4 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(04/15/15 6:10pm)
On Monday, March 4, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz was interviewed by former correspondent, anchor, and Washington bureau chief for CNN Frank Sesno ’77. Preparing for his departure in June, Liebowitz reflected on his thirty-one years at the College. The interview was streamed over a live webcast on the College’s website, and a recording can be viewed on the News Room page.
During the hour-long interview, Liebowitz was asked summative questions about the value of a liberal arts education, the changes he has noticed with Middlebury and its student body and faculty, and the effect of technology use in the classroom.
Speaking about his interview, Liebowitz said, “With regard to the more broad questions, I find it difficult to give such short answers. You know you always want more time to sort of explicate on a difficult topic, and he did ask about a lot of good issues. I think trying to hone in on what I wanted to say in that short period of time was challenging. I think Frank happened to put the questions in a good order, and many of them came from a student perspective, which I thought was really smart.”
Sesno was especially interested in Middlebury’s student body, and asked Liebowitz to talk about the changes he has observed over his time at the College.
“I thought Frank really honed in on some of the issues, like asking about how the students have changed, and not specifically what they’re majoring in, but rather about them as people,” Liebowitz said. “I think students now are a lot more idealistic in a good way, and they’re also much more pragmatic, much more able to sit down, I find, and listen and have their minds changed and affected. They hear, they listen, and they digest. I find that to be refreshing, and a good environment for learning.”
He continued, “I think [this change] stems from the incredible access to information … back in the 70s, if you didn’t read the newspaper, you didn’t have any idea what was going on. Today, students are getting bombarded with information. The big challenge I see is having to sift through it all and make meaning from it, but if students are as smart as they are here, and they are dedicated to a particular issue, the amount of information makes them that much more aware of the problems that are facing us.”
As a result of the changes in students over the past few decades, Liebowitz explains that the College must adapt to accommodate them properly. For example, students now enter the College having used a computer for much of their primary education, and expect to be able to do so here.
On the College faculty, Liebowitz said, “I think we’re slow to react to, or we resent these computers in the classroom. But the more I think about it and the more I engage with students, the more I see this mismatch of pedagogy and learning styles.”
He concluded, “I watch our kids who are in [the] third, fifth, and sixth grades, and what they’re doing and how much of it is independent with computer assistance. It’s so different. The first reaction from someone like me, growing up with the old pedagogy is to feel a little bit insulted. But you know what? I changed my mind. I think students learn so differently that it would be counterproductive to expect them to sit in a classroom they way we did.”
(02/18/15 9:27pm)
Over the past several weeks, residents of Ross dormitories have been encountering vandalism to their building in multiple locations. In an email sent to all of Ross Commons in January, CRA Mila King-Musza highlighted some of the damages.
The email read, “This past weekend, walls were damaged in Hadley and Kelly, property was stolen in Hadley, and one window pane on the door to the Ross Commons office was shattered.”
King-Musza also said that she has seen broken vending machines, damage to community spaces and a general mess created in hallways
Ross resident Jacob Dana ’17 added more to the list. “I’ve seen broken lights, dents in walls, and posters being torn down in hallways,” he said.
When damage is done to a residence hall such as Ross, the first step in fixing the problem is identifying who exactly is responsible, in order to determine who has to pay for the cost of repairs. In addition to paying for the damage, the person responsible is usually also charged an extra fine for vandalizing school property.
However, it is not always possible to identify the responsible party in cases of vandalism, especially when buildings are open to non-residents.
According to King-Musza, many of the damages done in Ross are likely a result of non-residents who are in the building for a number of different reasons.
Because of Ross’s size and all of its components, including the dining hall, it is more likely to receive traffic from non-residents than any of the other residence halls. King-Musza believes that this may account for the frequency of vandalism in Ross over other buildings on campus.
“I think Ross is in a very unique position because all our residential spaces are connected. Especially during this cold weather, people take advantage of this: they’ll use whatever entrance is closest and walk through other buildings to get to where they’re going,” said King-Musza.
She continued, “When you don’t have any connection to a space, it can be easier to forget that your actions have consequences and there are people on the receiving end of your actions.”
Much of the vandalism has occurred on weekend nights. However, what may seem harmless on a Saturday night has real effects on the residents. “I get that kids get drunk and want to screw around but it’s not fun to deal with in the morning,” Dana said.
King-Musza wrote in her email that these acts of vandalism make those who live in Ross halls feel violated.
“Late on a Saturday night, taking a silly decoration from an open suite may seem like a harmless joke or a funny story to round out your night … Someone’s living space now feels a little less safe; someone now feels less comfortable in their home,” she wrote in the email.
King-Musza hopes that the vandalism will come to an end, but understands that the problem is bigger than just Ross.
“This is definitely a difficult situation and the conversation about what to do is on-going and constantly evolving,” she said.
At the end of her email she asked residents to please be respectful of their surroundings. The email read, “Without your help, this vandalism may not stop. Let’s work together to make our home a better place to live.”
Dorm damage has been an ongoing concern among admistrators and residential life coordinators. It was what drove the closure of Prescott House, colloquially referred to as ADP, and since has been a part of dialogue on campus.
Community Council has discussed possible solutions for limiting dorm damage and at one time was considering the implemention of camera systems that would hold students more accountable for their actions in dorms and in less public areas.
Former Dean of the College Shirley Collado often discussed her concern for this topic.
“Dorm damage, tree damages and thefts have gone on. There is now a question about whether or not cameras in any major location on campus would be something we should think about,” Collado said in a Community Council meeting last year.
(11/13/14 4:56am)
The Student Government Association (SGA) announced the formation of the SGA Reform Working Group, which, according to an email sent out by SGA President Taylor Custer ’15, is designed to “examine the efficacy of student governance on campus.” It was created in part to examine the information gap between the administration and students, which has undergone recent criticism with regard to changes in the tailgating policy and other social life issues on campus.
Custer describes this issue as a lack of transparency between the administration and student body.
“On some things, they don’t communicate; and then on others, there’s this gap between what the administrators think the student body knows and what we’re actually focused on and talking about,” Custer said.
Custer added that he was frustrated to first hear about the tailgating policy through a school-wide email.
“For a lot of the administration it was a management issue. So for those directly involved in it, they never thought about it as something that students would need a say in because it was a safety issue from their perspective. Whereas if you had asked any student beforehand they probably would have said this will be a big deal for students,” he said.
Custer hopes that going forward, the group will create a forum through which students can get involved with the decision-making process earlier.
The group will examine the relationship between the administration and students. It will also evaluate the student-SGA relationship and will focus on increasing awareness of the role of the SGA.
Custer said, “It is by no means just a reaction to what happened with the tailgating issue.” Custer also sees the lack of interest in last year’s SGA elections as an indication of a larger issue.
“The fact that people didn’t seem to want to run and the lack of general interest in it is, to me, a huge problem. If students aren’t interested in engaging with the SGA it makes it that much more difficult for the SGA to argue for policy or try and speak for the student body,” he said.
The group has been split into two groups with different functions.
“One [will] work on the SGA side of things and the other [will] work with the administrative,” Custer said. “For the SGA side, it is figuring out how we’re going to find out what can be better in terms of student engagement. What issues do students currently have with the SGA? Do they not know who is in it? Do they not think it has the power to do anything? What is the reason for the lack of engagement?”
This side of the group will identify problems, while the administrative side will look further into how the administration is set up.
“The idea would be that we’ll learn a lot about how the administration works and which people govern what,” Custer said.
To do this, the SGA has been looking into the administration part of the website and talking to faculty members to understand its structure, which, to Custer, has proven to be a confusing and complicated task.
“One really helpful resource is going to be our staff advisor Doug Adams [Associate Dean of Students for Residential and Student Life]. He’s been here for 15 years and is sort of our institutional memory,” said Chief of Staff Danny Zhang ’15. “He knows what past SGAs have done, and obviously how the administration works.”
Going forward, the group will be able to submit recommendations about changes in policy to President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz, who has told Custer he is very open to the idea of students getting more say in administrative processes. These recommendations will come in the form of a list, which will have to be voted on by the SGA Senate and Community Council. “It can be slow and the ultimate ability to actually make the change is in the administrators’ hands rather than students’. I think that’s just a reality of being students in a college. To a certain extent, we have to be okay with making an argument, getting the evidence and saying, ‘This is why the change should be made’. At the very least, then the administration has to give us a justification for why they’re not going to accept the recommendations,” Custer said.
Custer is hopeful that the group’s recommendations will actually be approved. He added that administrators have been very genuine about trying to be more transparent going forward.
“I do think they’ll take a lot of the recommendations, whatever they are, from the working group seriously and enact some of them,” he said.
(11/05/14 6:09pm)
Last weekend, students in Forest Hall got the first taste of Middlebury’s newest alternative dining option: pizza from the recently installed cob oven in the Organic Garden. The idea for the sustainable wood-fired oven came from students Caitlin Haedrich ’16.5 and Larson Lovdal ’16.5 last fall, following a visit to Haedrich’s hometown, which has a large public oven.
“We used the oven there and decided it seemed like something the Middlebury community really needed,” Haedrich said.
Plans for the project began after fall break, and the two submitted a proposal to the Space Committee in the spring. However, the process of getting approval from the College was far more difficult than they had imagined. Haedrich talked about several of the safety hoops they had to jump through in the planning process.
“It seemed like a weekend project, but as we started to get into it, it ended up being a really big deal,” she said. “This is a really innocent project but the amount of concern the college has about liability and health and safety is huge, which makes sense.”
The two worked alongside Jen Kazmierczak, the Environmental Health and Safety Coordinator, to flesh out all of the details.
The project was funded in part by Ross and Cook commons in an effort to promote cross-commons unity by bringing people together over good local foods. Money from the commons was used to build the oven itself, which is made primarily out of materials the students found on campus.
“My favorite part of the oven is that everything in it comes from within a very small radius,” Haedrich said. Unusable stone from the construction of several buildings were used for different parts of the oven.
“We have [stone from] Bicentennial Hall as the hearth, the library is the cornerstone, construction at Nelson is the base, and the cobble on the side is old rock from the Geology department,” Haedrich explained. The clay used for the dome is recycled from unusable leftovers found in the sinks of the ceramics club’s studio. The hay used came directly from the Organic Garden.
The Organic Garden’s involvement with the project began when Haedrich and Lovdal contacted Organic Garden Consultant Jay Leshinsky last winter when trying to figure out where to place the oven on campus.
“We agreed that it would be a good site and we would be able to provide vegetables for cooking at the oven”, Leshinsky said.
As it turned out, contacting Leshinsky helped the project out financially as well.
“At the same time a friend of mine approached me to provide a gift that would fund the majority of the project. She thought that a pizza oven at the Organic Farm would provide an excellent environment for discussions about food and farming in a setting where the food was being grown,” Leshinsky explained. This anonymous donation was used to build the structure that protects the oven and its users from wind and rain.
Construction took place in just two weeks over the summer. “They were really long days,” Haedrich said. “We had help from a couple of students, but for the most part it was Larson and I on the job site from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.”
While the oven is now up and running, there are still a few boxes that need to be checked before it is available for student use. Haedrich and Lovdal hope that, by the spring semester, any student who completes the safety steps — which include watching a brief instructional video on how to operate the oven — will be allowed access to the oven. Individuals who wish to use the oven will bring their own ingredients, but the two hope that it will be used for larger school functions as well.
“It’s a site where they can have alumni functions or sports team events,” Haedrich said. “It’s a long-term contribution to the college and I hope that it gets well used and loved.”
