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(02/13/13 10:42pm)
On Jan. 25, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz, Dean of the College Shirley Collado and Vice President of Finance Patrick Norton agreed to resume funding several programs — including midnight breakfast and 24/7 open hours at the library during finals week — which the Student Government Association (SGA) had previously covered from 2008 to 2012. The administration also agreed to cover more significant portions of the club sports and commons’ budgets.
The decision came on the verge of a proposed spike in the student activity fee — a decision that likely would have been highly unpopular with students — which would have been the result of an overburdened SGA budget.
Earlier this fall, Peter Mattson ’14, chair of the SGA Finance Committee and SGA President Charlie Arnowitz ’13, assembled the Student Activity Fee Committee to assess the current budgetary revenues and expenditures with the aim of maintaining core SGA functions without raising the fee significantly.
The analysis found that for the current academic school year, total SGA revenues amount to $949,000. Expenditures to date however are approximately $1,040,054 and anticipated spending by the end of the year, $1,110,100.
With this money, the SGA funds over 200 campus organizations as well as a portion of the funding for each of the five commons budgets and a significant portion of the funding for the College’s 15 club sports.
The review also established that in recent years the SGA has also funded big-ticket items such as midnight breakfast and the newly reinstated MiddView orientation trips, as well as significant one-time expenses, including the YouPower Bike Room and new boats for the crew team.
“We started to realize that these spending patterns were unsustainable,” said Arnowitz.
“If nothing had changed, we would have had to raise the Student Activities Fee by about $65 (from the current $380) in order to balance the budget,” he added. “We didn’t want to do that, but we also didn’t want programming to suffer.”
Arnowitz explained that during the recession, the College looked to the SGA to pay for things like midnight breakfast and MiddView as a result of increased pressure on the College’s budget.
According to the Arnowitz, the SGA was able to pick up these additional costs, resulting from the fact that the primary source of the SGA budget is the student activities fee — a stable revenue stream.
The SGA budget remains relatively constant over time. For the 2012/2013 academic year student activities fee provided the SGA with nearly $950,000, and the College made up the minor difference between the fee revenues and SGA expenditures.
The review also showed that past SGA governments had overspent with respect to student organizations, allowing budgets to expand beyond the SGA’s capacity to pay.
Recognizing this budgetary strain, the SGA leadership, including Arnowitz, Mattson and SGA Chief of Staff Anna Esten ’13 began talks with the Collado, Norton, Dean of Students Katy Smith-Abbott and Liebowitz to come up with a solution.
According to Arnowitz, the discussions with the administration were fruitful, and the SGA was pleased that the College decided to both reabsorb old programs — like midnight breakfast and library open hours — and also take on some of the heavier costs of the commons and club sports budgets — all to the tune of nearly $200,000.
“We were gratified by the extent to which administrators listened to what we had to say,” he said.
“While they didn’t agree to absorb every expense or agree on every point, that was never the expectation. Instead, we had good and frank conversations. And on some issues — for examples, the commons — they ended up adopting exactly the compromises we proposed, to the dollar.”
One of the last items to be discussed by the committee is the financing the College’s yearbook, which has previously been given to all seniors free of charge, with an annual cost of approximately $53,000. The SGA stated that they will continue to work with the administration, Kaleidescope — the company that produces the yearbooks — and with other stakeholders to devise a sustainable funding model.
(01/17/13 2:10am)
Laurie Essig, associate professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies, was recently informed by Forbes.com that her blog position would be “sunsetted” as a result of a post she wrote regarding the Newtown, Conn. shootings on Dec. 17.
In her last post, Essig confronted issues of masculinity and violence in the context of mass shootings. Shortly after being published, the post was removed from Forbes.com and Essig’s position as a blogger — one that she had held since Sept. 2012 — was annulled.
Following its removal from the Forbes.com site, Essig’s post, entitled “Speaking the Unspeakable in Newtown,” was reposted online by Seven Days.
“There have been 19 mass shootings in the past five years and every single one of these mass shootings has been committed by a man,” she stated. “Far more women (and Blacks, Democrats and residents of the Northeast) support gun control than men,” continued Essig.
In her post Essig also suggests that President Barack Obama implied that parents and were more able than those without children to comprehend the tragedy, referring to his remarks following the shooting. She describes cringing, listening to Obama’s remarks in which he stated: “I react not as a president, but as anybody else would as a parent. And that was especially true today. I know there’s not a parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.”
In Essig’s critique of this narrative, she suggests that the President Obama followed the line of other ideological claims that imply that, “people who are parents and who are married are somehow better than and more deserving of rights than those who are not.”
“But surely people who are not parents are just as grief stricken by the massacre at the Sandy Hook school,” she argued.
Forbes.com did not reply to a request for a comment by the Campus in response to Essig’s dismissal.
“In her classes, Professor Essig encourages us to question who benefits when certain opinions are silenced,” said Cailey Cron ’13.5, a student in Essig’s Sociology of Gender course this fall.
In email comments, Essig described a race-based double-standard she has identified in media coverage of mass shootings. “When a white man commits an act of terrorism such as the one in Newtown, it is generally described in the mainstream media as a psychological, and therefore individual, issue,” she said.
“It is never linked to ‘culture’ or ‘religion’ or potential social pathologies the way it is with non-white shooters.”
According to Essig, the media omits “potentially pathological parts of dominant American culture” as “part of a larger social refusal to make privilege and power visible.”
Cron echoed the comments of her professor with respect to the constraints facing writers.
“I think that it’s challenging for writers who work in the mainstream media. Those at the top know precisely what they want to hear, and I that’s something different from what Professor Essig had to say.”
Reflecting on her own career as a blogger at True/Slant, Psychology Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Forbes.com, Essig said that the recent decision by Forbes, is “hardly unusual,” explaining that such a business is “always full of changes.”
Essig called her position at Forbes.com “an interesting experiment,” and speculated that both Forbes.com and she knew “we were going to have a very short run.” Reflecting on her role as an academic cultural critic, Essig noted her difficulty in writing the sort of stories she wanted and getting paid for them.
Essig said she hopes the next blog will be a more “obvious fit.”
(12/05/12 11:22pm)
Last Wednesday, Anne Knowles, professor of geography, received the Award for American Ingenuity from the Smithsonian. Currently the chair of the geography department at the College, Knowles teaches courses in historical geography, cultural geography and the history of cartography.
Knowles and eight others received the Ingenuity Awards for innovations in the fields of climate science, social change and music, among others. This is the inaugural year of the award.
“I had never felt truly humbled until I met the other awardees that evening,” said Knowles, of receiving the award for her work in historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
“GIS is a technology that allows you to map anything with location,” explains Knowles in the video clip on the Smithsonian website.
Knowles has used GIS to visualize the Battle of Gettysburg, the Holocaust and the development of the iron industry in the United States. GIS software allows a historian to affix information from the past — troop movements, census data, environmental data, etc. — to specific locations on a map. This process allows historical geographers to “reveal patterns and relationships that would otherwise be invisible,” according to Knowles.
Despite her work in a wide range of topics, the Smithsonian chose to focus on Knowles’ visualization of the Battle of Gettysburg.
“I imagine that is what’s most relevant to an American audience,” said Knowles.
Knowles’ work with the Battle of Gettysburg revealed that General Robert E. Lee could see far more of the battle than historians had previously thought he had witnessed. By combining sketches of the battle, information about troop placement and topographic data, Knowles shed new light on General Lee’s decision to order Picket’s Charge.
In her remarks at the ceremony, Knowles explained that sometimes her work had felt like swimming upstream, as many colleges and universities have closed their geography programs in recent years.
However, Knowles has continued to make notable headway in the field of historical geography. In recent years, she has edited two books on the use of GIS for studying history, and has an upcoming book on the development of the American iron industry.
Indeed, pursuing her passion for a truly grounded and spatial sense of history was not always easy. Knowles searched for years for a faculty position before Bob Churchill, former chair of the Geography department, offered her a position at the College.
Since then, she has collaborated with undergraduates to map the Holocaust (she is teaching a seminar in the spring, “Geographies of the Holocaust”) as well as a host of independent projects.
“The nature of the work would have been very different, had I not been hired at Middlebury. The energy of the undergraduates is astounding,” she said.
Yet this enthusiasm seems to work in both directions, as students in Knowles’ classes regularly commented on the creativity that their professor elicits.
“Knowles encourages a sort of non-linear thinking,” said Molly Rose-Williams ’13.5, a student who first took Knowles’s “Place and Society” course in her first year at Middlebury, and now studies with the geography professor in her “History of Cartography” course. “She’s always looking for connections, and her passion is infectious,” Rose-Williams said.
Through her classes Knowles has provided students with a new to way to look at history, through the process of visualization. Such a creative approach has been recognized by the Smithsonian through the presentation of an award that recognizes historical geography as a relevant and innovative way to study the past.