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(09/17/20 9:59am)
As Phase One neared its highly anticipated end, the college concluded its campus quarantine programming last Friday with a remote lecture and Q&A by Scholar-in-Residence Bill McKibben. During the talk, titled “This Crisis and the Next One: What the Pandemic Suggests About the Century to Come,” McKibben spoke about the relationship between environmental injustice and Covid-19 and the reasons he believes Vermont has been so successful in its battle against the pandemic.
Jim Ralph, professor of American history and culture, introduced McKibben. Following his talk, three underclassman student panelists — Tim Hua ’23.5, Alicia Pane ’23.5 and Daisy Liljegren ’24 — opened the Q&A session with prepared questions.
Before diving into the future implications of the pandemic, McKibben began by speaking about its ramifications in the present moment. He emphasized the disproportionate severity of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on minority communities, even in predominantly white Vermont: one of the state’s few bad outbreaks occurred in Winooski, a city with a large immigrant population.
“If there was a single powerful quote from the last six months, it came, tragically, from George Floyd,” McKibben said. “And, as you all know, what he said was, ‘I can't breathe.’”
He described the many ways in which the compounding crises of the past six months have restricted the ability of people, particularly Black Americans, to breathe: police brutality; poor air quality from coal fired power plants, usually seen in POC communities; the wildfires filling the air with smoke; and the sheer heat of this past summer.
“We have this huge mix of crises on top of each other,” he said.
During his talk, McKibben highlighted three key aspects of the relationship between the pandemic and the climate crisis.
1: Reality is Real
“I've spent the last 30 years trying to remind people that chemistry and physics won't negotiate or compromise,” McKibben said. “And the pandemic was a good reminder that the same is true for biology. It’s fine for the president to get up and say it’s all a hoax and whatever, but the microbe could care less. If it says stand six feet apart, then stand six feet apart.”
2: Reaction Speed Matters
“We've learned a lot about flattening curves this year,” he said. “The U.S. and South Korea had their first cases of Covid-19 on the same day in January. South Korea went, admirably, to work. And it’s not over there, but it's definitely in the rearview mirror, and with a tiny fraction of the suffering and the loss of life that we've experienced here. That's because we wasted a couple of months, as Bob Woodward has demonstrated over the last couple of days, despite the fact that the White House knew very well what was going on. That slow reaction is the equivalent to the way that we've done nothing about climate change over 30 years that the scientists have given us a warning. And so now, of course, we need to move with extraordinary speed.”
3: Social Solidarity is Really Important
“I grew up in the political shadow of Ronald Reagan,” McKibben said. “He was the dominant figure in my early life, elected while I was in college. Unlike most presidents, he really did realign the country around a new ideological idea, and that idea basically was that markets were going to solve all problems — that government was, as he put it, the problem, not the solution. Indeed, the most famous laugh line in Reagan's speeches, always, was, ‘The nine scariest words in the English language are, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’ Well, it turns out that the scariest words in the English language are, ‘We've run out of ventilators,’ or ‘The hillside behind your house is on fire and you have to leave now, without any of your possessions.’ Those are not things that are solved by markets. Those are things solved by social solidarity of one kind or another, governments learning to work competently, but people joining together with some trust in those governments — and with each other.”
According to McKibben, about 78% of Vermonters mostly or completely trust their neighbors, compared with 38% of Americans. And 69% of Vermonters say they know most of their neighbors, as opposed to just 26% of Americans. He credits the state’s high level of social trust for the early, effective intervention that limited the spread of Covid-19.
Earlier this year, as armed protesters gathered in many states in opposition to wearing masks and other pandemic-related mandates, “in Vermont, there was a demonstration called for Montpelier outside the state capitol,” McKibben said. “And when the day came, there were seven protesters on the ramp for that demonstration.”
He doesn’t attribute Vermonters’ willingness to wear masks and maintain social distance to particularly liberal politics: though Vermont is home to democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, the state’s governor, Phil Scott, is a Republican. Rather, McKibben ascribes it to the state’s unusual geographical and political structure. Unlike other remote states, which tend to be centered around a small number of major cities, Vermont’s population is spread more evenly across the state, and individual towns manage their own affairs through annual town meetings.
“It is a state of villages, and what that means is that people tend to know each other better,” McKibben said. “More to the point, what it means is it’s enabled this long Vermont tradition of very close, democratic self-governance.”
He believes that local self-governance disincentivizes polarization, “simply because you have to get the business of the town done and everyone knows it.”
Many of the questions from panelists and audience members alike addressed the concept of social trust. Hua, one of the panelists, asked whether anti-mask protests could have decreased social trust elsewhere in the country; attendees raised questions about encouraging trust on a larger scale and the potential for people with more diverse backgrounds, in more densely populated communities, to develop similar levels of social trust.
McKibben emphasized that it is unclear how significantly Vermont’s demographics — being a particularly homogenous state with a predominantly white population — impact social trust throughout the state, and that it is difficult to gauge how well the concept of local self-governance might translate to other parts of the country. He denounced the increasing political polarization perpetuated by the current federal government and spoke highly of efforts like “citizens’ assemblies,” designed to help communities become informed about, and collaborate on ways to deal with, local issues.
Pane, another panelist, asked how McKibben sees Vermont’s motto, “Freedom and Unity,” playing out during the pandemic.
“We have chosen, I think, unity above other freedoms here in Vermont during the course of the pandemic,” McKibben said.
(05/14/20 9:59am)
For Edyth Moldow ’23, this is a hopeful moment. Back home in Denver, Colorado, she is staying involved with the Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG) and Sunrise Middlebury, both close-knit environmental organizations with a large on-campus presence.
“Despite all of the negative consequences [of Covid-19] and all of the bad things that are going on in the world right now, it's actually pushing people to take more action than we were before,” Moldow said. “So in a way, it's kind of amped up the climate activism to a really high degree.”
SNEG and Sunrise have continued their work via Zoom, Instagram and other digital platforms, but it’s been hard to stay in close communications from a distance, Moldow said. While not everyone is able to devote the same energy to organizing that they could on campus, those who can still participate have become even more dedicated, with many members channeling feelings of helplessness and isolation into environmental action.
“Right now, there is more of a need than there ever has been, to be taking action in whatever capacity we're able to,” Moldow said.
Malia Armstrong ’22.5, also a member of SNEG and Sunrise, is using this time in Southern California to check in with herself and her community. The two organizations are prioritizing community-building, she said, by touching base at every meeting and figuring out new ways to support each other — an attitude she described as, ‘Don’t worry, we have your back.’
Even during a normal semester, activism can be draining, and going remote has posed additional challenges to Middlebury’s environmental leaders.
“At school, we feel like we're getting so much accomplished,” Armstrong said. “It's easy to see what we're doing. Like, we'll have an event and we can see all the people who came, or, we plan an action and we get to see the action come to fruition. But here, like it's harder to visualize success. What we've been doing, it's not tangible anymore.”
Armstrong helps new Sunrise members find their place in activism — something she also struggled with when she arrived at Middlebury.
“As a person of color, I don’t have the luxury of being able to get arrested without fear of being targeted,” she said. She prefers working behind the scenes on community building and event and action planning, a side of activism that was new to her, but which she has come to embrace.
“Being a part of such close communities with SNEG and Sunrise, and hearing other people’s stories and their journey through activism, has helped me figure out what I really enjoy and what I care about,” Armstrong said.
Jacob Freedman ’21, a co-founder of place-based conservation effort The Wild Hometown Movement and Middlebury offshoot WildMidd, was supposed to spend the semester at the Middlebury School in Argentina. The program was canceled on March 13.
“As I was flying home, I was super flip-flopping on my emotions,” Freedman said. “I was like, ‘No, this is horrible, this is the worst thing ever,’ and then 10 minutes later, I’d be like, ‘I need to do everything that I can to help my community find solace and security and safety in this time.’”
Freedman has been working with his local land trust in Worcester, Massachusetts since high school, and he jumped back into land protection work as soon as he got home. He’s been making maps using GIS, finishing an urban trail network he has wanted to get up and running for years, and searching for rattlesnakes in a nearby forest. The rattlesnake hunt is a long-shot conservation effort: developers are interested in cutting down the forest, but if Freedman can find a rattlesnake, the land will be protected.
He and a filmmaker friend are also putting together a series of videos about Worcester’s forests and nature areas. The project aims to help build community around nature.
“I think with people looking for things to do right now, just sort of showing that the natural world is alive and nature is thriving around us, that’s a really hopeful message,” he said.
Freedman and WildMidd co-founder Oscar Psychas ’21 passed the torch to new club leadership, and are focusing on expanding the organization to other New England colleges.
“The whole goal of WildMidd is connecting with nature where we live, loving the communities that we live in and recognizing that the wild world exists all around us,” Freedman said.
“I’m super excited for this to be a moment for folks who feel really comfortable on online platforms to take the lead,” said Hannah Laga Abram ’23, who does not consider herself a particularly internet-savvy activist. She thrives on in-person organizing and is using this time to center down, take long walks in rural New Mexico and refocus on the nature she is fighting to protect.
“As much organizing as is being done online and virtually, it just isn't the same as being able to be in the same space with people and really talk to folks, and hear their stories, and really engage them,” she said.
Laga Abram continues to attend SNEG meetings, and has been co-writing op-eds highlighting the need for socially transformative solutions to Covid-19.
“I think that's a really important way to get our opinions out right now,” she said, “particularly regarding the way that COVID-19 is completely enmeshed in the climate crisis, and all of the ways that the broken systems that this is revealing are exactly, also, what have caused and continue to cause the climate crisis. And that our solutions to this used to be really focused on that.”
Haley Goodman ’21 had to leave Middlebury’s program in Madrid in March. She returned home to New York and soon started volunteering remotely with the Addison County Relocalization Network (ACORN) in Middlebury, helping to start a virtual farmers’ market that opened on April 29. Customers at the market order directly from farmers and collect their orders at one of two pick-up locations, in Bristol on Wednesday afternoons and Middlebury on Thursday mornings.
Goodman worked at ACORN in the summer and fall, and they reached out to her after she left Spain about assisting with the farmers’ market. Since then, she has helped out wherever is needed, including onboarding farmers, finding locations for dropoff sites, contacting volunteers, editing the website and building the app.
“It's been so heartening, and made me just feel filled with joy and hope, trying to reach out to get volunteers, and see who's interested in helping us out in any way, because the response that I've gotten has just been people being overjoyed to share all the resources that they can,” Goodman said.
An environmental geography major, Goodman is reformatting the market’s interactive map, which connects people in Addison County to more than 200 farmers and food producers, to be compatible with its forthcoming mobile app.
Correction May 14, 2020: An earlier version of this story stated that Goodman created the interactive map. She did not make the map, but is adapting it to the mobile app.
(05/07/20 9:47am)
The Middlebury academic experience is marked by a vast range of classes, a set of distribution requirements that push students to explore courses outside of their academic comfort zones, a strong honor code and small class sizes that allow students to develop relationships with their professors and peers.
But these college brochure bullet points don’t capture the full picture. This year, our Zeitgeist data answered more inconspicuous questions about those experiences, from why students skip class to what distribution requirements are hardest to fulfill, to how many students break the honor code and in what ways.
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Overall, students overwhelmingly feel intellectually stimulated at Middlebury, by their professors, their classes, their peers within their major and their friends. In fact, only 4% combined — 40 students — indicated that they either somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with the statement “I feel intellectually stimulated at Middlebury.” Sixty-five percent of students indicated that they strongly agree with the statement, while another 30% said that they somewhat agree.
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The vast majority of students indicated that they are most intellectually stimulated in the classroom, pointing to professors (39%), class material (35%) and classmates (8%). For some, the most prominent source of intellectual stimulation is outside the classroom: 10% of students indicated friends, followed by talks and student organizations, both at 3%.
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Students report consistent levels of intellectual stimulation across all majors. The concentrations with the fewest majors saying they felt intellectually stimulated were arts majors, with 57% of the 40 total arts majors choosing that option. Language majors — 32 total students — reported the highest rate of intellectual stimulation, at 72%. Arts and language majors were also less represented in the survey than most other majors.
Those 4% of students who strongly disagree about feeling intellectually stimulated are evenly distributed across major groups.
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Do students find that their peers within their major are intellectually stimulating? Almost two-thirds — 64% or 792 students — said yes. 18% said neither yes nor no, and 14% marked themselves as undeclared. Only 5%, or 63 students, indicated that they did not.
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Those who indicated that they are strongly stimulated by the other students in their major are most likely to be humanities, literature or natural sciences majors, and least likely to be arts, language or social sciences majors.
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And as for Middlebury’s Honor Code, which, “[r]equires of every student complete intellectual honesty” and which all students sign at the start of their time at the college, 46% of students wrote that they had broken the honor code, while the other 54% said that they had not. Last year, 35% wrote that they had broken the honor code, 57% said they hadn’t and another 8% chose ‘prefer not to answer’, an option which was not available on this year’s Zeitgeist.
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More than half of all honor code violations were with the use of unauthorized aid, such as translators, calculators, SparkNotes and friends’ edits. Cheating on a test comprised 29% of honor code violations while plagiarism, reusing papers and assignments and falsifying data made up the remaining 17% percent.
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Distribution requirements oblige students to take courses in seven of eight academic areas, in addition to four courses pertaining to certain civilizations areas out of six total regions. Students must also complete one comparative civilization course, and two College Writing courses. When asked which of these requirements is hardest to fill, the largest number of students, 24%, said that they did not have any trouble fulfilling any distribution requirements.
Students struggled most with the civilization requirement, with 20% indicating that this was the hardest to fulfill. Of the eight core requirements, students report having the most trouble fulfilling the physical and life sciences (SCI) requirement, at 12%. This is followed by deductive reasoning (DED) at 9% and then a foreign language (LNG) at 7%.
The social analysis (SOC) requirement is the easiest to fulfill, with less than 1% of respondents choosing this option.
There are many factors that may make some requirements easier or harder to fulfill than others. One of these is the sheer number of classes available within a given tag: SOC, for example, was a requirement met by 150 classes offered this fall, compared to only 61 for Literature (LIT) or 26 for Philosophical and Religious Studies (PHL). Additionally, some tags are more interdisciplinary than others: SCI, for example, was tagged only to classes offered in the Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Studies (although only one class), Geography, Geology, Linguistics (also only one course), Neuroscience, Physics and Psychology departments, while the SOC requirement is offered in 30 departments, including in First-Year Seminars.
Additionally, the Foreign Language (LNG) requirement sometimes requires completion of two or three semesters of a language, such as in the case of intro-level language courses, compared to the single-semester required for almost all other categories.
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Middlebury appears to have a solid attendance record: only 7% of students reported skipping class at least once a week, with 37% skipping “a couple times a semester” and 23% skipping just once per semester. Another 33% reported that they never skip class.
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Students cited mental health as the most common reason for skipping class, with mental health being the cause of 23% of missed classes, followed by feeling overwhelmed by assignments, 21% of the time.
Physical health accounts for another 18% of missed classes, while 13% is the result of oversleeping. 11% of the time, students say that they skip because their class time does not feel productive.
Respondents said they miss just 3% of classes because peers are also skipping, while only 2% of skipping happens because students feel intimidated or uncomfortable because of the class or the people in it. Of the 60 respondents who noted skipping class for other reasons, 19 mentioned travel and five cited skiing. Other responses mentioned job interviews, having friends or family visiting or studying for exams in other classes.
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More than half of students reported spending between four and six hours on academic work outside of class per day, with 28% spending less time and 19% spending more. A total of 6% reported spending 10 or more hours a day on schoolwork outside of class.
(04/16/20 9:59am)
Middlebury hosted Vermont’s branch of the “Solve Climate by 2030” project, drawing more than 70 Zoom users to its virtual panel while universities in nearly all 50 states hosted simultaneous webinars last Tuesday. Dr. Eban Goodstein, director of the Center for Environmental Policy and the MBA in Sustainability at Bard College, launched the project last year with the aim of convening a panel of experts in every state who would determine three ambitious but attainable actions that communities could take against climate change.
“What you do locally will change the future,” Goodstein said in his pre-recorded introduction to the panel, which was streamed to attendees at the beginning of the Zoom conference. He reminded viewers of the 2030 deadline to prevent catastrophic climate change, set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018, and emphasized the need for immediate, local action that will facilitate an equitable transition to clean energy sources and green jobs.
Transportation, heating and efficiency became the three areas of focus in the Vermont group’s discussion, which centered around constructing a Vermont that would work for all. The four panelists — Jared Duval, executive director of Vermont’s Energy Action Network; Carolyn Finney, scholar-in-residence in environmental affairs; Fran Putnam, a community organizer from Weybridge, Vermont; and Jack Byrne, dean of sustainability and environmental affairs — spoke at length about issues of justice and inclusion in future energy and transportation policy. Jon Isham, professor of economics and environmental studies, moderated the talk from the lounge inside Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest, with the familiar backdrop of Adirondack House and Forest Hall visible behind him.
Due to concern about “Zoombombing,” attendees remained muted for the duration of the panel, with their posts in the chat function visible only to the panelists. The biggest challenge seemed to be keeping panelists within time constraints; the introduction portion of the panel took up most of the webinar’s scheduled 90 minutes.
Duval, the first panelist to speak, addressed Vermont’s particular energy challenges: 70% of the state’s climate pollution is the result of transportation and heating, which also make up most of Vermonters’ energy costs. While the state has developed successful policy in its electricity generation sector, Duval said it has not seen the same success in the transportation and heating sectors.
“It’s important to focus on the fuel,” he said, “but the fuel is not enough. It's also about the equipment — the vehicles and the heating systems — and intervening at that point of purchase when you can avoid locking in a decade of fossil fuel use with vehicles, or two or three decades with the average life of a heating system.”
Duval noted that any policy addressing transportation and heating would need to focus on equity to ensure that low-income Vermonters are not left out of the transition to electric vehicles and heating systems.
Finney built on Duval’s point about justice in her introduction, discussing how the power dynamics and relationships present in Vermont decide who gets to participate in climate conversations. The issue of justice brings greater complexity to the conversation, she said, and this complexity must be addressed when developing solutions.
“It's as though we're asking ourselves to cut through to the solution,” Finney said of the panel’s aim. “And I think that makes a lot of people nervous — it makes me nervous — because I want to get there too, but I don't want to get there the same way we've always gotten there. Because a lot of people are going to lose.”
Like Goodstein, Finney drew comparisons between Covid-19 and climate change. “Climate change does not honor borders,” she said. “And we know that just like we've seen with Covid-19, that it can impact everywhere, but it doesn't impact everyone in the same way.” Throughout her introduction, she reiterated the importance of considering the diverse impacts that climate change will have in Vermont.
Putnam, who gave a talk last month about her self-designed study trip in the Nordic countries and is best known on campus for her work with the Sunday Night Environmental Group, spoke about her experience as a local environmental leader. As a retiree motivated to do something about climate change, she spearheaded programs for weatherization, waste management and transportation in Weybridge, Vermont and began volunteering with statewide environmental organizations and state legislators.
“If somebody like me with no academic credentials in this field, or expertise, can do something like this, anybody can do this,” Putnam said.
In Putnam’s experience, people in Vermont already want cleaner heating options and more efficient cars. The issue is affordability. “That's where the state of Vermont has to come in,” she said. “That's where our tax policies have to change. That's where the political structure has to buy into this and let us do what needs to be done.”
Byrne brought his experience developing Energy2028 — the college’s commitment to use entirely renewable energy sources, reduce consumption by 25%, divest from fossil fuels and integrate the commitment into its educational mission by 2028 — to the conversation. He emphasized the potential for other towns to draw from the college’s success.
Following more than an hour of introductions, Isham raised a question from the chat about including indigenous people in climate conversations. Finney responded by criticizing the idea of outreach and its implication of offering help, focusing instead on the need to build a relationship of trust with indigenous communities and respect the actions they are already taking to combat climate change.
Isham then invited atmospheric scientist Alan Betts to join the conversation. Betts spoke for several minutes about the inability of the capitalist economic system to withstand planetary crises like Covid-19 and climate change, and the need to construct a just and stable world. “We cannot have justice unless we confront the corruption of the system that we have bought into and make it pay all the costs,” he said.
As the panel’s time limit approached, Isham asked the panelists to summarize their own priorities. Duval reiterated the importance of establishing a comprehensive policy and regulatory framework centered around equity, while Finney pushed for honesty and truthfulness in legislation and education.
Both Putnam and Byrne referred back to Betts’s call for economic transformation. Putnam spoke about the need for climate policy with fixed goals, which is currently stalled in the state legislature, as well as a fairer tax structure that prioritizes climate solutions, and the inclusion of indigenous voices. Byrne cautioned against polarization, and said, “I echo Alan again. Truth to power.”
(03/12/20 10:10am)
Bill McKibben was arrested in a Chase Bank in Washington D.C. this February as part of an effort to stop big banks from funding the fossil fuel industry. The issue is closer to Middlebury than it might seem — the college currently contracts with Chase Bank, the world’s largest lender to the fossil fuel industry, for its purchasing cards.
College purchasing cards enable faculty and staff to make purchases and pay for travel on behalf of the college. Purchasing cards are also used for some expenditures on behalf of student organizations.
When McKibben, a scholar in residence at the college, realized that Chase Bank provides Middlebury’s purchasing cards — including McKibben’s own card — he contacted David Provost, executive vice president for finance and administration, to ask about changing the contract. Provost immediately agreed to explore alternatives.
“I said, ‘I am totally open to developing criteria that would align better with our mission,’” Provost said in an interview with The Campus.
Middlebury’s existing contract for the purchasing cards is shared with the other institutions in the Green Mountain Higher Education Consortium, which includes Middlebury, Champlain College and Saint Michael’s College. The contract expires in October 2021.
Provost noted that the college cannot break its contract without incurring significant penalties until then. But he said he supports doing a full request for proposal in the summer of 2021. The process of finding a new supplier will involve soliciting bids from other banks and determining Middlebury’s new selection criteria.
Ahead of seeking a new contract, Provost asked McKibben to provide a list of banks that the Middlebury community would support and that have the capacity to handle Middlebury’s national and international business.
McKibben told The Campus that the most suitable bank in the region is Amalgamated Bank, the largest union-owned bank in the United States, which is fully divested from fossil fuels. Amalgamated Bank issues Visa-branded purchasing cards.
The college has not made an official commitment to change banks to Amalgamated Bank, or any other bank, when the contract expires.
Provost expects that the other institutions in the consortium will follow Middlebury’s lead in seeking a new provider. “We represent the highest part of the transactions,” he said, referring to the college’s spending on the purchasing cards. “They’re benefiting from the rebate level because of our size.”
McKibben hopes Middlebury will publicly announce its intention to divest its purchasing cards. “That would certainly help others move in the same direction,” he said.
(02/20/20 10:59am)
This election season, Bill McKibben is turning the spotlight to big banks. He was arrested last month during a sit-in at a Chase Bank in Washington D.C. that served as a trial run for the national mass action, “Stop the Money Pipeline,” set to take on the financial sector this April.
“I think it’s worth remembering that there are two levers of power on our planet,” said McKibben, a writer, activist and scholar-in-residence at Middlebury, in an interview with The Campus. “One of them is political and the other is financial.”
McKibben published a piece in The New Yorker last September calling climate change a timed test. He described political change as usually involving slow compromise even in a working system, something not seen in what he called a “dysfunctional gridlock” in Washington.
“Even if everything went great in the election in November, it’s still not like our government’s going to turn on a dime and do all the things we need,” McKibben told The Campus. He sees rapid political transformation as unlikely at best, especially on a global scale.
But Wall Street, McKibben said, remains the money capital of the world. With swift action needed worldwide, he said it should come from the financial sector as well as the political one.
“When Wall Street moves, it moves quickly,” McKibben said. “If Chase did make some announcement that they weren’t going to be, say, loaning for expansionary fossil fuel projects, then 45 minutes later, the stock market would have reflected that in powerful ways.”
McKibben identifies the money held by Chase and similar banks as a primary driver of the climate crisis in both The New Yorker piece and a New York Times op-ed he co-authored this January, .
“Chase is by far the biggest lender to the fossil fuel industry and they lend the most to all the most aggressive expansionary projects.” McKibben told The Campus. Chase Bank has lent more than $195 billion to oil and gas companies over the last three years — more than the market value of BP oil — to fund projects such as oil drilling in the deep ocean and the Arctic, according to McKibben’s piece in The New Yorker.
The January protest coincided with the last day of Jane Fonda’s Fire Drill Fridays, weekly climate demonstrations in D.C. during which Fonda has repeatedly been arrested. “While Jane and Joaquin Phoenix and Martin Sheen were up on Capitol Hill, about 25 of us went into the nearest Chase branch and had a nice chat with the manager, and just sat down,” McKibben said.
Fonda later led protesters down to the bank, where they rallied out front. Inside, McKibben said, the atmosphere was pleasant and low-key. “We were very, very clear to tell the people working there that we had not the slightest beef with them,” he said. The goal of the sit-in was to reach the bank’s higher-ups in New York — and to give people an idea of what the national day of action might look like in April.
“We’re hoping that there will be demonstrations at hundreds or thousands of bank branches across America,” he said. Among the top targets are Chase, BlackRock and Liberty Mutual, listed on the Stop the Money Pipeline website as three of the world’s biggest funders of fossil fuels.
Because there are no Chase branches in Vermont, McKibben expects that some Vermonters will travel out of state to protest. He said others will get together to cut up Chase credit cards, which include the Amazon credit card, the Southwest and United Airlines mileage cards, the Starbucks rewards card, and others.
Two of the most important things Middlebury students can do, McKibben said, are to let Chase know that they’re not going to ever take out a Chase credit card, and to make it clear that they’re not ever going to go to work at Chase.
McKibben cited Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America as three other major funders of the fossil fuel industry, cautioning that people shouldn’t just cut up their Chase credit card and get a Bank of America one. Better alternatives, he said, include fully-divested Amalgamated Bank on the East Coast, Beneficial State Bank on the West Coast, and Aspirations online.
“Most people don’t have a coal mine in their backyard,” McKibben said. “Most people don’t have a pipeline that runs through their neighborhood. But a lot of people, tens of millions of people, have a credit card in their pocket from Chase and a pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer.”
(02/20/20 10:56am)
Naomi Klein, acclaimed writer and climate activist, brought fire to Wilson Hall last Thursday.
Klein spoke to a packed Wilson Hall about her new book, “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal” for this year’s Scott A. Margolin ’99 Lecture. The talk addressed justice and hope in a warming world, but fire was the key theme of the night.
Scholar-in-Residence Bill McKibben opened the talk with an abridged account of Klein’s long history in the climate movement, including her work as the first board member of 350.org, the climate action non-profit McKibben founded. Then, Klein and moderator Dan Suarez, a professor of Environmental Studies, took the stage.
Klein described in vivid detail the infernos still burning across Australia and the 2018 fire that claimed 86 lives in Paradise, California. She said that worsening wildfires and other unprecedented natural disasters are, unmistakably, results of global warming.
“I don’t think it is a coincidence that as our planet’s temperature increases, the political temperature is increasing,” Klein said. She identified growing political instability as a key reason behind the rise of far-right leaders like President Donald Trump, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“They are true planetary arsonists,” she said, “seemingly determined to torch the planet, convinced that their wealth and privilege will protect them.”
But Klein doesn’t think that wildfires and what she dubbed “the fires of hate” are the only important fires of our time. The third fire, she said, “is our fire.”
Klein has a clear message about what to do with that third fire: change everything. A radical future awaits us, she said. We must decide what kind of radical we want it to be. She envisions a future in which we rebuild zero-carbon societies founded on the ideals of equity and resilience. “Why wouldn’t we?” she said. “We’re changing anyway.”
And that change is already visible: three years ago, Klein said, climate ranked 19th on voters’ list of priorities at the Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic primaries. This year, climate came second, only after health care.
The house is on fire, she said, and to truly step into this moment in history, we must all work to clear away the debris from those flames — to move past whatever it is that’s stopping politicians from confronting climate change. For Klein, that means electing Bernie Sanders to the White House. She said she sees Sanders as the only candidate who will treat climate as the priority that it is.
During the Q&A portion of the talk, Suarez asked Klein how young people should deal with the questions of how to live, where to go, what to do, what to learn and who to be in the face of climate change.
“Whatever your expertise is, whatever your passion is, you need to figure out how the emergency is going to reflect in your work,” Klein said.
Lynn Travnikova ’20.5 brought up the question of inclusion and exclusion in the climate movement. “How do we get [people from marginalized communities] inside the conversation, and how do we make sure that regardless of race and socioeconomic status people feel like they are part of that conversation, and their voice matters?” she asked.
For a long time, the mainstream environmental movement has not represented the communities that are most impacted by environmental harms, Klein said. “Those are the communities that need to be first in line to own and control their own renewable energy projects,” she said, referencing the fights against pipelines led by indigenous people as an example of more diverse collaboration.
Suarez told The Campus that the talk, organized by the Environmental Council and other students associated with the Environmental Studies department, aimed to reach students beyond the department who were grappling with what it means to come of age in a time of climate breakdown. He said that achieving the radical transformation Klein called for will take everyone.
“It’s going to take all kinds of roles, all kinds of capacities and all kinds of contexts,” he said.
(01/23/20 11:07am)
Middlebury now recognizes the economics major as a STEM program, following an internal review of the major’s requirements and the growing importance of quantitative reasoning within the department. The decision went into effect retroactively, beginning in the 2018-2019 academic year.
An email explaining the changes, sent to all economics majors in December, said that the new classification better represents the department’s “evolving curriculum, its increasingly quantitative coursework, and the purpose of the economics major.”
The shift will impact the F-1 visas held by many international students. F-1 students majoring in economics will now be eligible for the 24-month STEM-OPT Extension, which prolongs the standard 12-month stay available to all F-1 students after graduation. The additional year allows students on an F-1 visa more time to find an employer that will sponsor their continued stay.
The college formerly categorized the major under the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) code as “Economics, general.” It will now be listed as “Econometrics and Quantitative Economics,” which qualifies as STEM due to its greater emphasis on mathematical and statistical analysis.
“Nearly all of our classes incorporate quantitative-type analysis,” said John Maluccio, chair of the economics department, “so it’s a better description of what we’re doing in the department.”
Student inquiries about the nature of the major last year led the Economics faculty to explore economics programs at peer institutions, many of which are considered STEM and have comparable curriculum to the courses taught at Middlebury. The department voted unanimously to change the CIP code for the major, a decision then approved by the college.
Maluccio emphasized that the economics department has not seen dramatic changes to its course offerings in recent years. “This is not about changing who might be taking economics,” he said. “It’s much more about—okay, you’re in the major, these are the things we’re doing, let’s give it a more appropriate label within the Department of Education.” He does not expect the change to impact enrollment in the major.
(05/09/19 9:57am)
A committee of faculty, staff and students proposed a new college protest policy at the April 26 faculty meeting. They developed the new policy collaboratively in response to the unpopular draft protest policy published online last November. While the initial draft policy, written by General Counsel Hannah Ross, was criticized for its ambiguity, the new policy aims to be as clear as possible in upholding the three pillars of the college’s academic mission: academic freedom, respect and integrity.
“How do we experience freedom and express respect and have integrity simultaneously?” asked Michael Sheridan, associate professor of anthropology and a member of the policy committee, in an interview with The Campus. “By definition, protest is disruption.”
The committee is not attempting to define the right way to protest, Sheridan said, but is trying to reduce ambiguity through the creation of a space for things to be done right.
The goal of the draft policy is to determine what happens when the conflict mechanisms of non-disruptive protest are unsuccessful. The committee, led by Amy Briggs, professor of computer science, considers development of institutional mechanisms and protocol regarding policy enforcement to be a necessary next step, but sees it as something beyond the scope of the committee’s designated task.
Sheridan said the student members — Ami Furgang ’20, Lily Barter ’19.5, Taite Shomo ’20.5 and Grace Vedock ’20 — drew inspiration from out protest policies from Brown University and Colorado College, which they saw as especially “interesting and compelling and useful.”
The committee set out to “work through what a Middlebury-centric policy would look like, trying to capture the kind of clarity and the kind of issues that were in those other policies,” Sheridan said.
The modified draft that the committee developed after receiving feedback, and plans to present at the May meeting, is organized beneath five headers: “Protest and demonstration are rooted in our educational mission,” “Public speech must be consistent with academic freedom, integrity, and respect,” “Peaceful protest and demonstration are important forms of activism,” “All students and employees can engage in non-disruptive protest and demonstration,” and “Disruptive behavior will be subject to sanction.”
Though the committee’s new draft is more concise than Ross’s, it is still much longer than Brown’s twelve-sentence policy. Rick Bunt, professor of chemistry & biochemistry, said at the faculty meeting that the Brown policy was “pithy,” able to convey a lot of information in few words. He questioned whether shortening the new draft could make it even more effective.
Renee Wells, director of education for equity and inclusion, was the only staff member on the committee. Following faculty questions about what might be considered “demeaning” speech, condemned alongside hatred in the draft policy, Wells said that the goal was not to prohibit speakers or ideas, but to prevent speech that targets people.
The faculty cannot approve or reject the policy at the May meeting, but their vote will be considered representative of the collective faculty opinion on the proposal moving forward.
(05/02/19 10:00am)
More than 200 students answered the question: “What makes you feel othered at Middlebury?” Responses addressed socio-economic status, race and ethnicity, athletics, sexuality and other subjects, shedding light on the ways in which cultures and demographics at the college impact students’ sense of belonging.
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Roughly one in three students feel othered at Middlebury.
Highlighting certain demographics paints a clearer picture of who feels othered at the college. Students of color, recipients of financial aid, members of the LGBT community, those who feel their political views diverge from the norm and others whose identities do not match the dominant demographics of the college were more likely to report sentiments of otherness.
Money was the most commonly cited cause of feeling othered at Middlebury. Respondents who indicated feeling othered expressed frustrations with the high level of wealth on campus, the challenges faced by first-generation students and other financial factors. 45% of respondents indicated receiving need-based financial aid. 30% of the written responses explaining why students feel othered at Middlebury attribute these feelings to socioeconomic status.
The influence of wealth on campus culture is not surprising; data from 2017 showed that Middlebury had a greater proportion of students from the top one percent than most other schools in the country. 76% of students came from families with household incomes in the top 20%, according to the 2017 study.
“The tremendous wealth of the students here makes it easy to feel like an outsider,” one respondent wrote.
Another student wrote that their feeling of otherness stems from the fact that they did not come from a privileged background like many of their peers. “I have to work twice as hard to get half of what is given to these people.”
65% of respondents who chose to write about feeling othered indicated receiving financial aid. This is disproportionately large compared to the 45 % of total respondents who said they received financial aid. Many students cited not graduating from private high schools as the reason they feel isolated by wealth culture. Dozens more described not being able to take part in the same activities as wealthier students, which has led to feelings of social exclusion.
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Roughly half of those who receive need-based financial aid feel othered at Middlebury, while only 20% of those who do not receive aid feel the same way.
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Equally striking is the relationship between race and otherness at Middlebury. Of all racial groups, white students were the only group in which respondents did not overwhelmingly report feelings of otherness.
A campus climate assessment released last week by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion revealed that only nine percent of students of color believe Middlebury is inclusive to members of their race.
Of the 78 respondents who cited race or ethnicity as an othering factor, more than half described not fitting into the white majority as the primary cause. The other students who mentioned race listed it alongside additional reasons, most commonly socioeconomic status, gender and the many challenges posed by the college’s social and academic environment.
“Middlebury’s whiteness and affluence makes me feel othered,” one student wrote. “De facto segregation everywhere I go,” another said.
“Sometimes I become a token in class. When I speak, I feel I have to do so in a way that validates my intelligence,” a third student said.
A student identifying as Latino wrote, “Sometimes I feel dumb when I forget to code switch to the white man's vernacular and they look at me as if I am speaking a foreign language.”
Another student, who specified being a white-skinned Latino, said, “I fear that my skin will make people identify me solely as a white person … I have had negative comments addressed to me based off my skin color, or people laughing at me because of the way I pronounce my name.”
“I am white but I am international,” one student said. “I don’t fit in with the American majority at all but am often labelled that way because I am white.”
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Sexual orientation also factored into feelings of otherness.
“Middlebury is a very heteronormative space,” one respondent who identifies as lesbian said.
Others mentioned feeling isolated from the queer community on campus: one student attributed feelings of otherness to “not fitting stereotypes of the LGBTQ+ community.”
The SGA’s Thirteen Proposals for Community Healing, developed by the student body and sent to the administration following the cancellation of Legutko’s lecture, aim to enhance students’ say in administrative decisions and expand inclusive spaces on campus.
Students who do not identify as cisgender overwhelmingly report feeling othered on campus. “Middlebury fosters a sometimes hostile environment for non-binary individuals,” one student said “I feel pressure to “dress straight” and accommodate the outdoorsy — and hyper masculine — campus culture.”
Students on both ends of the political spectrum described Middlebury as hostile and unforgiving toward people whose views do not align with the norm.
“If you express an opinion that does not align with the majority,” one wrote, “then somehow, they will come after you.”
Another respondent said that the same students who “pride themselves on being liberal and open … are often the most judgmental.”
Many students indicated that Middlebury lacked spaces for discourse where dissenting opinions could be shared and respected.
“I don't like to ignore another person's opinion just because I don't agree with it,” said another. “I prefer to address it and find out where we differ in opinion and why. Many students here don't seem used to that. They are very scared of having a different view and stating their reasons.”
As one student put it, “I’m too woke for some and not woke enough for others.”
While several religious students said they feel alienated because of their religious beliefs, most said they felt othered for being religious, rather than their religion itself.
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More than 70% of respondents reported feeling lonely at least once a week. Almost 20 percent said they feel lonely every day.
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Students who feel othered also report higher occurrences of loneliness: 28% are lonely every day — almost twice as likely as the 16% of students who do not feel othered. Among the less than 7%of students who said they never felt lonely, three-quarters said they did not feel othered at Middlebury.
Loneliness appears frequently in written responses, too, often alongside mentions of cliquiness, frustration about not being outdoorsy or “crunchy” enough and dissimilarity of interests compared to peers, especially regarding weekend activities such as campus drinking and hookup culture.
One student described feeling pressure to never feel lonely. Another said that when they chose not to express traditional femininity or engage with the party scene, they were treated like an outsider.
“I don't hang out with friends or party often,” wrote another. “This is fine literally anywhere else in the world, but I feel lonely and abnormal at Midd.”
A student who does not drink said the decision “makes it challenging to find friends and meet new people, so I spend most of my weekends alone.”
19 comments reported feelings of cliquiness in relation to the divide between athletes and non-athletes.
One former athlete said that their otherness stemmed from not being a varsity athlete anymore. A non-athlete said student athlete culture left them feeling ostracized by varsity teams.
Another student said being involved in athletics is incompatible with being a minority. “These two identities cannot be expressed at the same time,” they wrote.
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Though mental health only appears in a handful of written responses, knowledge about on-campus mental health support systems corresponds to feelings of otherness. Nearly all respondents said they would know where to go for mental health services. But almost half of the respondents who disagreed, and the majority of those who strongly disagreed, said they felt othered at Middlebury.
Mental health was not named by any students as their sole cause of othering, but was listed in several responses, including one that said the issue was with their “decision to prioritize mental health over academic success.”
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Nearly all students feel like they deserve to be at Middlebury — despite the prevalence of feeling othered, roughly 90% of students agree that they have earned their place at the college.
According to respondents, Middlebury’s culture and demographics contribute significantly to the sense of otherness felt by minority groups on campus.
“There are very few spaces at Middlebury where students of color feel welcome,” one student wrote. “Yes, the [Anderson Freeman Center] exists, but if that is the only space dedicated to diversity at Midd, then we need to do better.”
A few students wrote that “everything” about the college culture and community makes them feel othered. “My identity in all spectrums,” one of these students wrote.
“This world wasn’t made for me,” said another.
(05/02/19 9:59am)
The Department of Sociology and Anthropology (SOAN) proposed splitting into two individual departments, offering two separate majors, during the faculty meeting last Friday. Linus Owens, associate professor of sociology, and James Fitzsimmons, associate professor of anthropology, presented the plan, which aims to expand the autonomy of the new Sociology and Anthropology departments while increasing majors’ focus on their field of choice. Per college policy, the proposal cannot be voted on until the final faculty meeting of the year in May.
“We’re two different disciplines, and we’ve grown over the years,” Owens said during the meeting. “We’ve gotten big enough to become increasingly disciplinarily focused on each side, and it makes sense. We think we are at the size where we’re better off splitting to offer both a sociology major and an anthropology major, rather than trying to pull them together.”
The current SOAN major offers three tracks: an anthropology focus, a sociology focus, and a combined third option that allows students to take an equal number of classes in both disciplines. Prior to 2012, the department did not allow students to choose a focus. It has since grown then to 12 faculty members, with six in each field, numbers comparable to departments such as Classics, Education Studies and Comparative Literature.
“As soon as it becomes possible, it starts to feel like it needs to happen,” Owens told The Campus. He said most SOAN faculty members agree that they should offer separate majors through separate departments, but do not all agree on the timing.
Several faculty members expressed concern that the process was too rushed, while others worried that the division could prevent students from moving as freely between the disciplines while deciding on a major. “What this proposal in one way has allowed each side to do, I think, is to further define these disciplines,” said Professor of Anthropology Ellen Oxfeld. “So the new anthropology major is going to look more defined than the anthropology track.”
Oxfeld said the element the department was still deciding how to go about the joint major option, which would replace the current combined SOAN track.
“We have the requirements worked out for each major. Each side seems satisfied with those requirements,” Fitzsimmons said at the meetings. “We also have a provisional outline for a special joint major. Yes, at least as far as the joint major stuff, that’s more of what’s worked out in the last week. What I would add is that there is willingness on both sides to compromise.”
Amid questions about the specifics of that which they were voting on and how much authority faculty had over these decisions, one professor at the meeting asked whether the split would involve a need for new positions or increased funding. “There’s no additional staffing expected, required, asked for,” Owens answered.
Members of the SOAN department are working with Dean of the Faculty Andi Lloyd on the administrative processes involved in the proposed split. Lloyd, who Owens described as an objective voice more informed about the college’s procedures, was unable to attend the faculty meeting.
Owens told The Campus that the “how” complicates the “why.” He said the majority of Middlebury’s comparably-sized peer institutions have separate departments, the current system unnecessarily combines two different disciplines and the current flexibility of the SOAN department does not offer students sufficient disciplinary depth. While the current plan is to continue offering a joint major, “most people have a preference,” Owens said.
Preliminary discussions with students indicate support for the split. “Students’ educational outcomes are also a driving force behind these decisions,” Owens said.
(04/25/19 9:57am)
In celebration of Earth Day, The Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG) and Sunrise Middlebury hosted an Eco Fair last Friday in Wilson Hall, followed by a Town Hall Meeting on the Green New Deal in Mead Chapel.
Eco Fair
Representatives from an array of environmentally conscious on-campus and local organizations sat at rows of tables at the Eco Fair, describing their forms of activism to interested students and community members.
Several of the groups that attended specialize in encouraging more sustainable dietary practices. MiddVegan, a club that started in the fall, promoted their monthly vegan dinners at their table. Weybridge House, the local foods interest house, explained their emphasis on sustainable eating; they purchase all of their food, except oil and spices, from within 70 miles of the college. The Environmental Affairs Committee (EAC) displayed a possible version of the reusable, fully recyclable and compostable to-go cups they plan to introduce in the near future.
Other organizations highlighted the less-obvious connections between their work and environmental issues. Members of Feminist Action at Middlebury, representing Planned Parenthood, emphasized the disproportionate effect climate change has on female and minority communities. Juntos talked about the impacts of of environmental threats on migrant farmworkers.
Some displays were more interactive. Students painted flower pots at a table labeled, “Plant a friend.” Luke Bazemore ’21 piled the Mountain Club table with sticks and challenged passerby to try starting a fire by rubbing the sticks together. Fortunately, nobody succeeded.
Haley Goodman ’21 ran a waste-sorting game at the Sustainability Solutions Lab table, asking students to determine which bins frequently-misplaced waste products really belonged in. “All of the disposable containers that you get from the Grille and Wilson Cafe, and our to-go cups, are all compostable, so that includes even things that look like plastic,” Goodman said. She said that plastic Amazon packages and bags are newly recyclable.
SNEG, Divest and Sunrise Middlebury, the college’s chapter of a national youth coalition combating climate change, shared a table with 350.org, the international climate organization founded at Middlebury in 2007. Across the aisle, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) discussed their effort to ban single-use plastic bags in Vermont.
Margie Bickoff from Huddlebury, a new Addison County group that also advocates for a ban on single-use plastic bags and sews reusable cloth bags from repurposed fabrics to donate to food shelves and businesses, said the project grew from its founders’ shared desire to make change after the Women’s March.
“We call them re-bags for ‘reduce waste, reuse and recycle,’ and the fabric that’s being used is recycled,” she said. “In fact, some people have brought in their old curtains.”
Town Hall
Sunrise Middlebury organized the Town Hall as part of a series of similar events hosted by affiliated groups nationwide to resolve misrepresentations and spark community conversations about the proposed Green New Deal.
Each of the six student presenters — Molly Babbin ’22, Phoebe Brown ’22.5, Katie Concannon ’21, Leif Taranta ’20.5, Emily Thompson ’22 and Olivia Sommers ’21 — began with their own reasons for joining the Sunrise Movement and organizing the Town Hall.
For Taranta, it was the devastating impact of fossil fuels on the air, water and people in their hometown of Philadelphia. For Babbin, it was witnessing the effects of rising sea levels at home in Connecticut. For Concannon, it was overwhelming climate grief following the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. For Brown, it was the impending loss of winter as it exists now.
They started the presentation with a brief history of the climate crisis and the influence of the wealthy on climate denial. A slide on ExxonMobil read, “They knew. They denied. They deflected responsibility.”
“I personally think money speaks louder than words,” Concannon said.
But unlike fossil fuel companies, young people have numbers, and “this system can’t stay up if we don’t let it,” Taranta said.
Over the next decade, the presenters said, the Green New Deal, aimed at combating climate change and economic inequality, will facilitate a just transition to a livable future through a national mobilization for all.
Using an interactive format that asked audience members to reflect on their own communities’ needs and to share those ideas with the people around them, the presenters introduced the three pillars of the Green New Deal — good jobs for all, a democratic economy and a good life for all — and described its plan to expand the lowest-carbon parts of the US economy to form an energy democracy and put wind and solar in the hands of the people.
“Green jobs,” they said, “have to be good jobs.”
They ran through a few frequently asked questions: “How will it become concrete?” Through future legislation. “Is it technologically feasible?” Yes. “How will we pay for it?” In response, Babbin read a quote from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to resounding applause “Why is it that these questions arise only in connection with useful ideas, not wasteful ideas? Where were the ‘pay-fors’ for Bush’s $5 trillion wars and tax cuts, or for last year’s $2 trillion tax giveaway to billionaires? Why wasn’t financing those massive throwaways as scary as financing the rescue of our planet and middle class now seems to be to these naysayers?”
“In some places, I wouldn’t just get cheered when I read the quote,” Babbin later told The Campus, referencing the cynicism many outspoken opponents of the Green New Deal have already expressed. “In other states, maybe they’re skeptical, but here people were so on board.”
During the Town Hall, Taranta emphasized the importance of talking about the Green New Deal and combating the widespread misinformation that it is not economically, technologically socially or politically possible. “The idea that this will never happen is a propaganda campaign used against us to discourage us,” they said. It can happen — it has to.
Members of Sunrise Middlebury and SNEG are also drafting a Vermont Green New Deal, which they plan to present to the state legislature in January, nearly a year before the national proposal makes its way through Congress.
The six students concluded the presentation portion of the Town Hall by inviting local organizers, many of whom presented at the Eco Fair, to join them at the front and sing, “Social Justice Song 2019,” composed by Bickoff, the Huddlebury representative from the Eco Fair.
Gabe Desmond ’20.5 was the first audience member to speak. “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been affected by climate change,” he said. Every hand in the room went up. Desmond talked about a time last summer when he was unable to finish a hike in Seattle, Washington, because smoke from wildfires to the north, east and south had caused Seattle’s air quality to be the worst in the world.
“I think the really scary thing about climate change, to me, is that it’s hidden,” Desmond said. “When something like Irene happens, you don’t always think about climate change as being the thing that floods your home, right? It’s the water. When I can’t breathe, ‘Oh, it’s the fires. It’s not climate change.’ But it is climate change.”
One community member, who said he graduated from college more than 50 years ago, said politicians are cowardly, and their constituents need to push them to do greater things.
Another said that people do things for two reasons: out of fear of loss and out of desire for gain.
“We keep living in the fear of loss,” he said. “We need to change our minds. We need to change our hearts.”
A self-identified baby Feb asked about the best way to reach a Representative. An email? A phone call? A letter?
Fran Putnam, a local resident closely involved with SNEG, answered, “All of the above.”
“In 11 years,” said a girl at the front of the room, “I will be 24 years old. And I am completely terrified and overwhelmed by that, because I will only have lived a quarter of my life, hopefully, at that time. And if this doesn’t work out—though I’m hoping that it will—that’s it for me.” Describing the renewed hope she gained while participating in the Next Steps Climate Walk earlier this month, she started to cry. Her comment received one of the longest rounds of applause of the evening.
“I was anticipating more questions,” Concannon told The Campus. “I was ready to answer questions about how to pay for it. I was ready to answer questions about, ‘Why do you need to include the social aspect with the environmental aspect?’”
“We thought we were gonna get drilled on the details, because generally when I have a conversation with a friend or a parent, they drill me on the details,” Babbin added. “But it seemed like the people who showed up there were already very much wanting large change.”
“I have struggled a lot with ecological despair, to the point where sometimes it just feels like there’s nothing to do about anything, and everything’s hopeless, and I just get in my head, like, why even try,” Sommers told The Campus. “Which I think is a more common thought pattern than we let people know. And I found that channeling that into activism and planning and this town hall, where I’m bringing awareness about the Green New Deal, and bringing people into that, is a way to deal with my climate anxiety, and hopefully make it productive.”
“Climate change isn’t always associated with strong emotions and grief,” Babbin said.
“But it is,” Concannon said. “It’s loss of life. It’s loss of place. It’s loss of home.”
(04/18/19 10:30am)
Two weeks ago, extensive collaboration among members of Middlebury’s Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG) and a number of local and statewide activist organizations culminated in the “Next Steps: Climate Solutions Walk.” Protesters joined in for as much of the 5-day, 65-mile walk as they could, beginning at the Middlebury Town Green on Friday and concluding on Tuesday, April 9 with a protest at the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier.
The Next Steps march was inspired in part by a climate awareness walk held during the fall of 2006. Thirteen years before Next Steps, Bill McKibben and six others gathered at Carol’s Coffee Shop, formerly located where The Daily Grind stands now, to think through the branding, logistics and outreach of a climate walk. Professor of Economics Jon Isham was one of the six. Isham told The Campus that the group settled on a route from the Robert Frost Cabin in Ripton to Burlington, themed around the idea of a road less traveled.
Because Middlebury “has the oldest environmental studies department in the world,” McKibben wrote in an email to The Campus, “it naturally focused on these issues before others did.” He identified SNEG as “an early example of fine organizing,” and said he gave the first talk on his 1989 book “The End of Nature”, the first book on climate change written for the general public, at Middlebury at the request of a student.
“To see that this spirit has reached even the trustees, with their landmark decision on divestment, makes me extremely proud to be part of this community,” McKibben wrote.
Isham also praised SNEG, saying that Middlebury students’ activism is continuous, though their methods have varied, mentioning a past group of students who put fake parking tickets on SUVs to draw attention to emissions.
“One generation of students passes down victories and ideas and frustrations to the next,” Isham said.
Divya Gudur ’21 is a student activist and SNEG member who played a central role in organizing the Climate Solutions Walk. Her primary roles included registering participants and coordinating the younger walkers, whose involvement was a key feature of the Climate Solutions Walk.
“It’s like, I’m responsible for this one thing, but there’s so much planning going to other things,” Gudur said. “Everything had to come together.”
Gudur said the march was a communal activity — a time for people brought together by a shared cause to get to know each other, with no distractions except the beautiful land around them. It was an opportunity for everyone to connect personally to climate issues, and for Middlebury students, especially, to engage more closely with surrounding communities.
“I had a blast,” said Leif Taranta ’21, another student activist and SNEG member who marched for several days. He said the walk was a fun, cheery experience, which was something he had not anticipated because of the grimness of climate change. It was musical, too, he added, as participants sang along the walkand were occasionally joined by bands along the way.
The marchers began walking around nine each morning and took frequent rest stops throughout the day. The days all had themes — reunion, resist, recreate, reimagine and reform — and the stops matched those themes. On Sunday, April 7 they explored “recreate” by looking at climate solutions including a solar farm, and held a greeting ceremony in Hinesburg, where the Vermont Gas Systems pipeline passes through Geprags Park.
At the end of the day, communities hosted the marchers for the night in churches, houses, and community centers and held potlucks for the marchers. “All these community members would make us food,” Gudur said. “It was amazing. The food was amazing.” After-dinner programming varied daily, but consisted of nonviolent direct action training, action planning, community conversation and an art build.
The Climate Solutions Walk focused on three resolutions coming up in the Vermont legislature related to banning fossil fuel infrastructure. A number of marchers will testify at the recently announced public hearing on April 23. In recognition of the resolutions, the protestors carried pussy willow branches into the statehouse and placed them at each representative’s spot in the House and Senate energy committees. On tags attached to the branches, the younger participants wrote the things they wanted to preserve.
About 300 people packed into the halls of the statehouse at the end of the march, with the youth standing in the middle. As they sang “More Waters Rising,” Gudur said the solidarity was powerful, referring to it as “literally the best day of my life.”
Taranta stressed how valuable it would be for more Middlebury students to get involved in climate issues and work to make change themselves. “Not everyone can walk 65 miles,” he said, but “there are hard things that all of us can do.”
(04/18/19 9:55am)
Last fall, days after Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Dan Suarez gave a talk branding climate change the impending end of the world, Kyle Freiler ’19 walked into Suarez’s office in a panic. He was experiencing what the American Psychological Association now recognizes as climate grief: the shock, hopelessness and despair that result from worsening effects of climate change. Freiler called it an awakening.
“I think what Kyle is going through is akin to a microcosm of what a lot of people are going through,” Suarezsaid. “How do you find your way in this world? What do you do? How do you live in it?”
While Freiler’s climate awakening was beginning, he and Charlotte Massey ’19 were in the process of arranging speakers for a panel sponsored by the Symposium Philosophy Club and the Debate Society. Inspired by his awakening, Freiler wanted to host a panel discussion with leading environmental thinkers. Suarez suggested Rupert Read, an activist, environmental think tank leader and member of England’s Green Party, as one panelist. Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and Middlebury’s Schumann Distinguished Scholar, was an obvious choice. Suarez and Keiler reached out to several contributors to the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report before selecting Kim Cobb, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech and the lead coauthor of the 2018 IPCC report.
Freiler told The Campus that he asked Suarez to moderate because of his role in bringing in panelists and because “he’s young, he’s in the same boat as us, and he has a really clear-eyed look at the problem.”
Suarez moderated the resulting panel, “Climate Change: What Should I Do About It? How Can I Live With It?” in Wilson Hall last Monday. Read and McKibben appeared in person. Cobb spoke via videoconference, because she adheres to a strict personal carbon budget that limits her ability to fly.
Middlebury President Laurie L. Patton introduced the panel, drawing on the words of former French president François Hollande: “The time is past when humankind thought it could selfishly draw on exhaustible resources. We know now the world is not a commodity.”
In his own opening remarks, Suarez said, “It wouldn’t be quite right to say that it is my pleasure, exactly, to be with you here today, although it is, given the circumstances that have brought us together. And specifically the bewildering and preposterously grave seriousness that defines our subject matter.”
The panel aimed to confront the discomfort, anger, heartbreak and fear felt by many in the face of climate change, and to investigate the perennial question: what is to be done? By forcing reevaluations through exploration of justice and injustice, the panelists urged attendees to reject complacency — as Suarez said, “finally facing what needs to be faced.”
Read was the first of the panelists to give his opening statement. Stepping to the podium as Suarez returned to his seat, he said, “Your so-called leaders have failed you. Your parents, I’m sure, mean well, but they and their generation have failed you. Your teachers, despite their best intentions, have failed you. And we, despite our best endeavors, even we have failed you. We’ve all failed you because we are sending you, naked and unprepared, into a deteriorating future.” He went on to say that the Paris Agreement was “a voluntary agreement to do far too little to stop catastrophic climate change from occurring,” that climate-related agricultural breakdown will end the lives of some audience members long before rising sea levels inundate Boston and New York, and that the older generation has failed younger ones through complacency.
Love, Read said, caring enough about life, wilderness, future generations and encouraging one another to really show up to the climate fight, are the only things that can propel humanity through this.
Cobb opened by talking about her own wake-up call. For most of her career as a climate scientist, she thought climate change was someone else’s problem to fix, while her own role was to publish papers and raise her four children. That changed in 2017, when, over just five months, she witnessed the death of 90 percent of the corals at her Pacific research site, Christmas Island, which she described as an “absolute tropical paradise.” Soon after, she started biking to work and created her carbon budget.
“I know that the young people today will fix this,” Cobb said. “I have absolutely all the confidence in you guys. And it’s my job to try to give you the best head start that I possibly can.”
McKibben tied it all back to the iron law of climate change: “The less you did to cause it, the more and more quickly you suffer its effects.”
“How do we do this better?” Suarez asked, referring to the work of educators in guiding students in the face of climate change.
Read said that climate grief can be liberating. It eliminates the expectation of a predictable future, freeing people from the assumption that comfort is to be expected. It offers people the chance to be part of the generation that tries to save the future.
“In my experience,” McKibben said, “the great antidote to angst about all this is to be engaged in thefight.”
The discussion moved to the need for a massive change in consciousness related to climate change. Cobb said there has already been a rapid shift in public opinion in recent years. Read urged everyone to keep warning people, to take them into threatened nature, and to spread the messages of the panel.
Read said that the degree of transformation necessary to combat climate change is roughly equivalent to the human revolution — when humans first evolved. And it needs to happen fast: unless people make a serious start at turning things around in the next eighteen months, it will be impossible to complete that task within the eleven years before the consequences of climate change become even more disastrous.
“The polling in this country took its most decisive shift in the week or two after the fires in California,” McKibben said, describing the shift in people’s understanding of what is natural and normal and obvious. “Watching a town literally called Paradise literally turn into hell in half an hour had a sobering effect on a lot of people.”
“This is the world we now live in, whether folks choose to accept it or not,” Suarez told The Campus. He emphasized that in this exceptional moment of urgency, as climate change finally catches up with those who have been most responsible and most insulated from its effects, the issue of privilege, and the influences of responsibility and complicity, should not be overlooked.
(04/11/19 10:41am)
The protesters stood in a circle on the Middlebury Town Green, holding their handmade signs high: “Every Day is Earth Day,” said one; “Got Emissions?” read the text beneath a cow-patterned milk jug; an arrow pointing to a hand-painted globe declared, “I’m with her.”
United by their shared desire to take action against climate injustice, Middlebury College students joined community members for the kickoff of the Climate Solutions Walk that took place this past weekend. The crowds took to the hills, inspired by the young legislators propelling the Green New Deal forward in Congress and the teenagers strengthening the climate movement around the world. Their goal, in solidarity with Vermont’s native communities, was to recognize the climate emergency. The activists hoped to celebrate solutions to this emergency while also grieving the damage it has already caused.
The walk, a 5-day, 65-mile trek from Middlebury to Montpelier, began on a windy, overcast Friday morning, but people chatted enthusiastically in spite of the sharp breeze and the rain forecast for the next several days. Most of them wore winter coats, knit caps, waterproof shoes, and backpacks. Some wielded cloth signs with “Climate Justice for Us” printed in bright colors around a drawing of a flower. Others pinned smaller “Climate Justice” signs to their backs and wore them like capes.
Organizers structured the kickoff as an interfaith ceremony of opening and reunion, and asked those present to call out brief invocations as they were moved to. Among the shouted phrases were: high peaks, love, my daughters, facts, climatic freedom, justice, transformation, tenderness, resistance against extinction, power of the people, resilience, hope, wilderness, gratitude, earth, compassion, reciprocity, clean water, and joy.
Four people then blessed the natural elements, each represented by an object resting on a cloth square in the center of the circle: shreds of fabric tied to a stick, a candle inside a lantern, a clear vase of water, and a potted plant. Divya Gudur ’21, one of the student organizers of the march, invoked Hinduism as she blessed the fire.
The speakers asked people to call out their intentions for the walk. Responses included: the power of the climate movement, awareness of the precious earth, healing, make our concerns visible, for the sake of future generations, giving truth to power, embodying our nature, my grandson, waking up, visibility, relationships, connection, going deeper, amplifying solutions, finding new directions, living by example, remembering what it means to be a true steward of this land, and being thankful.
Environmental journalist and activist Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury, concluded the kickoff.
“As we walk, think about the people—even in the last two weeks—the people in the Midwest who dealt with floods like they’ve never seen before, lost their cattle, lost their crops, lost their homes,” McKibben said, going on to outline some of the countless instances of suffering caused and exacerbated by climate change.
“Think about the people in Mozambique, who two weeks ago suffered what they’re now describing as the worst natural disaster in the history of the Southern Hemisphere, when a cyclone smashed into Mozambique and Malawi and Zimbabwe and left a thousand people dead, and huge areas just turned into malarial lakes,” McKibben urged. “Think about the people in Iran, where they’re having the worst flooding right now they’ve ever had, every region of the country under an emergency order.”
McKibben left his speech with words to keep the climate activists motivated even when their feet tired of walking: “Something like that now happens every single day. Someplace in the world people get their Irene now, every day. That’s what happens when you change the atmosphere.”
This walk follows in the footsteps of another climate march, from the Robert Frost Cabin in Ripton to Burlington, organized by McKibben in 2006.
“Middlebury—college and town—has been a real cradle of the climate movement,” McKibben wrote in an email to The Campus. “Because it has the oldest environmental studies department in the world, it naturally focused on these issues before others did.”
McKibben also described the residents of the town of Middlebury and of the state of Vermont as key players in the climate movement. He offered less credit to the state of Vermont, writing “Vermont should be making clear and steady progress, but it really isn't: the legislature hasn't risen to the occasion, and so even here it is necessary to keep reminding them. It's always necessary to keep the pressure on!”
The protesters marched out of the Town Green, their signs aloft, singing, “Lead With Love,” and paraded off down Route 7 for the start of the climate walk.
(04/11/19 9:53am)
The earth is not to be taken for granted.
Last Thursday evening in Wilson Hall, 30 years after publishing the seminal climate change volume “The End of Nature,” Bill McKibben revisited the many lessons he has learned since the book’s publication. That was the first one.
McKibben, known for his work as a journalist and environmental activist, founded the international climate change organization 350.org in 2008. In 2010, McKibben was named Middlebury’s Schumann Distinguished Scholar. Since then he has regularly given talks on campus and appeared at college events, while continuing his work as an activist outside of Middlebury. During last week’s talk, entitled “What I Learned in the Last Three Decades: A First Glimpse of My New Book,” he shared eight lessons about the climate crisis and human nature along with excerpts from his newest book, “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?”
The talk began with introductions by Professor of Economics Jon Isham, Dean of Environmental Affairs Nan Jenks-Jay, and College President Laurie L. Patton. Isham read a new poem written by the environmental poet Wendell Berry about McKibben, the first entry in a book of writings gathered from close colleagues and friends of McKibben’s. Jenks-Jay presented McKibben with the book. Patton read her own entry, thanking McKibben, whom she called “the world’s colleague and friend,” for his many contributions to the college over the last 18 years.
About two months ago, Jenks-Jay suggested giving McKibben an award in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the publication of “The End of Nature,” Isham told The Campus. This idea evolved into the book they presented to him at the talk, a collection of 39 contributions from people who have worked with him on the front lines of the fight against climate change.
Today’s climate movement did not exist fifteen years ago, McKibben wrote in an email to The Campus. “Whether it’s strong enough to match the fossil fuel industry I don’t know,” he wrote, “but it is very good to know that at least there will be a fight.”
The second lesson McKibben learned is that some people actually do their jobs. The price of solar panels has fallen by 90 percent in the last decade, he said, thanks to the work of engineers — and the “ex-hippies” who spent their time “down in the basement fussing with the lead-acid batteries.”
“The good story of the last thirty years is that we know, now, how we could solve a problem that in a certain way seemed insoluble in 1989,” McKibben wrote. In 1989, there was no clear alternative to coal, gas and oil. Now, as solar power has become more affordable, there is.
His third lesson: it’s possible to win the argument, but lose the fight. Despite winning the climate change argument, scientists lost the fight to the world’s fossil fuel elites who had enough money and power to inhibit change. Oil companies knew all the basic facts of climate change by the 1980s, but their willingness to spread “the most consequential lie in human history” produced a 30-year debate about whether climate change was real at all.
For the fossil fuel companies, that lie remains a success. “The President of the United States believes that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese, an idea so odd that if you were sitting on the ACTR bus next to someone muttering this, you would get up and change seats,” McKibben said.
After the release of “The End of Nature” in 1989, McKibben worked to grow the global climate movement and continued to write books. Just over a decade ago, he began dedicating more time to organizing, combating the massive amounts of money in the fossil fuel industry, moving away from book writing. But “Falter” felt necessary, especially considering how far McKibben has come since he wrote “The End of Nature.”
“‘The End of Nature’ was a good book, but written by a young man,” he wrote. “That has both advantages and disadvantages.”
The fourth thing McKibben learned is that large numbers of people will gather and do the work they are asked to do, “if they’re given a — even mildly plausible — reason to think it might be successful.” He brought up the then-upcoming Climate Solutions Walk held last weekend, a five-day march from Middlebury to Montpelier. He described a similar march in 2006, during which protesters walked from the Robert Frost Cabin in Ripton to Burlington.
In 2006, when they reached Burlington, he said, they were greeted by then Congressman and senatorial candidate Bernie Sanders, who praised them enthusiastically for their activism. Sanders then asked, “What is this about, again?”
McKibben’s primary takeaway from the 2006 march was that people respond better when they are asked to do more challenging things, because they are more likely to step up if they feel that their work means something. This is also seen in the unexpected global success 350.org saw in 2009, when they coordinated thousands of protests around the world on the same day.
In 2009, McKibben said, climate activism was an unfilled ecological niche. But while nobody focused primarily on climate change, many worried about closely related issues: women’s rights, war and peace, development, public health, hunger, and “all the problems you couldn’t address on a planet that was rapidly destabilizing.”
Lesson five, he said, is that it is sometimes necessary to go beyond education and confront the problems. The Keystone Pipeline protests show, regardless of their outcome, that it is possible to stand up to big oil. Divestment of money invested in fossil fuels has also been more successful than McKibben ever anticipated, with coal and oil companies now recognizing the financial losses as a serious threat.
The sixth lesson: “it’s possible we may not win this fight.”
Never take a snowstorm for granted, McKibben warned, because winter as it exists now will not last much longer. The evidence of climate-related losses is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Coral reefs, “once the most enchanted corner of God’s brain,” he said, “are now just lobotomized and vacant.” He played a video he had filmed of a glacier disintegrating into the sea.
The seventh lesson is a little bit more optimistic: to have any chance of “winning”— of slowing and limiting climate change enough for human civilization to survive—people will need to stretch well beyond their comfort zones. After all, he said, the planet is way outside its comfort zone. And what people have done so far is clearly insufficient.
McKibben cited two mechanisms which have been enhanced over the last 30 years and serve as reasons for hope. One is the solar panel. The other is the evolution of nonviolent resistance. Activism by pioneers like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi serve as the foundation of the climate movement protests.
“You shouldn’t have to go to jail to get people to listen to science,” McKibben said. But it works.
His eighth and final lesson is that the world is so beautiful, and so remarkable, that all of this is worth a try. Earlier that day, he said, as his flight to Middlebury passed over the Adirondacks, he found himself captivated by the view. And yet, while watching a recent SpaceX launch, he realized that the richest people on earth just want to leave this planet behind.
Moving forward, the next ten years are likely to be the most critical, McKibben said. “Can we make a decisive transition away from fossil fuels in that period? If not, I think the prospects for catching up with the physics of climate change become vanishingly small.”
“We are messy creatures, often selfish, prone to short-sightedness, susceptible to greed,” McKibben said at the end of the talk. “In a Trumpian moment, with racism and nationalism resurgent, you could argue that our disappearance would be no great loss. And yet most of us, most of the time, are pretty wonderful. Funny. Kind. Another name for human solidarity is love. And when I think about our world in its present form, that is what overwhelms me.”
(03/14/19 9:58am)
The Hillcrest Orchard was filled to capacity for the “White Allies: It’s Your Turn” meeting last Thursday evening, with students lining the windowsills and crowding onto the floor as organizers Treasure Brooks ’21 and Wengel Kifle ’20 spoke about the need to eliminate racial violence from the Middlebury curriculum. [pullquote speaker="Treasure Brooks ’21" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]The academic institution is the greatest mobilizer of white supremacy.[/pullquote]
“Repeat after me,” Brooks told the crowd, “the academic institution is the greatest mobilizer of white supremacy.” Attendees echoed her words. Later, asked how she came up with the phrase, she said, “It’s just the truth.”
Promoted as an opportunity for white students, particularly those who oppose campus inequality but rarely speak up outside the classroom, to learn about advocating for racial equity, “White Allies” offered white students a glimpse into the social and academic difficulties faced by students of color. Brooks, who is black, described Middlebury as a site of colonial indoctrination, and said that the first step toward being on the right side of history is to decolonize the curriculum by incorporating diverse viewpoints that are often neglected by academia.
“Decolonizing the curriculum, I think, is to intentionally teach different authors and teach from perspectives that are non-western and non-white,” Brooks said. Most of the academic content used in Middlebury’s courses was produced in colonial and white supremacist systems, she said, and the intentional addition of different perspectives to curricula makes the context more complete.
“It’s not just adding in new voices,” said Renee Wells, director of education for equity and inclusion. “It’s adding in new voices that can name the ways in which our historical modes of thinking are oppressive.”
The event was completely student-run, but Wells described herself as a sounding board for student concerns, including those recently put forth by Brooks and Kifle regarding campus climate and curriculum.
During the meeting, Brooks referred to Carr Hall, which houses the Anderson Freeman Center, as a space for students of color. One white student, seated on the floor in the back corner of the room, turned to the person beside her, and whispered, “What’s Carr Hall?” The other student, also white, just shook her head.
At the end of the meeting, the presenters had participants break into groups by academic department and then passed out petitions, urging students to approach professors about the need for Middlebury to undergo an institutional process of academic decolonization, and to request that faculty members sign on in support.
The meeting organizers began co-writing the petition the day after Brooks served as guest discussion leader for Middleground, a new student group created as a platform at the end of last year for students to share personal stories about the challenges they face at Middlebury. Brooks, a History major, told The Campus about a STEM major who spoke at Middleground and started to cry while describing an experience with intolerance in the classroom, and the profound effect it had on her own attitude toward college academics.
[pullquote speaker="Treasure Brooks ’21" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]The violence we experience in the classrooms is truly across disciplines.[/pullquote]
“The violence we experience in the classrooms is truly across disciplines,” Brooks said.
Changing the social climate on campus is a complex endeavor, but Brooks and Kifle see expanding diversity within curricula as a goal that is both critical and attainable. Brooks read the college’s mission statement aloud during the meeting, emphasizing its claim to prepare students to “contribute to their communities, and address the world’s most challenging problems.”
“Whose community are we learning how to help, to engage with?” she said. “Whose?”
Most Middlebury students would describe themselves as allies, Kifle, who is also black, said in an interview with the Campus. But she noted that white students lack the double consciousness held by students of color and, as a result, frequently don’t realize that they are not getting the entire perspective. Expanding the curriculum, she said, helps everyone.
“It’s not that people of color need this more,” Brooks said. “The chasm in our education is more visible to us because we know our own history and we know what’s missing.”
Middlebury’s mission statement promises to prepare students to address the world’s most challenging problems, but the current lack of global, critical perspectives presented in the classroom fails to accomplish that, Kifle said. Limiting the voices available to students to one dominant demographic, specifically white men, hinders the scope of their education and leaves them unprepared to face real world issues.
“Professors are just serving as moderators instead of educators,” Kevin Mata ’22 said, after Brooks invited students of color to share their opinions about the academic environment.
“A lot of them are teaching the way that they were taught,” Brooks said at the meeting. “That does not make it right.”
Kifle told The Campus that the petition circulated at the meeting demands the education Middlebury already claims to provide its students, holding the college accountable for what its mission statement promises.
“What we’re attempting to do is not radical whatsoever,” Brooks said.
[pullquote speaker="Francoise Niyigena ’21" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]We all come with different misconceptions about people who are different from us.[/pullquote]
“We all come with different misconceptions about people who are different from us,” said Francoise Niyigena ’21, one of the founders of the student organization Middleground. She started the organization with a group of friends after they realized that they had all come to college expecting to have transformative conversations with people who were profoundly different from them, but that those conversations rarely happened. Niyigena said that most students who currently attend meetings are struggling with some aspect of campus culture, or face discrimination in the broader community, but that the group welcomes anyone who wants to learn.
Middleground meets every other Thursday from 6–7:30 in the Hillcrest Orchard. Kifle will facilitate its next meeting, focusing on immigrant students’ experiences, on March 14.
Kifle told The Campus that the petition serves as concrete evidence of support, but that their main motivation for holding the meeting was to raise awareness about, and increase student involvement in, the process of decolonizing Middlebury’s curriculum. The “White Allies” organizers said they had big plans moving forward, but added that those plans depend on white allies’ continued support.
(03/07/19 10:58am)
The U.S. Department of State has named Middlebury a top producer of Fulbright U.S. Students and Fulbright U.S. Scholars. Three college faculty members along with 10 students and recent alumni received Fulbright grants for the 2018-2019 academic year.
The prestigious and competitive Fulbright program, established in 1946 by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, is open to U.S. citizens and operates in more than 140 countries. The program awards its 8,000 annual grants to college students through the Fulbright U.S. Student program and college faculty through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar program.
Fulbright students pursue two types of international work, English teaching and study and research. While individual countries determine the number and placement of assistant English teachers they receive through the Fulbright program, study and research applicants are responsible for developing their own projects and finding host universities within their target country. Research funded by the Fulbright encompasses most academic disciplines.
Middlebury is consistently listed as a top producer of both students and scholars. This year, it is one of just 11 institutions nationally, including seven baccalaureate colleges, to be ranked for both Student and Scholar grants. The college is ranked seventh among Bachelor’s institutions, tied with Davidson College and Hamilton College, for its total number of Fulbright Student grants, and tied first for Scholar grants with Colgate University and Trinity College.
“One of the things that is really key here is that our students study abroad, and they actively learn other languages, and they’re interested in other cultures,” said Lisa Gates, Associate Dean for Fellowships and Research. Gates is one of the students’ primary resources throughout the extensive Fulbright application process.
Samuel Finkelman ’14 referenced many of these same factors as the reasons he pursued a Fulbright year in Russia. “My decision to study Russian language, literature, culture and history at Middlebury was truly life-changing,” he said. “This decision, and especially my experience studying abroad in Irkutsk during the spring of my junior year, convinced me that I wanted to continue engaging intellectually and professionally with the post-Soviet space.”
Finkelman went on to live in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, while teaching English at Siberian Federal University.
“I began to learn the boundlessly difficult art of teaching, and I continued pursuing my own love for Russian language and literature,” he said. “Without a doubt, the Fulbright year was key in setting me on the path that has led me to where I am today: pursuing a PhD in Russian and Soviet history at University of Pennsylvania.”
Another reason Gates cited for the strong candidacy of Middlebury students is the college’s strong culture of senior work. She said that over half of Middlebury students do some form of senior work, including the senior thesis and senior research, adding, “Having that experience is also really important...in terms of being competitive in the applicant pool and being prepared to be successful when you’re on the ground and doing the work.”
Fulbright students identified the Center for Teaching Learning and Research (CTLR) as a particularly helpful resource during the grant application process.
“The CTLR staff constantly reminded us of upcoming deadlines, offered useful feedback on personal statements,” said Georgia Grace Edwards ’18, a current Fulbright student teaching English in the Czech Republic. “They wrote wonderful letters of recommendation and challenged us to think critically and creatively about how and why a Fulbright would be beneficial to both us and our chosen communities abroad.”
The CTLR works with seniors and recent graduates during the application process. Each year, approximately a quarter of Middlebury’s Fulbright applicants are alumni.
“I applied as an alumna, so I had the option to either apply through Middlebury or ‘at large,’ but I knew of Middlebury’s strong track record of Fulbright scholars and other grantees, and also I had pleasant experiences with the Fellowships and Research team prior to graduating,” said Brennan Delattre ’16, a current Fulbright student whose research investigates the positive impact of cooperative movement in Brazil. She became interested in the topic during her time at Middlebury and pursued it in her senior thesis.
Elena Cutting ’14 described the application process as longer for research applicants than for teaching applicants, because of the statement of grant purpose required alongside the personal statement.
“Unlike any other scientific grant you will ever apply for, this research proposal is going to be reviewed by non-scientists,” she said. “So you have to be really careful to break down complex methods or ideas that may seem commonplace in the lab down into digestible bits of information.”
Cutting, who spent her Fulbright year at the National Center for Oncologic Investigation in Madrid, Spain, said she decided to become a doctor during the eight months she spent in Argentina in high school. For her, the Fulbright was an opportunity to spend a year doing something different before entering medical school.
Gates emphasized how the Fulbright Scholar program focuses on international academic exchange, allowing college faculty to conduct research at universities abroad. “It supports bringing scholars from other countries to the United States and supports scholars going to other countries,” she said.
The three faculty members abroad this year are Mez Baker-Médard, assistant professor of environmental studies, Svea Closser, former associate professor of sociology and anthropology and Carrie Anderson, assistant professor of history of art and architecture.
Anderson said she applied for a Fulbright scholar grant for a number of reasons, including the chance to live in a country that had long been a subject of her research. “The prospect of living for a year in the country that has been the primary focus of my research and teaching was particularly appealing,” she said. “I knew it would enable me to teach directly from paintings and objects housed in some of the most amazing collections of Dutch art in the world.”
Anderson has not been disappointed with the research materials she has worked with since arriving in the Netherlands. She has also found the experience rewarding beyond the research opportunities.
“I have also met so many amazing people during my time here so far,” she said. “Other fulbrighters, students, faculty, neighbors, friends. I feel so fortunate to be a part of this incredibly welcoming and generous community.”
Professor of Economics Jon Isham spent the 2016-2017 academic year as a Fulbright Scholar developing and teaching a social entrepreneurship course at Ashesi University in Ghana. He spoke highly of the Fulbright program’s generous financial support and the effort it put into integrating his family into the embassy community.
“The Fulbright is a wonderful thing, and faculty know that,” Isham said. “Franci Farnsworth in the grants office is a tremendous aid and carries decades of experience to make the process both understandable and efficient, and she plays a big role in the success that Middlebury faculty have had getting Fulbrights.
“For most of us, it’s a once-in-a-career opportunity, and I certainly feel very lucky that I got one,” Isham said.
20 of the 31 Middlebury seniors and alumni who applied for Fulbright grants for the 2019-2020 academic year were selected as semifinalists, and will hear back about moving forward in the process between March and April.
(02/21/19 10:59am)
The Residential Life System is poised to undergo major changes, which could include building renovations, a new student center, and the elimination of a commons dean.
After a 10-month review, members of the How We Will Live Together Steering Committee charged with reimagining the system presented its recommendations to the community in a forum Tuesday evening.
The Student Government Association (SGA), Community Council and the steering committee hosted the forum in Wilson Hall. After the presentation of the draft’s seven key recommendations, the floor was open to discussion, and students expressed their concerns about issues including ADA compliance and changes to staff positions.
The draft is the culmination of an extensive review of the college’s Residential Life system, which included surveys of staff and student feedback as well as internal and external reviews. Those reviews showed discontent with the second-year aspects of the commons system, dissatisfaction with social spaces on campus and feelings of isolation among minority students, low-income students and Febs.
“What we now have is one of the most expensive residential systems among all of our peer institutions, with some of the poorest outcomes, particularly around student satisfaction,” said Robert Moeller, assistant professor of Psychology and co-chair of the steering committee, in an email to The Campus. “It is time to make some changes.”
[pullquote speaker="Robert Moeller" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]What we now have is one of the most expensive residential systems among all of our peer institutions, with some of the poorest outcomes, particularly around student satisfaction.[/pullquote]
The new draft recommendations prioritize improving housing and infrastructure. Its main suggestions include renovating Battell Hall, reclaiming lounge areas currently being used as student rooms or office spaces, eliminating restrictions on sophomore residency, increasing support for students staying on campus during breaks, improving integration of Febs into the rest of the campus community and constructing or developing a new student center.
“We need a student center,” said Derek Doucet, associate dean of students for student activities & orientation and one of the heads of the steering committee. Although McCullough Student Center is an important space, he said, it is not a true student center, since the building currently houses staff offices, a faculty and staff lounge, and the Mail Center. Crossroads Café and the Grille have limited open hours and remain locked when closed.
Another critical element of the proposal is improvements to new student experiences. This pertains to all aspects of new student orientation, including First@Midd, International Student & Scholar Services (ISSS), orientation trips and better placement of Febs. The goal of the proposal is to create an improved residential education program with clearly communicated, measurable goals and outcomes.
The proposal also suggests changes to the placement and role of commons deans. The five current deans would be reduced to four and assigned to first-year seminars instead of commons, and would work in designated offices in a more central location. They would be partnered with a newly designated case manager, whose tasks would include consolidating the presently disjointed student care practices and transforming administrative support for students in crisis from a reactive process to a proactive one.
Deans’ work would be refocused on student support, with some of their additional roles delegated to other staff members. The draft recommendations also include the repurposing of commons houses, all with the goal of deepening the connection between students and the faculty and staff associated with their commons.
“How are we keeping the coziness of ResLife?” asked John Cambefort ’21, a Wonnacott First Year Counselor (FYC), during the forum.
Doucet responded that closeness and immediate accessibility remain important considerations in the steering committee’s decision making process. He also acknowledged that many of his colleagues and students have a strong investment in the present system and that for those students the process can be an emotional one.
After the forum concluded, Ross FYC Steph Miller ’20 told The Campus she was concerned that newly consolidated Deans’ offices would be “less cozy, less homey, less accessible, less social.”
[pullquote speaker="Derek Doucet" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]We’re virtually certain to make mistakes along the way, so careful and ongoing assessment, an area where we’ve frankly been weak in the past, will be essential.[/pullquote]
The Friday before the forum, Doucet spoke to the intercommons Residential Life team about the proposed changes. Still, several members of Residential Life who attended Tuesday’s forum mentioned feeling excluded from the development of the recommendations.
During the public comment period of the forum, Doucet asked that everyone look through the full draft, available now at go/livetogether, and share their questions and concerns online. After incorporating feedback and making final edits, the committee will submit a final report to Baishakhi Taylor, dean of students and vice president of student affairs, and the Senior Leadership Group, who will decide which aspects of the plan, if any, will be incorporated into the residential system.
“A critical thing to acknowledge is that depending on which recommendations are ultimately adopted, implementation may be an extended and iterative process,” Doucet said in an email to The Campus. “We’re virtually certain to make mistakes along the way, so careful and ongoing assessment, an area where we’ve frankly been weak in the past, will be essential.”
*Editor’s Note: News Editor Bochu Ding is a member of the How Will We Live Together steering committee. Ding played no role in the reporting. Any questions may be directed to campus@middlebury.edu.
(02/14/19 10:53am)
The sixth annual student-organized global affairs conference, “Beyond #MeToo: Global Responses to Sexual Violence in an Age of Reckoning,” was held between Jan. 22 and Jan. 24. The conference, organized by Grace Vedock ’20 and Taite Shomo ’20.5, began with an Atwater dinner, followed by a series of lectures and screenings over the next two days.
“Beyond #MeToo” emphasized the varied global perception of sexual violence, looking at the #MeToo movement through an international lens in an effort to spark deeper discussion among Middlebury students, particularly those who do not ordinarily take an active stance on such issues. The organizers cited a talk last spring on the global implications of #MeToo by Sujata Moorti, Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, as their inspiration for the conference.
Vedock and Shomo both saw the conference as a success, describing engaged students and great faculty at every event. The only letdown, Shomo said, was attendance. “I think we both wish that more people had shown up to the events,” she said.
Turnout ranged from an estimated 50-60 people at the Atwater dinner to significantly fewer at most of the screenings and lectures.
“I think a lot of people are really reluctant to engage in these conversations,” Vedock said. “It’s something that, as a society, it’s gained a lot of traction, media attention, things like that, but when it comes to actually showing up and having the hard conversations and engaging, it’s not something that everyone can do — for various reasons, we understand that, of course — but it’s hard to get people engaged. It’s really, really hard.”
“If I could title this article,” Vedock said later, “it would be, ‘Show Up.’”
The first screening, shown in Axinn immediately after the Atwater dinner, was Roll Red Roll, a documentary detailing the complicated aftermath of the assault of a teenage girl by high school football players. The film exposed the extent to which rape culture is ingrained in the United States through the story of one small Ohio town.
The following night, UN Sex Abuse Scandal, which features personal accounts by survivors of sexual assault at the hands of United Nation Peacekeepers, was also shown in Axinn. The Frontline documentary focused on conflict zones in Central Africa as survivors, witnesses and officials described an issue that is still very much unresolved.
Associate Professor of Political Science Sarah Stroup led a discussion immediately after the screening, during which most attendees expressed shock about their own lack of awareness about such a major international issue and questioned why more was not being done.
“When I asked, ‘What else you would want to know to understand this story,’ many of the students reported interest in more insight into how the UN and its peacekeeping missions work,” Stroup said. “Both Professor Amy Yuen and I regularly discuss those topics in our upper level political science classes.”
Other invited lecturers broadened the scope of the conference. Janet Johnson, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, gave a talk titled “#IamNotAfraidtoSay but not #MeToo: Russian Women’s Ambivalence in Claiming Sexual Autonomy.” Another lecture by Tina Escaja, Director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont, was titled “#Cuéntalo: Black Moon/Luna morada and the #MeToo movement en español,” and focused on the interpretation and effects of the #MeToo movement in particular regions. Vedock described Escaja’s talk, which focused on art and poetry as a form of resistance, and the speaker’s poetry reading, as “breathtaking.”
The final speaker was Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associate Dean for International Programs at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who gave a talk called “More Than a Public Reckoning: The Need for Laws.” De Alwis is recognized worldwide for her expertise on women’s rights. She started the Global Women’s Leadership Project in 2017 to support UNESCO and UN women’s work on peace and justice and women’s human rights.
The conference concluded with a panel moderated by Karin Hanta, director of Chellis House Feminist Resource Center, called “The Age of Reckoning at Middlebury College,” which explored next steps regarding sexual violence at Middlebury.
“At the final discussion about the future of Middlebury, one thing that we talked about a lot with the people who were there was wanting to implement more preventative strategies, like teaching about consent, and teaching about healthy relationships, rather than reactive things, like Green Dot, or like the sexual assault posters in the bathrooms,” Shomo said.
“In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to put on this event,” Vedock said, stressing the need to approach sexual assault as a cultural issue.
“We had a great discussion at the end that left it on — maybe not a positive note — but a hopeful one,” she said.