiative toward its implementation came from students until practically exam time, if then.”
O’Brien also observed how the administration was involved from the very beginning and that students were not yet invested in the code:
“Many students are far from ‘sold’ on the Honor Code. They feel that the Administration has been determined to have an Honor Code here no matter what and that the students finally let the Administration have its way. These students have a sort of uninvolved, ‘play it cool’ attitude. They intend to wait and see how ‘they’ will work it out. If students who felt that way could see the minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee on Honor Code for May 27, 1965 they would feel that their perception was largely confirmed. These minutes make it clear that the Honor Code Committee, chaired by the Dean of the College, consists of several professors and administrators and that to the meeting of this committee were ‘invited’ several specified undergraduates.”
O’Brien also cited a study from Columbia University that said for honor codes to be effective, the motivation should come from students and should appear to be coming from students. The difference between the honor codes at Princeton and Middlebury, he told this newspaper in October 1965, was not Princeton’s “obligatory clause for reporting, but a strong and firm belief in the system by faculty and students.”
Of the code, “it was held with a great deal of pride,” O’Brien said. “Most complaints of the new Middlebury system that I have heard have not been substantive, but procedural. And I think there are some false expectations about the system by a few students.”
A Reversal in Student Perception
Two years later in another report, O’Brien suggested that the honor code might have already backfired soon after its implementation.
“The Honor Code seems to be functioning well although there is still a certain amount of feeling against signing the pledge,” he wrote. “I personally feel that the distaste for the pledge grows out of a hypersensitivity on the part of students today that they are not trusted. As they are not trusted to close their dorm doors during parietal hours, so they feel they are not trusted in the matter of honor in examinations.”
This reversal in opinion was extraordinary. The push for the Honor Code, at least from students, was based on the idea that it would give the students more responsibility and was in the same spirit as a move away from parietal hours. Based on O’Brien’s report, the code had the opposite effect, making students feel like the administration trusted them less than before.
Whether the code was truly being followed is difficult to assess based on available records, but O’Brien writes that “a student was convicted of a violation of the Honor Code this year and suspended for a semester,” a low number of convictions by any standard.
Although during the 1960s the social rules at colleges and universities like Middlebury were being chipped away from all sides, it still took a great deal of effort on the part of members of the SA to pass an honor code via a student vote. Additionally, the faculty minutes and annual reports of the College show that at least one top member of the administration was ready to intervene to institute an honor code and held back probably because of concerns of its effectiveness if instated and operated by Old Chapel.
O’Brien’s 1967 assessment is revealing. There had been two unsuccessful votes from students amid vocal support from the administration and faculty; as a result, many students identified the Honor Code as an administrative device. A corollary explanation is that the social changes in the 1960s cut both ways on an honor system: while these sweeping changes helped make the code a possibility, they also changed the way a code was viewed in the years afterward. Increased freedom for students allowed them to pass the code; however, the perception of the code after 1965 was that it was an administrative measure — not a student-owned freedom.
“It’s very important that the students read the honor code as an administrative imposition as opposed to something that boiled up from the students,” Stameshkin said. “The students felt often as if the administration was kind of the enemy. They wanted to be adults and they felt the administration was treating them like children—you have to be in at this hour and all that — it wasn’t paranoia, but the students felt that way about a lot of things.”
The Campus reported in March 1968, three years after the code passed, that the student Honor Board was worried about the new system’s efficacy. The board had only heard six cases since 1965, and three of those were in the 1967-68 year. Two cases resulted in convictions, and only one of the six cases was because of a report submitted by another student. “This the board felt suggests either that only two students have cheated in the last three years, or that students have not accepted the responsibilities implicit in the system,” reported this newspaper.
The Honor Board, as a result, began to consider changing the constitution of the new Honor Code from passive acceptance of the code to hold responsible a student who did not report a violation.
A decade later, in January 1976, the student body approved by a landslide the revisions proposed by a committee on the honor system. There were dual changes: students now had a moral obligation to report cheating, moving away from the ambiguous language of the original code, and also proctors would be allowed in some cases with the specific authorization of the Judicial Review Board. Even under the best of circumstances, O’Brien said in a recent interview, getting students to report their peers may be asking too much.
“My guess is that [peer-reporting] never works terribly well, unless you’re in a highly codified organization like the military academy,” O’Brien said. “I’m not even so sure how well it worked at Princeton … it’s a nice thing to have: there’s a certain moral responsibility, and I love the idea of going up to somebody else and saying, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ But I suspect it doesn’t happen very often.”
It is difficult to assess whether the code cut down on cheating, as suggested by research that shows colleges with an honor code have less self-reported cheating by students. On that front, Emeritus Dean of Advising and Assistant Professor of American Studies Karl Lindholm ’67 said the Honor Code did not hurt and probably helped.
“I remember thinking it was a great idea. I don’t think there was any greater level of cheating than when the exams were tightly proctored,” Lindholm said. “It was almost a challenge to see if you could beat the system then,” with stories of notes written on hands and crib sheets hidden during an exam. “With unproctored exams, I don’t recall any greater level of cheating,” he said.
Approaching Another Vote
In a January survey by the SGA, 33 percent of the student body said they support the Honor Code in principle but that there need to be changes. 59 percent of the 1438 survey respondents said they support it in its current form and about 7 percent said they don’t support it.
Additionally, the Campus published (“Cheating: Hardly a Secret,” Oct. 30, 2013) the results of a survey by Craig Thompson ’14 for the course Economics of Sin where 35 percent of 377 students surveyed admitted to violating the Honor Code at least once in the 2012-13 academic year. 97 percent were not punished.
On Sunday, the discussion came to a head when the SGA Senate approved, in a nearly unanimous vote, the decision to move ahead with a bill that would subject the Honor Code to a biennial student referendum. Per the Honor System's Constitution, 2/3 of the student body must vote, and 2/3 vote in favor, for the change to take effect. The amendment would then need to be ratified by the faculty at large. If the amendment passes, a spring 2016 referendum would give students three options: to vote to maintain the honor code as it stands, to eliminate it or to revise it. A majority in favor of revision would cause the Honor Code committee to survey opinions during a two-week revision process. Students would then vote on the revised Honor Code to either approve it, to maintain the original code, or to eliminate the code.
Student Co-Chair of Community Council Ben Bogin ’15 was an impetus behind the SGA proposal and said fighting atrophy was a goal. “The idea behind our method is to encourage people to continue talking about the Honor Code after they sign it as a first-year,” Bogin wrote in an email. “The Honor Code only works if it’s a living, breathing document that people cherish and take seriously. We’re trying to breathe a little more life into it.”
SGA Director of Academic Affairs Cate Costley ’15 added that the idea is to reclaim the Honor Code as a document students care about and take ownership of.
“Through conversations and debates, we settled on a schoolwide vote to try to solicit the voices of our peers and to see what they think,” Costley said. “And having an edge to it with the possibility of eliminating the Honor Code is to say to people, ‘Let’s not take this document for granted.’”
Vice President for Student Affairs, Dean of the College and Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture Katy Smith Abbott said she believes discussion has also been sparked by the decision in the Economics Department to proctor exams in introductory classes starting last spring.
“It’s not that proctoring hasn’t been an option for faculty — it has been — but it’s required a certain kind of approval process that most people thought was not necessary or wasn’t in the spirit of the Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “And I think when that decision was made (thoughtfully, and at great length) by the Economics Department, it meant that a larger number of students were being exposed to the question of whether the Honor Code is working.”
Smith Abbott also said that the code could possibly fail in a referendum, based on what she has heard from students.
“I think some of my lack of a firm sense of how it would go is based on the variety of opinions out there right now about whether or not the Honor Code is working,” she said. “I think if we have entered into a period where more students, through their own experience or inherited wisdom, think the Honor Code isn’t working, we could see it fail.”
Several on Community Council, according to Smith Abbott, have raised doubts about the wisdom of a biennial survey in which the Honor Code could be eliminated.
“I think a lot of folks on Community Council — and I have mixed feelings about this — felt that those are insurmountable odds that, if two years later, you have two classes of students who have never lived with an Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “What’s their investment in bringing it back? Why are we putting that on them by saying, ‘[An honor code] worked for some people and didn’t work for others, but it’s on you to decide to overwhelmingly vote it back into existence?’”
Bogin, however, said that that he is not worried about failure and that the discussion of the code’s relevance is worth having through a referendum.
“I think that it’s incredibly unlikely that the Honor Code would fail in a vote. According to our most recent student survey, in which about 60 percent of the student body voted, 92 percent supported the continued existence of the Honor Code,” Bogin wrote. “I also think that it’s important to say that if something isn’t working, and everybody agrees, we should be able to get rid of it. It’s hard to say that the Honor Code is student owned if students don’t have the power to get rid of it.”
Hawley, who was at Middlebury during the Honor Code debate, said renewed attention to the code is not a bad thing.
“I think the cycle of concern is probably the best thing, whatever the outcome, because it’s heightening student awareness of how it’s my responsibility to do my own work. I don’t think there’s anything that would prove that a certain kind of honor code produces more honor,” Hawley said. “It’s sort of what Jefferson said about the American Constitution: it should be revisited; there should be at least a thread of revolution every 20 years to keep attention fresh on what the values are. I think raising the climate of concern about it is probably the most important thing with respect to honor, not necessarily what code you have written down.”
(03/04/15 7:48pm)
On Saturday night, a large fire engulfed a non-College house at 107 Weybridge Street rented by five College students. None of the students were harmed.
After battling the fire well into the night amidst freezing temperatures, firefighters were able to get the blaze under control and by late Sunday morning the fire was out. Middlebury Fire Department Chief David Shaw said the cause of the fire is as of yet unknown.
Sayre White ’15 was the only student home at the time of the fire. White had been asleep and woke up around 8 p.m. to the smell of smoke filling her room.
“I could hear the crackling and could see the flickering light outside the window,” White said. “I pulled back the curtains and looked along the side of the house and there were already 10-foot flames all over the porch.”
White believes that she was probably not in any immediate danger because of the house’s large size and the fact that the fire started on the opposite side. After evacuating her room, she ran outside and saw two students she knew who were pounding on the house’s side door to see if anyone was within.
Shaw was first on the scene and arrived two minutes after the call. He said there was an initial search for a person inside.
“It was reported to me that there was somebody still in the building on the second floor,” Shaw said in an interview.
After sending a first team through on quick search that did not find anyone, Shaw said, “Very shortly after they sent another team to search, it was reported that the person was accounted for.”
Meanwhile, the firefighters’ first effort to suppress the locus of the fire on the building’s porch went underway.
Around 9:45 p.m. a sophomore student walking past the house witnessed flames coming from the top of the building.
“There were flames coming out of the window on the third floor and nearby there were flames coming out of the rooftop and through the house structure,” she said. “It was pretty crazy.”
The emergency involved six other neighboring fire departments, in addition to the Middlebury Fire Department. The other departments were on the scene to assist the Middlebury firefighters because of the extreme cold.
“I saw about seven fire trucks go by while I was walking from town with my friend,” said Brennan Delattre ’16. “The area was blocked off with cones. There was smoke coming up.”
According to Shaw, at least three student volunteer firefighters from the College helped contain the flames.
“There were student firefighters on the scene who were actively engaged in the suppression of the fire throughout that period,” Shaw said.
White said that despite a combination of fire and water, thanks to the firefighting team some belongings were saved.
“The firemen did an incredible job of removing items that looked like they had a lot of sentimental or personal value into other rooms, so we’re beyond thankful for that,” she said. “They even unpinned pictures from my walls and moved them. I got quite a few items out.”
The fire was a 16-hour endeavor for the Middlebury Fire Department. Because of the cold, firefighters had to return to the station at 2 a.m. after the fire was under control. Shaw said that at 7 a.m., firefighters returned to put out remaining hot spots and were on the scene until 10 a.m.
The severity of the blaze was compounded by the age and wooden structure of the apartment. Made of long-timber lumber, modifications over the years such as interior walls caused the fire to spread. Shaw said he has not written the building off as a complete loss. Nevertheless, the building remains severely damaged, as are the belongings of the students who lived there.
In an email to the College community on Sunday, College President Ronald D. Liebowitz and Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College Katy Smith Abbott thanked the firefighters.
“We are deeply grateful that the students are all safe and we thank the Middlebury Fire Department, along with neighboring departments who arrived on the scene to help,” Liebowitz and Smith Abbott wrote. “We also want to thank the emergency first responders for their efforts overnight.”
In their email, Liebowitz and Smith Abbott wrote that the College is assisting the students who rented the house to find housing.
“We are working to support the students to find alternative housing and to assess their longer term needs as a result of what was lost in the fire,” they added.
As of Sunday, all of the students had been moved into new housing on campus. White praised the College’s efforts, particularly Smith Abbott, Atwater Commons Dean Scott Barnicle, Residential Systems Coordinator Karin Hall-Kolts and Associate Dean of Students for Residential and Student Life Doug Adams.
“They have gone above and beyond; they’ve been amazing,” White said. “They’ve offered to buy people new computers or to open a charge account at the bookstore to replace all of our books. Katy Smith Abbott has even organized people to do clothing drives, made sure we have down coats, offered to buy us boots—they’ve been absolutely incredible.”
White also said that she and the other students have been overwhelmed by support from Middlebury community members and fellow students.
“The amount of people rallying around us has been remarkable,” she said. “We are just incredibly grateful that none of us were hurt and that none of the firemen were hurt.”
(02/12/15 3:22am)
Changes to tuition and senior housing are on the table following the latest meeting of the Board of Trustees. While the Trustees tackled a variety of topics in their January 22 to 24 meeting, their discussions indicate two significant changes in the months ahead for the College’s finances and infrastructure.
In addition to discussing whether the College should increase the comprehensive fee beyond the specific formula, the Trustees tentatively approved (pending decisions on the final design and project financing) a plan for housing on Ridgeline and Adirondack View, where proposed senior residences are intended to assuage town-gown tension.
Notably, in the meeting the administration recommended to the Trustees that the College depart from the existing formula used to calculate and control increases in tuition and room and board. The formula, referred to as CPI+1, capped increases in the comprehensive fee to no more than one percentage point greater than the year’s increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measurement of inflation.
President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz said in an interview that in the recent meeting the administration suggested a three to five percent increase rather than strict reliance on the CPI+1 formula. In the years prior to the 2010 adoption of the CPI+1 formula, the administration would recommend a range for any potential comprehensive fee increase.
Liebowitz said, “This past meeting, we recommended a range once again by showing them the reasons why we thought we had to move away from CPI+1.”
Pressures on the College’s budget include a higher percentage of the student body receiving financial aid and costs driven by compensation and federally mandated regulations, which require new staffing. The class of 2018 had 48 percent of the incoming students receiving financial aid, the highest level in the College’s history. Additionally, Liebowitz wrote in his email to the College community that operating costs in higher education have risen due to compensation costs rising faster than inflation, largely because of the increasing cost of benefits.
As a strategy for controlling the rise in tuition, CPI+1 appears to have been an effective one. Liebowitz explained that when CPI+1 was adopted in 2010, Middlebury was among the most expensive liberal arts colleges in a 21-school peer group. Now, the College’s 2014-2015 comprehensive fee of $59,160 sits below its peer schools in New England, including Williams College ($61,070), Amherst College ($61,206) and Wesleyan University ($61,198).
When asked whether the Trustees have discussed how the comprehensive fee continuing to rise beyond 60k could price out prospective students who are neither able to pay the full fee nor qualify for substantial financial aid, Liebowitz said the board discusses access for middle-income families year in and year out, and will continue to do so at each of their meetings.
“Middle-income families are the ones who often don’t apply to schools like Middlebury because they’re not aware that even they are eligible for financial aid,” Liebowitz said. “Even with CPI+1, we’re concerned about the middle class and about families knowing that, even though they may think they’re not going to be eligible for financial aid at Middlebury, they should apply anyway.”
According to the administration’s plan, students already on aid will not be affected by any increase beyond CPI+1 because their aid packages should increase accordingly. “We don’t think this shift in setting the tuition is going to affect the middle class all that much so long as they apply for financial aid,” Liebowitz said.
In response to whether the administration has long-term plans to control the inexorable rise of the comprehensive fee in the absence of CPI+1, Liebowitz said the College’s concern with the cost of higher education is nothing new and was what led to CPI+1 in the first place.
“We had discussions about the sustainability of the model in almost every committee meeting,” Liebowitz said. “This is a continuation of the discussion and is not something new. What is new is the regulatory environment, which has forced us to add staff members and which increases costs – salary and benefits are more than half of our operating budget.”
Additionally, Liebowitz said that although the administration had recommended discontinuing CPI+1, the College has been exploring solutions to the pressures causing tuition to rise.
“We started late in the game in terms of building our endowment, but we, unlike other liberal arts colleges, have multiple revenue streams—that’s why the language schools, and schools abroad, additional revenue streams, are important to Middlebury, because they help underwrite the overall budget of the College,” Liebowitz said.
While the Board will continue discussing next year’s comprehensive fee and no decision has been made, all indications are that the College will discontinue the existing formula. In the 2013-2014 comprehensive fee, the College took the first step toward moving away from CPI+1. The Trustees increased room and board beyond the CPI+1 formula for the first time, calculating it separately from the increase in tuition.
In addition to their sessions on risk management and online learning ventures, the Trustees gave preliminary approval to a plan to construct additional senior housing near the Ridgeline houses and on Adirondack View.
In his email, Liebowitz wrote that the new housing “is intended to improve senior-level housing, reinstate lounges that had been used for housing students, eliminate the mods (which are several years beyond their recommended lifespan), and reduce the number of students who are living off campus.”
The construction plan comes on the heels of a fall semester that saw significant town-gown tension over parties hosted by students living in non-College owned off-campus housing on Weybridge Street. When asked whether the College’s relationship with Middlebury residents was a factor in the plan to reduce students living off-campus, Liebowitz said it was but that the proposal has been in the works for many years, driven by the commitment to the town to replace the mods, which have been used beyond their intended lifespan.
“We accelerated the Board’s discussion even though the Board had been discussing the replacement of the mods and new housing on Adirondack View and Ridgeline for quite a while,” Liebowitz said.
As a part of the new housing plan, the administration intends to reduce the number of students living off-campus, which currently is around 110, in part because of concerns voiced by Middlebury residents about parties in a primarily residential area.
“We would feel comfortable with a smaller number of students being able to live off-campus,” Liebowitz said. “The goal is to reduce the density of students living around Shannon Street and Weybridge because that’s where more of the new non-College rentals are being rented by students, which has created some problems in the neighborhood.”
Current residents of the mods Zoe Kaslow ’15 and Cate Costley ’15 reacted to the plan with optimism and high expectations for the mods’ replacement.
“It is evident that [the mods] are past their sell-by date,” said Costley, who has lived in the mods since last spring. “That being said, it’s a great way to live with 6 other people in a discrete building. It’s a home,” she added.
Kaslow, who also serves as the president of the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB), said the ideal senior housing in the Ridgeline and Adirondack View area would replicate the feeling of independence the mods offer.
“I’m really excited to see what they do. I hope that they get a lot of student input,” Kaslow said. “I think seniors should step up and tell the administration what they think because the first-years don’t know. It’s important to say your last bit and provide insight in that way. Even if we’re not going to see it come to fruition, it’s important that we give our knowledge.”
On Tuesday night, members of the Dean of Students Office, Facilities Services, and representatives from the design firm spearheading the new residences presented the plan in Bicentennial Hall. The project, which represents the first new residential housing construction since the Atwater halls were built, is set to undergo future discussion as the financing and construction plans are finalized.
(12/03/14 6:11pm)
Students, faculty and staff walked out of classrooms and offices on Monday, Dec. 1 to stand in solidarity with Ferguson, Mo. in light of the recent grand jury decision not to indict former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. The crowd of approximately 100 people gathered in front of Mead Chapel to listen as Rubby Valentin Paulino ’18 read the names of victims of police brutality, including Brown, Tamir Rice and others.
Paulino said, “1,100 miles. 1,100 miles away a black boy was murdered. 1,100 miles from Ferguson, here we stand. 1,100 miles away from Ferguson, here I stand. Just as brown, just as young, just as dangerous to America.” After a moment of silence, the crowd raised their hands in the now-famous “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture.
The walkout took place at 1:01 p.m. and occurred in conjunction with other walkouts happening on college and university campuses across the country at 12:01 p.m. Central Time, the time Brown was shot. A week before the walkout, on Nov. 24, a Missouri grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Brown. The jury’s decision was the impetus for the demonstrations across the country on Monday.
The mood was somber throughout the event; however, smiles broke out at one point, when Paulino told the attendees to hug the person standing next to them.
“Take the time to look at those around you. Come on, give someone a hug! These are your friends and allies,” Paulino said. “Look to each other for places of comfort and unity. Look to each other for change. We can rewrite our own history and you being here today gives me no doubt about it.”
The walkout on the College campus comes amidst several other events designed to facilitate discussion and raise awareness of the issues in play with the Ferguson decision. On Oct. 22, over 50 students and several faculty members walked across campus in a silent march against police brutality to mark the National Day to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation, which held particular significance given August’s events in Ferguson. On Nov. 25, Assistant Professor of Sociology Jamie McCallum and Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Rebecca Tiger held a discussion on the grand jury decision in the Brown case.
“The discussion on the 25th was to allow people space and time to allow people to share their visceral feelings about the non-indictment verdict. There was no agenda planned,” McCallum said. “Many more people came than we anticipated and we had a good discussion. At the end of it there was some productive planning that happened, but ultimately it was a meeting to come and share thoughts and sentiments.”
Although the walkouts on Monday were the initiative of the national Ferguson Action Network, the event held at the College was not a part of any student organization. Paulino said the event emerged organically. Thanksgiving break did not leave much time for reflection on the grand jury decision, according to Paulino, and he wanted students to have a chance to mark the occasion upon their return to campus from break.
“I wanted to do more for my community,” he said.
Word quickly spread through social media over the weekend. “I invited 10 people and by the end of Sunday night there were 800 invites and 150 people who RSVP’d, so that was powerful,” Paulino said. “The most powerful part for me was watching people put their hands up. I directed everyone to use the time to reflect, look around and be in that space.” He said asking attendees to hug was intentional to emphasize the human interaction and collaboration needed for any movement or activism.
Paulino said the members of the College community who attended were not just students, which came as a surprise but a happy one nonetheless. “I walked up to the scene and basically thought, ‘Oh my God, there are adults here,’” he said.
A challenging and sobering part for Paulino prior to the event was sorting through the list of black victims of police brutality to create a list to read in front of Mead Chapel.
“There were a lot, and how do you pick which names to use?” Paulino said. “There is a sea of people. There is a website that lists black murders by police and specifies that they were unarmed cases — they update it every time somebody dies.”
Rod Abhari ’15 said he would not typically attend a walkout or protest, but that the events surrounding the Michael Brown decision made Monday’s event different.
“I realized that joining people here in solidarity is important for my own spiritual sake, realizing that we as a part of something larger can take action into our hands,” Abhari said.
He approached his professor to inform her of the walkout beforehand and was surprised by the response.
“When I talked to my professor about it, she actually proposed it to the class and our entire class walked out, a seminar class of 10 people,” he said.
Another walkout attendee, Aashna Aggarwal ’16, said that as an international student, the events surrounding the death of Michael Brown showed a different side of the U.S.
“When I first heard about the decision, I was really shocked — I’m from India and every time we talk about or hear about the U.S., it is the country where you want to be or the country that’s got it right,” she said. “I went to the meeting on Tuesday, and then I went to Burlington for the protest. I feel this is something we can change and have an effect on. I’m happy to show my support in whatever way I can.”
David Fuchs ’16 attended the walkout and said that he wanted to be there because he fit the typical demographic of the College’s student population.
“I’m a white kid from the suburbs from an upper-middle class family, and I feel that everything about my identity and my life experiences is built on a historical system of privilege and oppression that has created the spaces that I’ve lived in and created the reality that I was told to see. I feel that that reality is just as implicated as any other in this struggle,” he said. “So it’s important for someone like me to be here because it shows to other people who might identify with me and my demographic that they are just as implicated in this, too.”
When asked if the death of Michael Brown had opened eyes to police brutality for college students, McCallum said, “I think a lot of people grow up believing that we live in a place in which police aren’t allowed to kill people and get off without a trial, and that’s not true. I think students experience a moment of cognitive dissonance when they grow up thinking we live in a democracy, and this seems like an instance of failed democracy — what does it mean for them as students, American citizens, and young people interested in social justice?”
McCallum was not teaching a course at the time of the walkout, but said he talked to several faculty members who, like Abhari’s professor, gave permission for their students to attend the walkout.
A walkout’s significance, according to McCallum, comes from the disruption to the normal routine, whether one is an employee or a student. “The way people have power is to withhold their contribution to society, whatever that is. If you’re a worker, it means withholding your labor. If you’re a student, it means withholding your obedience or the ordinary course of your day to promote business as usual,” he said. “A walkout is a disruption of the ordinary life that is otherwise apathetic. And as a disruption, therefore, it has some power.”
The discussions will continue with a Ferguson deliberation event on Thursday, Dec. 4 at 4:30 p.m in the Warner Hemicycle to plan future action on campus.
“We began this semester with the tragedy of the shooting. We end the semester with the tragedy of the non-indictment and the ongoing police violence in Ferguson,” McCallum said. “So I think and hope this forum on Thursday will be to help people process the last three months of the issue.”
(11/19/14 9:31pm)
Dr. Laurie L. Patton was named Middlebury College’s 17th president, and the College’s first female president in its 214-year history, at an announcement ceremony in Mead Chapel on Nov. 18. Patton, who is currently dean of the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University and the Robert F. Durden Professor of Religion, addressed the Middlebury community for the first time at the meeting after opening remarks from President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz, Chair of the Board of Trustees Marna Whittington and Chair of the Presidential Search Committee Allan Dragone Jr. ’78.
Faculty, alumni, Trustees and students packed Mead Chapel to witness the announcement of the new president and to hear her first remarks to the Middlebury community. After brief introductions to the proceedings by Liebowitz and Whittington, Dragone discussed the selection process at length, emphasizing the importance of the many different constituencies within the broader Middlebury community in the selection process.
According to Dragone, the committee, which was comprised of “members of the faculty of both Monterey and Middlebury, staff from both Monterey and Middlebury, alumni, Trustees and students,” made it a priority to represent stakeholders without direct representation in the process such as residents of the town of Middlebury, parents and students.
The lengthy selection process was designed to ensure that the president-elect would be a perfect fit for the College. The selection committee and the Board of Trustees played an active role in ensuring the strength of the applicant pool.
“We talked to leaders in higher education across the country who were the rising stars,” Whittington said. “And we went out and recruited some of them to our pool, so we had a terrific pool.”
“The caliber of candidates was deeper and more accomplished than I could have possibly have hoped for,” Dragone echoed. Of the more than 260 initial candidates, the committee chose 100 with competitive backgrounds and curricula vitae and then pared this group down to 50 after group deliberation. By means of another round of phone conferences and small group meetings, the committee winnowed this list down to 12 finalists who sat for comprehensive interviews with the entire committee. The committee then selected five finalists for multiple rounds of interviews and an exhaustive background and reference check.
“On our shortlist of five final candidates, any one of them would have been a good president of Middlebury College, but Laurie is the best fit for Middlebury at this time in its history,” Whittington said.
Patton, who was elected in a unanimous vote by the Trustees, emerged as the natural choice of this group of finalists for a number of reasons. Her vision for a liberal arts education in the 21st century, which she outlined in a lecture she gave at Middlebury last February entitled “Liberal Learning: The Recovery of Dialogue in a Global Context,” aligned neatly with the core competencies that the selection committee identified. These competencies were “scholarly values, leadership capabilities, management expertise, commitment to diversity and finally cultural fluency for a really global perspective,” according to Dragone.
After an introduction by Dragone and a rousing round of welcoming applause, Patton took to the podium and proceeded to outline her definition of a liberal arts education and detailed three key words as the guiding principles behind a successful 21st century liberal arts education: innovation, adaptation and integration.
“Every educational institution must exemplify these educational goals of innovation, adaptation and integration in its own unique way,” she said.
Paying homage to her background as a scholar of religion, Patton next applied her vision of a 21st-century liberal arts education by offering a list of institutional attributes she called “The Seven Great Educational Virtues of Middlebury” before concluding her speech to raucous applause.
Student reaction immediately following the announcement was overwhelmingly supportive of President-elect Patton, but student comments also carried the weight of the community’s high expectations for its new leader.
“I think the student body is passionate about a lot of different things,” Maeve Grady ’16.5 “And I’d really like Laurie to be someone who is willing to listen to a lot of different voices and take them into account.”
The Campus and other local media organizations later attended a press conference with Patton in the Davis Family Library. She was asked what, if anything, being the first female president of the College means to her. “On the one hand, it’s a wonderfully happy accident that I’m a woman, and the best thing that I can do is to be the best president I know how to be and serve this community as energetically, intelligently, patiently (and as impatiently) as I possibly can,” she said.
Patton added that she has written extensively about women in South Asia and has participated in micro-philanthropy and educational initiatives for women and girls in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra. “Women’s education is of huge importance to me. I think it is one of the major issues facing us globally,” she said. “One of the great joys that I have as an educator is when I’m able to mentor young women who have not had the privilege or the chance to build the confidence to come into their own voice. That’s true of all people but I think, in particular, it’s a great privilege to be able to be a role model for young women in that realm.”
The announcement of the next College president comes during a slightly rough patch in the otherwise positive town-gown relations of the past decade. When asked what the College’s role should be vis-à-vis the town, Patton praised President Liebowitz and outlined some future steps, based in part on her experience with the Duke-Durham partnership.
“I’ll put it very straightforwardly and simply: I think that if colleges and universities are not outward-facing toward the community, then they will not thrive in the 21st century,” she said.
In response to a question on how she plans to increase diversity in the College’s student body and engage with students from various backgrounds, she explained that diversity issues are viewed in a broader lens by students today than by her generation.
“Diversity earlier was about a binary,” she said. “I think now students are in a very multiform environment. It is something much bigger, where the multiple forms of diversity create new kinds of intersectionality, and I think students, as I listen to them, are very concerned about their multiple identities and how they intersect. I also think sexual and gender identity and transgender identity is a very big issue for students today in ways that we need to pay attention to on college campuses.”
Patton also said that the College is uniquely positioned to both communicate the importance of diversity and also to be a place where students of different backgrounds can thrive.
“I think a lot of our admissions processes and welcome to students have to do with making sure that students of diverse populations know that they will thrive in a Middlebury context. We have to make sure we follow students from the admissions contact through to their life on campus,” she said. “I know Middlebury has participated in the Posse program which has been very successful — how do we push that even further and create even more diverse, welcoming environments to help students through their Middlebury career into their post-graduate career?”
Patton’s current position at Duke includes an active fundraising role, experience that she hopes to capitalize on at Middlebury to the benefit of financial aid.
“The crucial thing for us is building not only our endowment but also building even more endowment for financial aid. I think it’s going to be an absolutely essential mission,” she said. “Middlebury’s financial aid package is very generous, I’m really proud of that already even though I’m not here yet. But I think we need to do more and better.”
She mentioned named scholarships as one avenue that studies have shown can create a diverse campus.
“I look forward to being very creative with our financial aid packages and building them even more vigorously so we can make sure that that diversity — intellectual, economic, racial, et cetera — is protected,” she said.
Students were enthusiastic about the announcement throughout the day. “I’m really excited to see who they picked and why they picked this new person,” Vassily Zavoico ’17.5 said before the announcement. “It’d be cool to see in what direction Middlebury might be going in the next ten years.”
Members of the College community lined up in Wilson Hall in the late afternoon for a chance to chat with the College’s president-elect. “I’m really excited for Laurie and I am really excited for Middlebury College, and I think that the first few words out of her mouth — innovation, integration and adaptation — are incredibly important for this school,” Moria Sloan ’15 said. “She hit a lot of hot-button issues and hopefully she will deal with them tactfully.”
Patton professed excitement to begin working with the Middlebury community. “I can’t wait to get here,” she said. “I can’t wait to listen and to learn more, to dive into our deepest challenges and have our best arguments.”
According to Dragone and Whittington, she will return to her post as dean at Duke for the next two months or so while Liebowitz focuses on his agenda. The College will begin to “really get focused on transition activities about Feb. 1, so you’ll hear more as we get closer to that,” Whittington said.
Additional Reporting by Hannah Bristol and Claire Abbadi
(10/22/14 7:33pm)
Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, will visit the College on Oct. 25 to deliver a lecture. Robinson, the seventh and first female President of Ireland, held the office from 1990 to 1997. After leaving office, she became the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, traveling to war-torn regions. Robinson is a member of the group of world leaders known as The Elders, many of them former heads of state who no longer hold public office and work as advocates for peace and human rights. The group was brought together by Nelson Mandela and is chaired by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Robinson has made combating climate change a centerpiece of her international advocacy.
Robinson’s lecture is the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB)’s fall speaker. It is a public lecture that will take place at 7 p.m. at Mead Chapel. Robinson will speak for approximately an hour and will take questions afterward.
MCAB President Zoe Kaslow ’15 said the Board wanted a speaker that could talk about women’s rights and topics that would apply to a community larger than Middlebury. “Mary Robinson was definitely the number one choice, I think especially because she speaks on so many topics that are relevant to the College,” Kaslow said. Last spring, Kaslow was the co-chair of the Speakers Committee along with Robbie LaCroix ’16 and initiated the plan that would ultimately bring Robinson to campus.
Kaslow said when reading the College’s Mission Statement, the values listed lined up with what Robinson focuses on in her work. “I think she is going to be fantastic, she really has a presence and I think her credentials really speak for themselves,” Kaslow said.
Robinson’s endeavors are similar to the College’s efforts to attain carbon-neutrality by 2016 and embark on other projects in sustainability. In a June 2014 speech to the Freedom and Solidarity Forum, she said, “To put it starkly, the physical world faces potential catastrophe because of climate change and we are running out of time to take the necessary corrective action. We need rapidly and equitably to make the transition to a carbon-neutral world.”
In July of 2014, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Robinson as Special Envoy for Climate Change. She is now the President of the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, an organization that focuses on raising awareness of the consequences of climate change for the world’s poor.
Nicholas Orr ’15 is a co-chair of the MCAB Speakers Committee, along with Izzy Kannegieser ’17. “Students are very excited,” Orr said. “I think it’s a very relevant topic and it’s one of the highest-profile speakers we’ve had in the last few years.” The most recent former head of state to visit the College was President Bill Clinton, who delivered the Commencement address in 2007.
The lecture by Robinson also takes place during Fall Family Weekend. “I think it’s a nice thing to take your parents to as well,” Orr said.
(10/22/14 7:28pm)
The Middlebury Campus sat down with College President Ronald D. Liebowitz to discuss his time at the College. The conversation ranged from when he first became President to some of the changes he has seen at the College in the past years. Liebowitz will depart the College at the conclusion of the school year.
Middlebury Campus (MC): What was it like moving from a role as a Professor at the College to an administrator (specifically Provost and Executive Vice President), and then to the College President? What was it like, as someone within the College, stepping up to become College President?
Ronald D. Liebowitz (RL): Like many things, it had its advantages and disadvantages. In my particular case, I was a tenured member of the faculty, which means I went through the tenure process and then I served in two major academic positions before becoming president — the dean of the faculty and then provost. Having had these opportunities, I was able to learn a lot about the institution, seeing things from many angles, and working with major committees along the way, all of which was so very valuable and a real advantage for me.
The disadvantage coming “from inside” the institution is that, having had to make some tough decisions, sore feelings sometimes linger. When you come into the presidency with a history, you face some additional challenges when trying to move the institution forward. So, there are pluses and minuses to both, but I feel very fortunate to have known the institution as well as I did when I began my term as president.
MC: And I think a lot of people forget that it has only happened three times in the College’s history.
RL: Yes, I like to remind people who are not knowledgeable of Middlebury’s history that the college has had a president from within three times in 214 years – once in the 19th century with Ezra Brainerd, once in the 20th century with John McCardell and me in the 21st century, so maybe that means we can expect outside presidents for the next 85 years!
MC: Do you think your background as a specialist in political geography influenced the projects that you have embarked on during your time as President? Examples include new schools abroad, new language programs, and Monterey.
RL: I have never given this much thought. I think my background as a Russianist and also as a political geographer had some impact but I would like to think that most academics today, regardless of one’s discipline, would see the changing world in which we live and how that relates to the type of education that our students need and by which they would be best served. I would hope that most academics would see the direction we’ve taken as complementary rather than in competition with a traditional liberal arts education and reflects the changes external to Middlebury and higher education in a smart and beneficial (to our students) way.
MC: Where do you hope to see Middlebury’s relationship with Monterey go in the next decade or so?
RL: I’ve been fairly consistent about this since 2005 – I don’t believe that programmatic (academic) integration can and should be forced where it does not make sense. The great attraction of Monterey was that, while Middlebury and Monterey shared an underlying commitment to linguistic and cultural competency, it was such a different institution from our undergraduate liberal arts college. The differences open up many opportunities for students to engage in courses and programs, plus meaningful engagement with MIIS faculty, whose philosophy about cultural competency is similar to our faculty’s, but whose curricular content and pedagogy are so different from what our students have here on campus. We are not a professional, graduate school – we’re not even a pre-professional undergraduate school! We are a liberal arts college – and the juxtaposition and the complementarity of these two is powerful for those students interested in international careers.
That said, Monterey and its programs are not for everyone. They are intended to be for those students who want to pursue international-related careers. But beyond the obvious complementary curricular opportunities, there is another benefit that comes from the collaboration: the strengthening of the “Middlebury” network. About 30-35 percent of Monterey students are international students (the majority from Asia), and most graduates go on to work all over the world. By expanding our alumni network to include Monterey alumni, faculty, and staff, we strengthen the Middlebury network, which helps current students and recent graduates by opening doors to internships, employment opportunities, and meaningful connections across the globe. This is an often overlooked benefit of our relationship with Monterey. My hope, then, would be that students take advantage of the opportunities to combine a professional international education offered at Monterey with their undergraduate traditional liberal arts experience to the benefit of their post-college plans; that they would use the resources that Monterey offers for both advanced degrees and a robust, international-oriented network.
MC: On the topic of the undergraduate experience, in the time that you’ve been here, how do you think the student body has changed? Have you seen changes in the typical Middlebury student?
RL: The student body has changed over thirty years, yet the influence of the institution itself on each generation of students remains stronger than any specific change I might highlight. One example: a characteristic of the student body that I noticed immediately upon arriving at the College is that students are incredibly civil towards one another. We have disagreements, altercations, and skirmishes for sure. Yet, the culture here is very forgiving to individuals who in other environments would face far greater challenges. I suspect this is because the student body as a whole recognizes that over their four years here each member of the larger community is going to rely primarily on the 2,450 other undergraduates for one’s intellectual, social, and cultural sustenance. On campuses in urban areas or at institutions with a graduate population, this might not be the case; the environment is different. Here, though, the undergraduate experience is not diluted, it’s a close-knit community, and this cultural aspect has remained a constant and has been present for a very long time. It is something that first-years learn early on so by the time they are sophomores, juniors, and seniors, they themselves pass this on to incoming first-years.
There’s a flipside to this characteristic of the Middlebury culture. Although ours is a very smart student body, many faculty see less “mixing it up” intellectually in class than one might find at a Columbia, a Harvard, a Yale, or a Wesleyan – places located in more urban environments. If this is true, I believe it’s a fair trade-off. I think without the cultural characteristic of students being civil toward one another, less competitive, more supportive, and more collaborative, a lot would be lost here in terms of the overall quality of the educational experience for students.
But to your question, what has changed? The student body has become a lot more socioeconomically, culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse. Though we strive for greater diversity still, those of us who have been here a long time see great changes on this front. When I first got here, about 1 in 20 students were American students of color or international; now, that ratio is greater than 1 in 3. That’s a huge change. We know that a more diverse student body translates into a richer educational experience as a result of students sharing different perspectives and life experiences both inside and outside the classroom.
Other changes: students today are obviously more conversant with technology. They are more apt to volunteer not only in town, but across the country (alternative break service trips) and across the globe. And many of my colleagues report students are more visibly focused on jobs and employment, which is understandable given the changed financial circumstances they face at graduation than 30 years ago. So there has been change, yet the overall dynamic of the student body – being supportive of one another, collaborative, and open-minded – remains and still is the general feel one gets here.
MC: I want to talk a little bit about the carbon neutrality initiative, the Franklin Environmental Center and the Solar Decathlon entries as examples of how Middlebury has become an environmental leader in the past 10 years. Is there one achievement that stands out to you from all those?
RL: No, not really. In the last 10 or 11 years during my time as president, a number of notable things have occurred and the spotlight should be on the students; in almost every case the students have been at the center of these initiatives.
The whole idea of carbon neutrality at Middlebury didn’t start with the administration and it didn’t start with the Board of Trustees; it started with a student back in the 1990s who shared his work from a senior seminar and passed it on to younger students interested in climate change and environmental stewardship. About a decade later, when the Sunday Night Group formed, students in that group were the ones who brought forward the proposal for the institution to reduce its carbon footprint and eventually to pursue carbon neutrality. Some Middlebury faculty worked with students to fine-tune their pitch to the administration and eventually to the Board of Trustees. Their presentation was excellent: they admitted when they couldn’t answer a question and pledged to get the answer to the Trustees later (and they did); they had a deep command of the issues; and succeeded in getting the trustees to adopt their resolution, which was never a foregone conclusion. Seven years later, with the coming implementation of our bio-methane initiative, we are almost there – becoming carbon neutral without purchasing any offsets.
For the Solar Decathlon, the idea was first proposed by my wife, Jessica, and with the guidance of faculty and staff in the sciences and environmental studies, the students more or less took over the project. The institutional commitment was significant to support the effort, though the rest was on the students, and they showed remarkable maturity in overcoming some real challenges that they had never encountered in their traditional liberal arts education. It was not just about the academic challenge or learning about solar power, renewable energy, engineering, and more; it was also a huge challenge of working together as a team, respecting one another, accepting opposing views, and compromising on so much along the way. We don’t have a graduate program in engineering, or even an undergraduate engineering program. Nor do we have a graduate school of architecture, and so the students had to rise to the occasion to learn things on the fly and they did. Yes, they were mentored by faculty and staff in a significant way, but they needed to use their skills and knowledge gotten in the classroom to draw on the expertise from around the state of Vermont to help them as well.
If you go through almost every environmental initiative over the last 20 years – the start of recycling, the establishment of our composting program, sustainability initiatives, biomass gasification, carbon neutrality, real food, plus others – most have been student-led or the idea was student generated. I think that’s the key thing that we should take away and really applaud: that the institution is a leader in sustainability, but that wouldn’t be the case without the students.
MC: When you stepped into the role of College President in 2004, did you think about what you wanted your legacy to be when you eventually depart?
RL: I think almost every President probably steps in saying, “If I could leave the institution in a stronger position upon departing than when I began, I’ve done well.” All the more when one inherits an institution of the quality and stature of a Middlebury. I think what has made these last 10-11 years so interesting has been our need to recognize, for really the first time in many decades, the external forces that have created some great challenges for higher education, including Middlebury. If I would have been told in 2004-05 that we would face the worst recession in a century just 3-4 years later, I would have said, “Wow, what are we going to do?” You don’t plan on such an occurrence – higher education financial models seem to show variables all moving in the positive direction, year after year, and fail to include stress tests or “worst case scenarios.” And, there is no blueprint or plan sitting in a desk drawer in the president’s office awaiting you when an issue of this magnitude arises.
It is easy to ignore the external pressures mounting on higher education and continue with a “business as usual” approach to operations, but such an approach will no longer do. I believe getting some tough issues on the table for discussion and action, no matter how much people wish to ignore them, is an important part of the past 10 years.
MC: On the subject of the recession in 2008, can you talk about what it meant to manage that crisis?
RL: The most challenging thing about the recession was that we didn’t know when it might end. We needed to judge and judge early, the level of cuts we would need to make in order to address what we had estimated would be $30 million 4-5 years out, yet it could also have been worse: we just did not know. Since compensation amounts to roughly half the institution’s budget, it was clear the only way to make real headway into a projected deficit would be to address staffing. But when you make a decision to reduce staffing through layoffs, it can be devastating to a small community if it is not handled well and with great sensitivity. Though we knew we needed to reduce staffing, we didn’t know how many jobs needed to be cut.
In the end, I thought the institution – faculty, staff, students, administrators, alumni, trustees – did a remarkable job because we were one of the first schools, if not the first school, to engage our community, letting them know that it was likely we would need to begin a process to determine how best to address the economic crisis. We didn’t have any specific answers or recommendations, of course, but we tried to prepare the community for a process that would result in significant cuts. The challenge at that early date was the unkown: how much would our endowment drop? How would our students’ families be affected? How many people’s financial situation would change? So the greatest issue was the unknown - not knowing when the crisis would end.
I think back to the changes the recession brought to other institutions and I am grateful we were able to preserve what our students, faculty, staff and alumni told us was most important to them for us to preserve. Though there were some differences among the priorities for each group, everyone emphasized that we needed to avoid involuntary layoffs: that was the biggest concern among all the groups. As a result, we offered voluntary and early retirement programs for staff and faculty through which medical coverage continued until age 65 and individuals received payments that provided security and were based on years of service. Between 2009 and 2011 about 110 staff positions were eliminated through these programs, and 12 faculty colleagues chose to retire early. We also reduced services at Atwater (no meal-plan dinners and only a continental breakfast); reduced significantly catering options for departments; reduced some budgets between 5 percent and 10 percent; froze salaries except for the lower end of the pay scale; and increased the size of our student body by 50 to provide more revenue to make up for the endowment decline.
However, the alternatives to our major cutbacks were severe. Some peer institutions ended need-blind admissions, others had to delay library and science center projects, and still others cut faculty positions. We didn’t freeze the size of the faculty and in fact added 11 new faculty positions as was planned, we had no involuntary layoffs. We did not sacrifice the excellence of our academic program.
Moving early and decisively, having feedback from so many constituencies through the extensive surveys, and being able to focus on what was most important to each of the groups helped us to come out of the recession as well as we could have hoped.
MC: Are there other difficult choices that you had to make in your time here that come to mind?
RL: There have been a number of challenging or difficult choices surrounding policies, but that is to be expected. The Monterey opportunity, allowing military recruitment on campus, accepting a gift to create the (Chief Justice) Rehnquist endowed professorship, and establishing Middlebury Interactive Languages stand out. All of these represented contested issues, and a lot of the differences in opinion, in my view, stemmed from the different time horizons that a president and board must take when considering opportunities and institutional direction. Students, faculty, and staff, if I can generalize, tend to view things in the shorter-term – those things relevant to a student’s four years here, or for faculty and staff what is related to the here and now or to one’s career. A president and Board must look beyond that time horizon to project what is in the best interest of the institution long term. Some disagreements are rooted in true philosophical differences (e.g., “what is the relationship between a liberal arts education and our students’ finding jobs after graduation?”), yet I would say there is greater agreement than there are difficult and contentious debates. The difficult issues, however, bring out passion and sometimes anger, and sometimes overshadow all that we do agree on as an institution.
(10/22/14 7:19pm)
On Oct. 17, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz announced several administrative changes in an all-campus email. Included was the news that Dean of Students and Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture Katy Smith Abbott will serve as interim Dean of the College beginning in January. Smith Abbott is replacing Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College Shirley Collado, who is departing Middlebury to become Executive Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Executive Vice Provost at Rutgers University – Newark.
Collado wrote in an email to The Middlebury Campus that Smith Abbott is the right person for the position. “I am thrilled that Katy will assume this interim role,” Collado wrote. “She has been an incredible colleague and leader as the Dean of Students, and I am confident that she will bring strong vision, experience and a student-centered approach to her work with our Student Life team.”
In his email, Liebowitz also detailed several other administrative shifts that will occur through the 2015-2016 school year. The various changes are due in large part to Collado’s multiple responsibilities at the College, which include serving as the College’s Title IX Coordinator and Chief Diversity Officer. These roles are now being divided among several administrators. Liebowitz explained that the creation of these positions as interim roles and the division of Collado’s responsibilities are because of the broader changes underway at the College during the presidential search. In his email, he wrote, “This will provide important continuity for the community while giving the next president of Middlebury the opportunity to consider and make long-term administrative leadership decisions.”
Collado believes that the decision to separate these roles into different positions will ultimately leave the College in a strong position when a new College President takes the reins. “These recent appointments demonstrate the College’s serious investment in the critical areas of responsibility that I oversee. Given the leadership transitions at the institution, I think it is wise to appoint three outstanding individuals to oversee student life, diversity initiatives and Title IX responsibilities,” Collado wrote. “There are a variety of ways that this work can be structured, but what is most important is that Middlebury must remain deeply committed to these goals and areas. I have no doubt that dividing up the roles with three talented individuals is the best way to address our institutional needs and strategic goals at this time.”
Smith Abbott brings years of experience in student life to the Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College position. She, along with her husband, Professor of Mathematics Steve Abbott, served as co-heads of Ross Commons from 2002 to 2008. In 2011, Smith Abbott was appointed Dean of Students after four years as Associate Dean of the College. In his email, Liebowitz wrote that in Smith Abbott’s new role, “She will oversee residential life, student activities, athletics, public safety, new student orientation, judicial affairs, the Parton Center for Health and Wellness and the centers and programs related to innovation, entrepreneurship, career services, and internships.”
There is significant overlap between Smith Abbott’s current responsibilities as Dean of Students and her new responsibilities as Dean of the College. However, new areas that will fall under Smith Abbott’s purview starting in January include Athletics, the Department of Public Safety and the Parton Center for Health and Wellness. There are also new responsibilities for Smith Abbott in managing offices and programs such as the Project on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts, the Center for Social Entrepreneurship and MiddCORE.
As she prepares to step into the new role, Smith Abbott said, “I’m eager to support the initiatives already in play and to create real dialogue with students about the issues that matter most to them. I already work closely with all my colleagues in the office of the Dean of the College and I look forward to the collaborations across student life.”
Working with Smith Abbott in January will be Dean of Wonnacott Commons Matt Longman ’89, who will serve as Special Assistant to the Dean of the College.
“Matt Longman is taking part of the Dean of Students portfolio. He is taking on some, but not all, of the responsibilities of the Dean of Students role so he can preserve his commitment to the Dean of Wonnacott role,” Smith Abbott said.
Longman will continue to serve as Dean of Wonnacott Commons. A Middlebury graduate, he has worked as a dean at the College for the past 17 years.
Looking past the 2015-2016 school year, Smith Abbott said there will likely be a conversation with the new president regarding the structure for student life administration. “I think a lot depends on the vision the new President has for student life,” she said.
Professor of Spanish Miguel Fernández ’85 will be the Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) for the 2015-2016 school year. With Collado’s departure, starting in January the CDO will be its own position. Fernández, who has previously served as chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and director of Latin American Studies, will take on existing initiatives in diversity. Notably, Fernández will support the Creating Connections Consortium (C3). Collado was instrumental in securing this $4.7 million grant for the College, along with Connecticut College and Williams College, from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to increase diversity among faculty. Fernández will be stepping into the CDO role as C3 continues to grow and add other university partners to the program. He praised the program in an email to the Campus. “This is not simply a post-doc fellowship that brings underrepresented graduate students onto the faculty for a couple of years. It is a much more complex program with ambitious goals,” Fernández said. “I am attracted by the creative approach of C3 and how it goes to the root of a problem and seeks workable solutions that benefit not just our institution, but the whole academy.”
Additionally, as CDO, it is likely that Fernández will also be involved in the ongoing conversations around a proposed Intercultural Center. “I will pay close attention to the proposal this fall and get myself up to speed on the process,” Fernández wrote in an email to Campus. “My expectation is that the proposal will pass and that I will have an active role in the implementation of the Intercultural Center proposal.”
Finally, Liebowitz detailed an administrative change that ties into the new governance structure of the Board of Trustees. Vice President for Language Schools and Schools Abroad Michael Geisler will now also serve as the College’s Chief Risk Officer (CRO).
“The addition of CRO to Michael’s title and responsibilities is a reflection of the increasingly complex legal and regulatory environment in which Middlebury and all of higher education now operate,” Liebowitz wrote. “This complexity requires a designated senior-level administrator to manage risk and to articulate and implement best practices and appropriate policies.”
As Vice President for Language Schools and Schools Abroad, Geisler assessed risks when looking for new sites for programs abroad. “We spend a long time measuring the relative safety and how it is different from Middlebury and comparable cities in the United States,” he said.
Geisler will be the primary liaison to the risk management committee, one of the six functional standing committees that now exist within the Board of Trustees in its new governance structure. He will also oversee the work of the new Title IX Coordinator and Compliance Officer. Collado previously held the Title IX Officer position, and the individual who will fill this new role of Coordinator and Compliance Officer is unnamed as of yet. “Title IX and the Clery Act will be some of our responsibilities,” Geisler said, “as well as emerging threats like Ebola and new programs and what they mean in terms of the challenges on the financial side, on the safety side and on the side of managing staff and faculty resources.” Investment policy is also a part of the CRO’s responsibilities in risk management.
Geisler said the transition to the new governance structure in relation to his new role has been smooth. “There was thorough preparation done by the Trustees themselves and by the administration,” Geisler said. “By the time we had those meetings, everybody knew what their roles were and we were able to engage in much more focused and substantive discussions than under the former governance structure.”
Collado is still heavily invested in diversity and inclusion initiatives in her remaining time at Middlebury. “These include the approval of an intercultural center at Carr Hall, key faculty diversity initiatives, greater support for our first generation college students and community college transfer students, continued sexual violence education and prevention, further strengthening our MiddView new student orientation program and the successful launch of our new Posse STEM Program,” Collado wrote. “These are just some of the initiatives that I hope Katy, Miguel and the new Title IX Coordinator will continue to push forward through the 2015-2016 academic year.”
(09/10/14 8:33pm)
In a change to existing College policy on adjudicating sexual misconduct, the Sexual Misconduct Review Panel (SMRP) was eliminated in August. The SMRP, which had been in existence from the fall of 2011 until this summer, reviewed case materials that were prepared by an investigator. These case materials, which included information gathered through meetings with the complainant, respondent and witnesses, were reviewed by the four-person SMRP. Members of the SMRP were drawn from the Community Judicial Board.
In an all-campus email on Sept. 8, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz wrote, “While the students, faculty members, and staff members who served on the SMRP in the three years of its existence have done excellent work, we believe our institutional goals and the meeting of evolving standards of compliance will be best served by the new process, which places the adjudication responsibility in the hands of full-time professionals with extensive and ongoing training and experience in this area.”
Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College Shirley M. Collado described the new policy in an email to The Middlebury Campus.
“The investigation and report preparation processes remain the same,” Collado wrote. “What has changed is the body that makes the official determination as to whether there has been a policy violation, and the body that assigns the sanction.”
Under the new policy, the College’s Human Relations Officer (HRO) takes the place of the SMRP in evaluating evidence and determining if the policy or policies under investigation were violated. The HRO’s standard of evidence is preponderance of evidence – whether it is more likely than not that a policy violation occurred.
Collado, who also serves as the College’s Title IX Officer, said that there were several reasons behind the change. According to her, under the previous policy, cases that occurred during the College’s various programs such as the C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad, the Middlebury Summer Language schools, and MiddCORE were adjudicated by the HRO. In contrast, cases that occurred on the Vermont campus during the academic year or during the summer when neither party was enrolled in a Middlebury program were adjudicated by the SMRP.
“It is important that students, faculty and staff are able to expect the same process regardless of what program they are participating in or when the event in question occurred,” wrote Collado. “Having all cases adjudicated by the HRO and all sanctions for students assigned by the Dean of Students supports consistency in process and outcome.”
The new policy is also designed to solve the logistical issue of convening the four-person SMRP during the summer, since the HRO is available year-round.
The change takes place in the midst of a chorus of national attention on the issue of sexual assault on college campuses. Last spring, a recommendation from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which oversees compliance with Title IX, discouraged colleges from including students on hearing panels involving sexual misconduct. Following suit, the change to the policy now has the HRO as the only evaluator of evidence and the only individual responsible for determining if a policy has been violated.
Other colleges and universities have made a similar change to eliminate students on a sexual misconduct hearing panel. On Sept. 4, the Indiana Daily Student reported that Indiana University was removing students from hearing panels during an Office of Civil Rights investigation of the university’s Title IX compliance. Additionally, on Sept. 4, The Daily Princetonian reported that a Princeton University faculty committee is recommending similar changes to remove “the current adjudicatory role of a subcommittee from the Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline.” Two weeks ago, the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill announced a new sexual misconduct policy that removed students from adjudicatory hearing panels, according to an Aug. 29 article in The Herald-Sun.
Unlike Princeton and the University of North Carolina, Middlebury College is not among the list of institutions of higher education under investigation for a possible violation of Title IX for their handling of sexual misconduct cases.
Last September, the College was the recipient of a $272,528 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office on Violence Against Women. This grant was awarded to strengthen existing programs designed to prevent and respond to sexual assault on campus. Collado said that the new policy is largely unrelated to the grant from the DOJ. “This particular decision was primarily based on our own analysis of Middlebury’s structure and the needs of our community,” Collado wrote.
The College’s process of hearing cases on sexual assault has evolved over the past four years. In 2011, the Sexual Assault Oversight Committee changed the policy on adjudicating cases involving sexual misconduct so that instead of the eight-person Community Judicial Board hearing these cases, a special investigator would be appointed who would then present the results to the SMRP. With the new change, the SMRP has been phased out and the HRO takes its place.
Collado wrote, “We feel that the new approach is more consistent, allows us to resolve cases in as timely a fashion as possible, and is in keeping with best practices across higher education.”
Michelle Peng ’15 is actively involved with the It Happens Here project, which aims to raise awareness about sexual assault on campus. She said the professionalism of having the HRO adjudicate cases is a plus to the policy change, but she hopes there can be several people weighing in on such a significant decision.
“Having someone or a professional with extensive training has great benefits,” Peng said. “At the same time, it puts a lot of pressure on the HRO as a single person. It is always, in my mind, beneficial to have multiple people weighing in on such an important, life-changing decision.”
Rebecca Coates-Finke ’16.5 is a MiddSafe advocate and returning member of the confidential campus peer resource for those affected by sexual violence. She agreed that there are positives to having adjudication by the HRO in terms of cohesion and logistics. Coates-Finke also added that MiddSafe’s role has not changed despite the judicial process evolving. “In terms of MiddSafe’s perspective, it doesn’t really change our job that much or the support that we would be giving to someone going through the process.”
(09/10/14 8:22pm)
One afternoon last October, I descended the stairs of Davis Family Library for a foray into the College Archives. My purpose was an article on the Archives and its staff, but in truth I was simply curious about what the Archives was all about. Before that article debuted, I had not spent time in what I now realize is a treasure trove of documents, photographs, and recordings documenting the history of the College.
A classic saying in journalistic circles is that reporters write the first draft of history; for the College, this phrase is actually true. When speaking with the highly experienced team in the Archives, they explained that the Campus figures importantly into the research of students and faculty who wish to examine life at Middlebury throughout the past century. The role of this newspaper, I learned, is more than just breaking news stories and running articles having to do with the day-to-day life at a four-year liberal arts college. Many times, the archived copies of the Campus serve as an invaluable snapshot of the lives and opinions of the students and faculty who called this place home.
The papers in the basement of Davis Family Library have served as a crucial resource for many researchers, including me. Last January, I took on a research project on the origins of the Honor Code for a Winter Term course. I was in debt to the College Archives team, for the paper I produced relied on the copies of the Campus from the 1964 school year in order to hear the voices of students on the new Honor Code proposal. Additionally, students write award-winning theses on life in Vermont in bygone days every year by using material from the Archives, including the Campus.
It might seem antiquated to print a stack of newspapers every week given how a typical student primarily consumes news online. However, the historical value of a physical copy should not be underestimated. None of this is to say the Campus is ignoring the online medium. In fact, this year the Campus will continue to create video features and other dynamic content we will disseminate via Facebook and other social networks. We also hope to collaborate with online sources of campus news. Ultimately, no matter the format, you can rely on the Campus for in-depth stories you cannot find anywhere else. Editors spend countless hours each week to bring you insightful coverage in every section, not to mention discerning opinions from our Editorial Board.
As I take up the position of Editor-in-Chief, I want those interested in historical inquiry and those who simply want their voice heard to take heart. If you have something to say or an issue to explore through journalism, the Campus is where you can do it. Submit an Op-Ed – we welcome all opinions and strive for diversity in the letters we print. Join our skilled writing staff – you will be a part of a 109-year-old tradition of reporting the first draft of Middlebury history. Moreover, there is staying power in the ink on these pages. Someday, a junior in the class of 2064 may be reading your article to discover how students at the College lived “back in the day.”
(02/19/14 6:38pm)
How do you make an ice rink out of nothing but a stretch of grass on a quad? As difficult as it might sound, every February, the Facilities Landscape Services staff makes it happen, albeit with a little improvisation.
With winter weather unpredictable in Vermont, Facilities staff have to be simultaneously flexible and persistent. Things do not always go according to plan. An original attempt to construct the broomball court outside McCullough Hall met warmer weather in the second week of J-term. On Jan. 21, the Landscaping crew was out in sub-zero temperatures to take another approach during week three.
Clinton “Buzz” Snyder, supervisor of Landscape Services, explained how the broomball court is usually constructed in advance of Winter Carnival and how this year is something of a trial run.
“We’re out here trying something different this year,” Snyder said. “Normally what they do is they plow off an area to get all the snow off and the guys will come in at two in the morning. They’ll stand there with an inch and a half hose and just sprinkle it and let if freeze.”
This method is heavy on effort, not to mention the time-comittment in the cold.
John Quelch, a crew chief for Landscape Services, who was surveying the court nearby, said that the old method took several days of spraying water on the court to prepare it for skaters or broomball aficionados.
“[It took] two to three days of doing that, just spritzing it,” Snyder said. “So we are trying something different.”
The team had used a tractor to recreate the snowbanks around the court that had melted the week prior and were preparing to add the water.
“We plowed up some banks, and we’re going to try to flood it with a fire hose,” Snyder said.
A fire hose, hooked up to a hydrant near Old Chapel Road, was pumping water onto the grass that would soon be the ice rink.
The new method was not without its snags.
“We’re running into some difficulties because we knew [the ground] was going to be uneven,” Snyder said. Trying to create an even surface over slush was too difficult.
“We’re going to have to go around and hit it with more water in different areas and let it freeze and come back and pour more water on top,” Synder said. “It takes a while because it is uneven. See the high spot by that lamp? The low spot down here? It may look level to the eye but once water hits it, water tells you everything,” referring to how when the water runs over the slush, it instantly shows where the ground is not flat.
Undismayed, Snyder said the Landscaping team had a plan.
“We’re going to get the tractor over here and do some more banking,” he said.
Quelch would man the tractor, pushing snow out of the center of the court and onto the banks in order to have the fire hose laying down water on grass as opposed to slush. The team had originally just set the fire hose on the ground, but Snyder said that strategy was quickly shelved.
“It went crazy on us, so we’ve got to hold onto it and move it around,” he said.
All this effort, Snyder said, is ultimately for the students and their Winter Carnival enjoyment.
“We’re going to get John to get the snow off, because we really ought to start with just grass. See how we are getting slush on the top? And then that freezes too rough for them to play,” he said. “It’s just broomball, but once in a while people get out there with skates.”
(01/15/14 4:40pm)
For the heating and cooling team within Facilities Services, December through January is their Super Bowl. With huge swings in temperature, Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) staff like Scott Barker have to keep buildings heated at a comfortable temperature without wasting energy from the Biomass facility. Buildings across campus, many of them old, cannot always be trusted to handle the influx of steam from beneath the Biomass Plant. On a chilly afternoon in December just before finals, the steam and water were shut off in Starr Hall. The reason for the shutdown was that Barker had been notified that a great deal of excess steam was seen exiting out of the basement on one side of Starr Hall.
“Anybody in Starr will get an email that says, ‘At 9 a.m., we’re going to have a water shutdown today,’” Barker said. “We’ve scheduled two things today to try to consolidate the downtime for the building.”
The first task, which fell to Barker and fellow HVAC and Refrigeration Staff Member Jon Manns, was to replace a condensate pump deep within the bowels of Starr to prevent the excess steam. Barker and Manns tinkered with the steam pump, a small metal sphere designed to open and close with a snap depending on how much steam is needed.
True to its name, HVAC handles everything related to heat and cooling.
“We not only work on all the steam equipment — all the refrigeration systems and every bit of air conditioning is in our office as well,” Barker said.
The plumbing shop was working in Starr Hall’s basement that day as well, necessitating the water shutdown.
“The plumbing shop has the water off, and they’re replacing the pressure-reducing stations,” Barker said, “which reduce the pressure of the water coming into the showers of the building.”
When students turn on water in dormitories, the heat comes from the Biomass Plant and runs through heat exchangers that use the steam to heat water.
“We use steam to heat up anything, so that’s how we heat the hot water for heating systems as well,” Barker said. The steam trap Barker replaced in Starr Hall’s basement is designed to remove condensate from that steam.
Even though it is currently the coldest month of the year, the steam does not run constantly. Barker explained that if the outside temperature is 51°F or above, the steam pumps do not run. Additionally, the steam is heated to far beyond what the actual temperature is when water comes out of a shower or faucet.
“We’re giving your building 138 degrees of heating water,” Barker said, a step in the process designed to make sure the heat is not lost in the pipes en route to its destination. The colder it is outside, the hotter the steam is when it leaves the Biomass Plant.
Barker and Manns were on a tight schedule to get the steam back on.
“We better get trucking,” Barker said, glancing at his watch. The two grabbed the repaired pump and walked over to Starr Hall.
“Between the plumbing, electric and HVAC shop, we have a lot of things on our plate everyday,” said Barker.
Down a rickety flight of stairs in Starr, a cramped basement had two plumbers from Facilities working on the pipes to one side. The building, one of the oldest on campus (built in 1860) and not designed for modern equipment, had pipes, gauges and valves crowding what seemed like every inch of space in the dark basement. The small space was sweltering.
“The newer buildings are better,” Barker admitted, referencing the tight quarters.
There was a great deal of elbow grease required to get a relatively small steam pump into place. At one point, Barker had to practically heave the pipes to get them situated. Eventually, the valve was in place and all systems were back to normal. The pace of the steam that had been billowing out of Starr’s vent had been reduced to its usual rate.
Manns said that many people call the HVAC team to let them know that their heating is not working when, in fact, the lack of heat is intentional. “We get a lot of no heat calls [when] we don’t have the heat on in the buildings because it is kind of warm outside,” he said. “We can look at their buildings from afar and look at what is going on before we get there.”
Barker, on a nearby computer, pulled up graphs through the Energy Management System (EMS) showing data from all of the buildings on campus, including internal temperatures and even data on individual rooms.
“We can pick any building on campus,” Barker said.
The system is sophisticated enough that the tightly monitored controls within the Service Building rarely malfunction. More often than not, heating monitors are damaged because of windows being left open.
“We’ve had heating systems break open but it is mostly from human error,” Barker said.
Ultimately, Barker said keeping the windows closed can have an outsized impact.
“When it’s cold outside, students should keep their windows shut, because it will affect everybody else. It’s not just them, it’s everybody,” Barker said. The importance of keeping windows closed has to do with how the older systems measure the temperature of the building as a whole.
“Certain people have certain rooms, so if it’s 30 degrees out and the kid in that room has his window wide open, the temperature in there will be fairly cold so it will drive our heat exchanger to go open and give you guys a bunch of heat,” Barker said. “Meanwhile, that heat is going right outside.”
(11/21/13 5:20am)
It is 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night. The campus is illuminated by a full moon, and the faraway thumping bass of music can be heard echoing across lawns as parties get started. Tom Raymond is on the clock, checking in for his shift as a night watchman. “The College campus is a lot different at night than what it is during the day,” Raymond said. “It changes a little.”
He radios into his supervisor from Facilities and buckles a belt jangling with over 20 keys. Tonight Raymond is working a graveyard shift from 9:30 p.m. until 2 a.m.
Raymond climbs into the cab of the pickup truck he uses to travel around campus, checking buildings.
One common misconception about the night watchmen is that the three staff members — Raymond, Pat Bushey and Gene DeLorenzo — are an arm of Public Safety.
“A lot of people think of night watch as security, and it’s not at all — [it’s] totally separate,” Raymond said. “Public safety, as you know, deals mostly with students.
We offer assistance to them if they need us for something but we don’t tend to be Public Safety at all.”
Raymond said he sees a discouraging amount of vandalism to buildings and equipment.
“Fire extinguishers, breaking off exit signs, lights,” Raymond said, listing the results of nights of partying. “I guess a lot of it could be attributed to the fact that, for a lot of the kids, it’s their first experience with alcohol and they don’t really know how to behave when they’re drinking.”
Despite the vandalism, Raymond likes being able to interact with students.
“For the most part, the students are great, from what we see,” he said. “I love my job just because you get to see students all the time, and it’s mostly always upbeat and I really like that.”
There have been a few large-scale vandalism events during Raymond’s time at the College.
“Besides being a real safety violation, there is so much mess and expense involved with cleaning up fire extinguishers,” Raymond said. “That chemical stuff goes everywhere. The second year that I was a night watchman, it was close to commencement, and there were 13 of them fired off in one night. They had to call in custodial and everybody. I don’t know what the final tab was, but that kind of thing really bugs me.”
The misconception about night watch is clear as Raymond walks around campus.
“As you walk in some place you’ll see people gasp,” Raymond said. “But then they realize, ‘no, he’s the night watchman.’”
Sure enough, as Raymond entered social houses, people tended to walk hastily away or greet him with a nervous “hello.” The volume of music, previously ear-splitting, was turned down, and students eyed Raymond until it became clear he was checking a sprinkler system or fire safety equipment.
During an early stop on his route, Raymond walked into the kitchen of the Kirk Alumni Center. Walking to a corner of the kitchen, he deftly pulled out a grey rectangular device from a holster on his belt and pressed it up against a scanner on the wall the size of a light switch.
“We have these stations, and at the end of the night we get a printout and it shows everywhere we went and what time we were here,” he said. “It’s for College fire insurance so they know the buildings are being checked.”
Prevention is just as much a part of Raymond’s job as is addressing problems.
“We’ve been up here before when the dishwasher would leak,” he said. “And if you catch it rather than it leaking all night, and either shut it off or get someone in here to fix it before it starts running through the ceiling, it makes a big difference in how much damage is done.”
Down a flight of stairs, Raymond checked a fire panel with rows of glowing lights that indicated systems were normal.
“Our primary responsibilities are mechanical, checking for safety,” he said. “The fire systems, anything mechanical ... we go to all kinds of mechanical rooms, making sure mechanical stuff is working correctly.”
Checking the air compression of sprinklers is another one of Raymond’s duties as a watchman. The mechanism of the system relies on a certain amount of air compression in the pipes buried within the basements of many of the buildings on campus, and Raymond has to record the pressure nightly to ensure the system is not activated by a faulty amount of pressure.
Raymond has been at the College for just over four years, and his experience with the buildings shows. At many of the sites where Raymond checks the pressure of sprinkler systems, he knows what exact pressure to expect from each valve and gauge.
The pickup truck Raymond drives from location to location is sometimes the object of late-night pranks. According to Raymond, a few years ago, another night watchmen’s truck was taken for a joyride and found in Salisbury, Vermont after the staff member, wanting to keep the engine running in the cold, left his keys in the ignition. This was a lesson not lost on Raymond. At one point, a large and raucous group of students walked down the hill to the modular housing as we exited the truck, and Raymond cautioned, “You better lock your door.”
Raymond’s experience also comes in handy when traversing the bowels of hundred-year-old buildings such as the Emma Willard House. The night watchman has to weave through the labyrinth of corridors in which anyone else would be hopelessly lost.
“You get used to the sounds that the buildings make, too,” Raymond said. A bang from an air vent as loud as a gunshot did not cause Raymond to even bat an eye.
Raymond often has to work around crowded parties, especially on weekends. He recounted a time when he had to muscle his way through The Mill when there must have been 400 people there by his recollection.
“You would wonder if it would stand up or not, there were so many people packed in there,” Raymond said. “Just last weekend they had a paint dance – I walked through that and came out looking like a rainbow. Luckily, it was all washable.”
Despite his years on the job, Raymond also encounters things that scare or worry him. Walking out on the roof of McCardell Bicentennial Hall, Raymond described one of those more worrying moments. He had been checking the roof of Bicentennial Hall and had discovered that a concrete block used to weigh down an antenna had been dragged near the railing.
“I don’t know if they were thinking they were going to throw it off, but [someone] ran a cable through all of them now, so you can’t move them,” he said. “But that was spooky to see that sitting there, right over the third-floor entrance.”
The night watchmen are put through their paces on the walk route of campus.
“On the walk route there are 1,750 stairs,” he said. “I counted them all just out of curiosity one night.”
Raymond’s crossed paths with fellow night watchman Bushey on his Saturday route.
“It’s pretty boring when the students are gone,” said Raymond. “I’d much rather have the students here.”
“Free entertainment, you know,” Bushey joked. “Some people go the movies, or bowling, we just come to work. To me, the reward is when you’re cleaning up puke or fixing a window, when the students come by and say thank you. That, to me, is rewarding.”
(11/07/13 10:53pm)
Snake Pit with Adeline Cleveland ’13.5 & Alan Sanders ’13.5
Middlebury Campus (MC): How did you form?
Addy: Both of us came together at the beginning of this semester. We’ve been friends for a while and we’ve each had different shows all four years. We’re in our last semester, and our former partners graduated last year, so we were just chatting one day and decided to do a story together.
MC: How did you come up with the name?
Alan: I came over to Addy’s house one day, and her friend from high school was there, and he works in a reptile house.
Addy: He makes snakes, like he alters different parts of their DNA.
Alan: It was a wild experience. And the next day we were supposed to fill out the application. So we came up with SnakePit.
MC: How would you describe the sound of your show?
Alan: We are a hip-hop show, but we also play a lot of new electronic and electronic-pop acts.
Addy: It’s not really a theme every show, but sometimes a common thread will appear as the show goes on and we kind of just go from there, depending on the flow of the show.
Alan: We try to play new music as much as possible – we play what came out each week.
MC: Three adjectives.
Alan: Slithery
Addy: Dangerous
Alan: Venomous
MC: Why should listeners tune in?
Addy: We generally play songs that flow well into each other so it’s nice to listen not only for one song, but the show is pretty coherent as a whole, and our banter is pretty on point. It’s intentional and informative. Alan is pretty knowledgeable and up-to-date on the artists and albums we’re playing, and I don’t know that stuff. So we’re not both talking at people, we’re both conversing.
Alan: It’s a good way for listeners to get to know new music and new artists. Also, our show is on a Thursday night, so people can listen when they’re in the library studying or in their dorm rooms, not studying. Eighty percent of our listeners are from town, not on campus. Our listeners vary between lots of different age groups.
MC: How do you broadcast to listeners across different age groups?
Addy: Making a conscious effort to not just have our conversation center around stuff that happens at the College. We definitely bring things that are happening on campus, but I think by keeping our conversation centered around current pop events and music, that’s easier to relate to than two students talking about Proctor dining hall.
Second Hand Groove Machine with Jebb Norton ‘13.5 and Eric Benepe ‘13.5
MC: How did you form?
Jebb: Destiny.
Erik: We went to the first meeting our second semester, and we had known each other before. We had very similar musical taste and decided to do a show together.
MC: How would you describe your musical style?
Erik: We do a different genre every week, we have different themes. Sometimes we’ll pick a genre, sometimes we’ll pick a period in musical history, sometimes we’ll play instrumental beats with different speeches we’ve gotten by famous people.
Jebb: We did a show for Shel Silverstein a month ago. We played a bunch of his poetry and songs that he wrote and stuff by his friends. We have fun with it.
Erik: Basically, we both listen to a lot of music and on our show we try to play things that we’re interested in and use it as a way to find out more about the music we like.
MC: Three adjectives.
Jebb: I’d say funky. More than most people would think of, I think funk music is about doing what you want to do, and we definitely bring the funk.
Erik: Goofy. We get kind of ridiculous sometimes. We’ve got a solid core of fans, but sometimes we get callers and we have no idea who they are.
Jebb: I like it because every week, we have a two hour period where we never do work. It’s just a period where we can listen to music and talk, or just think. It’s just a separate mind space from normal time at Middlebury.
MC: Do you think that vibe is communicated to your listeners?
Jebb: Yeah totally, I hope so. If we were doing homework, I think they would know. It would change, we wouldn’t be as engaged.
MC: Do you plan ahead?
Erik: We’ve gotten to a point where we don’t know how to plan that much. We know each other’s music style well enough and we have good chemistry. We sort of improvise what sounds good.
MC: Why should listeners tune in to your show?
Erik: Because we emphasize playing good music, and we don’t talk too much. When we do talk, we try to contribute things to teach people about the music.
Jebb: We don’t ask each other what we had for lunch, and then talk about it for fifteen minutes. People should listen to us because everyone needs an escape. And that’s what we give.
Rock in Rio with Fabiana Benediini ‘15 and Jess Parker ‘16
MC: What is Rock and Rio?
Benedini: So Rock in Rio is actually not a world show, it’s Brazilian music – Brazilian country and rock. Brazilian rock says a lot about Brazilian history so most of the bands complain about the government and how corrupt it is. There are a lot of songs about disillusionment and anger and those are really good. And Brazilian country is about Brazilian daily culture, so heartbreak, drinking a lot and women.
MC: How did the show start?
Benedini: Jess and I were having dinner at Proctor. She wants to learn Portuguese so I said okay, let’s have a show so you can practice by listening to music and you can talk in Portuguese. Her mom’s Brazilian and she wants to learn Portuguese so she knows a little bit and she’s taking Portuguese for Spanish speakers right now.
MC: Do you speak Portuguese on the air?
Benedini: We do speak in Portuguese to each other when she asks about the lyrics.
MC: Are the songs from growing up in Brazil or are they more modern?
Benedini: It’s hard to find modern songs but I can usually message my friends in Brazil and they can tell me what good music is going on right now. So I get input from Brazilians.
MC: When does the show air?
Benedini: It airs Wednesdays from 7 AM to 8 AM. It’s super early. It feels like it’s super early. It’s so fun to see Jess there and hang out with her. And it’s a good way to start our morning, especially because it’s music about heartbreak or anger – it’s hilarious.
MC: What you might hear:
Capital Inicial, “It is usually about corruption or disillusionment and it is rock.”
Ivete Sangalo, “It’s pump up music. It’s a style that is very typical of Brazil.”
MC: Any callers?
Benedini: Jess’s mom called once.
Almost Famous with Ben Goldberg ’14 and Maddie Dai ’14
MC: As the General Manger, what is your role at WRMC?
Goldberg: I kind of do a little bit of everything. I am learning as I go. The official description of my position is I’m the student president [of WRMC], I’m responsible for budget and the money side of things. We have a business director for that as well but I’m very much involved. I’m also a link between us and the administration, student activities and probably most significantly, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). On a day-to-day basis, making sure everyone else is doing what they need to be doing. So, it’s a full time job.
MC: What would be your pitch to listen to WRMC?
Goldberg: It’s nothing like anything else you have on the air in Addison County – commercial free radio, tastefully picked music. We’re not catering to a certain audience, we’re not playing just top 40 hits.
Dai: There’s a lot of banter, there’s a joke a minute.
Goldberg: It’s nice to hear a range of student voices giving input. It’s a surprisingly personal experience to listen to someone’s show and what they’re up to and what they’re listening to.
Dai: If you’re driving a car, what else are you going to do?
Goldberg: All the shows are pretty different. We are predominately music, alternative music (whatever that means), but it’s at least diverse to some degree. We try to make it as diverse as possible but the fact that you’re listening to peers or even to someone you don’t know playing music they care about, have something to say about and want to share that with you, that’s a way to connect with other people. It’s so much more fulfilling than just putting on your iPod or putting on a CD when you have someone crafting a playlist for you.
MC: Almost Famous’ description says, “From boy bands to mental breakdowns.” What does that mean?
Dai: We go through all those iterations. One day we’ll be a boy band and the next we’ll have a mental breakdown. It’s actually our third show together and it’s been the evolution of us. We started in Oxford, we went abroad there.
Goldberg: Oxcide student radio.
Dai: There’s not many things Middlebury does better than Oxford but radio would be one of them. They have more Nobel prize winners in general but we have a good radio station. So we went there and then we had a show last semester called Zig-a-Zig-Ah which was a Nineties tribute show and now we do pop.
Goldberg: It was sort of a natural evolution. On our first show, Back to the Boombox, we would pick a different era of music but focusing on some sort of pop era, more or less.
Dai: We relive a lot of our childhood memories. But at a time when we were extremely awkward probably and it’s not necessarily overly sentimental, at an exciting time of middle school dances.
Goldberg: Maddie and I come from wildly different places but strangely enough we are able to connect through Nineties pop culture. That was the foundation of Zig-a-Zig-Ah and we didn’t want to have to be stuck playing just nineties music and the nineties music we were listening to for the most part was pop or some variation thereof. So now on Almost Famous we’ll do each week a different phenomenon in pop music.
Dai: Not to intellectualize it but it is interesting to look at pop as industrialized, very attuned to different cultural fads and movements and the movement from boy bands to girl bands.
Goldberg: We’re taking a stab at sociology.
Dai: Via Wikipedia.
Goldberg: Neither of us are trained sociologists. I still haven’t taken a sociology class but we can speak at length about Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake or Beyoncé and it’s nice because everyone who’s listening knows what we’re talking about.
MC: What are some typical songs or artists on Almost Famous?
Goldberg: Lately there’s been a lot of Lorde.
Dai: And also because I’m a New Zealander so I’m shamelessly promoting her.
Goldberg: And also her album is just objectively pretty good.
Dai: Britney is often the epicenter from which we like to compare other artists, in terms of her career that’s gone through so many evolutions, rising and falling, so there is some Britney but we talk about her more than we play her.
Goldberg: I don’t feel like there is a pattern in the artists we play but I guess as far as pop goes we play a lot of Beyoncé, Rihanna here and there, Justin Timberlake. Music we respect, whether as individuals we respect them or we respect their music.
Soul Food with Josh Swartz ’14.5 and Alia Khalil ’14.5
MC: Tell me about the formation of Soul Food.
Swartz: I spent part of the summer in New Orleans and inspired by the music culture down there and going to see live music down there and pretty much everyday thing that people do. That’s something that I loved. It’s also just the time of our show from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. when ppl are just finishing up classes, getting a burger at Proctor and getting ready for the weekend. It’s easy to listen to, puts you in a good mood, old and new. This is the first semester that SF has been in existence. Alia and I have a good rapport. We have a good time.
MC: Explain what Soul Food is.
Khalil: It’s two friends sharing their music with all their other friends. In every set, there’s definitely one song you can fit your taste to. We play a lot of different types of music, but even within the soul genre, there are older and recent songs.
Swartz: A big part of the show is us bantering about Halloween costumes and favorite animals, community events, and things that happen at Middlebury. Our last guest has a particularly good Norah Jones impression. Our conversation focuses on light-hearted fun things, like talking about Halloween or movies. The tone of our conversation is very upbeat and easy to listen to. It is something we’re conscious of: everything we do is geared toward a universal audience.
Khalil: Regardless of if you’re in Middlebury or not, you’re able to understand our conversations. A lot of radio shows have inside jokes, but that is not us.
MC: What does the music do to you?
Khalil: It energizes you. We always say it is music that feeds your soul so it’s not limited. Our generation doesn’t realize how versatile soul music can be which can include lyrical ballads or some songs with strong beats.
Swartz: One tradition is that we always end every show with the same song: “September” by Earth Wind and Fire. That song really legitimizes what our show is about. Everyone recognizes it; it’s a happy song. It used to make more sense because it used to be September. Now we just use it to feed people’s souls.
MC: What is the best show moment to go down in Soul Food history?
Swartz: We got a call from Vergennes, who I think calls in to WRMC a lot — so this might not have been that special — but he said, “Wow, I really loved the show” and was super supportive. I actually think that he is someone who calls in pretty frequently, but I like to pretend that he just called in our show.
Khalil: My favorite moment was when we introduced “September” for the first time and we were just kind of joking about autumn activities and announced that we were going to. Closes the show.
Swartz: From that moment, we could both feel it was the start of a very powerful tradition. It happened in our very first show; it happened so organically.
MC: What can you guarantee that your listener will hear when they tune into the show?
Khalil: You will hear Josh’s awesome radio voice, which a is a bit of an alter ego from his normal voice. He sounds like a radio DJ who plays soul music.
Swartz: We always talk about a concert that is happening or happened at Middlebury. We do talk about local music scenes. In our last show, we played Apenglow to promote that concert on Higher Ground on Sunday. There’s a local consciousness to our show. That’s being part of the Middlebury community and the Vermont community — that’s an important part of being a radio show.
Khalil: We both have different taste in music and we both complement each other in new bands we’ve heard of and introduce each other. Even in my own radio show, I’m always finding new songs.
The Campus Voice with Greta Neubauer ’14.5 and Ian Stewart ’14
MC: Explain to a 5th grader what the Campus Voice is.
Neubauer: The Campus Voice is a way to bring the work of the Middlebury Campus and its writers into broader dialogue with the members of the community who are commenters on the story written in the Campus. They relate to those issues and we make that vocal and in a dialogue, where people can interact beyond the pages.
MC: What is the difference between the dialogue on the Campus Voice and one with your friends?
Stewart: It seems in most conversations with your friends, you kind of try to get to an agreement on an issue. Whereas with the show, no one has to leave agreeing. Part of what we do is to try to tease out the distinct arguments that are being made at different sides of the issue. When you’re with your friends you’re less likely to push your friends that we can be with our host hats on.
Neubauer: The differences among people who go on the show are greater differences than those in our groups of friends. A lot of the friends that I have these conversations with — we all sort of have the same opinions about this issue. The Campus Voice brings the dialogue out of niches on campus.
MC: Why should someone who reads the newspaper want to tune into the show 4 days later?
Stewart: Issues are changing constantly on the campus. The dialogue is changing, new events are coming out, absurd emails are being sent out and are not being sent out and so the story, as with any story, evolves. This is a nice chance to check in a few days later. There’s not that pressure of the 500 or 600 words [in print]. Just tell the straight facts. Get your three quotes in. Tell it in this neat, closed story. Another thing is that it’s different to hear someone’s voice and to hear their pauses and their inflections and their emotions, their excitement. That’s something that no amount of adjectives and adverbs on print will be able to recreate. You’re taking out a layer and so you’re closer to the people and story than you might be with a story on the page.
Neubauer: I also think that we’re taking an issue that’s come up on campus and bringing it back to the broader conversation. Whether it’s homophobia on this campus or the topic of dialogue.
Kyle Finck: Also, moving forward the point is not only to read the news but to interact with the news, so in terms of submitting questions, getting them answered, whether it’s having Dean Collado on or a student provoked by Collado’s blog. This is about interacting with the news.
MC: What is the best moment captured on your show?
Stewart: The one I keep thinking about is when we did a show on spoken word artists and hip-hop rap artists on campus. To see their art on campus and the way they talked about it was almost seamless. I was so blown away by their articulateness in the Q&A part of the interview that I felt like it was an extension of the rhymes and language in their art.
Neubauer: That too was my favorite moment of the show. There was something really special about seeing the performance and the question. I always love when I go to an art museum and I want to hear the whole description of the painting on an audio guide or docent and so I really like to hear interpretation. That was cool to hear them in spoken terms give us that description. Similarly, talking about the interpretation of Chance’s lyrics. I come to a different place on the issue having engaged with people who talking about it a lot.
Stewart: The idea that you can change our opinion in a conversation in the same way it had naturally is unique to the radio. You’re just selecting snapshots in newspaper — that’s what is going to represent what you felt at that moment and that’s valuable, but we have the chance to change someone’s mind over the course of the show and see the evolution the same way it happens to us sitting there and listening.
MC: What’s one thing you can promise listener in every show?
Stewart: Almost everytime when someone says something, they were sincere about it. You will hear a true sincere moment that is not a sound byte. It’s something they thought about or believed.
Neubauer: You think you understand Middlebury, you talk in classes but it’s not the same as hearing people’s perspectives. It’s surprising. I have this idea that I understand Middlebury and its student body, and it’s not true.
(11/06/13 8:08pm)
13 miles of sidewalk. Over 300 acres. Even for a 14-year Landscape Services veteran like John Quelch, these numbers are daunting. Nevertheless, Quelch has an eye for detail when mowing and holds his team to a high standard.
“Maybe it would surprise [students] if they saw what we didn’t do or if they saw someone who didn’t care how it looked,” said Quelch. “For me in particular, no matter what it is, I look for the end result – what it looks like when you’re done. When you start off, it’s not pretty, but you chug away and get it done.”
Landscape Services Supervisor Clinton Snyder pulls out a map of campus full of little Sharpie markings that divide the campus like a battlefield; a commander keeping track of troops on the battlefield. “We have an average of 12 to 18 guys working in landscaping and it’s broken up into three groups,” said Snyder.
North, Central and Athletic are the three zones in which Landscaping operates.North encompasses everything from College Street toward Bicentennial Hall, Central covers the areas around Old Chapel and Athletic demarcates the athletic fields to the south. Quelch is the crew chief in charge of Central and is responsible for 5 or 6 staff members who run the landscaping from Old Chapel to the CFA.
“He makes sure everything is looking good,” Snyder said. “This is a high-profile area of the College and he works with his guys making sure everything is mowed and it looks primo.”
The mowing happens on a schedule. “The North crew mows on Monday and Tuesday, and we mow Central on Wednesday and Thursday,” said Quelch. “Usually it takes us a little over a day and a half to mow our section and then we have to string trim it, all around the trees and any objects that you can’t get to with a mower. That’s quite a bit of work just doing that. In the summer it’s pretty much mowing and weed whacking.”
The team has a Toro lawnmower with wings on it that drop down and can mow 10 to 12 feet on either side which they use to mow large fields and open areas. As the weather turns colder, Landscaping has been preparing for the first snowfall with an eye to keeping the exits of buildings free from snow.
“We were working on it yesterday. We have to distribute shovels to every building and the custodians,” said Quelch. “The custodians will sometimes take care of the front and they’ll just shovel 6 or 7 feet out for us just to help out because we’re sometimes short-handed in that department.”
Landscaping also has to work with the Facilities auto shop to prepare the tractors and trucks for moving snow.
“We have plow trucks that we are responsible for maintaining and guys out in plow trucks. Then we have tractors to do all the sidewalks and the larger equipment (the backhoe and the payloader) doing the parking lots and removing the snow,” said Snyder. “They just started doing it now, right into Thanksgiving, getting every piece of equipment ready so when the snow falls, we’re ready with the trucks, the tractors and the snow blowers. This is the rotation we start now – taking out winter stuff and putting away the summer stuff.”
Once heavy snow begins falling, the real work begins.
“Bicentennial Hall has to be shoveled on the roof – the entire top,” continued Snyder. “We have 200 plus buildings and over 300 acres that we’re taking care of, so every building has an entrance and an exit, everything has to be shoveled, usually six feet wide out to a walk or out to a drive.” The wear and tear on machines and tools is evident after only a few years. “Brand new shovels get worn right down,” added Snyder.
Quelch also has his share of snowstorm horror stories.
“We had a really big storm on Valentine’s day 7 or 8 years ago,” said Quelch. “It was brutal; lots and lots of snow. I called up here and told people if they didn’t have to travel not to do it,” said Quelch. “People stayed here that night and the College paid for however many hours you worked in that storm, they gave you double your hours. They had cots out for people to stay in.”
On the Gator, Quelch does hesitate to do some clean up at a moment’s notice.
“I’m going to pick up this branch while I’m here,” said Quelch, stopping the vehicle to grab a large branch that had fallen down in from of the Emma Willard House. Right now, however, the main target is fallen leaves.
“We have a lot of leaves and a lot of them are still on the trees now. Oaks always hold them,” Quelch said. “We are constantly after leaves, as long as we can do it before the snow hits.”
All the leaves are collected via vacuum devices that are attached to either a box on a Gator or a separate truck.
“We have a leaf vacuum – a vacuum that goes in a straight shot and sucks them up,” Quelch said. “And then we have another one that we are experimenting with this year. The auto shop people built a box on the back of it. It has an engine on it and it has knives and it chops the leaves up and blows them into the box on the back of a Gator.”
“They also like to mulch as much as they can with the mowers,” said Snyder, a tactic used to get as much organic matter as possible back into the ground. “But at some point they have to stop doing it because you get so many leaves you’re basically just plowing because there are so many leaves so they need to start picking it up.”
The leaves are first brought to the Facilities services building but eventually they go to a site off of the TAM which Landscaping calls the ‘stump dump’. Quelch pointed out this site while on the Gator, where Landscaping keeps gravel, brush, woodchips, and manure from the Morgan Horse Farm. Leaves are piled next to the manure and food compost from the dining halls is mixed in. “We turn that into topsoil so we have fresh topsoil,” said Snyder.
A little-known part of Landscaping’s duties are R-25 forms, a variation of a work order which lists events all over the College that require the department’s attention.
“It’s our responsibility to read that and see what is going on each day,” said Snyder. “It says in each event to see if it’s something we need to do. It could be as little as getting garbage cans out there or roping something off.”
Landscaping also takes care of the brunt of Monday morning’s trash pickup.
“I get sick of that but to keep it looking nice it’s got to be done because there’s always beer cans, broken glass, napkins. We start our day out Monday morning with campus pickup,” said Quelch. “Usually it takes about 2 hours with 4 people.
“We’ll get a call like, ‘At FIC there’s broken glass across the whole parking lot.’ You have to stop what you’re doing and take care of it,” said Snyder. “They stood by that parking lot and drank and every time they drank a bottle they threw it. By the end of the night there was broken glass across the whole parking lot.”
The ridgeline houses and the mods are reportedly the worst spots for garbage in the campus. Despite incidents like this, Quelch is nonplussed.
“It is our job, but sometimes it’s frustrating if you go down there three or four times, but it’s in our job description,” said Quelch. “Most of them are very respectful like when we are cleaning off a sidewalk. A lot of students come by and say thank you. That’s pretty nice to hear that they appreciate what you are doing for them.”
The importance of being alert is obvious on a Gator. While driving the Gator around campus on Friday, Quelch made a point to veer off whenever pedestrians were near, an unspoken rule of landscaping.
“When we are mowing and students come by we idle down, shut our blades off, and let them come by,” said Quelch. Quelch also said his crew is mindful of keeping the noise down around lecture halls and other classrooms.
Quelch grew up in Vermont and started work at 12 years old as a butcher and meat cutter. “That’s pretty much what I’ve done for most of my life until I cam here,” said Quelch.
“You learn a lot about blood and guts, that’s for sure. But I can do the whole job.”
Quelch pulls up at 468 McKinley, a College house near the athletics center and points to a group of three facilities crew members. The three all wear the backpack-style leafblowers and use them to drive leaves into a pile, fighting gusts of wind.
“We definitely play the wind and we couldn’t really suck the leaves up today because they don’t suck up when they’re wet and it clogs a lot,” said Quelch, referencing a rainy morning.
Despite the monotony of mowing, Quelch says he enjoys his work.
“Mowing up the leaves and chopping them up with the smell of the fresh air is awesome,” said Quelch.