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(05/01/13 8:56pm)
“So what’s your purpose?”
That’s what Ron Rost asked me after I talked to him on a Saturday afternoon. This Saturday in the life of Rost was like every other day – a product of all the days that came before it. Before arriving to our meeting, he had been reconciling how to drill holes through 12-inch wood with a 10-inch drill.
“So how do you do that?” he asked. “You can do it by measuring really well and making parallel lines or” – here Rost pantomimed a haphazard glance and a reckless drilling motion – “and you split the wood.”
Rost is a farm-carpenter musician. That is, he is the carpenter for a farm outside Vergennes, where he has lived – and sugared – since 1986 and also plays music.
“I moved in with a couple people. There was a studio in the back. We started a band,” said Rost.
Formed in 1980, Rost’s band grew to 10 people, so he asked his landlady if he could take down a wall to accommodate the whole group.
“She said yep, go ahead, just save the wood. I’m still building from that wood,” said Rost.
Rost plays the lap dulcimer. It is oblong, wooden and stringed (imagine a stretched-out violin), and he has carried it in his travels since his trip hitchhiking across the country after his college graduation.
Rost started to play and learn more about the dulcimer after college, and began to play with different groups of fellow dulcimer-players. He began to make connections around Vermont simply by carrying his instrument.
“First night I came into town I was walking around Burlington, I was looking at a marquee there. Guy came out and he said, ‘Hey, that a dulcimer on your back? And I said yeah. And he said, ‘Ah, I could use a dulcimer player in between this act and that act.’ And I said, ‘Well, what a great town.’ And it happened to be 1980. How bout that 1980?”
Rost also found that music gave him a purpose to travel, one of his other interests.
“I like travel but I wanted to travel more directly. So I thought music was one way to do that. That gives purpose to the travel. That’s one of the reasons I did what I did,” said Rost.
Last year Rost travelled to Ethiopia. Through some band mates and friends, he landed a job at an arts camp for children in southern Ethiopia. The camp eventually culminated in a circus production.
“I brought 250 pounds worth of art supplies and some juggling pins [for the circus]. I worked with the band. They wanted to learn blues, jazz and reggae,” said Rost, who is well-acquainted with all three.
Reflecting on his experience in Ethiopia, Rost realized how unprepared he had been for the job.
“When I got there, I still didn’t really know what I was doing,” he said.
Sometimes, Rost wonders if we ever really know.
“Is this what you do?” Rost asked. “I don’t know,” Rost responded.
“Is this the right way to brush your teeth? I don’t know,” Rost asked and responded again. “But I don’t say that all the time. I make up something. Or base it on something I’ve read or what somebody told me was right.”
Though he is prone to philosophically questioning his life, Rost’s daily routine retains a comfortable degree of regularity.
Everyday Rost cuts an onion. He grows them alongside his potatoes in his garden.
Everyday Rost drives his car. It’s a big 2002 silver Astro van with an array of instruments and carpentry materials rattling around in the back.
But the greatest constant in his life is music.
“These past four months, I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to know, but I don’t. There’s a point where it’s just, I am playing music. This seems to be what I’m doing more than anything else. I’m in it,” said Rost.
Rost accompanies the dance classes offered by Middlebury’s dance department and plays in the dance department’s performance improvisation ensemble on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. His repertoire on any given day includes anything from the piano to whatever forms of percussion are lying around, often a cymbal or a set of bongo drums, to the trumpet. On special days, he brings in the synth.
“I’d like to be a genius. Or I am a genius,” Rost said. At 57, Rost is still looking for more genius. “To feel something different. I mean that’s what I’d like to do, feel something different. To be surprised. I want to be surprised.”
(04/17/13 4:25pm)
If Patrick Devereux ’15 had a soundtrack, it would be comprised of such princes of southern rap as Gucci Mane, Waka Flocka, OJ da Juiceman and Lil Wayne. For this particular day in the life, track no. 1 would be “Shawt Bus Shawty,” a Youtube sensation that parodies Devereux’s composers.
“I eat the red crayon ‘cause the red one tastes the best,” says an animated caricature of Gucci Mane. “And I cheat off Lil Darryl every time I take the test.”
“I’ve seen this video a lot,” comments Devereux as he becomes the 34,622,675th viewer of the Youtube video through a fit of laugher. “But I’ve never noticed that. He crossed out his own name and wrote Lil Darryl. Cause he cheated off him.”
It’s a scene that hits closer to home for Devereux than for most other students, particularly on the caricatured depiction of high school in the ghetto front.
A day in the life of Devereux begins with abiding to the gendered bathrooms of Hepburn hall, respectfully schlepping with his shower caddy through two sets of doors to the men’s room. Track no.2: “Girl you stank (take a bath),” Soulja Boy.
“Soulja Boy sold this song in a record,” explained Devereux. “It references Doo Doo Head, a character from another Soulja Boy song called ‘Doo Doo Head.’ How did he make money off this?”
Devereux attends Chinese class, a quiet scene quite unlike the high schools of “Shawt Bus Shawty” and Devereux’s alma mater Warwick High School, of Newport News, Va.
“Imagine if you have 30 kids in your class who are just rowdy, loud, talk back to you, don’t listen to anything you say and interrupt you and so it’s impossible for you to talk and the only thing you as a teacher can do is go get security or the principal, but they [the students] don’t care about being suspended,” said Devereux. “It’s not a punishment. What do you do as a teacher? I can see why the teachers just didn’t do anything.”
Devereux’s average day did not include homework.
“The teachers knew that if they assign homework, no one’s going to do it anyway,” he said.
Devereux claims he beat the system.
“I did zero work in high school and got all A’s and ended up at Middlebury,” he said.
But maybe Devereux was just operating on a different system. Track no. 3: “Duffle Bag Boy,” Playaz Circle featuring Lil Wayne:
“If I don’t do nutthin I’mma ball / I’m counting all day like the clock on the wall.”
While many of Devereux’s peers growing up literally lived out Playaz Circle’s narrative, Devereux took a different path.
“I did Quiz Bowl in high school,” said Devereux. He gets his sticky, spongey, hungry brain from his mom.
“Me and my mom always used to watch “Jeopardy” together everyday,” he said. “We’d answer all the questions and probably get 85 percent of the questions between us. Pop culture was always our worst. Anything academic was our best. Literature, geography, natural science. My dad killed pop culture. But that was the only thing he would ever get.”
Thursday night trivia at Crossroads serves as an extension of Quiz Bowl. His team, fielded by several other former Quiz Bowl kids, often wins.
Devereux’s other team is his the rugby team. Before that, there was also his high school swim team; a team within a league that mingled some of the nation’s top swimming recruits with your barely water-safe amateurs in swim trunks.
After rugby practice, Devereux dines at Proctor. It’s a starkly different scene from the Newport News day-in-the-life Devereux, despite the common aspect of free food.
“Some people came to school just because they got free lunch,” said Devereux of Warwick High School.
He fills up his glass from the juicer and is reminded both of his favorite Gucci Mane song, track no. 4 “Lemonade,” Gucci Mane and Community Day at his swim club back home.
“The swim club I belonged to cost $300 for yearly membership,” he said. “That’s probably not that much but my neighborhood’s really poor and most people couldn’t afford that. The city paid our pool $6,000 to have a day where, every Wednesday, anyone could come. There’d be, like, 250 people there. It’s so hot and humid. Everyone would show up. There were huge barbeques; everyone orders pizza. The local Pizza Hut and Domino’s, they would just come by with 80 pizzas already made and sell them at the door.”
Track no. 5: “Yellow Claw,” Krokobil feat. Sjaak and Mr. Polska. Devereux doesn’t believe in studying for tests. Instead, he prepares for his upcoming German test by decoding the similarly-rooted Dutch lyrics of “Yellow Claw.”
“‘Jouw bil is een krokodil,’ that’s basically saying your ass is a crocodile.”
(02/13/13 10:35pm)
In the wake of the 2000 Olympic summer games Nike aired an ad featuring Olympic runner Suzy Hamilton. Like all patrons of athletics, Nike enjoys the lucrative window opened by the Olympic games that vaults athletes other than football, basketball and baseball players into the American mainstream. Suddenly the otherwise obscure women’s beach volleyball team is the new face of Nike and Apollo Anton Ono, with his charming soul patch, sells Visa cards. Suzy Hamilton was no exception as she raced in short shorts and a sports bra playing the tantalizing damsel in distress with a man in a hockey mask at her heels. The tagline was, “Why sport? You’ll live longer,” and it only took a few airings for viewers to react.
Leslie Wright ’84, the founder of Stride, was one of them.
Wright was a member of both the cross-country team and ski team at the College, the latter of which she served as captain for the nationally-ranked squad. Nike wasn’t going to get by this one, since the ad triggered a memory for her.
“I myself was kidnapped and held at gunpoint,” said Wright. “How could Nike have ever put this ad out?”
After many letters to Nike without much success, NBC eventually pulled the ad off the air. But that wasn’t enough to quell Wright.
“I thought that I was so angry that I might start a foundation,” said Wright, remembering.
At first, though, Wright thought that rather than start a foundation, she would donate money to an already existing foundation.
“I thought, okay, I’m just going to raise a bunch of money and give a bunch of grants [to programs],” said Wright. She quickly learned that the programs didn’t exist.
That is when she decided to create a foundation and, 13 years later the Stride Wright foundation now thrives. There are three programs in tandem with the College’s women’s basketball and ski teams. For Wright it’s easy. The positive correlation between girls’ health, confidence and academics is undeniable.
The Middlebury Union middle school participants in the basketball program concluded their season with a pizza party with the Middlebury team last week.
“The girls get to pick up on the energy of the college players,” said Wright. “They get to see that doing sports is cool. At that age kids are so influenced.”
The Middlebury women ran practices for the girls throughout winter term.
“The college students come and watch their games and it’s funny because the girls get so excited they start to forget what they’re doing,” said Wright. “Then they pull it together.”
Central to Stride Wright’s mission to empower women is breaking down social and economic barriers.
Even in the post Title-IX era, women’s sports trail far behind men’s in popularity and media coverage.
“Boys are programmed to play sports,” said Wright. “The women’s hockey team at Middlebury is having a great season and no one goes to see the games. The men’s hockey team isn’t doing as well and everyone goes.”
According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, the drop out rate for girls by age 14 is twice that of boys.
When it comes to the age-old question of nature versus nurture driving this statistic, Wright is unequivocal.
“A competitive girl is just as competitive as a competitive boy,” she said. “But I think girls approach sports differently. They have a more social point of view. They are more supportive in a competitive framework.”
Economic barriers are at the forefront of Stride Wright’s program in Winooski where 98 percent of middle school students receive subsidized lunch.
The basketball program at Winooski Middle School was struggling and losing participants to cheerleading. After Stride Wright came in, the numbers on the girls’ team rebounded.
The ski mentoring program with the College offers six weeks of lessons to girls who would otherwise not have the financial privilege.
“I love seeing a girl for whom sports click. When she goes skiing with her school, she isn’t stuck on the beginner hill, but breaks the barrier and skis with everyone else,” said Wright of the most rewarding aspects of her program.
The next step for Stride Wright lies in the mountain biking program. Wright teamed up with Midd alum sisters Sabra and Lia and Mountain Moxi professional mountain biking team to fund and mentor the girls. Last summer’s pilot successfully coached two girls and the number has now tripled.
With no overhead and entirely volunteer based mentorship, Stride Wright runs on about $6,000 a year. The support primarily comes from a Two Brother’s hosted event with a silent auction and raffle. Since it’s advent, Stride Wright has seen over 100 girls through the program — not to mention the college mentors who reap the indirect benefit of having a bleacher full of face-painted seventh graders cheering for them at their game.
(12/05/12 9:38pm)
Mitchell Parrish ’14 loves Thai food more than he loves Chinese food. He loves Bazooka and Eclipse gum, but for different reasons. He loves technology but not cell phones.
“I think it would be fine if we all just had personal home phones,” he said.
However, his apathy towards cell phones and current lackluster effort to relocate his misplaced phone is not reflective of his fascination with technology. As a political science major, Parrish works for Leng Professor of International Politics Allison Stanger researching specifics within the broader topic of technology’s effects on politics. Stanger’s class, Politics of Virtual Realities left a strong impression on Parrish, as it explored technology’s role in social, political and economic realms.
“The opportunities are endless when it comes to the Internet and creating things,” said Parrish, “we’ve only scratched the surface. We don’t even know what the Internet is. We just know that we can communicate remotely now.”
According to Parrish, the potential of tapping into virtual spaces is on the horizon.
“I think it will be Matrix-esque but not as scary,” he said.
In the meantime, Parrish decided to read up on computer programming.
“I was eight chapters in and I was like why am I doing this? I’m not going to be a programmer. I just read about it,” Parrish said. “My friends like to say I’m a little more of a geek about technology than I lead on,” he added.
Parrish holds many interests outside of his passion for technology. He enjoys movies, including Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall.” He loves the Grateful Dead’s “Eyes of the World”, specifically the Nov. 11, 1974 Winterland live edition. On Tuesday, he loved the Kinks’ “Strangers.”
“I’ve always played in a band. I’ve always played with music. This semester it’s been a thing. It’s kind of become real to some point,” said Parrish who plays guitar and bass and is a member of the band Thank God for Mississippi.
This semester also marks the beginning of Parrish’s attempt at being a Garageband beat composer. Technology meets music — seems like a match made in heaven for Parrish the tech junky musician.
As a seasoned musician in the traditional sense, Parrish’s testimony gives validity to the growing front of amateur Soundcloud-caliber composers, a group that brings definitions of artistry and music into question.
“Is there too much music?” Parrish wonders. “The internet is now music, porn and cat videos. It’s limitless. It’s gotta be organized somehow. If I could be a musician, I would have to find a niche,” said Parrish.
The idea of touring as a struggling artist doesn’t sound particularly appealing to Parrish. Neither does the idea of returning to his hometown of Montgomery, Ala.
“I am proud to be a southerner. It is a very big part of who I am. But I guess I just have to do me. I think I was supposed to be born in the south but I’m not supposed to live my days there.”
“You can’t describe it,” said Parrish of southern culture. He arrived at a similar loss for words when attempting to describe the feeling of playing guitar.
“My best performance could have been Brooker two or three weeks ago,” he settled on. “It was the Whiskey Collective on a Thursday night. The feeling is you can’t do anything wrong but you’re not trying to not do anything wrong. Everything works.”
Parrish loves writing songs in the common room of his mod. There he is inspired by things people say. Everyday situtations gave rise to songs like, “So Should I Take a Shower?”
“That was the song people were singing along to at Brooker,” he said. “That was the first time I’ve seen people singing along to something I’ve written. That’s cool.”
(11/14/12 11:07pm)
Last Friday, Carllee James ’13 celebrated being 200 days away from the end of a journey she started three years ago as a first-year from New York City with an afro and without any idea of what she wanted to study. But, 200 days definitely gives James some time left at the College. For James, there’s some unfinished dabbling to do.
“It still feels far. I’m also not racing around to find a job or anything. I’m just kind of enjoying my time here, not sad, not excited yet,” said James. If she was sad or excited, her face would be sure to tell.
“I’m pretty reactive,” she explained, “I react first with my face. If something doesn’t sit well with me, I kind of give a stank face, as they say.”
James gives kudos to her dad for both her facial and long-limbed expressiveness. Ten years ago, James had a bicycle cameo on an episode of Sesame Street — thanks to her dad as well.
At that time, Mr. James was writing for Sesame Street and was able to land his daughter this role, as well as a meeting with Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo.
“I was pretty young when I met him so he did his Elmo voice and I was like, ‘Cool … oh my god … Elmo’s black!’”
Race is a big topic for James. She identifies as biracial. She specifies that her mom is white and her dad is black, feeling that the delineation of half-white and half-black doesn’t do her identity justice.
“I think it’s hard because in the United States the racial system is this binary white-black so there’s no real recognized biraciality yet. I kind of felt like I needed to pick sides at some points,” said James.
Social situations in high school involved some code switching between the ways in which she would interact with black friends and white friends. Middlebury presents a different scenario.
“Because it’s so white here, when someone’s not white they kind of stand out. Really I’m just not white because I look not white or I look exotic and that’s kind of cool to people or something.”
James is working with other students on the JusTalks initiative, which aims to break down the black-white binary of student identities.
The project has been underway for a year and will culminate in an event in January that takes students through a day of activities focusing on different aspects of identity.
James herself, as a tap-dancing, Frisbee playing, theater dabbling, psychology major with an interest in disabilities studies, has proven even the most expansive umbrellas of student identities to be too limiting.
“Probably down the road, I might teach. I always played student and teacher as a kid so I grew up liking that. I just need to learn more before I can teach someone,” she said.
James is already a teacher, though. At the secular Jewish camp James attends every summer she teaches a variety of folk dances to the younger campers, a cohort of kids who are primarily the offspring of radical leftists.
“They’re very simple folk dances and I think the joy of it is at the end of the summer there’s a camp wide dance. That’s when everyone is out on the basketball court dancing,” she said.
After graduation, James plans to study sign language, which James views as a dance in its own way. The limbs-and-face language of sign seems to be a perfect fit for her.
“I went to this sign language immersion program for a few days this past summer and I can remember everyone’s face so well because it’s so much about your facial expression. Yeah, your hands matter, but you’re facial expression has to go with it or else it doesn’t make sense to the viewer,” she said.
You can also find James tearing it up on the frisbee field.
“I probably use the least amount of flair on the team, just because, you know, I like to play in shorts sometimes rather than a tutu.”
(10/31/12 8:34pm)
Last week, Amherst College’s student newspaper, the Amherst Student, published one of the most talked-about articles in recent college journalism, a former student’s chilling first-person account of being raped in May 2011.
The article sparked an international conversation about rape on college campuses and the way that college policies and administrators deal with the issue.
Angie Epifano’s account details Amherst’s neglect.
“In short I was told: No you can’t change dorms, there are too many students right now. Pressing charges would be useless, he’s about to graduate, there’s not much we can do. Are you SURE it was rape?”
The article shows that Amherst, Middlebury and other elite liberal arts college campuses are not exempt from this issue.
“There’s a false security of being in a community where you really let your guard down,” said Emily Pedowitz ’13, a student organizer of the Sexual Assault Oversight Committee (SAOC). In the same way that Middlebury’s small, intimate environment can make coming forth with accusations difficult, it has potential to have a positive impact.
“It can be really easy once there’s a feeling of solidarity to combat these assaults,” said Pedowitz.
This solidarity begins with awareness. It Happens Here, a student initiative headed by Luke Carroll-Brown ’14 and Margo Cramer ’12, made it its mission to raise awareness of sexual assault.
“The issue of sexual assault doesn’t get discussed. People think that it doesn’t exist if it’s not discussed,” said Brown.
It Happens Here hosted last year’s well-attended event, of the same name, the first in which students were invited to share their stories of sexual assault encounters at Middlebury. “Students felt that they had confidence and trust in us because we had no ulterior motive but to share their stories,” said Pedowitz.
The Amherst article calls attention to the need to give students a voice in a forum that is independent of the school administration.
In response to It Happens Here and SAOC’s efforts, Middlebury’s administration has made some policy changes. The school now employs a private investigator who submits the assault case to a judicial board. The case is then reviewed at a hearing at which the perpetrator cannot be present. In the interest of confidentiality, the policy also limits the number of individuals at the hearing.
The college also created an Anti-Stalking Policy this year to try and prohibit the behaviors that cause sexual assault.
“It’s difficult to pinpoint trends on campus with such an under-reported problem. As a field, however, we are increasingly aware of the connection between sexual assault, stalking, and intimate partner violence,” said Associate Dean of Judicial Affairs and Student Life Karen Guttentag.
Guttentag works with the SAOC to combat sexual assault at the College, and the Amherst article led to the group e-mailing a survey out to students.
“Our recent SAOC survey made it clear how hungry our community is for more opportunities for open dialogue about all of the multiple facets of the complicated issue of sexual assault: consent, gender role expectations, the connection between sexual assault and alcohol, sexual assault in the GLBTQ community, bystander intervention, Middlebury’s hook-up culture, etc” said Guttentag.
“People are nervous about healthy sexual relationships. They numb the nervousness with alcohol,” said Karin Hanta, director of Chellis House and Women’s Resource Center who closely correlates alcohol with sexual assault.
Yet, Carroll-Brown said that the problem goes far beyond alcohol. “Far too often, alcohol is used as a scapegoat for bad intentions,” he said.
Pedowitz chooses to keep the issue of alcohol distinct from sexual assault.
“I think there’s some really hurtful notions that it doesn’t happen here and when it does there’s this false notion that people regret what they did the morning after,” she said. Victim acceptance of the legitimacy of their assault is paramount. The College handbook’s recently expanded definitions of consent, rape and sexual assault aim to help victims appropriately recognize their situation.
The stories and speakers at last year’s It Happens Here event helped to debunk the misconceptions about sexual assault.
“It was a beautiful mix of all genders,” said Pedowitz.
Carroll-Brown emphasizes the importance of men’s involvement in the issue.
“Until the anti sexual-violence movement is one [led and supported] by men, we’ll be putting bandages on a problem that emanates from male culture,” he said.
The athletics department is taking initiative. Head of Athletics Erin Quinn developed an interactive PowerPoint to be presented to all teams.
“As a department we had identified some important community standards we wanted to promote. These are all issues that are addressed in other ways on campus, but we felt as if we have the opportunity through our teams to do some additional, meaningful education,” said Quinn in an email.
To promote their sequel to last year’s event, It Happens Here will post campus maps, on which they will invite students to put a dot on a location where they had an incident with sexual assault.
“Seeing is believing,” Carroll-Brown said.
(10/31/12 8:32pm)
For many students, MiddExpress transcends the services of a basic convenience store. Or maybe it is the bone-chilling excursion on a Vermont winter night that can turn a simple toothpaste run into what makes MiddExpress a true staple. Be it the offering of a wide variety of chasers on a Saturday night, a fuel stop — when 4:00 Proctor seems an impossibly distant future — or a provider of overpriced toiletries, MiddExpress is at your geographically monopolized convenience.
“There are students that come in three, four, five, times a night,” said Doug Shivers who, if you frequent MiddExpress, you proably already know. For those of you who don’t hit that tally on an average night and therefore don’t have the opportunity to become closely acquainted with the staff, Shivers is the late night guy curating your shopping experience with classical music.
“I always remember individual Reese’s cost fourteen-cents,” said Shivers, after ringing up a modest purchase of one Reese’s peanut butter cup (cherry-picked out of the bulk candy bin, a popular move according to Shivers) and a Mango Tango Naked juice. Shivers has been ringing up Reese’s and playing classical music at Midd Express since June of 2011: language school students were his first customers.
“A lot of people who came in here didn’t say anything. And then there were some who knew the rule about going into stores and would talk to me in English for five minutes,” said Shivers. “I know a little Hebrew so sometimes I would surprise them with that.”
The academic setting was not new to Shivers, though. Before coming to Vermont, he taught children at a Montessori school in Portland, Ore. for 22 years.
“Children are very, very excited about learning and they’re very creative,” he said.
Shivers detects the same curiosity amongst students at the College. With his teaching days behind him, Shivers can now enjoy a balanced lifestyle in which his work life remains separate from his personal life.
“I like to cook things. I have to really fix my own things because I’m vegan and gluten free,” said Shivers. He’s been a vegetarian since 1970 when a bunch of his friends all moved into a house together and someone proposed, “Hey, why don’t we be vegetarians?” He’s the only one who’s still a vegetarian. In the midst of my conversation with Shivers, he paused to troubleshoot with the finicky cash register.
“This is our 1998 technology,” he said. He took his time to rewrap and reload the spool of receipt paper.
“I guess the slow cooker is kind of my approach to life,” he said. “I do the same thing when I run or go swimming. I’m not trying to race anyone. I look at all the beautiful fall colors and just enjoy the experience.”
The slow cooker approach doesn’t always exist in the traditional academic environment. Having held two jobs that sandwich the typical educational trajectory, Shivers finds that the need for speed starts young.
“[At Montessori school] it’s always getting ready for the next step and here it’s getting ready for a job,” he said. As for the newly displayed tiny packs of Orbit for just 69 cents: “what word do you think every woman thinks of when they see that? Cute. It’s all marketing.” Shivers knows what he is talking about.
(10/10/12 10:19pm)
As a campus that prides itself on being environmentally conscious, it is easy for students to fall into a trap of complacency. However, the Campus Sustainability Coordinators (CSC) have taken it upon themselves to ensure that their peers’ involvement in environmental affairs is not the chance product of passive action, but instead the byproduct of a widespread active awareness amongst the student body.
The campus sustainability coordinator position evolved from the former Residential Sustainability Coordinator (RSC) position, in an effort to reflect the group’s broader and more ambitious goals.
“It’s a new name and a new initiative,” said Spencer Petterson ’14.
“The mission of the CSCs is to promote sustainable living habits by educating their peers on ways to reduce their carbon footprint.”
Since the group’s inaugural year in 2010, it has gone through many structural changes, according to CSC Rebecca Hartje ’14.
Prior to this year, the RSCs narrowed their focus to informing residents, commons by commons, about sustainable practices within the dorm.
“The group is getting more serious and is actually trying to accomplish something on a broad scale,” said Petterson.
Petterson spearheaded this week’s Trashy Tuesday event to kick off the group’s all encompassing new initiative. By stationing themselves outside of Proctor with a tangible image of what a week’s worth of waste looks like, Petterson hopes the event created a dialogue between students and the CSCs.
“It’s an opportunity for people to ask specific questions about what waste goes where and how they can reduce certain types of waste,” she said. The CSCs plan to hold many campus wide, can’t-miss-it-if-you’re-walking-with-your-eyes-open type events throughout the year to bolster awareness.
“I think the best solution to the environmental issues would be if one morning everyone woke up and had it on their mind,” said Petterson.
Hartje agrees.
“I think that the first step in bringing about real change is getting people to care, which requires people to actually have a base knowledge of the state of the environment,” she said. Hartje was inspired to join the group two years ago by its deliberate focus on intercampus education.
In providing a common education for students through campus wide events, CSCs function as community builders.
“The group tries to take an approach that is educational, but also fun and entertaining,” said Dean of Environmental Affairs Nan Jenks-Jay.
While many of the group members’ academic interests involve the environment, they want to move outside of the classroom to affect more tangible change.
“I think there are a lot of myths about sustainability that often get mistaken as truth, and I really enjoy when I can help inform people and dispel those rumors with actual facts,” said Hartje.
You can stay posted on the CSCs’ latest initiatives through updates on Middlebury’s environmental blog, Green Poodle.