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(12/10/15 4:14am)
“Have you been feeling depressed or down for most of the day nearly every day? Are you experiencing a loss of pleasure in activities you usually enjoy?” After a full summer of conducting phone interviews in a neuroscience lab that studies depression, these questions are burned into my memory.
And so are the answers to these questions that I received. This experience led to my firmly held belief that many people are experiencing extreme emotional pain and so much of this pain is being hidden.
There is a misconception about mental health on this campus. There have been pervasive conversations about stress — particularly with respect to academic performance — and wellness of the student body. However, much of this conversation misses the mark.
Mental health is about the subjective experience of the individual. There are a myriad of mental health problems — anxiety disorders, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, to name a few — with a myriad of potential causes including loss, trauma, possibly genetics and stress.
Notice that stress is just one of the potential causes. Academic stress has come to dominate our community’s conversation about mental health, and it is only a piece of the puzzle.
Generalizations and comparisons disregard this very important aspect of the concept of mental health. Therefore, we need to shift the conversation not to what is causing the general stress of the campus but rather what is causing the stress of the individual. Each person has a unique background and personality disposition. Although it is important to discuss the culture in which we students exist on this campus, there is not enough discussion about the fact that mental health is individualized. The assumption of homogeneity is an inaccurate assumption.
The other problem that I have commonly seen in my conversations with peers on this campus is the problem of comparisons, a problem that is exactly counter to the concept of mental health. It could be that one individual with a significant trauma history develops no PTSD, but an individual with a genetic predisposition and no precipitating event develops significant major depressive disorder. Many people feel guilty about seeking help when they feel they have not had a significant event to cause their mental health problems. We should not be making generalizations or comparisons. Rather, we should be focusing on giving individuals the tools to tackle their highly individualized mental health problems.
Part of this will entail reducing stigma on campus. Whenever I sit in the waiting room in Parton in the counseling office, I always notice the immediate air of embarrassment when another student walks in. People are uncomfortable and ashamed to openly acknowledge their struggles with mental health.
This is partly why I believe academic stress has become a central part of the conversation on campus. Academic stress is something that almost everyone experiences and that it is socially acceptable to discuss. However, people are exceedingly uncomfortable when it comes to talking about social anxieties or family problems or other forms of stress. Therefore, academic stress is receiving a disproportionate amount of attention. I also think that this emphasis on the academic stress of students is creating a divide between students and faculty members within the community. In reality, faculty members experience their own stressors and mental health problems that should be included in the dialogue.
We need to take a step back and look at how we are approaching mental health on this campus. Rather than jumping at the chance to make generalizations about academic stress causing mental health problems, we need to have more conversations about the experience of individuals. The Grid is a step in the right direction with a more holistic approach to student wellness, but there is still more work to be done. The Grid is a solutions-based approach to a problem with root causes that have yet to be fully determined. Groups such as the Student Wellness group and Resilience should be broadcasted, and students should be encouraged to engage in an open dialogue. This is a key part of the problem – there is so much going unsaid about things people go through on this campus, things that reach far beyond just academic stress. People are embarrassed and scared to share their experience, and this is the aspect of our culture that we need to address. We need to put more emphasis on the concept that mental health is about the experience of the individual.
(12/10/15 4:14am)
This fall, I submitted an application to the Small Concerts Initiative and was given a grant to bring hip-hop artist, Chris Felner, aka “Felly,” to Middlebury. His show was scheduled for last Friday, and ultimately he performed for over 550 students. However, just prior to his arrival in Vermont, Chris was accused in a Middlebury Campus op-ed of being a cultural appropriator because of his skin color, the way he talked and the sound of his music.
Elizabeth Dunn, the author of the op-ed, is certainly entitled to her opinion and, while I don’t agree with all of her views, I fully respect her right to share them with our community and beyond.
But after spending the weekend with Chris, I felt compelled to respond to her piece, which I believe not only unfairly tarnished our guest, but also misses the point of artistic endeavors and their role in our community.
When I picked him up from the airport on Thursday after his eight-hour cross country trip, Chris had already gotten wind of the op-ed. I expected him to be upset that he was facing a growing protest at the school where he was about to perform. I was wrong. Instead, Chris, who turned out to be a down-to-earth, positive, optimistic kid, was interested in Elizabeth’s perspective and wanted to speak with her. He told me he had “nothing but love for her for expressing her opinion and being so convinced of something. But,” he noted, “anyone convinced of something should be open to hearing another side.” And while we immediately reached out to Elizabeth after Chris’ arrival on campus, we unfortunately did not hear back from her in time to arrange a meeting. That was certainly an opportunity lost.
For those of you who don’t know his music, Felly uses African and Jamaican rhythms and roots from African and Jamaican culture in his songwriting. Yes, it’s true that Felly is not African-American and he is not Jamaican. Yes, it’s true that he comes from a privileged background and might not have the same experiences as many African American or Jamaican musicians. But if we cherish diversity, don’t we want cultures to influence each other? Don’t people from different backgrounds deserve equal opportunities to express their inner creativity and artistic inspiration? Should Eric Clapton be prohibited from singing the Delta Blues because he has a British accent? Transcendent musicians crossing cultural divides is musical appreciation, not cultural appropriation.
Yet the editorial expressed deep skepticism over Felly’s “supposed” Rastafarian connection. It’s interesting to note that Bob Marley, one of the musicians most associated with “Rastafarianism”, was half white and half black. The op-ed wrote, “Rastafarianism is black. It is exclusive…” Does that mean there was an element of cultural appropriation in Marley’s music?
Unquestionably, Chris is not “culturally” Rastafarian. He has, however, spent lots of time in Jamaica, and has cultivated multiple friends on the island. He’s led four separate service trips in poor areas, and visited other times solely to hang out with his local Jamaican friends. Chris explained to me that he loves the way the Rastafarians “preached love and unity,” and that it’s his goal to infuse his music with those same qualities. Notably though, Chris does not limit his musical exploration solely to Jamaican music. Chris mines many other cultures to expand his musical outlook, including those from Brazilian, African and European cultures.
Elizabeth also wrote, “Felly doesn’t seem especially interested in interacting with actual black people… likely it’s because black people aren’t cool.” I’m not at all clear on how based on the viewing of one music video she reached this stark conclusion, but the assertion is completely at odds with the person I got to know this weekend. In the face of unexpected controversy, Chris showed himself to be open, outgoing, sincere and accepting. The whole weekend Chris interacted with a diverse group of students here and started conversations with everyone trying to understand their perspectives. Yet he’s being labeled a racist. As an aside, Elizabeth might be interested to know that two of the musicians who appear on Felly’s most recent album were African-American, including one who grew up in Jamaica and just happens to be one of his closest friends.
One of the first sentences of the op-ed wrote, “Felly, those who were responsible for bringing him here and those planning to attend his concert are unaware of the systematic racism black people face, and how even seemingly innocuous or insignificant actions, like going to a concert, reinforce discrimination.” As the person responsible for bringing Felly to campus, I take issue. I’ve never met Elizabeth, so I don’t know from whom she’s getting her information about my awareness, or lack thereof, of the systematic racism black people face. But I do know that I enjoy music and when I proposed to bring Felly here, it was specifically because I relished the idea of bringing a musician to Middlebury who could bring together a wide array of people for a shared experience. A human experience.
The editorial also noted that “considering Middlebury College’s own history with appropriation, it’s no surprise that Felly was chosen as our visiting artist”. Our Spring concert last year was T-Pain. Middlebury College was also the first college in America to graduate an African-American student.
Of course, I believe cultural appropriation is an issue, and needs to be addressed. This, concert, and Felly, did not deserve to be mired in controversy. Like Dwayne Scott (D. Scott, opener for Felly) said in front of the enthusiastic audience, “I want to address a recent article that has summoned a lot of mixed feelings and caused my own background singers to cancel performing with me. We, as artists, are just trying to share and express our art with y’all. Don’t make things controversial that don’t need to be controversial. I don’t have an issue with Felly. We’re backstage kicking it. So when he comes out on stage, support his art and make the most noise possible. Show love y’all.”
After a terrific weekend and performance, Chris wanted me to deliver a message to Elizabeth: “I have this same love for you regardless of the negative words you have thrown at me. I’m sorry you feel this way, but I hope you can see my side. I’ll keep fighting for unity while you try to do the same through your methods. I take pride in the fact that I’ve been able to bring in hundreds of people (Black, White, Asian, etc.) to my shows to come together for the simple love of music.”
I admire Chris as a young artist following his dream, and I admire Elizabeth for her willingness to express her views in an open forum. Discourse is healthy, and in a college environment, particularly necessary. But we must all accept that as a community, we will never be able to come to a complete agreement on any issue, and instead resolve to respect each other as individuals. It’s my fervent hope that artists of all stripes can and will continue to draw on cultural traditions not their own, as they broaden their own horizons, as well as ours. Let’s knock down the walls and come together, not build them and grow farther apart.
(12/10/15 12:46am)
If mystery and suspense are your genres of choice, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson is a must-read. A tense, unpredictable novel with frightening characters and a crafty plot, this book has become an international sensation. Originally published in Sweden under the title Män som hatar kvinnor, meaning Men Who Hate Women, the book has been translated and published worldwide, followed by its two sequels, film adaptations in both Swedish and English and a graphic novel adaptation, published by DC Comics. Although critics’ reviews have been somewhat mixed, the novel’s sheer popularity speaks to its power to capture an audience.
The story opens with Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist hired by retired CEO Henrik Vanger to look into the cold case of his grandniece Harriet’s disappearance. Henrik believes Harriet was murdered by a family member. After uncovering new evidence which puts him on the trail of the killer, Blomkvist requests assistance with his research and is joined by Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous girl with the dragon tattoo. She is an exceptional computer hacker, extremely anti-social and, when need arises, unapologetically violent. Since she was declared legally incompetent as a child, she has a legal guardian – placing her in a position of dependency which she resents.
What ensues is a familiar mystery story full of unexpected twists and turns. Larsson successfully takes tropes that appear in dozens of novels – such as the “locked room” mystery set-up – and keeps them exciting, making the ending unpredictable. He achieves the perfect balance of the mystery novel by giving you just enough information that you feel like you should be able to figure it out, while obscuring enough to make sure you’re still surprised when the twist happens. As with any good mystery, Blomkvist and Salander discover there are far more skeletons in the closet than just Harriet’s ¬ both proverbial and literal ones. As they delve deeper into the history and secrets of the Vanger family, they discover murders spanning decades as well as danger in the present.
As good as the suspense and mystery is, stay away from this book if you do not do well with violence in media. Larsson does not shy away from revealing the ugliest side of human nature. His characters are intelligent and enjoyably complex, but many of them are also incredibly vicious and have no qualms about causing physical harm. The story takes many dark and unpleasant turns and leaves behind bloodied corpses in the process - other characters move forward with a horrifying lack of remorse. Larsson’s graphic descriptions of kidnapping, murder, rape and torture sometimes make Game of Thrones look positively tame. It creates a definite atmosphere for the book, making the characters gritty and self-sufficient, while dragging the ugliest realities into the spotlight. Just don’t read it if you aren’t prepared to hear a story where savagery and retribution are everywhere.
Despite all the violence, the book is not devoid of emotion or happiness. In fact, without spoiling too much, I can say that part of the ending seems almost too happy, slightly out of place in a book with so much darkness. Still, the relationship between Blomkvist and Salander remains intriguing: they are definitely the most developed and most interesting characters in the book and thus their partnership creates many of the novel’s high-points. The pair have some genuinely touching moments that feel like gasps of air of human goodness, although they certainly clash against one another from time to time as well. Through and through, they challenge each other and are both better for it.
Although the announced mystery is Harriet Vanger’s disappearance, the character of Lisbeth Salander is the true enigma of this novel. From her first entrance, Larsson raises a number of questions about her backstory. What could have led to her current personality? Why does an apparently brilliant though anti-social woman need a legal guardian? How much of a criminal is she? The hints we are given are murky at best and often raise more questions than they answer. Blomkvist is more often the reader’s point of view character and typically we follow his revelations and deductions more than Salander’s – yet Salander is the character who captures more interest and imagination. Larsson does ultimately reveal more of her backstory in his sequels, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, but for this book, Salander remains mostly indecipherable.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo may not be for everyone, but if you’re looking for an intense, scary, enigmatic ride, this is the novel to get. It will puzzle you, disturb you and ultimately leave you breathless and dying to know what happens next.
(12/10/15 12:43am)
Dartmouth Professor of Biochemistry Jon Lull spoke last Friday, Dec. 4 about his research using fatty acids to treat cholera and other gastrointestinal bacterial diseases, which, combined, kill 100,000 people every year.
Cholera is caused by Vibrio cholerae bacteria and is spread through contaminated drinking water. Before the germ theory of disease, it was believed in Europe that Cholera was a “bad air” that emanated from rotting organic matter and made people sick. John Snow, a father of epidemiology, first discovered its real method of transmission when he mapped Cholera outbreaks in London and noticed their association with certain drinking wells (he also surprisingly found that it was safest to live in or near a brewery; bacteria can’t grow in beer and it was the safest thing to drink before basic sanitation).
Cholera is most prevalent in cities with poor sanitation and outbreaks often occur after natural disasters.
“Most of the time we don’t get it because we’re drinking purified drinking water,” Lull said. “But what happens sometimes, particularly in developing areas, if there’s a monsoon or a natural disaster or an earthquake like in Haiti, the water supply and sewage lines get mixed together and you can get a cholera outbreak.”
People in affected areas often have little access to antibiotics and can die from severe dehydration resulting from diarrhea. Jon Kull proposed a novel solution to treating Cholera: use natural products high in monosaturated fats like sea buckthorn and synthetic analogs of fatty acids. These chemicals would be a cheap substitute to antibiotics in areas without access to them. His decades long work on Cholera virulence proteins led him to discover that fatty acids can help prophylactically prevent Cholera.
Lull is a structural biologist and primarily researches the structures of proteins – the molecules that are the active workers of a cell and carry out its essential functions. When he first joined the faculty at Dartmouth, a colleague from the Darmouth Medical School approached him and asked him to find the structures of proteins in Cholera that make it toxic. Lull agreed (coincidently, he remembered that audience member Mary Lothrop, Middlebury’s CCI director of health profession advising, was his first researcher and worked with him when he began the project).
Lull’s most exciting results have come from studying the ToxT protein, the master regulator of Cholera toxicity. Not all cholera bacteria are pathogenic; they need to have insertions of two different packages of genes that lead to the deadly effects of cholera, and one of the insertions contains ToxT. ToxT regulates two important genes that make cholera deadly: the cholera toxin gene and the cholera toxin coregulated pilus structure.
"The cholera toxin gene is what actually makes you sick,” Lull said. “Your intestinal cells take it up and the cholera toxin causes ion transporters to open up and pump ions out into your intestine. Water follows and you die of massive dehydration in a couple of days.”
Jon Lull studied the ToxT protein and found its structure using a technique called X-ray crystallography. In X-ray crystallography, a protein is precipitated into a crystal and X-rays are directed at its crystal. The pattern by which light bounces off gives valuable information about a molecule’s structure. When he looked at the structure, he noticed something unexpected.
“What was very surprising was the presence of a small molecule tucked in a small pocket of the middle of the protein,” Lull said. “And I remember looking at it for the first time and thinking this can’t be an amino acid… it looks like a fatty acid. And sure enough it was. Like most surprises in science in retrospect it turned out to be not so much a surprise.”
He discovered that the fatty acid was palmitoleic acid. When the fatty acid is bound to ToxT, it has difficulty expressing the two deadly cholera toxin genes.
One night, during dinner with his wife, Lull came to a sudden realization about the implications of his discovery.
“It was one of those scientific epiphany moments and I said, ‘Oh my God, I know how to cure cholera’ – we give people fatty acids and this prevents them from getting cholera,” Lull said. “It seems obvious now, but no one had said that yet at this point.”
Lull has since experimented on using different monosaturated fats to prevent cholera. In one mouse study, control mice died on average 24 hours after being exposed to cholera. The treatment mice who prophylicatically received palmitoleic acid survived significantly longer than the control mice and were still alive after the conclusion of the experiment 48 hours after being infected.
Lull is currently pushing for clinical trials to treat patients with sea buckthorn, a plant produced in large amounts in China that is high in palmitoleic acid and working on creating synthetic chemicals that could be more effective than palmitoleic acid in treating Cholera. If his project comes to fruition, we could have a new drug in our arsenal to help prevent and treat cholera.
(12/09/15 8:05pm)
After a hot 3-0 start to the season that featured a beatdown over Oneonta St. and two nail-biting victories against Hartwick and at in-state opponent Johnson St., the Middlebury women’s basketball team suffered its first loss this season at Skidmore, 63-60. After beating the Thoroughbreds last year by just three points, the Panthers had hoped they could repeat the same feat, but excessive turnovers proved to be Middlebury’s downfall.
The Panthers trailed for all but 29 seconds of the first half, eventually entering halftime down 32-26 after a 9-6 Skidmore run right before the half.
The Thoroughbreds stretched the lead to 10 multiple times in the third quarter, but Middlebury refused to die.
A 15-3 run early in the fourth quarter gave Middlebury a late one-point lead, 56-55, with 4:09 to play. With both teams locking down on the defensive end, points were hard to come by down the stretch. Skidmore’s Veronica Moceri hit a three-pointer to give the Thoroughbreds the lead once more, but Rachel Collins ’18 nailed a jump shot to tie the game at 58.
Moceri came up huge for Skidmore once again, hitting a three-pointer to go up three with 51 seconds left in the fourth. Catherine Harrison ’19 then hit two quick free throws to bring the Panthers within one before fouling to extend the game. Skidmore made what could have been a deadly mistake, turning the ball over with 13 seconds to play. Middlebury got a look at a go-ahead layup with eight seconds remaining but could not capitalize. Skidmore’s Kelly Donnelly hit two free throws to make it a three-point game once again. Panther point guard Sarah Kaufman ’18 had a chance to tie the game and send it to overtime, but her desperation three point attempt missed the mark.
The Middlebury team that got off the bus in Saratoga seemed to have been a different team than the one that went undefeated in the month of November. The Panthers turned the ball over an insane 28 times and Skidmore was able to convert those miscues into 32 points. Middlebury far surpassed its average of 19.0 turnovers per game with that mark. Additionally, Skidmore’s bench outscored Midd 28-6.
Kaufman led all scorers with 20, while Harrison added 12, and both Eileen Daley ’18 and Collins had nine for the Panthers.
First-year phenom Harrison continued her unbelievable collegiate start grabbing a career-high 14 rebounds. Harrison is now averaging 14.0 points a game and 11.3 rebounds a game. She also is shooting an impressive 61.5 percent from the field. Harrison and Kaufman form a formidable 1-2 punch. The latter is averaging 17.8 points per game and is automatic from the line, shooting 83.3 percent.
The Panthers look to get back on the winning track Saturday, Dec. 11 in their home opener against Plattsburgh State at 2 p.m, and will play seven games between today and the first day of the Winter Term, including some holiday season action at the NYU Holiday Classic January 2 and 3. Everything leads up to the first weekend of conference play which will be at home for the Panthers as they square off against Wesleyan and Conn. College on Friday, Jan. 8 and Saturday, Jan. 9.
(12/09/15 8:05pm)
Middlebury men’s and women’s swimming and diving traveled to Amherst College’s Pratt Pool last Saturday, Dec. 5 to race against the Lord Jeffs in their first dual meet of the season. Both the Panther men and women fell to their hosts, emerging from the meet with very similar scores of 173.5-111 and 177.5-111.5, respectively.
“Dual meets are always a great opportunity to get up and race while we’re in the middle of our training,” women’s co-Captain Lily Sawyer ’16 said.
Isabel Wyer ’18, Liza MacCowatt ’19, Megan Griffin ’16 and Morgan Burke ’17 were some of Middlebury’s first off the blocks for the 200 medley relay, and their time of 1:50.50 secured second place for the Panthers.
In the next race, Lucy Scott ’16 finished less than three seconds behind Amherst’s Marie Maxwell (first) to take third in the 1000 free.
Burke placed third in the 100 free (54.12), touching the wall just 0.12 and 0.07 seconds behind the top two Amherst swimmers, while Alaina Pribis ’19 finished the 500 free a heartbreaking 0.16 seconds behind Lord Jeff Charlotte Chudy to notch another third place finish for the Panthers.
Wyer left her competitors in the 200 free in her wake with a time of 1:55.45, and first-year Grace Stimson ’19 took first in the 200 IM (2:14.77).
Stimson touched the wall just 1.10 seconds before Pierce (2:15.87), and Katie Aman ’19 captured third in the IM event with her 2:18.48-second swim.
“We beat Amherst for the first time in a long time last year, so they came back with a vengeance,” said Maddie Pierce ’16, Sawyer’s co-captain. “[However,] we came off a tough week of training, and the team performed really well given that.”
Burke, Griffin, Stephanie Andrews ’18 and Wyer later won the 400 free relay in a combined time of 3:41.96.
Sawyer’s other co-captain, Griffin, explained that “Coach Rueppel sees meets as extensions of training, so our goal was to race hard, have fun and not worry about times.”
On the men’s side, the Panthers’ ‘A’ entry — made up of Paul Lagasse ’16, Jack McLaughlin ’18, Brendan Leech ’19 and Bryan Cheuk ’16 — won the 400 free relay with a time of 3:14.04.
Individually, Michael McGean ’17 tied Lord Jeff Connor Haley to win the 1000 free (9:54.51).
Later, McGean (first) and Andrew Rosenthal ’16 (third) swept two of the top three spots in the men’s 500 free. McGean sealed his win by 7.45 seconds with a time of 4:50.94, while Rosenthal rounded out the podium with a 5:00.90.
Connor McCormick ’18 won the 200 IM with a time of 2:04.03.
Cheuk’s 21.86 in the 50 free earned him a third place finish as he came in just 0.74 seconds after the winner, and his 48.84 in the 100 free secured him second in that race.
Leech and Andy Grant ’17 earned overall points for Middlebury, swimming a 2:02.84 in the 200 backstroke and a 2:05.66 in the 200 IM respectively to place second in each of those events.
In the diving portion of the meet, both Will Greene ’19 (209.25) and Elissa DeNunzio ’18 (188.63) placed second on the 1-meter board to earn points for the Panthers, while DeNunzio led the competition in the 3-meter event (198.00).
“Overall, both the women’s and men’s teams had great swims this past weekend,” Griffin said. “It’s always fun to race against a NESCAC rival.”
When the teams began their official practices a few weeks ago, Head Coach Bob Rueppel pointed out that, “Not looking too far ahead is the key with such a long season.”
“Right now, [we] are focused on putting in the work for the last few weeks on campus before we head off to Florida for training camp [in late December and early January],” Pierce said.
Before the teams leave campus for their short winter break, the Panthers will host Springfield for their second dual meet of the season this Saturday, Dec. 12 at 1 p.m.
(12/09/15 7:58pm)
The Middlebury men’s basketball team has begun to claw their way back towards a .500 record by stomping Johnson St. for the second time in five days on Thursday, Dec. 3 and beating Castleton St. in Middlebury’s home opener on Tuesday, Dec. 8, sandwiched around a five-point loss on the road at Skidmore on Saturday, Dec. 5, to move to 4-5 on the season.
Middlebury once again had an easy time dispatching the Badgers of Johnson St., using its considerable size advantage while out rebounding a winless Johnson team 45-12. It was all systems go out of the gate for Middlebury, as the Panthers jumped out to a 7-0 lead off of layups from Connor Huff ’16 and Matt Daley ’16 and a three-pointer from leading scorer Matt St. Amour ’17. Middlebury took a 10-point lead with 8:20 to go in the first half and led by double digits from that point on. Jack Daly ’18 capped a 12-0 run to end the half with a layup to make the score 45-21.
The Panthers scored 50 points in the second half on the way to a 95-48 win. St. Amour led all scorers with 19 points on 7-10 shooting and 5-7 from beyond the arc. Forward Eric McCord ’19 posted a career-high 10 points and added five boards to his stat line. Daley was efficient and productive with eight points on 4-6 shooting and eight boards.
Middlebury’s next contest at Skidmore, who beat NESCAC Champion Wesleyan in the first round of the 2015 NCAA Tournament and returned two All-League players including Co-Liberty League Player of the Year Aldin Medunjanin, proved to be much tougher. The Panthers caught a break with Medunjanin out for the contest, but still could not overcome the Thoroughbreds.
St. Amour had a great first half for Middlebury, scoring 14 points on 4-7 shooting, 3-4 from deep and 3-4 from the charity stripe, as the Panthers went into halftime with a 35-29 lead.
The Thoroughbreds began the second half with an 11-6 run to take the lead by one, lost it on a couple of layups from McCord and Hilal Dahleh ’19, then took a lead they would never relinquish when Nick Volpe drained a three-pointer to make it 47-45 with 12:13 to play.
Skidmore kept Middlebury at bay for the rest of the game, stretching the lead to 10 with 4:35 left, but failing to put the Panthers away.
The Thoroughbreds led by just five late in the contest when Daly fed Dahleh for a three-pointer to tighten the score at 72-70 with exactly one minute to play. At the other end, Skidmore’s Edvinas Rupkus hit a pair of free throws to go back up by four. The Panthers tried to get a quick shot up but missed. Daley was able to corral the rebound and put it back up and in, drawing the Panthers within two once again. Rupkus once again made things difficult, hitting another pair of free throws for Skidmore. Middlebury closed the gap to one with 18 seconds remaining when Daly finished a three-point play the old-fashioned way, making a lay up and calmly sinking the free throw, but Skidmore just could not miss from the line, as point guard Royce Paris made two more free throws for the Thoroughbreds. It took all of six seconds for Dahleh to make a layup to make it 78-77, but once again it was Rupkus who made two more free throws to make it 80-77. With five seconds left, the Panthers needed a three-pointer, but the last-ditch attempt missed the mark, and Skidmore sank two more free throws to close it out, 82-77.
“I was happy with the run we had down the stretch to get a chance to tie the game in the final seconds,” Head Coach Jeff Brown said. “Our group plays with grit and determination.”
The Panthers coasted to their fourth win of the season with a 96-74 victory over Castleton St. Middlebury lead for the final 38:28 of the contest. Middlebury loves to run on offense, and finally showed off their aptitude to do so with 18 fastbreak points.
“We weren’t as successful as we wanted to be in our transition game [against Skidmore],” Coach Brown said.
Jake Brown ’17 notched a game-high 16 points and added eight assists to the mix. St. Amour continued his hot shooting with four three-pointers, including a 75-footer right before halftime, and 12 points overall. Zach Baines ’19 and Adisa Majors ’18 tallied double digit points with 11 and 10, respectively.
Middlebury plays just one more game before the long Christmas break, a Saturday, Dec. 12 contest with a Plattsburgh St. squad that has proven difficult in the past.
(12/09/15 3:43pm)
On Dec. 6 the town of Middlebury’s adopted ordinance concerning rental houses, apartments and the control of public nuisances went into effect. Associate Dean of Students for Residential and Student Life Douglas Adams notified all off-campus residents in an email the following day.
According to Adams, the town addressed experiences where student occupants of rental locations were chronically and excessively disruptive in Middlebury neighborhoods. Some of these instances have led to visits by the town police and contributed to the motion to create the new town policy.
“In the spirit of this ordinance, we ask that you remember to be sensitive to the potential impact you will have on the people who live nearby,” Adams said in the email. “Living in the community requires work and an understanding that what you do will impact people who have different work schedules, noise tolerance and expectations of behaviors than a typical college student,” he continued.
The new policy states that previous other laws and ordinances do not adequately control “chronic unlawful or nuisance activity or its detrimental effect on the community where such chronic activity occurs.”
The ordinance stipulates that the fourth or more separate noise violations occurring on the same property within a 180-day period is deemed as a public nuisance. A violation will be issued if loud noise occurs after 10 p.m. on weekdays and after 1 a.m. on weekdays, although complaints may be made before these times. The initial occurrence of a public nuisance on a property is a violation of the ordinance and may be punishable as a first offense with a fine.
In the email, Adams provided tips to foster better relationships between students who live off campus and their respective neighborhoods. In addition to better communication among all community members, he also reminded students to be responsible for any parties before and after they occur.
“I think its important to reinforce that students living off campus have to uphold certain expectations,” Greer Howard ’16 said. “We’re a part of the community, our neighbors aren’t all on the same schedules, and we need to be cognizant of those differences.”
(12/03/15 2:30am)
The College has welcomed seven new science and math professors in the last two years.
This year’s new professors are Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Amanda Crocker, Assistant Professor of Biology Jill Mikucki and Assistant Professor of Mathematics Albert Kim. Professors who came to Middlebury in the 2014-15 school year include Assistant Professor of Physics Michael Durst, Assistant Professors of Psychology Mike Dash and Robert Moeller and Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Lesley-Ann Giddings.
The hiring spree reflects a growing student interest in the sciences. Science enrollment increased by 6.9 percent between 2001 and 2012, and has continued to grow since then.
These new professors bring their unique research interests to the College, which include everything from medical technology to advanced ice drills.
Durst is developing the use of two photon lasers for biomedical imagery. This technique, which he describes as a much more advanced microscope, can produce extremely high resolution 3D images of tissue in real time. In a demonstration, he produced a real time 3D image of brain activity in a live mouse’s brain at a depth of one millimeter. Though the device is currently limited to depths on the order of a few millimeters, Durst hopes to improve the depth penetration through changing the shape of the lasers’ pulse and through incorporating nonlinear optics.
His use of light and lasers for biomedical imaging follows in the vein of the team who won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, who used a different technique, called “super-resolved fluorescence microscopy,” to perform biomedical imaging. Durst says that he is able to get a deeper and better resolution image with his technique than the Nobel Prize winners, but that each one of his images takes a considerable period of time to produce. He is therefore working on combining his research with a novel technique called temporal focus-setting, which he hopes will greatly reduce the time needed per image. Instead of capturing point images, this technique would allow the device to record activity in slices of tissue. As a long term goal, Durst and his team of student researchers aim to miniaturize their device (which currently takes up a several square meter table) to the size of a probe that can be inserted into the body. Colin Laurence ’17, who worked in Durst’s lab during the summer of 2015, asserts claims that this would be a “revolutionary” advance in imaging technology.
His research is extremely interdisciplinary, both within physics and with other sciences. Within physics, his work combines elements of optics, electromagnetism and quantum physics. He also brings in chemistry, biology and genetics. According to Laurence, most of this interdisciplinary collaboration will “happen later on, as right now [Durst] is just creating the tool.” He also draws on disciplines outside of the liberal arts, particularly engineering and computer programming. He and his research team build much of their equipment themselves, mainly for cost saving reasons.
Mikucki’s research is in the field of microbiology, with special focus on microbiology in bodies of water underneath Antarctic ice-sheets (called subglacial environments). She has spent 12 field seasons in Antarctica. This includes multiple years on the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project, the first project to confirm the existence of active microbial life underneath the Antarctic ice sheets.
In addition, she was the first to cleanly sample a sub-glacial lake (to sample a lake without introducing biological or chemical contaminants), a feat also achieved in the WISSARD project. Mikucki and her teams have devoted a great deal of their effort to avoiding contaminating the Antarctic environments that they work in.
“We want to collect our samples in a mindful way, as we know that we can potentially change the ecosystem just by sampling, so we want to figure out how we can be the most mindful, minimize our impact and make our impact transient,” Mikucki said. “I really want to know what is happening under the ice sheets and I do not want to accidentally see something that came from under my fingernail. So we spend a lot of time figuring out best practices for cleaning our instruments and samples.”
Though her drive to avoid contamination is partially to do with needs directly relevant to her research, it also relates to her long-term goals, namely to find life beyond Earth. Many researchers, including Mikucki, see Antarctic research as a staging ground for extraterrestrial research. The applicability of Antarctic research to the search for extraterrestrial microbial life in the solar system was what first got Mikucki interested in her field of research.
“I think this work lends itself to the search for life on other planets, as Antarctica is an analogue in some important ways for places like Enceladus, Europa and even the ice caps of Mars in that they are cold and potentially really salty,” Mikucki said. “The other thing is that the mindfulness approach [to avoiding contamination of the local ecosystem] is even more important on other planets, as NASA recognizes. My belief is that we have to be able to pull off clean sampling in Antarctica before we can send a probe or especially a manned mission to these other places.”
She also hopes that understanding what enables microbes to live in the cold, dark and often salty environments of subglacial waters will help space agencies narrow their searches for extraterrestrial life. However, she is careful to note that we may be surprised by the adaptability of extraterrestrial microbes to live in situations that Earthly microbes could not tolerate.
“We’d like to figure out how these microbes are able to deal with these extreme conditions, because that will help us inform our search for extraterrestrial life in ice-covered oceans,” Mikucki said. “It would be nice to have some clue of what we might be looking for so we can narrow our search.”
Indeed, Mikucki has personally collaborated directly with numerous space agencies. Her graduate work was funded by NASA, and she continues to work closely with NASA, including by working with some of their scientists in the field. She has also used ice drills designed by the German space agency, in large part to test their designs before they are deployed on extraterrestrial probes.
She has worked in several other projects across Antarctica, including at Blood Falls in the McMurdo Dry Valleys (so named because of the iron oxide that colors the waterfall bright red) and on the Antarctic Peninsula. She stresses that Antarctica is an extremely diverse continent, very much unlike the stereotype of it being a homogenous frozen wasteland.
“Antarctica’s a big continent; it is the size of the U.S. and Mexico combined,“ Mukucki said. “And there’s not just one type of lake in America, so we should expect a diversity of water systems below the ice sheets. For example, Blood Falls is really salty, and the water there is -7° Celsius, while Whillans is closer to fresh water.”
Not all of the new professors come from the traditional professorial backgrounds of academia and scientific research. Kim, for example, was a data scientist at Google before entering academia. He worked in Google’s ads department, analyzing which types of ad campaigns and ads worked most effectively. Working with Google’s data presented unique statistical problems, as Google’s datasets are far larger than datasets that most statisticians work with.
“Google’s data set is so big that you cannot fit it on one set of servers; you have multiple sets of servers spread out all over the place,” Kim said. “So that definitely led to challenges to analyzing our data; we had to modify traditional statistical methods to work on multiple servers.”
He continues to apply statistics and data science knowledge similar to what he used at Google in his research. His research is in the field of spatial epidemiology – the study of disease across geography – and he is devising methods to detect cancer clusters (locations with abnormally high cancer rates), including using advanced statistical techniques like Bayesian modeling.
However, he cautions that one should not infer from his research that certain locations are more cancer-prone because of geographical factors like contaminated water supply or proximity to power lines. A confounding variable, such as low socio-economic class and inaccessibility to health care, could be influencing cancer rates.
“There’s two valid ways we can interpret these data,” Kim said. “We could use this as a way to target public health interventions. Or we could control for the things that we already know cause spikes in the cancer rate and see if we maybe find some new unexplained trend that we can investigate.”
Professors have many different reasons for choosing to come to Middlebury. Both Durst and Kim emphasized the teaching-centric nature of positions at the College as the main factor in their decisions to teach here.
“When I was a grad student I really enjoyed teaching; I taught my own class even though that wasn’t a requirement of grad students,” Kim said. “My plan was to work for a little while to get a little experience then to come back and teach. I was always aiming for a liberal arts college, not some big research institution.”
Professors are also excited by Middlebury’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research and collaboration. Durst, whose research is inherently interdisciplinary, is one example of this. Mikucki was also particularly excited by the prospect of interdisciplinary collaboration, citing it as a main reason for choosing to come to Middlebury.
“I found myself in my research working across disciplines; and the more diverse and farther reaching the collaboration was, and the more difficult it was, the more rewarding it has always been,” Mikucki said. “Being new to Middlebury, my outward impression is that this is a place that really works on interdisciplinary collaboration. I felt like Middlebury was a place where you could really press the limits of conventional interdisciplinary studies, and really reach out beyond the sciences and also do some creative and risky science.”
(12/03/15 1:12am)
The Middlebury Panthers got their season off to a strong start with a 3-1 record. The team beat NESCAC rival Trinity twice, 5-1 and 2-1, on opening weekend, then hosted the Panther/Cardinal Classic this past weekend, where they fell to second-ranked Elmira College 3-1 and defeated Wisconsin-Stevens Point 3-1. Maddie Winslow ’18 led the way for the Panthers, tallying two goals and four assists in the four games and garnering NESCAC Player of the Week for her play at the tournament.
On Friday, Middlebury scored three times on the power play on its way to a 5-1 win over Trinity in the NESCAC season opener. Middlebury was slow to find its groove in the first minutes of play, as Trinity took a 1-0 lead 3:43 into the game on a power play goal from the right point. The women soon found their momentum with a power play goal of their own. Carly Watson’s ’17 shot from the left point, though blocked, was put home for a rebound by Katie Mandigo ’16. The Panthers struck again with the extra attacker at 11:22, taking a 2-1 lead with a goal by Elizabeth Wulf ’18.
Leading 2-1 in the second period, the Panthers added to their lead when Mandigo finished after a shot from Watson had been saved, and Kelly Sherman ’17 added one on a breakaway.
Julia Wardwell ’16 found the goal 5:00 into the third period to score Middlebury’s third power play goal of the night and seal a 5-1 victory for the Panthers.
The next day, the Panthers again defeated the Trinity Bantams with a score of 2-1.
Just as in the previous night, Trinity took an early 1-0 lead in contest. Melissa Maffeo’s initial shot was blocked before Shelby Labe jumped on the rebound and scored to put her team ahead.
Winslow answered for Middlebury in the second period, shooting a wrister to the top left corner of the net.
The game appeared to be heading into overtime when Wulf broke free from a pack behind the net and gained some space. She quickly fed Anna Van Kula ’16 in front, who sent a shot into the back of the net for the game-winning tally with only 47 seconds remaining in regulation.
This past weekend, the Panthers hosted the Panther/Cardinal Classic in Kenyon Arena. On Friday night, they fell to second-ranked Elmira by the score of 3-1 after leading midway through the second period.
The Panthers took the 1-0 lead when Wulf one-timed a shot from the slot on the power play into the back of the net at the 16:38 mark in the first period.
Elmira tied the game with an extra attacker 12:48 into the second period.The Panthers went on the power play at the 7:36 mark, with their best chance coming when Mandigo’s shot hit the pipe.
Elmira took a 2-1 lead with less than nine minutes remaining in the third period with a snipe of a shot into the top-right corner of the net, and the Panthers were unable to answer the goal despite a power play opportunity less than a minute later.
The Soaring Eagles gained some breathing room as the power play expired when the puck bounced off the stick of a Middlebury defender, leaving a race down the ice. Watson knocked the puck away, but the aggressive Soaring Eagles slipped the puck into the goal.
Following an Elmira timeout with 3:22 left, the Panthers pulled Dreher, but were unable to close the gap as Elmira took home the win.
“While we had a disappointing loss on Friday night, we felt good about how we played,” Mandigo said. “We competed all over the ice, and although we had a few breakdowns, overall we played well.”
On Sunday, the Panthers redeemed themselves with a 3-1 victory over Wisconsin-Stevens Point (5-4-1) during the final game of the Panther/Cardinal Classic in Kenyon Arena.
Middlebury got on the board first at 4:13 when Jessica Young ’18 stuffed home a pass from Janka Hlinka ’18. Only 22 seconds later, the Pointers came right back and tied the game at 1.
Two minutes into the second period, Winslow dug the puck out of the corner, skated to the goal and sent a cross to Shanna Hickman ’19, who scored her first career goal.
The Panthers added an insurance goal on the power play in the third period when Winslow sent her wrist shot to the far side of the net, securing a 3-1 win for her team.
“We had a good weekend battling some of the top teams in the country,” Mandigo said. “We have a young team, but everything is coming together nicely. We have high expectations for ourselves, but most importantly we are willing to put the hard work in for the outcomes that we want.”
With its pair of wins against conference rival Trinity, Middlebury sits atop the NESCAC, tied with Amherst at 2-0. The Panthers return to the ice this weekend for a two-game homestand against Connecticut College (0-2) on Friday and Saturday, Dec. 4-5.
(12/03/15 1:09am)
On Saturday, Nov. 21 both the men’s and women’s cross-country teams competed at the NCAA National Championship at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in Winneconne, Wisconsin this past Saturday. It was a chilly day with highs in the upper 20’s, but the Panthers made the most of it. Facing challenging conditions and competition, both the men and the women’s teams posted impressive finishes in the final meet of the season.
On the men’s side, Sebastian Matt ’16 earned All-American honors, as did Abigail Nadler ’19 for the women as they both finished in the top 35 places overall. The men finished 24th in a field of 32 teams, while the women were eighth in a similar field of 32 teams.
Nadler led the women’s team with a 28th place finish.
“I just tried to stay in the lead pack and remain relaxed,” Nadler said. “I was struggling near the end but overall I’m happy with my race. Everyone on the team put it all out there and we should be happy with that.”
Adrian Walsh ’16 (53), Erzsie Nagy ’17 (94), Sasha Whittle ’17 (142) and Katherine Tercek ’16 (152) followed Nadler to complete the team scoring. Also racing were Nikki Schachman ’16 (187) and Emma DeCamp ’17 (216). Outside of the Middlebury team, Williams won the national championship and Abrah Masterson of Cornell College was the individual champion.
On the men’s side, Sebastian Matt ’16 finished as an All-American in 17th place. Chony Aispuro ’18 (92), Brian Rich ’17 (137), Sam Cartwright ’16 (229) and Kevin Serrao ’18 (245) scored the rest of the points for Middlebury. Conor Evans ’19 (253) and Sam Klockenkemper ’17 (267) also competed. For the men, Wisconsin-Eau Claire won the championship and Ian LaMere of Wisconsin-Platteville claimed the individual title.
Matt felt reflective after his final race as a Middlebury panther.
“It was an incredible day,” Matt said. “Coming back from a draining regional race, we gave it our all. It wasn’t the best race we’ve run, but it was the best race we could have run. Mickey came in clutch, leading us from the beginning to the end.”
This wraps up the season for the cross-country teams, but shortly we will see many of them race out on the track. There will be many of the same match-ups and it promises to remain exciting.
(12/03/15 1:09am)
Before Thanksgiving break, men’s and women’s squash travelled down U.S. Route 7 to Williamstown, Mass. for a tournament at Williams College on Saturday, Nov. 21. The Panther men and women were in action against Cornell Saturday afternoon, and the men’s squad also took the court against Western Ontario in a pivotal match for year-end national tournament seeding.
For both the men and women, Cornell was going to be a tough match from the outset. The Cornell women entered the day ranked sixth in the country, while the Cornell men ranked 12th.
The women’s squad dropped all nine of their matches; although this seems like a tough way to start the season, the Panthers saw plenty of bright spots. Most notable was the play of two first-years, Bea Kuijpers ’19 and Alexa Comai ’19, who were second and fifth in Middlebury’s ladder.
Kuijpers gave Cornell junior Rachel Scherman a very good match, even taking the first game 14-12. While Kuijpers lost the next three sets — tallying six, four and five points respectively — she put up an impressive fight in her first collegiate match against a competitor ranked 28th in the nation.
Like Kuijpers in the second slot, Comai pushed Cornell sophomore Charlotte Knaggs to her limit in the fifth slot. Comai also won the first set of her collegiate career 14-12 before narrowly surrendering three games in a row. She dropped the second set and the decisive fourth set to Knaggs 11-6. The real turning point of the match was when Comai lost the third game 11-9, falling just short of a 2-1 lead that would’ve carried her into the fourth game.
“I felt strongest when I controlled the pace of the game and made [Knaggs] play my game instead of hers,” Comai said. “I thought the strongest part of my game was changing directions and moving her up and down the court ... to set up opportunities for ... attacking shots.”
Moving forward into their tough schedule to come, women’s squash knows they are still in a good position for success this season.
Senior co-Captain Tiffany Hau ’16, who held the fourth slot on the ladder against Cornell, explained that the team has “never been more fit,” which is very important in “such a physically demanding sport.”
“I think it’s great that we are able to play some of the stronger teams early on in the season because it prepares us for later on in the season when we play some of our closer rivals such as Bates and Williams,” Comai said.
The men’s squad did not fare much better than the Panther women against Cornell, with Wyatt French ’17 tallying the lone match victory for the Panthers. French clinched a win in four sets, winning three straight after dropping the first game 8-11. His three straight wins (11-6, 11-5 and 11-9) did not come easily, but French’s adjustment to a more patient pace allowed him a match victory against Cornell first-year Perry Hanson.
“In the first game against Hanson I played well but I made a couple of bad decisions going for kill shots at the wrong time and hitting the tin,” French said. “In the next couple of games I decided to be more patient and really wait until the perfect opportunity to attack. I was able to control the pace and retrieve most of his attacking shots and he started to get impatient and hit some tins.”
Regardless of Middlebury’s performance against Cornell, the men’s match against Western Ontario held the most importance in regards to post-season seeding. The Panthers rebounded from their 8-1 loss to the Big Red with an equally decisive 8-1 victory over the 19th-ranked Mustangs.
Once again, French led the way for the Panthers from the third slot on the ladder with a dominant three-set sweep (11-3, 11-4 and 11-6).
“Defensive game and movement were working well for me,” French said, reflecting on his first weekend of play at Williams. “Williams’ courts are hot and fast, which really helped me execute my defensive, up-tempo game.”
With solid performances from Henry Pearson ’17, Will Kurth ’18, Ben Krant ’17 and Sam Giddins ’18 on the bottom half of the ladder, French’s continued improvement would sure-up the top of the Panthers’ lineup as the season continues to heat up.
“My defensive game has always been my strength, and to have a more well rounded game I need to attack more,” French said.
Head Coach Mark Lewis has implemented specific exercises in practice to help French and his team strengthen their attacking game.
As a result of this training, French says he “will look to attack more and build confidence in [his] drops and volley drops” in the next few matches.
The Squash teams will head to Clinton, N.Y. to play at Hamilton College this Saturday, Dec. 5. Both squads face Hamilton at 2 p.m., and the men will play a second match against Hobart at 5 p.m.
(12/03/15 1:06am)
The men’s basketball team has endured an up-and-down start to the 2015-2016 campaign, compiling a 2-4 record in the early going. Center Matt Daley ’16 and guards Jake Brown ’17 and Matt St. Amour ’17 have served as the backbone of this young but otherwise talented roster.
The Panthers began their season with some tournament action hosted by Medaille College in the Western New York Knee and Orthopedic Tournament. Despite the comical name of the setting, Middlebury’s competition proved no joke, and the Panthers limped home with an 0-2 record.
The opening matchup saw Middlebury pitted against a hot-shooting Baldwin Wallace squad on Friday, Nov. 20. The Panthers took a seven-point deficit into halftime, but the Yellow Jackets exploded for 54 points in the second half and held a 24-point advantage with just over five minutes to play in a game that Middlebury eventually lost 97-87.
St. Amour was a bright spot for Middlebury, lighting up the scoreboard for a career-high 33 points on 7-17 shooting (3-6 3PT FG) and an insane 16-20 from the stripe, and has been relied on early on to become the team’s go-to scorer.
“I am comfortable with it,” St. Amour said, “but there are a lot of other guys that can score so I don’t need to force it.”
Guard Jack Daly ’18 got his first collegiate start and tallied seven points, seven boards, four assists and two steals.
The Panthers fell again the following day to St. Lawrence University, 63-57. This time the damage was done early by the Middlebury opponents, as SLU led by 11 at halftime. St. Amour once again led Middlebury in scoring with 15. Forward Connor Huff ’16 did his best Charles Barkley impression, scraping up 12 boards in 25 minutes off the bench.
The Panthers finally broke the ice with a 80-63 win at SUNY-New Paltz on Tuesday, Nov. 24 and were able to enter their short Thanksgiving break on a high note. Middlebury showed early on that they were the superior club to the now 1-4 New Paltz Hawks. Daley had 10 points and six boards in the first half alone as nine different players contributed to the Panthers’ 45 first-half points — most of which came from the interior. Middlebury held the Hawks to 27 first half points on 10-33 (30.3 percent) shooting from the field.
For the game, Daley finished with 19 points and 10 boards, and Brown and Daly nearly joined him with double-doubles of their own. Brown tallied 10 points and seven assists while Daly racked up nine points and eight dimes.
The Panthers were once again stymied in the opener of the University of Rochester Holiday Inn/Airport Tournament, losing 70-55 to No. 25 Oswego State. Middlebury was ice cold from the field, going just 20-63 (31.7 percent) from the field, 4-17 (23.5 percent) from deep and 11-23 (47.8 percent) from the free throw line.
Oswego didn’t shoot much better percentages, but 25 makes on 39 trips to the line gave Oswego the advantage. St. Amour once again led the Panthers with 23 points and Daley snagged 11 boards, but their efforts were not enough to get a victory.
Middlebury did earn its second win of the young season with a consummate 103-63 victory over in-state opponent Johnson State. The story of the game was a 60-20 advantage for the Panthers in the rebounding department. The Panthers’ 27 offensive boards led to 28 second-chance points compared to just one for Johnson State.
Multiple players put up impressive stat lines. Daley earned his second double-double of the year with 15 points and 10 boards. St. Amour and Huff both scored in double digits with 17 and 10, respectively. Guard Bryan Jones ’17 scored a career-high 14 points, and guard Zach Baines ’19 set his own career high with ten points. Forward Nick Tarantino ’18 (12 rebounds) and forward Eric McCord ’19 (10 rebounds, nine points), both made big impacts off of the bench.
Middlebury suffered a heartbreaker, 68-66, on the road at Rensselaer on Tuesday, Dec. 1. Brown’s career-high 20 points and Daley’s third triple-double were not enough to top 4-1 Rensselaer. The Panthers entered halftime down 33-24 after shooting just 34.2 percent from the field and going 0-5 from beyond the arc, but chipped away after halftime and had a chance to win the ball game late.
St. Amour tallied six points in a stretch of one minute and 38 seconds, shrinking the deficit to three points with 1:43 to go. With Rensselaer up 65-62, Daley grabbed a rebound off of a missed three-pointer from Rensselaer’s Tyler Gendron and pushed the ball up the court, but the Panthers’ turned the ball back over on a St. Amour charge in the paint. Rensselaer missed a jumper on their next possession, giving Middlebury hope once again. Brown then dropped in a two-pointer off of an offensive rebound to tighten the score at 65-64.
Both teams proceeded to make a pair of free throws, and Middlebury fouled to send their opponent to the line with six seconds to play. After Jonathan Luster missed the second of his free throws, the Panthers tried to get up the court for a chance at a game-tying two, but were unable to get a shot off, closing the door on a possible comeback.
The Panthers are now 2-4, a disappointing start for a team with lofty aspirations, but there are bright spots to point out, both as a team an individually.
“It’s still really early in our season and we are still learning to trust each other with our plays and defensive rotations,” St. Amour said. Playing very good teams early, they have been able to expose our early season mistakes but the more we’ve worked together the better we have gotten.
“Jack Daly and [Connor] Huff have been very strong contributors so far, both offering a lot of toughness into our starting five.”
Middlebury meets Johnson St. once again on Thursday, Dec. 3, and will open its home schedule with Castleton on Tuesday, Dec. 8.
(12/03/15 12:59am)
The women’s field hockey team won their second ever NCAA Championship on Sunday, Nov. 22 on Washington and Lee’s Turf Field. The Panthers (20-2) beat no. 3 The College of New Jersey 4-1 in Saturday’s Nov. 21 semifinal matchup before defeating top-ranked Bowdoin in the championship game on Sunday, Nov. 22.
“Our journey to the national championship really started with the tone set by the seniors and coaches at the beginning of the season,” Emily Miller ’17, the team’s starting goalie, reflected. “All the seniors made it known ... from day one of preseason that our goal ... was to win the National Championship.”
Miller describes a memorable moment after the Panthers broke their three-year winning streak by losing to Bowdoin in the NESCAC Championship.
“We were all standing together after the game, kind of sad, and one of our seniors [said], ‘Two words: national championship.’ [The loss] stung, and I think that ... spurred us to go on to be so driven and dominant in the rest of our games this season.”
In the rematch of last year’s semifinal game, where TCNJ defeated the Panthers before going on to win the national championship, Middlebury struck first and early. Pam Schulman ’17 netted the first goal of the game at the four-minute mark after Shannon Hutteman ’16 redirected a penalty corner insertion her way. Just six minutes later, Annie Leonard ’18 tallied her team-best 24th goal off a pass from Grace Jennings ’19 to put the Panthers up 2-0. With the goal, Leonard moved into fourth place in Middlebury’s single-season record book. Twenty minutes later, Caroline Knapp ’18 sent in a rebound off a penalty corner to give the Panthers a 3-0 lead. TCNJ responded with a few good scoring opportunities, but impressive saves by Panther goalie Miller and the defensive line led by Jillian Green ’16 kept the Lions scoreless for the remainder of the first half.
The Panther’s offensive line came out strong in the second half, and Schulman was able to send another ball past the Lion’s goalie for a 4-0 lead at the 41:54 mark. With just over six minutes remaining in the match, TCNJ got on the board when Jaclyn Douglas redirected a shot past a diving Miller.
The Panthers held an 8-6 advantage in shots and 3-2 advantage in penalty corners. Miller finished with two saves for the win, while Lions goalie Schlupp was credited with three stops.
With the win, the Panthers advanced to the championship game on Sunday against NESCAC foe Bowdoin. Top ranked Bowdoin had given Middlebury their only two losses of the season.
“To get to the national championship we had to beat teams that were ranked sixth, fifth, and third in the country [while] Bowdoin had to beat teams ranked fourth, eighth, and unranked,” Miller pointed out. “So [we came into the final four] ready and knowing how to fight through a really tough game. I think this gave us a bit of a mental edge over Bowdoin ... who came in undefeated, and had yet to play from behind all season.”
The first twenty minutes of the game were largely played in the midfield, with a few good scoring opportunities by Bowdoin. Miller, though, made a kicking save to keep the game scoreless. On Bowdoin’s first penalty corner of the game, Kelsey Mullaney had her first shot blocked and second attempt saved by Miller. Immediately following the corner, the Panthers made a quick transition and began an offensive attack. A Bowdoin defender tipped a pass from Schulman, and Jennings collected the ball in the middle of the circle before ripping a shot past the Bowdoin goalie to gain a 1-0 advantage. The Panthers were able to hold on to the advantage for the remainder of the first half.
“[Since] we scored first and in the first half, for the rest of the game we were in a familiar position of having maintain the win, while they were in a new position of having to come from behind,” Miller said.
Early in the second half the Panthers were awarded four penalty corners in a three-minute stretch, but were unable to capitalize on any of the scoring opportunities. Bowdoin drew a pair of penalty corners in the 59th and 60th minutes, but Miller made two great saves to maintain the Panther’s advantage. In the 62nd minute, Bowdoin had another pair of scoring attempts, the best coming from Liz Znamierowski whose shot after a rebound hit the right post and bounced away. The Polar Bears were unable to convert any of their attempts in the final minutes as Middlebury held on for the national title.
Bowdoin finished with a 17-14 advantage in shots, while Middlebury held a 9-5 advantage in penalty corners. Miller finished with six saves in goal to earn her eighth shutout of the season, while Belitz made three stops for the Polar Bears.
Anna Kenyon ’16, Schulman and Lauren Berestecky ’17 were each named to the all-tournament team, while Bridget Instrum ’16 was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player.
(12/03/15 12:55am)
The Middlebury women’s basketball team has had quite the hot start thus far in the season. Going undefeated in the month of November, the team has beaten Oneonta State (60-38) on Friday, Nov. 20, Hartwick College (61-58) on Nov. 21 and Johnson State (57-52) on Tuesday, Nov. 24. The Panthers have relied on their underclassmen’s talent to win games in the absence of captain and most senior leader, Elizabeth Knox ’17, who is injured and hoping to return to the courts in January.
Middlebury began the season at the Holiday Inn Classic at SUNY Oneonta where they played the host. The Panthers ended the first quarter with a 14-9 lead, and did not look back.
Oneonta only hit 14 of their attempted 75 shots (18.7 percent shooting), and grabbed 40 rebounds while Middlebury shot an impressive 41.7 percent from the field, going 25-60. The Panthers also grabbed 58 rebounds. Point guard Sarah Kaufman ’18 led Middlebury’s scoring effort, sinking 23 points total in the game. Catherine Harrison ’19 also helped seal the win in her impressive college debut: she knotted her first career double-double, scoring 12 points and grabbing 15 boards.
One day later, the team carried this momentum into their matchup against Hartwick College. Middlebury emerged victorious from the constant back-and-forth that ended with a score of 61-58.
Harrison was the high scorer of the game, with 20 points and 9 rebounds, while Colleen Caveney ’19 had 12 points and went 6-7 from the field. Kaufman again scored in double-digits, racking up ten points total. Middlebury continued their shooting success going 24-50 from the field (48 percent).
Three days later on Tuesday, Nov. 24, the Panthers embarked on another road trip to face their local rival, Johnson State (JSU). Middlebury won what proved to be another close contest 57-52.
JSU cut Middlebury’s lead down to two with just under a minute remaining. However, the Panthers hit three foul shots and a layup to seal a five-point win. Kaufman led Middlebury again in scoring with 18 points, while Harrison scored 12. Eileen Daley ’18 scored five and recorded a career-high of 13 rebounds.
After a very promising start to her Middlebury career, Harrison — who averages 16.0 points and 12.0 rebounds per game, and shot an 82.4 percentage from the floor (14-17) — was named the NESCAC Player of the Week.
The Panthers will begin to rev up their out-of-conference schedule as they face Skidmore on the road this Saturday, December 5th at 2 p.m. before NESCAC competition begins after the New Year.
(12/03/15 12:11am)
Last week, Gary Delima and Sharif Cargo, both age 26 of Brooklyn, NY, were indicted by a federal grand jury for various charges of human trafficking in Vermont.
According to a statement released by the office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Vermont, “Delima and Cargo are accused of recruiting, enticing and maintaining two individuals referred to in the indictment as “Victim 1” and “Victim 2,” and using force, threats of force, fraud and coercion to cause them to engage in commercial sex acts between Sept. 2012 and Sept. 2013.” In addition, Delima was accused of transporting a minor, referred to as “Victim 3,” to Vermont to engage in prostitution earlier this year.
Delima and Cargo were first suspected of human trafficking in July of 2013 when law enforcement officials responded to a call in a South Burlington hotel and found the two men there with two women. The police found evidence of prostitution and narcotics on the scene. In addition, they found that one of the women had been listed online earlier that day as an available escort in the South Burlington area. Records from the website showed that Cargo’s email address had been associated with the email and other similar advertisements.
This past February, police received another call from a South Burlington hotel, where they found two women. These women said that they were engaged in prostitution and that Delima had brought them here from New York for that purpose. One of these two women was a minor, which would lead Delima to face worse charges, if found guilty of sex trafficking of a child.
If convicted of Sex Trafficking by Force and Coercion, both Cargo and Delima would face a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison up to a maximum sentence of life in prison, according to a statement by the U. S. Attorney’s District of Vermont Office. If found guilty of sex trafficking of a child, Delima could also receive ten years to a lifetime in prison.
The indictment of Cargo and Delima came just several weeks after U.S. Attorney for the District of Vermont Eric Miller launched an anti-sex trafficking media campaign in Vermont in response to the rise in sex trafficking in the state in recent years. According to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, they received 37 calls and reports of seven human trafficking cases that mentioned Vermont in 2014, which was up from the 17 calls and reports of three cases in 2012. As of June 30, they had received 14 calls and three cases referencing Vermont.
The media campaign led by Eric Miller consists of a website, ucanstoptraffick.org. The homepages reads, “U Can Stop Traffick – help end sex and drug trafficking in Vermont.” The website features the stories of three women from Vermont who were victims of sex trafficking and ended up abusing drugs. There is also a one minute public service announcement video and a list of available resources.
Prior to this indictment for human trafficking, Delima and Cargo were also indicted back in March for distributing heroin and cocaine in Vermont. This connection between the drug trade and human trafficking in Vermont is not uncommon.
Human trafficking often begins with an addiction to heroin, cocaine or other opiates while under the control of their perpetrator. Once dependent on drugs, victims of human trafficking often turn to using sex as a means to make money to feed their addiction and to pay off drug debts. Jasmine Grace, a survivor of sex trafficking and drug addiction featured ucanstoptraffick.org, elaborated on this idea in her interview on the website.
“You become addicted to drugs, so now you don’t have an actual pimp over your head, you have a growing drug addiction, so the only way to support that drug addiction really is to prostitute,” Grace said. “I didn’t realize that this was going to turn into a heroin addiction.”
Not only are victims of sex trafficking drug abusers, many are also helping financially support drug dealers.
“No one deals drugs alone,” said Geni Cowles, First Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Vermont district. “For every dealer our office charges there’s a circle of people, charged and uncharged, who make that drug dealing activity possible and profitable.”
Cowles said 75 percent of the people who support drug dealers are women. They provide support by giving them housing, cars and contact lists. Many women are also used to transport drugs or make minor deals. Cowles added that many of these women are also trafficked for sex. Of these women, Cowles articulated that 60 percent were under 30, most were addicted to substances and one quarter were in a romantic relationship with the dealer.
The current indictment of Delima and Cargo highlights the common trend that human and drug trafficking are inextricably linked.
In light of this rising trend, public and private groups are working to reduce human and drug trafficking in Vermont. In addition to the U.S. Attorney’s U Can Stop Traffick campaign discussed above, the Vermont Human Trafficking Task Force was formed in 2010. The task force included two representatives from Give Way to Freedom, a Vermont-based non-profit that works locally and internationally to end human trafficking and support victims. As a result of the Vermont Human Trafficking Task Force, legislation was passed in 2011 that mandated training on human trafficking for law enforcement and gave the possibility of a life sentence.
(12/02/15 10:32pm)
As the end of the semester draws near, a familiar topic bubbles to the surface of everyday conversation: stress. The student body, as a collective, is stressed. But we are less certain on precisely why students are stressed and how to combat it. The answers to “why” and “how” are numerous and multifaceted. One’s academic standing, financial situation, social life and extracurricular engagements can all contribute to experiences of stress. The editorial board recognizes that this issue is complex and no solution is perfect, immediate or all encompassing.
We also wish to point out, however, that no solution will be successful without an ongoing dialogue between students and the administration. In the wake of Nathan Alexander’s suicide last spring, members of the administration attempted to address student stress and implement solutions through a project coined “The Grid.” Inclusive pedagogy training and increasing Parton’s counseling staff emerged as proposed initiatives. But these efforts were conceived over the summer and student input was not taken into consideration.
This is problematic. “Student stress” is inherently a student issue and we can offer insight into what that issue looks like. Without student input, the administration’s conversation has become single-minded. Likewise, when student stress emerged as a topic in a recent faculty meeting, the faculty voted to move into executive session and remove students from the room. The opinions that were voiced during the open portion of the meeting bear little resemblance to the sentiments voiced by students themselves. Some professors talked about how students overextend themselves in extracurricular commitments, causing stress; the reality is far more complex, as students could have told them.
Professors and members of the administration are largely out of touch with the stressors of today’s college students. Students have the added anxieties of applying for increasingly competitive internships and jobs, dealing with ever-rising student debt and managing the omnipresent role of social media in our lives. While we recognize that the administration is now seeking student input, namely at “The Grid” meeting on Wednesday, this initiative should have occurred much earlier. One must understand a problem before devising a solution. In the case of student stress, the College jumped straight to a solutions-oriented narrative.
Meanwhile, students have been leaders at combating this issue. SGA President Ilana Gratch ’16 proposed the creation of a peer-counseling program, which would enable students to connect and work through everyday stresses and challenges in an approachable environment. Due to liability issues, the suggestion is facing pushback. We understand that formalizing students’ role as “counselors” could pose potential problems. But there are plenty of other student-led initiatives that deal with sensitive issues, including JusTalks, MiddSafe and Res Life. Thankfully, under the guidance of Barbara McCall, SGA will expand the Winter Term Workshop entitled “Student Support Network” this January. This course will train students to support their peers in a robust, substantive capacity. We appreciate this effort and hope to see it eventually formalized into a mentorship program between older and younger students.
However, these initiatives cannot stand on their own. We recognize the administration’s efforts to promote wellness, particularly through “The Grid.” Suggested solutions are varied, from mindfulness exercises in the short term to additional CRAs in the long term.
In the meantime, what can we do? Policies and programs take time to implement and many of us will graduate before these plans come to fruition. But we can attempt to take control of our daily reality and of the ways we process and perpetuate narratives of stress. It often seems like we are engaged in a competitive “Work Olympics,” where everyone tries to one-up each other with how much they have on their plates. Stress becomes a humble brag; if you’re stressed, you’re high achieving.
This culture contributes to and heightens our collective stress. And so, as finals week approaches, let us make an effort to consciously avoid stress-related monologues. Let us not use our workload as a default line of conversation. By all means voice genuine concerns and seek help in times of trouble — there are resources and friends on campus who would be willing to lend a hand. But also remember that stress need not consume your daily reality; you are more than your stress. If you’re taking a much-needed break from your work, don’t spend it talking about your work. Stress should not be a defining characteristic of Middlebury culture and college is one of the few times in our lives that we will have the time and space to learn to better manage stress and anxiety. The stressors that exist at Middlebury are also steeped in the world outside of the College. Let’s commit ourselves as a community to addressing this issue and to looking out for one another in the coming weeks.
(12/02/15 9:21pm)
In an effort to alleviate student stress and promote mental health at the College, several administrators are working to develop a multi-faceted plan to build community and resilience, promote mind-body well-being, increase diversity and foster inclusivity. Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College Katy Smith Abbott, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty Andrea Lloyd and Professor of Spanish and Interim Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández are in the process of building upon their initial platform, which has become known as “The Grid” through a series of discussions with various audiences within the community.
“The Grid” is comprised of three separate umbrella objectives: Building Community and Resilience, Promoting Mind-Body Well-being and Increasing Diversity and Inclusivity. Each objective has its own chart and associated timeline of current, near-term and far-term concrete agenda items.
This project partly grew out of a series of meetings held by the College Board of Overseers, a sub-group of the Board of Trustees responsible for the undergraduate institution, in which its anchor administrator, Lloyd, had been helping to guide a conversation over concerns and challenges surrounding inclusivity, diversity and community on campus.
Following these conversations and a presentation by Smith Abbott, Lloyd and Fernández, these three were asked to put together a list of initiatives, programs and opportunities that the College could work to expand upon in the next few years. This “wish list,” as Smith Abbott termed it, was slated to include price tags for what it would take to get the College to a better place in terms of inclusivity and diversity on campus.
Separately, at the May meeting of the full Board of Trustees, Smith Abbott presented a long reflection on what had transpired throughout the year, particularly framed around student stress.
“We discussed what it feels like to not be able to get out from underneath the stressors of day-to-day life as students at Middlebury and what that brought to the floor in terms of what types of support were missing, and what students thought we lacked on campus,” Smith-Abbott said.
These talks on diversity and inclusivity paired with what was surfacing about student stress led to a sense of urgency on the part of the Board of Trustees that the administration needed to discuss these issues and work to develop an action plan.
“We were asked by the Board of Trustees to identify the areas in which we could have the greatest impact and to identify three ‘experiments’ that we could have on the ground in September that would address some of the causes of student stress,” Smith Abbott said.
Smith Abbott emphasized that they weren’t trying to collapse the diversity and inclusivity piece into the rest of the student stress like a problem to be solved, but rather saw a great deal of overlap between the stressors that students brought with them when they came to the College or experienced as a result of being a student in a community that traversed between the realms of academic stress and issues of identity, community, student support and bias.
In what started as a brainstorming session with a white board and a great deal of buzz-words surrounding stressors across campus, Smith Abbott, Lloyd and Fernández began to separate these words into three categories which naturally morphed into the three experiments requested by Whittington.
“We started by seeing how those qualities or stressors settled into three big categories, and then within each category we started to brainstorm both what was already happening, as well as what we could imagine happening this year and beyond,” Smith Abbott said. “We picked one thing from each of those big umbrella categories that we thought we could actually try to make happen this year.”
Due to fiscal year constraints, the items slated for this fall couldn’t be the more substantial ticket items because they were out of sync, and thus not yet included in the budget cycle which starts every January. They furthermore planned to follow through with only the smaller agenda items because the whole community had yet to be involved in the conversation.
“It wasn’t meant to be, ‘here’s what is good for everybody, as we recognized the need for a much broader community conversation, which we have moved forward this fall,” Smith Abbott said. “We were trying to be really thoughtful about which of the agenda items we felt were good, solid ideas to at least try, and which we would have to hold on until more people weighed in on them.”
Thus far this fall, “The Grid” has been presented to the Board of Trustees, the President Senior Leadership Group, the Middlebury Leadership Group, the Community Council and the entire Student Life Division. Students were shown the plan on Dec. 2 and faculty will be shown on Dec. 17.
These discussions have involved a powerpoint on the components of “The Grid” followed by brainstorm sessions in which small groups address what might already be happening on the small scale in order to gauge what efforts are already afoot, perhaps departmentally or in a student organization. After recognizing what was already in place, these small groups have then fed additional ideas into “The Grid.”
“One of the ironies of this is that as this grid grows, there is a danger of the thing itself becoming an overwhelming document, which we are trying to avoid,” Smith Abbott said. “Let’s not stress people out with a thing that is supposed to be helping with stress!”
One of the experiments slated to begin this Winter Term is a storytelling series called “It’s Not What You Think,” a space for staff and alumni to reflect and converse with students on past failures and the twists and turns of life. This is built upon a program Smith Abbott had learned about at a conference and is targeted to be a natural complement to existing storytelling series such as “What Matters to Me and Why” put on by the Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Smith Abbott stressed the need to identify and build upon such synergies within the community.
President of the College Laurie L. Patton reached out to the community earlier this week outlining a list of activities working to create a more inclusive community, including several objectives outlined by “The Grid.” One such measure they have taken is inviting the Posse Foundation to host three on-campus workshops — one for admissions and financial aid staff, one for faulty and administrators and one for student leaders.
According to her email, “These half-day workshops will leverage Posse’s experience designing and facilitating interactive experiences that explore and confront challenging sociopolitical issues facing higher education today.”
In addition to these workshops, the College has contracted Romney Associates to hold four faculty-recruitment workshops designed to boost their goal of further diversifying the faculty.
Among many potential longer term goals is a pre-enrollment program for first generation students or students coming from high school backgrounds where having some kind of summer preparation program could be helpful. Another expensive potential long-term objective is the addition of new CRAs to each commons.
Moving forward Smith Abbott stressed the need to figure out how the conversation will continue.
“One of the important things we’ll need to clarify moving forward is how this conversation will continue,” Smith Abbott said. “What is a mechanism that allows the campus to own this conversation and for it to continue in a robust fashion so that people really think their good ideas are being recorded and acted upon?”
One such mechanism is slated to be a website welcoming community input to further the conversation surrounding these objectives. Such a platform would provide a space where new ideas can begin to take shape and form.
“We are beginning work on a website that will act as a hub for discussion and ideas around issues of stress, inclusivity, resilience, mind-body well-being and more,” said Vice President for Communications and Marketing Bill Burger. “Given the number of initiatives that are being considered and that are in place already across the institution, we felt it would be helpful to the community if we created a modest site to describe these efforts and invite suggestions and comments. I think we all see this as a first step and we’ll continue to evolve the site and our approach to it over time.”
While this project could potentially continue under a working group as a part of Community Council or some kind of hybrid SGA and faculty-staff council, Smith Abbott spoke to its ever-changing nature.
She said, “We’ll need to see which things are really going to stay and what is the space for experimentation. The idea here is to keep things dynamic and open. We want people to have real influence by participating in a process to figure out what really works for Middlebury.”
(12/02/15 9:20pm)
The College joined more than 200 colleges and universities nationwide to sign the American Campuses Act on Climate Pledge to demonstrate support for strong international climate action. President Laurie L. Patton sent the College’s pledge to the White House on Nov. 10 in preparation for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 through Dec. 11.
The pledge reads: “As institutions of higher education, we applaud the progress already made to promote clean energy and climate action as we seek a comprehensive, ambitious agreement at the upcoming United Nations Climate Negotiations in Paris. We recognize the urgent need to act now to avoid irreversible costs to our global community’s economic prosperity and public health and are optimistic that world leaders will reach an agreement to secure a transition to a low carbon future. Today our school pledges to accelerate the transition to low-carbon energy while enhancing sustainable and resilient practices across our campus.”
According to a press release from the White House, all the institutions signing the pledge have already undertaken significant steps toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing campus sustainability and resilience and incorporating environmental action into academic programs.
One of the goals outlined in Middlebury’s pledge is to displace the remaining use of fuel oil (approximately 650,000 gallons per year) with carbon-neutral biomethane gas from a manure digester on a nearby diary farm. Furthermore, the College promises to “continue exploring ways to add new sources of renewable, carbon-neutral electricity sources to power the campus.”
Dedication to sustainability has been an official part of Middlebury’s mission since 1995, when trustees established a set of principles and objectives for the campus. As of today, Middlebury is on track to achieve full carbon neutrality by the end of 2016. The College has already reduced emissions of greenhouse gases by 50 percent from the 2007 baseline. One of the major milestones toward achieving carbon neutrality was the completion of the $12 million biomass gasification plant, which was installed in 2009.
The pledge also cites the ways in which the College regularly engages in a number of different environmental initiatives and projects. The campus-wide recycling center and compost operation, for example, diverts about 65 percent of waste from landfills each year. In 2012, in partnership with local developers, the College installed solar farms on and off campus, which provides five percent of electricity on campus. In addition, students competed twice in the US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon competition. The student-led projects to design and build single-family residential homes operating on only solar electricity and heat finished in fourth and eighth places in 2011 and 2013, respectively.
In addition to college and university campuses, about 81 American companies signed a similar climate pledge to show their support for international climate agreement ahead of the Paris conferences.
(11/19/15 4:39am)
I will be writing at further length on these concerns in future issues, but I thank The Campus for the opportunity to comment now.
