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(06/02/20 4:36am)
Students living within 500 miles of Middlebury who are not returning to campus this fall were asked to reserve a 90-minute time slot between June 3 and 17 to retrieve any belongings left at the college. These students — including seniors who graduated and students intending to study abroad in the fall — can also designate a proxy if they are unable to pick up their belongings themselves, according to Deans of Students Baishakhi Taylor and Derek Doucet in an email sent to students May 22.
Students who live more than 500 miles from campus will have their boxes shipped to them, though the college says furniture and other large items will have to be donated if students cannot pick them up or designate a proxy to retrieve them.
The school has coordinated with Vermont government officials for the staggered, brief return of students who need to collect their belongings stored on campus, according to Director of Health Services Mark Peluso.
“On May 19, Governor Scott made a narrow exception to the 14-day quarantine rule allowing students to enter Vermont for one day only, requiring no overnight stay with no non-essential stops within the state,” Peluso wrote in an email to The Campus.
Bitrus Audu, Ross commons residence director (CRD), said the Vermont government has stipulated that no more than 20% of the student body may return to the college for their belongings at the same time. Audu noted that the college’s plan allows a much smaller percentage to return simultaneously. Only about 10 students or proxies will be on campus during each 90-minute increment. In order to promote social distancing, residential life staff will reschedule students if roommates, suitemates or several hallmates reserve the same time slot.
“This plan is put in place recognizing that it's not a one size fits all, Audu said. “There's definitely going to be a handful of people that, you know, have special case situations, might need reasonable accommodations, exceptions, and we're working with those students to really try to navigate what that looks like.”
To reduce health risks, the college will ask students to abide by a health pledge. Peluso also listed several of the college’s additional requirements, including that each student or their proxy self-quarantines and practices social distancing for 14 days before they come to retrieve possessions.
Two facilities staff members will help each student move out their belongings. Jen Kazmierczak, environmental health and safety coordinator, said the college has implemented several measures to reduce health risks for employees during the move-out process next month. These include social distancing measures and requiring that students and staff wear cloth masks. Employees are also required to complete covid-19 safety training if they are approved to work on campus.
“Middlebury’s priority is the health and safety of our employees and students,” Kazmierczak said in an email to The Campus. “The process will be managed carefully to allow for the safe pickup of personal belongings.”
Facilities staff will also move the belongings of students who are returning to campus in the fall into their new rooms. However, the college will not announce the plan for the upcoming fall — including whether students will be on campus — until June 22.
(05/14/20 10:37am)
The following statement was sent to members of the college administration, as well as the Board of Trustees, on May 8. Signatories are listed at the bottom of this piece.
The piece has been lightly edited in accordance with The Campus’ style guidelines.
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the globe, causing death, sickness, stress and isolation. The parallel economic impact has likewise been enormous. As businesses have shut down, some have chosen to furlough or fire their workers, which has, in turn, led to massive increases in unemployment and economic hardships.
Middlebury has not been immune to the consequences of the virus. Some faculty, staff and students have fallen ill, we’ve lost loved ones, and our work lives have been quickly disrupted and transformed. At the college, there will be greater expenses than revenues this fiscal year and a projected deficit in the tens of millions of dollars next year. What is the best way to deal with this crisis? The Middlebury chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) believes that the solutions we should adopt should reflect the values the college has long espoused in its public statements and deeds.
One place to view the college’s values is through the people it chooses as recipients of honorary degrees. Each year Middlebury College chooses an Honorary Degree Recipient whose aspirations and achievements are meant to serve as role models for our graduating seniors. In 1996, Middlebury conferred an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters on Aaron Feuerstein. Feuerstein was the owner of Malden Mills, the producer of Polartec fleece. The company’s factory was destroyed by the largest industrial fire in Massachusetts. He could have collected the insurance money and retired to a comfortable life, leaving his former employees scrambling to find other jobs. Instead, Feuerstein vowed not only to rebuild the plant, but to continue to pay all his employees their wages and benefits during the construction process.
Could Middlebury follow Feuerstein’s example, one it so visibly honored, as it works through a temporary period of disruption caused by the virus? We believe that it can and that it should. Here’s how.
The AAUP plan: Stop endowment hoarding and create real transparency and faculty governance now
There are adequate funds in Middlebury’s endowment to get us through a 12- to 18-month period without firing staff and reducing the compensation — salaries, healthcare, sabbatical leaves, parental leaves, etc. — of those who work here. The small additional draw down from the endowment would have little long-term negative impact on the institution while providing much needed support for its loyal employees.
There is no principle of financial management, no wisdom of corporate governance or tenet of economics that would argue against an increased draw from the endowment in the face of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.
Yet, all the models Senior Administration is sharing with faculty groups only allow for a 5% draw from the endowment. In reality, we have the ability to use at least 20% of the endowment to confront this crisis. This includes unrestricted funds, the Trustee-designated funds, and funds designated for capital building projects.
Increasing the amount we draw from the endowment to at least 7% would allow us to maintain current compensation levels while weathering the crisis. We propose the college pursue this path instead of widespread austerity.
The so-called “five percent rule,” which has its origins in the laudable desire to preserve intergenerational equity, should itself be reconsidered. There is no ethical reason the current generation of Middlebury students, staff and faculty should bear all of the burdens. In fact, Middlebury has used up to 7.1% of the endowment as recently as 2001/02. Further, the particular choice of five percent, which delineates “surplus” from “deficit,” is itself a matter of some debate: intended to preserve the real value of endowments, there is evidence that it has allowed institutions to “endowment hoard,” and at least one New York Times op-ed has called for an eight percent rule which, if adopted, would transform the conversation on our campus. In this moment of extraordinary upheaval, we must utilize our resources to support the extraordinary education we offer here at Middlebury.
The budget challenges we now confront are not a choice between prudent finance and community values. Rather, we believe that the college must choose a financial path forward that honors the commitments it has made to faculty, staff and students — and to the values it so often endorses in public.
To help ensure that happens, we propose the creation of a collective bargaining process that will allow faculty and staff to negotiate with the administration over compensation and the financial future of the college. A democratic workplace means we must elect a body that is trained and committed to this specific bargaining task during this unique time. We need faculty advocates with a seat at the table who are treated as equals, not merely an advisory board. Such a bargaining committee would have full access to the college’s financial planning resources, and would be able to consult with the larger faculty and staff before big decisions are set in stone. We suggest that the AAUP seed such an organization, as it does at over 500 colleges across the country.
We are concerned about more than compensation, but the well-being of the institution and its future reputation. If faculty compensation is cut — as proposed in all of Senior Leadership’s projections, including the best-case scenario where students return in the fall — faculty will be forced to recalibrate their time and energies. Already, there is precarity among our community members who are supporting their families on one salary or who are living dual lives in order to maintain careers alongside their academic partners. Less money will translate to lower productivity because, necessarily, faculty will find alternative ways to generate income, such as freelance work, to pay their rent and mortgages and to support their families.
All of this means that our students will get less: fewer faculty with engaged research agendas, less faculty time and energy, and fewer faculty who feel they are being treated fairly by an institution that claims to put education first. The administration talks of “the Middlebury Way,” and relies on the rhetoric of “family” as they ask us to sacrifice for our jobs. This line of reasoning uses our own best intentions against us even as it obscures the reality that Middlebury is a nonprofit entity that has generated nearly a billion dollars in a sheltered endowment. We must ask: what is this money for if not to secure the well-being of the workers and students who make up the Middlebury community?
Middlebury’s future gets decided now
What we do now will define the future reality of working at the college. Research in the American Economic Review shows that when endowments experience negative shocks, hiring and benefits are taken away. When endowments experience positive shocks, these are not returned. We need full transparency and collaboration between our stated financial planners and the faculty and staff. To make decisions while only informing a small portion of the faculty and staff — some of whom were appointed by the administration or elected for unrelated committees — undermines faculty governance. Decisions about capital improvements, real estate acquisitions or even “brokering” a dorm building in Monterey, Calif. should not be made without the entire faculty being able to see the actual long-term costs of such projects.
As a community, we must ask ourselves what we value most — and act accordingly. Our AAUP chapter believes that high-quality education and maintaining our fair compensation for labor should be our primary concerns. We need a financial plan that reflects our mission and will rise to the occasion, not set us back a decade. We look forward to implementing such a plan alongside our faculty, staff and administrative colleagues — one that utilizes our endowment responsibly and ethically, to ensure a vibrant future for the college and those who work and learn here.
Signed,
Rachael Miyung Joo, American Studies
Marybeth E. Nevins, Anthropology
Ellen Oxfeld, Anthropology
Peter Matthews, Economics
Andrea Robbett, Economics
Tanya Byker, Economics
Julia Berazneva, Economics
Jeffrey Carpenter, Economics
Carolyn Craven, Economics
Akhil Rao, Economics
Tara L. Affolter, Education Studies
Antonia Losano, English & American Literature
Yumna Siddiqi, English & American Literature
Marion Wells, English & American Literature
Rebecca Kneale Gould, Environmental Studies
Erin J. Davis, Film & Media Studies
David Miranda-Hardy, Film & Media Culture
William Poulin-Deltour, French & Francophone Studies
Laurie Essig, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies
Hemangini Gupta, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies
Catharine Wright, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies and Writing Program
Carly Thomsen, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies
Natalie Eppelsheimer, German
Florence A. Feiereisen, German
Guntram H. Herb, Geograpy
Tamar Mayer, Geography
Carrie Anderson, History of Art & Architecture
Edward A. Vazquez, History of Art & Architecture
Febe Armanios, History
Maggie Clinton, History
Darién J. Davis, History
Joyce Mao, History
Jacob Tropp, History
Max Ward, History
Linda White, Japanese Studies
Enrique Garcia, Luso-Hispanic Studies
Gloria Estela González Zenteno, Luso-Hispanic Studies
Patricia Saldarriaga, Luso-Hispanic Studies
Luis Hernán Castañeda, Luso-Hispanic Studies
Irina Feldman, Luso-Hispanic Studies
Fernando S. Rocha, Luso-Hispanic Studies
Priscilla S. Bremser, Mathematics
Michael Olinick, Mathematics
Frank Swenton, Mathematics
Kemi Fuentes-George, Political Science
Justin Doran, Religion
Matthew Lawrence, Sociology
Jamie McCallum, Sociology
Linus Owens, Sociology
Rebecca Tiger, Sociology
James Chase Sanchez, Writing & Rhetoric
Hector Vila, Writing & Rhetoric
The signatories are members of the Middlebury branch of the AAUP.
(05/14/20 10:00am)
As college employees geared up last summer for another presumably normal academic year, some facilities staff members, frustrated with a lack of communication from upper management and the aftershocks of workforce planning, contemplated forming a union.
Now, only nine months later, nothing is the same.
Efforts to unionize with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) — the trade union that originally approached staff about organizing — are all but dead in the water, many staff say. And the college, which is the largest employer in Addison County, has scrambled to keep its approximately 1,500 employees with full pay during the pandemic until at least June 30.
Yet, as unemployment surges past 20 percent statewide and Middlebury deliberates how college will look come fall, employees are divided. Some workers feel that the crisis has led to a return of the “family feel” that had, according to many, dissipated as the college expanded. The acquisition of the Middlebury Institute for International Studies (MIIS) in Monterey and the growth of the Language Schools necessitated an operations model that became more business-oriented.
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But during the pandemic, administrators have ramped up college-wide communications, reiterating that they are committed to paying staff for as long as possible, whether or not they are able to report to work.
Other staff members — many of them working in facilities jobs in the college’s lowest pay bands — are less congratulatory. Several feel that the health crisis has only exacerbated an already strained relationship between administrators and staff, one that plummeted with workforce planning and years of insufficient pay. Some said they would still really like to see a union happen.
Most of the dozen workers The Campus spoke with for this story said the uncertainty about their employment status and pay after June 30 brought a great deal of stress.
The Covid-19 Pay Bank
Eight days after administrators announced that the college would transition to remote learning, staff received an email outlining the college’s plan to ensure continued pay. Through a new program, the Covid-19 Pay Bank, staff would be provided an additional 21 days of paid time off.
Three weeks later, staff received yet another email that guaranteed pay until June 30, regardless of whether or not workers had already burned through their Pay Bank days. If they had, but still had hours left in their combined time off (CTO), they would dip into those hours.
Rick Iffland, an Atwater dining hall staffer who has worked at the college for 14 years, has used some of his accrued CTO.
“The Covid Pay Bank was very gracious,” he said. “But I’ve had to use my own days now. That’s just the way it is.”
Full-time staff receive eight hours biweekly of CTO, with more hours allotted with years of experience. Staff can have over 288 hours saved up at any given time
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Several staff said they were frustrated about having to dip into their CTO hours.
“Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to be getting a paycheck,” said one custodial worker, who asked to be kept anonymous for fear of retribution from upper management, “but I am being forced to use all my banked CTO time now that the Covid Bank is used up.”
Vice President for Human Resources and Chief Risk Officer Karen Miller said she understands that staff might wish to hold onto their CTO. “But we’re operating in extraordinary times and the plan we developed was a way to ensure our commitment to wage continuity,” she said.
Communicating change
Many staff previously told The Campus that low morale mushroomed during last year’s cost-reducing workforce planning efforts.
Grace O’Dell, a career and academic advisor at MIIS and a representative on the Staff Council, said that staff were sometimes frustrated about how messages were communicated during that process.
“These crisis communications, however, have been really excellent,” she said. In particular, O’Dell said she has been reading the Covid-19 page on the college’s website for updates about the college’s budget, among other news.
Patti McCaffrey, who works in Atwater dining hall and has been with the college for 23 years, says she thinks morale might vary by department, depending on how communicative and understanding supervisors are.
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“Some of it has to do with the people who are managing you,” she said. “Whether you feel like they could be more empathetic to whatever issues you might have is crucial.”
Landscaping worker Todd Weedman agreed that communication depends on management. “I’m going to say the upper administration has been as good as they can be,” he said. “I do feel sometimes communication among supervisors and management could be better, but it could be worse.”
Some staff say that the family feel the college had allegedly lost in recent years has returned. “What more could they have done for us?” said McCaffrey. “Family is a ‘looking out for your own’ sort of thing. And I really feel like they’ve done that the best they can.”
[pullquote speaker="Patti McCaffrey" photo="" align="right" background="off" border="left" shadow="off"]Family is a ‘looking out for your own’ sort of thing. And I really feel like they’ve done that the best they can.[/pullquote]
At the beginning of the remote work period, the college sent out a voluntary online survey to all staff, including those in Monterey and abroad. The survey in part gauged how the 695 staff who responded (45% of the college’s workforce) felt about college communications from the administration.
One comment alluded to a string of stresses staff faced this year. “Please keep in mind that this is a population already fatigued and low morale after workforce Planning, the headaches of a challenging Oracle migration, and now COVID-19,” it read. “We are ready to be inspired. The decisions the college makes in the next two weeks — and how they communicate to and involve staff — will ripple through the Middlebury community for years to come.”
Separately, several staff also told The Campus they are also still frustrated by the pay compression caused by this year’s wage raises.
The college has plans to potentially address the compression, pending the results of a compensation review it spearheaded this year, but that timeline has been affected by dismal budget projections for the upcoming fiscal year. Miller said the review is slated to be finished this summer, and that the college “will consider its findings in context with other decisions we must make in response to Covid-19.”
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The months ahead
Dining hall staff are hoping to return to work once Governor Phil Scott lifts the stay-at-home order for the state, most likely moving to facilities or other departments on campus.
For employees deemed “essential,” like Public Safety officers, work has settled into a new normal. Public Safety Officer Rodney Grant says staff in the department are equipped with personal protection equipment and new protocols: all officers have personally fitted N95 masks; there is only one officer per car; and Parton Health Center, rather than Public Safety, is now transporting students to Porter Hospital.
Staff are now waiting to hear about what will happen after June 30, a decision that will ultimately depend both on whether the college will have students back on campus this fall — which the college will announce by June 22 — as well as a host of financial factors. Miller insisted that wage continuity will remain a priority as the college deliberates on a course of action come fall, but emphasized that the situation at hand is quite severe.
“My biggest concern is that at the end of June they will furlough me,” the anonymous custodial worker said. “Also, if they don’t furlough me, where will they put me? Will I still be able to be where I was, do what I was doing, have the same shift?”
(05/14/20 9:56am)
From a virtual two-hour performance of "Julius Caesar" to a museum tour accessible from your home, the college has transformed its interaction with technology since Covid-19 spurred the transition to remote learning. Behind it all is the Information Technology Services (ITS) team, which has been working tirelessly to ensure smooth technology access for the college community.
As the world adjusted to the crisis in early March, the college’s technological infrastructure was well-prepared. Many resources already take place online, such as Webmail, OneDrive, and Canvas. During the two-week spring break, ITS worked to engage with online vendor partners, and updated licenses to meet the growing need.
Even with those existing services, Vijay Menta, associate vice president and chief information officer for ITS, shared that home internet access has been a significant issue for the community. Faculty and staff residing in rural Vermont have experienced connection instability. To respond, the ITS team has put forward best practices to suggest improvements and contacted home internet providers to stay updated.
Prior to Covid-19, the college had 80 VPN users per day. Now it has 500 VPN licenses, peaking at just over 300 concurrent users per day—an increase of 300%. By the end of spring break, these measures were put in place for users.
Another major concern for the ITS is internet equity for the community.
“We were working on this (internet equity) from the very beginning, because we knew there will be students who don’t have the full internet access that is needed,” Menta said. “We have a program in place where we can recommend students to the student financial services for help.”
The department also recommended that professors remain flexible with students and adopt an asynchronous mode of learning. The department has loaned around 80 laptops, webcams, headphones and other accessories to students.
The financial needs behind these decisions were immediately approved by President Laurie Patton and the cabinet. There was also a savings offset as travels to conferences and professional developments were canceled, and the money was used to purchase VPN licenses in response to growing need. ITS also accelerated its planned laptop purchases, to ensure sufficient inventory in stock for anyone who requests them.
Virtual learning posed other challenges for academic instruction, and ITS partnered with Digital Learning & Inquiry (DILINQ) to work on innovating modes of learning.
“We’re trying to do as much as possible in a virtual manner, and if we notice something is needed for students to learn in a different way, we are able to look into those opportunities to see if we can provide that assistance too,” Menta said.
Not surprisingly, Zoom is the most popular service ITS has implemented during the transition remote learning. Prior to Covid-19, the college hosted roughly 700 Zoom meetings per week. In contrast, 8,000 Zoom meetings have been held since May 1. On a typical day this May, there are 500 meetings per day on a weekend and between 1,250 and 1,500 meetings on a weekday. The college currently owns 6,000 Zoom licenses, and has added 3,300 new users since early March, when it already had 2,600 active users.
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“Not only are we prepared to use Zoom, ITS is prepared to use alternative devices such as [Google Meet] and [Microsoft Teams] if backup is needed,” said Menta.
One way ITS supports virtual learning is through the help desk Zoom room. Traditionally, ITS help desk has staff and student helpers located in the Davis Library on campus. Now, this service can be accessed via Zoom.
Checko Mkocheko ‘22 worked at the help desk on campus and continues to do so from home. Mkocheko feels fortunate that the help desk is one of the few jobs that can go fully online, and he receives compensation as he did prior to Covid-19.
“I do not deal with personal computers, network issues, printing issues, software issues and classroom support anymore. I help clients mainly on credentials and accessing college online resources,” said Mkochecko.
Menta warned that there has been an increase in phishing attacks since Covid-19, with people posing as genuine organizations to compromise users’ accounts.
“I want people to be very vigilant about this, and when in doubt, when you don’t recognize the sender’s email, please make sure you contact infosec@middlebury.edu, which will help you protect in the long run and keep our data safe and secure,” Menta said.
But with new multi-factor authentication in place, Menta is confident in the college’s internet security.
The workload for ITS has been high as members of the team act in support of many members of the community. On top of the Covid-19 response, ITS is also planning to go live with its Oracle implementation as part of the Green Mountain Higher Education Consortium initiative. While other projects are on hold, regular maintenance, security, and upgrades must go on.
“As the leader of the group, one of the things I make sure is to categorize our tasks into must-do, important, and defer,” Menta said. “We need to better prioritize to make sure we are helping the community on Covid-19 responses and remote learning first. We are in a much more steady place now than we were in March.”
Menta expressed gratitude for his team, and their partners at the college, including DLINQ, communications and marketing, and other departments to make sure services are delivered. He is thankful that students and faculty have been working patiently with ITS, and emphasized that they are here to help with any questions.
(04/30/20 10:02am)
Increased financial stress has put the future of three public Vermont colleges in question as the Covid-19 crisis continues to unfold. On April 17, Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges System Jeb Spaulding announced plans to close both the campuses of Northern Vermont University (NVU) and the Randolph campus of Vermont Technical College (VTC). Deemed financially necessary, with projections of high deficits and particularly low enrollment, the plan was to be effective in fall 2020. Spaulding withdrew the plan for immediate closure days later amid public backlash, and announced his resignation on Tuesday.
Under Spaulding’s original plan, liberal arts programs at Northern Vermont University would be moved to Castleton University. Technical programs at Vermont Tech would continue, albeit in different locations, while its main Randolph Center campus would close. The colleges’ administrations would also be restructured. The consolidations would result in over 500 employee reductions altogether. In the wake of Spaulding’s resignation, the fate of the colleges remains unclear.
Financial struggles
The April 17 press release from the Vermont State Colleges System explained that the Covid-19 crisis will exacerbate a long history of financial struggle within the system, and that these challenges demand a major reorganization. Projections estimate an operating deficit falling between $7–10 million this fiscal year; $5.6 million of that deficit will come from refunds issued to students following the shift to remote learning. For the 2021 fiscal year, Spaulding forecasts a deficit of nearly $12 million even with “substantial” budget cuts. Furthermore, residential campuses of VSC are expecting expected to see a 15–20% decline in enrollment if they remain open.
Significant financial issues were a major concern even before the Covid-19 crisis introduced further complications. A white paper released by the chancellor’s office in August 2019 outlined challenges such as the level of state funding and demographic shifts. The report cites data that Vermont ranks 49th in the country in state funding for full-time students. State appropriations have also declined significantly as a revenue source since 1980, according to data provided in the report. In fall 2018, VSC requested $25 million in additional funds on top of annual appropriation. The state legislature ended up providing an additional $2.5 million.
The report also focuses on shifting demographics as a major challenge to small New England colleges. The number of Vermont high school graduates has decreased by 25% in the past 10 years. Births in Vermont have been in steady decline, and 2015 saw the lowest birth rate since the start of the Civil War. The report indicates that demographic trends are unlikely to change soon.
These demographic trends translate into declining enrollment, a key contributor to the colleges’ financial struggles. In the past five years, enrollments have declined at every VSC college except Castleton. There were 540 empty beds in the VSC system for the 2018–2019 academic year, which represents a 20% vacancy rate. In addition to demographics, the report cites competition from online education providers like Southern New Hampshire University, exacerbating declining enrollment.
Public backlash
The chancellor’s plan was met with a surge of mobilization and public backlash in the days following the announcement. Protests are taking place online across New England due to Covid-19 restrictions, though some protesters are also demonstrating offline.
A Facebook group protesting the closure, started by Ben Luce, a professor of Physics at NVU-Lyndon, has since grown to more than 10,000 members. “Most of the effort is focused on contacting legislators and the Governor, and raising public awareness as well,” Luce explained in an email.
Since the state has already downsized its programs, state funding is the obvious solution for Luce. At the least, Luce would look for the legislature to appropriate an increase of $25 million in funding. “Such an investment would pay itself back many times over,” he wrote. Luce believes that the legislature is not meeting state law which requires public colleges to be funded “in whole or substantial part” by the state. Currently, only about 17% of VSC’s revenue comes from the state.
Patrick Wickstrom, a student at NVU-Lyndon, formed an online petition protesting his school’s closure, which has garnered nearly 50,000 signatures. A member of the men’s tennis team and residential life at NVU, Wickstrom explained that closure would be “simply devastating'' to faculty, staff and students. “A lot of people are connected to this school and the institution, and were very disheartened to see this even remotely be a proposal,” he commented.
Wickstrom was concerned about the uncertainty of the chancellor’s proposal. Wickstrom, who is double-majoring in Climate Change Science and Atmospheric Science, does not know whether his program could continue at Castleton. “I know a lot of students personally in my program who would have transferred schools or put a hold on college,” Wickstrom said.
A perfect storm
State Senator Ruth Hardy (D-Addison), a resident of East Middlebury who has worked in education and serves on the Education Committee, agreed that state funding for higher education is a major issue. Since taking office in 2019, Hardy has pushed for scholarship funding to increase enrollment at Vermont’s public colleges.
Hardy notes that Vermont has a particularly strong K-12 education system, but is not doing enough when it comes to its colleges. “We have one of the highest high school graduation rates in the country, but we do not do a very good job of getting those high school graduates to go to college,” she said.
Covid-19, she explained, has put the chancellor in a difficult position. “For institutions like the state's colleges, which were already vulnerable and already sort of deterring, the Covid crisis is just absolutely devastating.” Hardy concludes that demographic challenges, insufficient appropriations and the Covid-19 situation amounted to a “perfect storm.”
However, Hardy feels that higher education issues in the state have been prevalent for many years, noting the closure of four private Vermont colleges in 2019 and 2020. “I feel like we need to have a broader conversation about higher education in Vermont in general,” said Hardy. She hopes to help public and private institutions towards a more sustainable future.
Hardy and others stress the value of the state colleges in rural and economically challenged regions of Vermont. Caledonia County, where NVU’s Lyndon campus is located, sits at 12 out of Vermont’s 14 counties for per capita income.
“The colleges provide a higher education opportunity for those who wouldn't otherwise have it, and they are also economic drivers for the region,” said Hardy. According to her, Vermont State Colleges educate many lower-income and first-generation students.
Luce agreed that keeping the State College System intact would boost Vermont’s economy after the Covid-19 outbreak subsides.
“The truth is that our state colleges are actually fantastically efficient institutions that provide enormous and direct economic benefit to our state,” he said. “Energizing [state colleges] going forward would be an enormously effective way to both keep young people in our state and help with the recovery from this terrible pandemic.”
Luce explained that the colleges both produce a multitude of jobs and foster students who will later work in the community. Wickstrom said that Burke Mountain relies upon Lyndon students for its winter operations.
“I don't know what better investment that the state has,” Wickstrom said of the state college system. Wickstrom cites a statistic that the two NVU campuses bring $113 million per year in economic outlook, a high “return on investment” from state appropriations.
Looking ahead
Although the original closure plan has been shelved, an aggressive response continues. Wickstrom is planning to work with a larger group to present before the VSC Board of Trustees. Luce plans to continue to advocate for NVU and the other colleges, but acknowledges that damage has already been done. “The proposal has already severely damaged our prospects for enrollment next year,” he said. Many colleges, including financially stable institutions, are already predicting lower enrollments because of Covid-19.
The VSC Board of Trustees originally planned to meet in a special meeting on April 27. This meeting was canceled, and the Board will meet at a later date to discuss the decisions ahead.
Editor’s note: Ruth Hardy is married to Middlebury College Professor of Film and Media Culture Jason Mittell, who is the Campus’s academic advisor. All questions may be directed to campus@middlebury.edu.
(04/30/20 9:58am)
Before coronavirus hit, a lot of people thought 2020 was going to be their year. It was certainly going to be college treasurer David Provost’s. Following years of scrupulous financial planning and cost reducing, he had walked back the college’s once-astronomical deficit to a sustainable level. At the end of Fiscal Year 20, which stretches from July 1, 2019 to July 1, 2020, the college would only be $4 million away from its goal. By FY21, it would hit its target.
But the seismic shift of Covid-19 set those projections back. Middlebury’s budget deficit is now back to where it was in 2017, with a $13 million loss projected for this year. In the next fiscal year, which starts this summer, that figure could hit $30 million, provided classes stay online. To avoid drawing on the endowment, the college will cut as many costs as it can while also accruing as much revenue as possible.
Provost, however, remains optimistic that the college can lower its deficit by FY22. And he says that projections would have been much worse had the college still been operating under its earlier numbers.
“I think our ability to weather through 2020 is fully reflective of the work that the entire institution did the last four years,” Provost told The Campus.
The last five years
Middlebury has been trimming the fat on its operating costs for years. In 2015, the school faced a $16.7 million deficit, which Provost said totaled $33 million when accounting for overdraws on the endowment (a practice the college is now trying to avoid for the sake of the endowment’s health). Campus reporting chronicled rising financial aid costs and flawed tuition policies as some of the many reasons for the hefty deficit.
That year, it laid out a “Road to a Sustainable Future,” which included a plan to break even on the budget — and generate a small surplus — by 2021. Last year’s workforce planning process was one of its more conspicuous cost reduction efforts, cutting staff and faculty costs through an at-times controversial voluntary buyout program for staff and incentive plans for faculty.
Overall, the cost reduction efforts were successful, prompting the college in 2018 to accelerate projections for breaking even to this year. But this spring, the college announced that unexpected healthcare costs in 2019 created an approximately $4 million gap that still needed to be closed. Provost previously told The Campus that those healthcare costs could in part be due to the timing of workforce planning — people might have taken advantage of the college’s insurance plan to get medical procedures they have been putting off, for example, before taking the buyouts and separation plans.
Additionally, Provost said the deficit was partly due to the staggered nature of the workforce planning process, as some employees — including all the faculty at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) who took the incentive plans — still had to finish up the year before taking the buyouts.
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Today
Those existing losses, in conjunction with the $9 million in losses for FY20 as a result of the coronavirus, contribute to an estimated $17.3 million in losses for this fiscal year. However, offset by cost-saving components like reduction in travel and food expenses, this deficit actually totals about $13.0 million for the year.
Those Covid-19-related losses come from four main areas: the $7.9 million in room and board refunds for the spring semester; the $900,000 in refunds for study abroad students; the $1 million in lost auxiliary operations from the bookstore, The Grille and other retail operations, the golf course, and the lost last month of the Snow Bowl’s season; and the $7.5 million predicted fundraising shortfall.
The Office of Advancement usually raises between $7–9 million in the last three months of the fiscal year. Now, with reunion canceled, it’s going to be difficult to do that. But the college gave families the option to donate their unused room and board credits as gifts; 19 families have taken them up on this thus far, for a total $83,000 in donations.
The college has also been preparing to embark on a capital campaign. The Office and Advancement and the Board of Trustees will reevaluate the timing of that campaign.
“Our donors and the largest donors in the world have lost a significant part of their wealth,” Provost said. “So that will play into thinking about that.”
The last capital campaign was also launched before a financial crisis, in 2007. It stretched from a five to an eight-year campaign, but ultimately surpassed the college’s target of $500 million.
There is also an estimated $800,000 in Covid-19-related expenses that the college will incur this year, which includes the over $110,000 it put toward helping students get home in March, which included travel expenses and gift cards for food costs.
Despite the recent buzz about the financial footprint of MIIS, Provost said he does not think Middlebury’s financial challenges stem from the institute. “They have been at times, but Monterey has done more to control costs and has been more successful at it,” Provost said. “They don’t have room and board so their FY20 numbers are looking pretty good. They might have a surplus.”
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Looking ahead to FY21
In a recent memo to faculty and staff, Provost estimated the college deficit could swell to $30 million next year. That is assuming the college continues remote learning in the fall and then moves to in-person operations in the spring, and that there is full wage continuity throughout the year.
“If we are able to bring most students back, the lost revenue will be much smaller, and manageable,” he said, noting that they’re prioritizing trying to get as many students back to campus as possible.
So how is the college prepping for next year when everything is up in the air? Contingency budget plans. A lot of them. Provost is working on seven or eight possible plans, which he will present to the Board of Trustees for feedback next week at their May meetings. The college won’t make a decision on what it will do this fall — or which budget plan it will follow — until late June.
Each potential scenario will contemplate its individual impact on tuition, room and board. Provost said that under no circumstance will the college cease operations completely this fall. Doing so could bring the deficit to a whopping $90 million.
Losses from summer programming also factor into the FY21 budget. With some programs not happening at all and others set to be held remotely, Provost said he expects to see $4–5 million in revenue from summer programs, versus the usual $17.9 million the college usually receives from these programs.
Ameliorating losses
The college is now pinpointing how it might mitigate the FY20 and FY21 losses. Some reductions happen naturally: the lack of travel expenses, paired with the reduction in food expenses and other operating costs, will save the college $7.5 million or more. Investure — the firm that manages the college’s investments — has deferred its payments for their fees until June, which also helps.
Other efforts will require more active planning, which is where the Budget Advisory Committee comes in. That committee will make recommendations to the Board of Trustees about where to cut in the FY21 budget.
Each area of the college is currently reevaluating its spending. All departments may only use “essential” or “contractually obligated” expenses for the duration of the fiscal year. The SGA already pledged to redirect hundreds of thousands of its unused funds to staff wage continuity and student emergency support.
The college has also already instituted a hiring freeze, which will apply to all open faculty and staff positions for the foreseeable future. Likewise, the college will not allow departments to fill positions that open up in the coming months, with limited exceptions granted on a case-by-case basis by the Ways and Means Committee.
Typically, employees receive small percentage salary increases each year. The college does not anticipate it will offer those raises in the coming year. It is, however, still contemplating addressing the results of its compensation review — the study it conducted with an external consulting group to gather market data this year. The college is undertaking that review partly to address the increased turnover it has seen over the last two years in positions within the lowest pay bands. In January, it raised wages for staff in its lowest-paid positions as an effort to make itself a more competitive employer amid staff shortages and grievances about low staff pay.
“We may not be able to address the [compensation review] results in the first half of the year, but it remains a priority,” Provost said. Members of the Budget Advisory Committee say they have not gotten an update on the review and that it has not been part of their recent discussions.
If the college continues remotely in the fall, it will have to address a litany of other concerns. Provost has consistently said that wage continuity is a priority for the college, but to continue to pay everyone, it might have to consider reducing all employees’ pay. Already, President Laurie Patton and some members of the Senior Leadership Group have taken pay cuts, per the most recent memo. Provost said employees with lowest wages would be the least impacted by the pay cuts, if they were to happen.
The college will also receive about $1.8 million from the federal government, The Campus reported this week, as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Ultimately, Provost thinks the college can balance the budget by FY22. The effort to balance the budget from a similar deficit took years the last time around, but that was because the college was spending past its means and not taking in enough revenue. This time, revenue, not expenses, is the problem.
Assuming the college can maintain its desired levels of enrollment, Provost said things should even out within the next 12–18 months.
“So when we return to normal, the revenue should go back, too,” he said.
The endowment
Throughout all of this, Provost says he does not plan on drawing more from Middlebury’s endowment than he would have pre-Covid-19. In recent years, the college has been pulling roughly 5.1–5.2% from the endowment — the industry standard for non-profits — and FY20 will be no exception. That amounts to about $57,590,000 this year, taken out in four installments throughout the year.
Provost estimates those numbers will be about the same for FY21. The dollar value of that 5% will be determined by a period of time before December 2019, pre-coronavirus. Any decline related to Covid-19 in the markets, then, would not take effect until FY22.
As for the current state of the endowment, Provost said the numbers are not in the red zone. He said the college has stress-tested the endowment and estimated that if assets were down 30%, it would be in trouble. Currently, those assets are down about 10%.
The college is awaiting the first quarter results of the endowment for the three months ending on March 31. Those results will be presented to the Board of Trustees next week.
Editors Bochu Ding and Benjy Renton contributed reporting.
(04/22/20 9:55am)
Two months into my freshman year at Middlebury, I got mono.
It was … well-deserved. (Sorry, mom.)
During the day, I was intimate with my essays and readings, delicately stapling printouts and color-coded notes. On weekends, I wasted my time at parties kissing guys who, after sticking their tongues down my throat, would lean in and whisper, “Hang on. Gotta piss.”
If that isn’t classy, I don’t know what is.
One night stands should not exist at Middlebury. Frankly, the framework that underpins casual sex is incompatible with Midd’s whopping 2,500 students (give or take a few). Small colleges prevent anonymity — a staple of random hookups elsewhere — and muddle otherwise impersonal sex with interconnected, complicated social undercurrents. At Middlebury, both casual and committed relationships are limited by friendship dynamics and calling arbitrary dibs on class crushes. But these factors alone are not enough to preclude relationships.
On numerous Saturdays nights over the past three years, I have wondered if it finally snowed enough to break all the cell towers in Vermont. That could be the only logical explanation for why my male peers, rather than sending me a text composed of simple words and sentences, opt for a tasteful Snapchat: “roll thru.”
It’s pathetic, but genius.
Snapchat has eliminated the discomfort of expressing interest, enabling men and women alike to send bold, visual messages that disappear within seconds. After a message is opened, recounting the conversation becomes hearsay, protecting the sender’s interests and invalidating the recipient’s claims. In a small university, the app thereby reduces the accountability involved in romantic pursuits, contributing to the uncertainty inherent in intimacy.
Despite these gray areas, many claim Midd is a relationshippy school, citing the recycled admissions statistic that 60% of alums marry each other (the real number stands at 17%, although I’m willing to believe in fairytales if you are). I admit, there are pockets of committed couples (see: much of my friend group). An arguably more relevant dialogue, however, deals with “pseudo-relationships,” a term coined by Leah Fessler ’15 in her thesis, “Can She Really ‘Play that Game Too?’”. Fessler uses “pseudo-relationships” to refer to partners continuously hooking up, oftentimes only with each other, without commitment or emotional investment. Of the 75 Midd students polled, Fessler found only 8% of women surveyed were satisfied in their pseudo-relationships. The majority of male respondents also felt insecure in ambiguous romantic arrangements; despite favoring committed relationships, most men felt their masculinity was judged on the number and attractiveness of their partners. And yet, in an environment where relationships are stunted by booze, insecurities and a rigid social life structure, no one feels comfortable asking the “what are we?” question, much less answering it.
This past fall, I studied abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Compared to Middlebury, St. Andrews is a traditional relationship school; there is a distinct “get to know you” culture centered around (relatively) sober courting. Most refreshingly, I went the entire semester without hearing the phrase “Snapchat message.”
I refuse to believe that I magically became more appealing the minute I went abroad. Sure, I had a “cute” American accent, but I was still loud, bad with rules, and prone to eating food in the grocery store before paying (sometimes I have to scan an apple core at the self-checkout line). These tendencies are wholly un-Scottish, which is why it surprised me that I was disproportionately (not to mention soberly) pursued across the pond.
Unlike Americans, Scots and Brits do not walk on eggshells. There is little space for Middlebury-esque pseudo-relationships in a culture that barely tolerates ambiguity. Once, a British guy I was seeing felt compelled to inform me — unprompted, no less — that he had enjoyed getting to know me but solely wanted a physical connection. Although I liked him and was bummed, at least I wasn’t left wondering how he felt. When we consequently broke things off, it was cordial.
By comparison, defining relationships at Midd becomes a painstaking process of obscuring and ignoring emotions (or the lack thereof). To this date, my personal favorite euphemism for “I just want to sleep with you” — which I received from a male friend during my second year of college — remains, “I’m in love with you but have a lot on my plate, so let’s hook up and talk about it after.” Good one.
To be fair, it isn’t entirely Middlebury’s fault. In many ways, St. Andrews has superior dating conditions: a larger student body, more cafés, a drinking age that permits controlled alcohol consumption in pubs or bars. Still, just like Midd, the town itself is a “bubble,” and so should theoretically incubate the lack of romantic privacy we say prevents “traditional dating” at Midd. And yet it doesn’t.
Hook-up culture is not an inevitable product of 20-something-year-olds, hormones and empty beds. We’ve created it.
The shortcomings of Middlebury’s romantic environment have more to do with the current, limited dialogue surrounding intimacy than an explicit desire for commitment. This is a loss: no matter how casual a fling, everyone wants to be respected. We might take a page out of the Scottish playbook. There is something undeniably sexy about being honest about what you want.
Maria Kaouris is a member of the class of 2021.
(04/02/20 10:01am)
Before I get into the usual business of my review, I’d first like to say that I hope you are all staying well in these chaotic times. I’m doing OK in frosty Minnesota, if not exactly thriving. Below is a summary of how I’ve spent my last fortnight:
George Orwell might have dubbed my routine “Down and Quarantined in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.” I begin each day at 11 a.m., breakfast at noon and try to walk around a lake near my house before dusk sets. At night I watch “Twin Peaks” while consuming buckets of Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Coffee BuzzBuzzBuzz ice cream. Sometimes I’m a renegade. On a whim, I might circle two lakes instead of one; “Mad Men” replaces “Twin Peaks;” I purchase a pint of Chocolate Fudge Brownie instead of my usual Coffee Coffee BuzzBuzzBuzz. Variety is the BuzzBuzzBuzz of life, I suppose.
That’s what I’ve been up to. But enough about me; Let’s talk books.
I’ve recently finished “The Raj Quartet” (1965-1975) by Paul Scott, a novel sequence about the final days of British Crown rule in India during and directly after World War II. The series is about 2,000 pages, and it requires a fair amount of time to read. But Scott’s thoughtful prose and exciting narrative make the quartet an epic worthy of attention.
Another reason to try out “The Raj Quartet” is that it’s super hipster stuff: I only heard about the series a few months ago when I read that Stephen King recommended it. Kudos to Mr. King, because “The Raj Quartet” is usually absent from the “Giant-Books-To-Read-Before-You-Die” articles that one sometimes finds when surfing the web. (Those lists usually go: “Middlemarch” (1872), “Anna Karenina” (1878), “Moby Dick” (1851) and — additionally — “Middlemarch” (1872).)
The quartet’s first volume, “The Jewel In The Crown” (1966), focuses on the August 1942 riots following the arrest of Indian National Congress leaders. In a Southern province, the fictional Mayapore, India, Police Superintendent Ronald Merrrick takes advantage of the violence and chaos of the riots to arrest six innocent men in a sexual assault case that had occurred during the riots. The novel deals with the psychology behind Merrick’s blatantly racist arrests, and the consequences for one of the detainees — Hari Kumar, who’s been having a love affair with a “memsahib,” an Indian term for an upper-class, white Englishwoman.
“The Jewel In The Crown” is the series’ most morose installment, but the author injects more action as “The Raj Quartet” progresses to include scores of new characters in myriad, more varied situations. The proceeding books — “The Day of the Scorpion” (1968), “The Towers of Silence” (1971) and “A Division of the Spoils” (1975) — tell a hectic story of romance and warfare. One minute we’re at a tea party in Delhi, then suddenly we’re at a firefight in Burma. One character begins as a hard-drinking wastrel; at the quartet’s end, the same character commits a heroic sacrifice. Scott’s series has Iliadic ambitions, and one reads the last 500 pages as if they’re 50.
One is first struck with the beauty of Scott’ prose. “The Raj Quartet” tackles the same general themes of colonialism in India as E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” (1923) — particularly in the “Jewel In the Crown” — but where Forster’s writing emphasizes clarity and logic, Scott likes to hint at things, to suggest or even brood, and then to suddenly pull the rug from under our feet.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Scott’s series has Iliadic ambitions, and one reads the last 500 pages as if they’re 50.[/pullquote]
“They found her thus, eternally alert, in sudden sunshine, her shadow burnt into the wall behind her as if by some distant but terrible fire,” goes the penultimate line in “The Towers of Silence.” A character has died, that’s fairly obvious. But what does “shadow burnt into a wall” actually mean? Why “sudden sunshine?” The next thing we learn is that this character died on the same day as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. The Hiroshima explosion was so bright that it left inverted shadows across the city, some by window frames and bridge railings, and some outlining the bodies of people caught in the blast. Through this historical allusion, an individual death becomes a deeply unsettling metaphor.
These books are jam-packed with history, too. In the quartet’s 2,000 pages, Scott gives the reader a fascinating account of mid-twentieth century India: the quartet discuss topics including the Muslim League/Congress rivalry that ramped up during WWII, Subhas Chandra Bose’s Japanese-backed Indian National Army, the creation of Pakistan, the sectarian massacres following the subcontinent’s partition and, most interestingly, the final days of India’s princely states. One learns so much reading these novels, and “The Raj Quartet” — unlike some Midd classes this semester — doesn’t even require Zoom.
But the most admirable aspect of Scott’s series is its lack of illusions about what the Raj represented (Kipling et al.). There’s certainly no love lost for imperialism in the quartet’s finale, “A Division of the Spoils.” “You honestly wonder where [imperial India’s administrators] come from,” says the character Captain Purvis. “Not England, surely?... The fact is places like [India] have always been a magnet for our throwbacks. Reactionary, unco-operative bloody well expendable buggers from the upper and middle classes who can’t and won’t pull their weight at home but prefer to throw it about in countries this….”
This sort of dark humor surfaces again and again in the “Raj Quartet.” Scott’s saying here that India was indeed ruled by some of England’s cruelest people. But, more importantly, he also suggests that the overseers of the Raj’s final days were of a largely pedestrian ilk: second-rate dullards of a crumbling empire.
(04/02/20 9:59am)
Political Science Professor Allison Stanger has extended her sabbatical another year after winning awards that will take her to Stanford, Calif. and Washington, D.C. next fall and spring.
Stanger, who spent this past year as a fellow and visiting professor at Harvard University, will be the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress for 2020–2021. On a separate appointment, she will also be a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) during that time.
She will spend the year working on her new book, tentatively titled “Consumers vs. Citizens: Social Inequality and Democracy’s Public Sphere in a Big Data World,” she said in an email to The Campus. She noted that the locations of her upcoming posts will position her ideally for this kind of work, since she will be close both to the offices of the government and Silicon Valley.
Stanger said she plans on returning to Middlebury for the 2021–22 academic year.
“I’m very grateful to both my colleagues in the Political Science Department and to the administration for their exceptional support, and I am looking forward to returning to Middlebury when my fellowships end,” she wrote. “The experiences I have had these past few years should make me a better teacher and resource for Middlebury students.”
Stanger was injured by protesters during Charles Murray’s visit to Middlebury in 2017. In the fracas that followed the disrupted talk, Stanger, who mediated the talk and escorted Murray out of the venue, suffered whiplash and a concussion.
The following fall, Stanger began what was slated to be a two-year leave. But at the end of the second year, Stanger announced to the Middlebury Political Science faculty and staff her plans to remain off-campus for the 2019–2020 academic year.
Stanger is currently a technology and human values senior fellow at Harvard’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, and is teaching a course at the university (now remotely, from Vermont) called “The Politics of Virtual Realities.” In her email, Stanger added that she was recently appointed to the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
The handbook states that the college does not guarantee to faculty “extraordinary leaves” — leaves that last more than one year — but that the college may grant such a leave when a professor is offered “an unusual professional opportunity.”
Dean of Faculty Sujata Moorti said that the college prioritizes “departmental and college planning in approving leaves.” The Political Science department in particular typically has between two and four professors on leave in any given year, according to Political Science Department Chair Erik Bleich. Next year, only one other professor — Professor Nadia Horning, who teaches in a different subfield — will be on leave.
According to information available on the college’s website, Stanger’s current leave of absence is unpaid by the college. When asked if next year’s leave would also be unpaid, Moorti said Stanger “will be paid by the institutions hosting her.”
The CASBS offers stipends to first-time fellows, and an endowment at the Library of Congress funds the chair position, which pays a stipend of $13,500 per month. Nominees for that position are sourced from a number of individuals and are recommended to the Librarian of Congress by a selection committee.
Bill Ryan, the director of communications at the Library of Congress, characterized the position as one that “supports exploration of the history of America with special attention to the ethical dimensions of domestic economic, political and social policies.” He said the start and end dates of the chairmanship have not yet been finalized. The CASBS position runs September 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021.
Before the coronavirus led to the cancellation and postponement of all on-campus events, Stanger was scheduled to visit Middlebury April 7 to talk about her most recently published book, “Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump,” alongside the New York Times’s David Sanger. The book was fortuitously released this September, the same day House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. The inquiry was spurred by a whistleblower complaint against the President.
In the months that followed the book’s release, Stanger made a number of high-profile radio and TV appearances, and penned pieces for the New York Times and The Atlantic. In February, Stanger was one of about 50 authors to win a Prose Award from the American Association of Publishers for the book, in the category of Government, Policy and Politics.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the location of Stanford University. It is located in Stanford, California.
(03/22/20 1:00pm)
Editor's Note: On April 7, the college committed to continuing staff wages through June 30, 2020, regardless of an employees' accrued time off, through the Covid Pay Bank, or sick leave.
As storefronts and institutions shutter their doors to ward off the spread of Covid-19, thousands of employees are being laid off across the country. At Middlebury — the largest employer in Addison County — the college’s crisis management team has developed a roadmap for maintaining staff wages after most students departed during the unfolding pandemic.
The plan, shared with the community in an email Wednesday, outlines the college’s goal of continuing both staff work and compensation in the coming months, laying out nine “tenets” in support of this objective. This commitment to pay staff in full will “continue to be evaluated on a month-to-month” basis, according to the email.
For many Middlebury employees, from groundskeepers to cooks, employment revolves around the 2,500 students who typically reside on campus. With fewer than 140 students now remaining in the dormitories, much of that work is dissipating. Moreover, the college expects to refund students for these unused services, which creates a gap in financing.
“We are committed to wage continuity as our first priority for as long as possible,” said Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration David Provost in an email to The Campus. “We are doing this knowing that we will be making a significant refund for unused dining and room charges, an obligation that reflects our commitment to our students.”
The commitment to continue paying staff applies to all benefits-eligible employees, meaning both full-time workers and workers who work at least 50%, plus one hour, of a full-time schedule.
Examples of part-time workers excluded under the plan are high school students who work a limited number of hours in the dining halls, according to Provost.
The college’s response to the dwindled demand for certain services is to move some employees into different jobs. As of now, there are around 70 dining employees who will soon be temporarily transferred to facilities. These employees’ work will focus on deep-cleaning college buildings and landscaping, according to Sarah Ray, the director of media relations for the college.
Patti McCaffrey, a cook in Atwater dining hall, is one of these employees who will be moving to work with the custodial team. She said that in the past week, the dining staff cleaned Atwater as she had never seen it cleaned before. Usually, they clean tabletops and floors. This time, they were also disinfecting chair legs and walls. “Usually we mop the floor, but we don’t usually do walls,” she said. “This time we did.”
Some employees expressed worry about continuing with business as usual during a health crisis. One staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from management, cited having a child at home with respiratory problems as a reason for their concern. They fear that continuing to work on campus will put their family at risk.
“All the people who can’t work from home, they are expected to be here, working every day,” they said. “That’s not really safe for us. I have family members who are extremely vulnerable to this virus. I’d much rather be at home with them.”
The staff member said the college has yet to provide protective gear for employees who are still reporting to work on campus. McCaffrey says employees are wearing gloves as usual, but that she suspects masks will be provided if the situation at the college becomes severe.
“We have to feed these remaining students somehow,” she said. “Even if it gets so bad that we’re pre-boxing food and leaving it at their doors. That’s when they’ll probably have us wearing masks.”
The college’s plan also provides a so-called Covid-19 Pay Bank. This bank gives staff an additional 21 sick days to stay home if they or a family member becomes ill with the virus. Staff can use the four weeks without dipping into their regular banks of sick days.
Middlebury’s staff plan for the viral crisis is comparable to other colleges’ plans--and in many cases, it is more generous. Tufts University has committed to pay employees if they need to quarantine, but did not specify how many days they will grant full compensation. Bowdoin College will assess compensation on a case-by-case basis, and advised staff to contact their supervisors for additional information if they become sick.
But staff are now facing another dilemma: childcare, which has long been in high demand in Addison County, even in the best of times. “While I appreciate that [the Pay Bank] is 21 days, the only issue I have is now I have to make the decision to use it in order to take care of my kids or save it in case I get sick,” said Erin Jones-Poppe, the college bookstore manager.
In accordance with Vermont’s mandate to close all “non-essential” childcare facilities, many daycare centers in the Middlebury area have stopped operating.
Otter Creek Child Center in Middlebury closed on Tuesday, March 17. The daycare only had 11 kids on the final day of operation, according to its executive director, Linda January. The center usually has 45.
“I haven’t received any pushback from family members,” January said. “Most families opted to keep their children home before we even closed. They get it.”
The college’s outreach to the wider community also holds uncertainty for staff. In an open letter to the community co-written with other community leaders, President Patton offered some of the college’s infrastructure — such as buildings — as local officials prepare for the worst.
President Patton said the college had already drained the ice hockey rink so that the arena could be used as a “portable hospital, if necessary” during an interview with the Addison Independent. As coordination between the hospital and the college is still in the planning stage, it is at this point unclear how the relationship might impact Middlebury staff’s responsibilities.
Although administrators are already in communication with local health officials, Provost clarified that no staff member would be required to work if there is future collaboration with Porter Hospital. He insisted that the college would only ask staff members to help if needed.
“From my perspective, I think the college is really going to bat for staff and trying to do what they can," McCaffrey said. "When I look at neighbors having to file for unemployment, I feel pretty good about what the college is doing.”
(03/19/20 6:14pm)
In an unprecedented decision meant to address concerns over the global Covid-19 pandemic, the college ordered students to leave campus last Tuesday. While the majority of students were expected to head home, those who wished to remain on campus — because of travel distance to home, high numbers of Covid-19 cases in their hometowns or other reasons — had the option to petition to remain on Middlebury’s campus.
Many who did so, however, were disappointed, as deans tasked with communicating the decisions pushed most applicants to find alternatives. At the same time, most of the students The Campus spoke with expressed understanding of the college’s safety concerns as the number of Covid-19 cases in Vermont increases.
Now, even those who were eventually granted permission to stay face uncertainty about the rest of the semester, as the college contemplates closing its campus to students completely depending on continual reassessments, according to emails sent by deans to students remaining on campus.
From 2,500 to 175
Administrators originally predicted that a few hundred students would be allowed to remain on campus. Ultimately, they permitted roughly 175 students to stay, according to an email sent by President Laurie Patton Saturday night. By Wednesday, March 18, as major U.S. cities instituted lockdowns and the U.S. closed its border with Canada, some students left campus for home; now, fewer than 140 students remain physically on campus, according to Dean of Students Baishakhi Taylor.
Deans were expected to tell students who petitioned to stay whether they could remain on campus for at least three weeks by Friday, March 13, the same day students were originally told to leave campus. The college later moved the departure deadline to Sunday.
The tight turnaround left students who were denied permission — many of whom were confident their situations warranted staying on campus — scrambling to find alternatives. The college advised those who were able to stay with family or friends stateside, which many are now doing, and is offering financial aid to those who need help traveling.
Deans were unable to respond for comment before this story was published. But many of the emails students received from their deans emphasized the importance of getting as many students off-campus as possible due to safety concerns arising from a potential Covid-19 outbreak. The emails encouraged students to exhaust all other potential options before petitioning to stay.
Donovan Compton ’23, a U.S. citizen who calls Italy home, had his petition to remain on campus rejected. With Italy on lockdown, he says returning home to that country’s Veneto region — one of the regions most heavily-affected by Covid-19 in the country — is not an option.
“If I were to actually attempt to go back to Italy … I would most likely not be able to access the country, and in the case I would be let into Italy, my parents wouldn't be able to retrieve me at the airport since the roads are blockaded so as to make driving extremely limited,” he wrote in an email to The Campus.
Compton’s request to stay was denied through a mass email sent to many students in Ross Commons. He said the decision so surprised him that he screamed aloud upon reading the email.
While Compton has family in the states, they are all located in Seattle, another coronavirus epicenter. For now, he is staying with family friends in Massachusetts.
Shahmeer Chaudhary ’21, who is from Dubai, also had his request to stay on campus denied.
“The decision did surprise me,” Chaudhary wrote in an email to The Campus. “I did not feel like I had any room or opportunity to negotiate. In fact, I was told by my dean, ‘You’re welcome to stop by and talk with me about that, but the answer will unfortunately be the same.’ I felt like I was out of options and the administration was unwilling to even hear me out.”
Domestic students also had concerns about leaving campus. Kai Milici ’21 is from Seattle and petitioned to remain on campus. She did not plan to stay there indefinitely, but felt that she needed a few more days beyond the Sunday move-out date to assess whether it would be smarter to return home or to stay with friends on the East Coast.
When Milici’s application was denied she, like many of her peers, reacted with frustration.
“I felt like I was being forced into a potentially dangerous situation,” she said, adding she was stressed by how the required self-quarantine would exacerbate existing feelings of isolation.
But in hindsight, with the possibility of travel restrictions and lockdowns looming in the coming days and weeks, she understands the college’s decision.
Milici has since returned to Seattle, where she said the high degree of social isolation has already resulted in increased stress. She does not expect to be able to leave for “at least a couple of months.” While she hopes to return to the East Coast to participate in summer internship opportunities, she is grappling with the potential that this may no longer be a possibility depending on how the situation progresses.
Tre Stephens ’21 was granted permission to remain on campus. Stephens is from Chicago, Illinois and petitioned to stay due to “extraordinary personal circumstances” regarding his home situation. He explained that he wrote to his dean out of fear, more than anything else.
“I wanted to stress that if I am requested to leave campus, I will literally have no place to go,” Stephens wrote in the email he sent to his dean. “I am honestly scared. Please please please consider letting me stay.”
This past summer, the stove in Stephens’ house exploded, causing a house fire that so completely destroyed the house that his family is currently living with other relatives. Stephens simply does not have a home to return to, he said.
The school initially denied Stephens’ request, instead offering to pay for his travel home. Stephens responded with another plea to stay. In his email, he wrote that he was not able to stay with family and close friends because they said they did not have space for him.
Following this secondary plea, Stephens was granted permission to stay.
Many students allowed to remain on campus have been warned that they may need to return home if the situation does not improve when the college re-evaluates its plan in three weeks.
An email from Assistant Director of Community Standards Elaine Orozco Hammond to multiple students last week insinuated this possibility. “It is possible we will be back in session, or asking people to leave in a few weeks,” it said. “We are taking this one step at a time.”
In that situation, Stephens has no idea what he will do.
“Where will I go? How will I get there? Money? Food? Clean clothing? These are all concerns that rush through my mind,” he said. But Stephens believes that college administrators are doing their best to act in the interests of students.
Other students applied to remain on campus for health concerns. Marisa Edmondson ’20 is from rural Colorado and has severe asthma. This condition compromises her immune system, and makes her particularly vulnerable to Covid-19.
Edmondson’s hometown is a two-hour drive from the nearest hospital, and her health condition posed a serious risk of possible contamination if she tried to fly home, she said. She considered living with friends in Rhode Island indefinitely when the school denied her request, but ultimately decided to road trip home to Colorado, where she will stay in quarantine with her parents.
Jake Guaghan ’22, from Honolulu, Hawaii, was denied permission to remain on campus. In his petition to stay, Guaghan cited the length and difficulty of traveling home and the likelihood that he may be exposed to coronavirus while in airports.
At the time of his petition — last Tuesday — he felt that it would be irresponsible to risk the possibility of bringing coronavirus back to an isolated locale. The denial of permission to remain on campus left Guaghan feeling anxious and scared, but not surprised.
“Throughout my time here, I've realized that American students who don't live in the contiguous 48 are often forgotten by the school,” he said. Students from Hawaii and Alaska face many of the same challenges as international students, he said, but there are no institutional structures to assist these students.
Owen Marsh ’20, from Scarsdale, New York, where there are multiple confirmed cases of Covid-19, has also been denied permission to remain on campus. After a middle school teacher in his town tested positive, many have been placed in quarantine.
Those living in Scarsdale are only leaving their homes when it is absolutely necessary and are constantly maintaining a distance of six feet away from all other people, according to Marsh’s parents. He was surprised, he said, when he received an email alerting him that he would not be able to remain on campus.
“I am lucky enough to have friends who have been willing to house me, but I don't know how long that will last, and I am sure that there are many much less fortunate than me,” Marsh said.
As of now, Marsh plans to move from place to place and avoid returning home. He hopes to be back at Middlebury before May — but at the time, it is unclear whether or not that will happen.
Gaughan’s plans changed constantly throughout the two days following the denial of his request to remain on campus. Ultimately, he has decided to go home. Given the escalating crisis, he is concerned that if he remains in the continental U.S., he would eventually be unable to return home.
During his flight home, another passenger seated in the row in front of Gaughan fell ill. The passenger was quarantined mid-flight and required the assistance of emergency medical services to deplane.
“While no one knows necessarily with what he is afflicted, I couldn’t help but think about how this type of scenario was exactly what I outlined in my petition to stay on campus,” Gaughan wrote in an email to The Campus on Saturday night.
Returning home will also impact the lives of students beyond the possible transmission of Covid-19. Due to the six-hour time difference between Vermont and Hawaii, there is the possibility that Gaughan will need to take his online courses at 2 a.m.
Chaudhary, the student from Dubai, expressed similar concerns. Dubai has a nine-hour time difference from Vermont. He is worried about how this will impact his ability to partake in classes that many professors are planning to conduct in a “video-chat” format.
Chaudhary said he is anxious about the impact returning home could have in the long-term, especially because he is hoping to do an internship in the states this summer.
Jiaqi Li ’22 is from China and, like Stephens, was granted permission to remain on campus. Li was concerned that flying home was not a viable option for her logistically or financially.
“I love Middlebury College dearly and at present, I truly consider this my home, my only home. The news on Tuesday really made me feel as if my world is falling apart, when the support system I rely on is no longer feasible,” she wrote in the email she sent to her dean requesting permission to remain on campus.
If Li’s request to stay had been denied, she felt that the best option would have been to explore housing options in Middlebury, off-campus, with the financial support of the college.
“This is a scary time for all of us. I know many people were sad to leave for multiple reasons, and for some of us leaving has never truly been an option,” Stephens said.
Editor’s note: Jake Gaughan and Owen Marsh are both Opinion editors for The Campus.
(03/19/20 4:30am)
Last Tuesday, a leaked email announcing Middlebury’s move to remote learning spread like wildfire across campus. Before most students could process the possibility of campus shutting down, a few seniors had already begun to organize an impromptu “senior week” of festivities to recognize this year’s graduating class — one that would take place in mid-March, instead of May.
Within an hour, an event titled “SENIOR WEEK” had appeared on Facebook.
“As responsible seniors, we have decided to take things into our own hands this week to ensure that we fulfill our seniorly duties before departing from Middlebury,” read the Facebook event’s description, penned by Tatum Braun ’20.
Close to 500 Middlebury students — with nearly 600 seniors in the Class of 2020 — eventually joined the private event on Facebook. She had no idea it would get so big.
“At that point, I just knew I wanted to make the last few days on campus count,” Braun said, “especially since most of my friends are not returning to Middlebury in the fall.”
Within the first six hours after the event’s creation, 20 students had posted suggestions of events and places for the senior class to get together. One of the first posts pointed out that Two Brothers, a local tavern and bar, opened at 3 p.m., suggesting seniors meet there. By 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the now-ubiquitous “2019.75” graduation year was used as a hashtag on the event page for the first time.
Senior events initially proved difficult to organize. Emotions and logistics collided with anxiety over the abrupt end of the semester. Yet by Wednesday, there were final a cappella concerts and seniors posting “crush lists” on the bulletin board outside Proctor dining hall. Traditions coalesced in their time-honored Senior Week form.
The day of the announcement, Evolution Dance Crew was slated to have a tech rehearsal for its upcoming show. Instead, members gathered to talk through the emotional tumult that accompanied the decision. Someone at the meeting suggested finding an alternative way to showcase all the work the group had been putting in since the first week of J-Term.
The result? A Thursday flash mob on Proctor Terrace.
“We didn’t really do much advertising — it was mostly word of mouth between friends — and we chose a time where Proctor is usually full so people walking by would see it,” said Evolution Co-President Abla Laallam ’20. Laallam is one of the eight seniors in Evolution.
“The word of the week was ‘processing,’” said Jack Litowitz ’20, a senior and the treasurer of the Senior Committee. “It’s hard to even feel sad or happy when you’re in shock. But despite that, we filled the week.”
On Saturday morning, many seniors trekked to the football field to watch the sunrise — a time-honored Senior Week tradition. They held a flag that bore “2019.75” for photos.
In hindsight, some seniors fear that the turbulent week — filled with “high highs and low lows,” according to Litowitz — may have flouted the CDC’s recommendations of avoiding large gatherings.
"I am a bit regretful looking back for starting a group that seemed to encourage drinking during days when Covid-19 was already significant,” Braun said. “But I had no idea the group would become so big, and I just wanted to make the final days at Midd as positive as possible.”
Student festivities may have been partially responsible for vandalism that occurred on and off campus toward the end of last week. Some of the destruction occurred at Two Brothers Thursday “College Night,” which is typically made up of majority seniors.
Although the college has promised to re-evaluate the public health crisis in early April, many seniors fear they will not return this spring.
Yet members of the Senior Committee — the eight seniors and two administrators responsible for events during students’ final year at Middlebury — remain optimistic.
“Seeing so many schools out-right cancel graduation is making me grateful for Middlebury,” Julia Sinton ’20.5, one of the Committee members, said. “We’re not a 30,000-person state school. That makes it possible to be a little more flexible in last-minute planning.”
As of now, all of the college’s reservations, catering bookings, and plans for Senior Week remain intact. It is also possible that the originally planned week, slated for May 19–24, could be postponed. But members of the committee are also aware of how the situation is “in flux.”
Until the Senior Committee receives the official word from President Laurie Patton that commencement cannot take place due to Covid-19, its members will continue to plan. “For now, it’s business as usual,” Litowitz said.
It’s difficult to imagine a postponed celebration topping the collective spirit and ingenuity that characterized this month’s improvised iteration. Seniors seized the fleeting week to celebrate the end of their truncated college career — all 3.75 years of it.
“The whole week was marked by an unbelievable coming together of students,” Litowitz said. “Not once was there an event this week where there was a guest list.”
(03/05/20 11:09am)
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ESSEX JUNCTION — Exactly 31 years after his first mayoral win in Burlington, Vermont Senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders held a rally at Champlain Valley Exposition to cap off Super Tuesday.
The fairground venue, which expected an audience of around 10,000, filled up Tuesday evening with Sanders supporters who came to watch primary results roll in all evening. The boisterous crowd listened to speeches by Bernie himself, Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman, Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan and Jane Sanders, the Senator’s wife.
“[This campaign] is about transforming this country,” Bernie told the crowd. “This movement started right here.”
The movement Bernie is leading, Jane said, is characterized by community — one that should feel familiar to Vermonters. “[Vermonters] taught me that being a community organizer is more important than being a politician,” she said.
Bernie also made multiple appeals to the working class at the rally, a hallmark of his campaigning style.
“What we need is a new politics that brings working class and young people into our movement,” he said in his address. He added that the inclusivity of his campaign will help achieve high voter turnout, echoing hopes of creating a coalition similar to Obama’s in 2008 and contradicting claims that he would not be able to generate a sufficient voter base to beat President Donald Trump this November.
Bernie addressed the prominence of billionaire campaign funding, which has been a fixture of other Democratic campaigns.
“We’re going to tell [Michael Bloomberg] that in America, you cannot buy elections,” Bernie said, contrasting Bloomberg’s campaign spending with his grassroots efforts. Bloomberg, who spent $500 million of his own money on his campaign, according to AP, dropped out of the race Wednesday.
The rally also featured live music by the Mallett Brothers Band, a Maine group who was joined onstage by bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman of the jam band Phish.
“Phish and Bernie — two things I love,” said Billy Stark ’22, a Middlebury student who drove up to attend the rally. “What draws me to Bernie [is that a] lot of his campaign is built on raising class consciousness, something that’s sorely missed in [this] country. It’s been inspiring to see so many people in America embrace Bernie’s platform.”
Stark said that he first started supporting Bernie in 2016 and has supported the candidate since.
Loyalty was certainly one of the themes of the night, and Bernie invoked his Vermont roots to talk about some of his most stalwart supporters.
“We have come a long long way,” Bernie said, referencing his position 30 years prior. “I want to thank the State of Vermont and all of the people in Vermont for years and years of love and support."
By the end of the night, Bernie had secured four out of 14 Super Tuesday states, including California, which holds the most delegates, and (unsurprisingly) Vermont. Though Bernie had hoped to win Texas at the time of his address, the key state was later won by Biden.
(03/05/20 11:04am)
Oliver “Ollie” the camel, for years an unlikely Route 7 celebrity and Vermont’s resident two-humped treasure, died on the evening of Feb. 21 at his farm in Ferrisburgh, Vt. He was 17 years old.
Ollie, a seven-foot-tall, 1,500-lb Bactrian camel often described as a “ham for the camera,” prompted countless roadside double-takes as he meandered around the pastures at Round Barn Merinos farm. Passersby and locals alike frequented Ollie’s fence, where he was known to mosey away from the sheep herds to nuzzle cheek-to-cheek for pictures and snacks.
“He wants people to acknowledge him and he’ll run and play for attention,” Round Barn Merinos farm owner Judith Giusto told The Campus in 2010. “People stop all the time.”
Ollie had been feeling under the weather in the week preceding his death, according to his Facebook page, though the ultimate cause of his passing was not reported. The online announcement was met with a deluge of love for the camel, with hundreds of comments and photos pouring in from his wide-spread admirers.
North Chittenden resident Kirsten Bouchard shared that, after her daughter was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of two, she began driving up Route 7 to Burlington every three months for doctor’s appointments.
“In the beginning these trips were hard — but the highlight was to look for Oliver — and if he was there in the field it was a little celebration,” wrote Bouchard, whose daughter is now 17. “We will still think of him every time we drive by. He is etched in our lives!”
Brandon, Vt. resident Louise Marrier expressed her sorrow in a statement to The Campus, describing her whole family’s adoration for Ollie. “When we got to the ‘spot’ we would look to see if the camel was out. It was just so unique to see a camel in Vermont,” said Marrier, whose children are now grown. “My husband and I would still look for Ollie. The drive will not be the same.”
Giusto, a shepherd and fiber artist, adopted Ollie from Wisconsin in 2002 when he was just a few months old. She raised Ollie among the farm’s herds of Merino sheep and alpacas, the unlikely bunch grazing together for nearly two decades. Although Giusto adopted the camel partly for the novelty of it, she also incorporated his hair and down into her knitwear which was sold at stores and galleries across Vermont.
“I cannot keep his fiber in stock,” Giusto told the Addison Independent in a profile of Ollie in 2017. “People eat it up. They come in all the time and ask me if I have anything from the camel.”
Although the New England countryside may not have seemed a likely habitat for Ollie, whose species of camel is native to the Gobi Desert in Eastern Asia, his down coat was well-equipped for the Vermont winters. Ollie always looked at home among the sheep in his pasture, a contentment he passed along to his devotees.
“I will miss you terribly,” wrote Middlebury resident Scott Bourne on Facebook. “I commuted up and down [Route] 7 for MANY years and you were ALWAYS the bright spot of my drive. I know there are hundreds of people who feel the same!”
Middlebury students are also heavy-hearted at the news of Ollie’s passing.
“He meant everything to me, really,” said MacLean Kirk ’21. “The amount of joy that I got out of seeing a fuzzy little camel on the side of the road — I mean, why else would I drive up Route 7?”
It wasn’t hard to notice Ollie’s popularity over the years, but Giusto has been stunned by the love and support that Ollie has received in his passing. “I now realize he is bigger than I ever thought he was,” she told the Associated Press.
Although Ollie is already dearly missed among his countless friends, his signature humps will live on in memory among the curves of the Green Mountain hills.
(03/05/20 11:02am)
If the two thumb-size polyhedral gold beads didn’t have an accompanying museum tag explaining their origin, many would not recognize them as Han dynasty (25-220 CE) adornments from China. Indeed, when most people think of Chinese antiques, their minds go immediately to beautiful Qinghua porcelain. Little attention has been paid to Chinese gold — until now. Curated by Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture Sarah Laursen and now on exhibit at the Museum of Art, “Lost Luxuries: Ancient Chinese Gold” is an attempt to showcase these ancient Chinese gold artifacts.
Laursen became fascinated with Chinese gold when she was completing her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked with ancient Chinese gold artifacts from Liaoning, a province in northeast China. After completing her doctorate, she broadened her research to look at Chinese gold across the country as new archeological sites emerged. That’s when she met conservator Donna Strahan, with whom she explored the technology behind the Chinese Gold Cicada Plaque, named after its shape.
The Cicada plaque inspired more curiosity in other potentially forgotten gold objects that American museums have in their collections. “There was so much [information on Chinese gold artifacts] in the US collection that nobody knew that was there,” said Laursen. In order to meet international standards, all antiquities purchased by the museum must have left the country of origin before 1970. To learn where qualified antiques are located today, she and her students went through domestic historical records, including the study of 20,000 records of the Caro Archive at Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.
Laursen was surprised by some of her findings. “I found out that the person behind that the single largest collection [of Chinese gold] in the United States was really a woman who never gets any credit,” she said. “She was referred to as Mrs. Charles Stinson instead of her actual name, which was Helen Pendelton Winston. That is tragic to me.”
Ms. Stinson donated numerous gold objects to the Minneapolis Institute of Art after the passing of her husband, who was a Minneapolis native and traveled extensively in Europe.
After preparatory work, Laursen visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Arts, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017 to look at objects in person. Many objects of this exhibit, such as a Zhou dynasty necklace, a Han dynasty gold box, a Sui/Tang dynasty Buddhist sutras and a Tang dynasty Rosette, are on loan from these respective museums.
When Laursen thought she had a full checklist for the exhibition, unexpected news struck: Christie’s would hold an auction titled “Masterpieces of Early Chinese Gold and Silver” in September 2019. After viewing its catalogue, she was immediately drawn to two polyhedral gold beads, originally from Dr. Johan Carl Kempe’s collection in Sweden. “I would do anything to have those,” she recalled herself thinking. True to her words, the museum had the winning bid on a Xianbei gold plaque and two polyhedral gold beads from the auction. The museum did not disclose the objects’ price to The Campus, but according to Christie’s public records, the museum paid $37,500 for the plaque and $60,000 for the beads.
The exhibition not only highlights the beauty of the showcased objects, but also zeroes in on goldsmith techniques and recent archaeological discoveries to create a comprehensive learning experience for its visitors with different technologies such as Esri StoryMaps and a Holosonics Audio Spotlight.
The use of technology in exhibitions stemmed from 2020 Vision: Seeing the World Through Technology, an initiative under Andrea Rosen, curator of the Fleming Museum of Art in 2016. Laursen explained that the curators decided on the strategy because technology can be adapted to fit a variety of museum types, science institutes, history museums, art galleries and many more.
The curation of the exhibition has been extremely gratifying, according to Laursen. She said that this exhibition, in addition to raising public awareness, also sparked other museum curators’ interest in Chinese gold.
“The most rewarding is knowing that I’ve changed the fate of those objects,” she said.
“Lost Luxuries: Ancient Chinese Gold” will remain on display at the Middlebury College Museum of Art until April 19.
(03/05/20 11:01am)
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is an anti-slavery novel written in 1852, eleven years before Abraham Lincoln’s historic Emancipation Proclamation. It aimed to characterize enslaved African Americans as dutiful, loyal, pious and undeserving of their inhumane plight of bondage. With this simultaneouly compassionate and piteous depiction, author and abolitionist Harriett Beecher Stowe attempted, with some considerable success, to sway the hearts and minds of Americans who supported slavery, persuading them to see the institution as one that birthed many hapless victims. The book, some 500 pages long, is available in print and as an audiobook on OverDrive, and is melodramatic, generously doused in Christian themes and a historical wonder.
As perhaps with any work, when approaching this text, it is important to conjure up its historical context: at the time of the book’s publication, slavery had a cultural and economic foothold in the United States for over 200 years, and largely defined the shapes of many lives, black, white and other, in the South. This likely meant that, as with our prisons today, for example, there was a broad variety of sentiment regarding slavery amongst the American populace: vociferous support, acceptance, indifference, ambivalence, abhorrent disgust, etc. Stowe was writing for an audience that held all of these views.
Beyond this, when encountering the moral pathos of the work, it’s important to hold in mind the centrality of the Christian church and religious engagement in late 19th century cultural life — a time replete with revivals and broad, regular church attendance. Most everyone was within a pebble’s throw of a sermon, likely every day of the week and Stowe’s most effective position then, as a white woman, was in pulling at her readers’ heart strings and Christian sentiments as her political power pre-suffrage would not have equaled that of a man’s. White American women’s voting rights would not arrive until 1920. And, moreover, in terms of literary work, remember that while literacy and access to books was likely lower overall for the average American, the competing media of entertainment then were perhaps fewer in the absence of television, cinema, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, et al. So there is a lot to be “read” when encountering this work. The cultural lens, to say the very least, was different.
There are several overlapping storylines in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and they mean to represent the voice of both the benevolent and the masochistic master, the Southern slave owner and the Northern abolitionist, the long-suffering enslaved and the fugitive in flight. It’s “good” in that the work achieved its goal, becoming one of the most popularly read works of its time, influencing both popular and political opinion and being adapted to many formats beyond the print work. Read by 21st century eyes, however, I must say it’s excessive in its pleadings; it includes caricatures, not people; and it feels too long. But I am thankful for its existence and the ways in which it helped to usher in a new era of freedom for my ancestors and other Americans.
I’d recommend it to American history majors, certainly anyone in black studies and, of course, anyone studying pre-antebellum literature. For more works like this, see “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead, “The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War” by Andrew Delbanco or anything by James Walvin.
(02/27/20 11:43am)
Presidential primary in Middlebury
Polls for the presidential primary will be open in Middlebury on March 3, 2020, from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Recreation Center, 154 Creek Road, Middlebury, Vt..
What is the presidential primary?
The presidential primary is a series of state-by-state inter-party elections to nominate a presidential candidate from each party to appear on the ballot in November. Although President Trump is virtually uncontested in the Republican primary, Vermont has three Electoral College delegates to offer the top-voted Democratic candidate in a winner-take-all contest.
How do I vote in Vermont?
Polls for the presidential primary will be open in Middlebury on March 3, 2020, from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Recreation Center, 154 Creek Road, Middlebury VT 05753. All those registered to vote in Middlebury can show up at any time during this period. No ID is required – your name will be on a list at the polling place. Expect to line up, state your name and possibly address, and cast a ballot.
What if I’m not registered to vote, or am unsure of my status?
You can check whether or not you’re registered to vote in a certain state on vote.org. If you’re registered elsewhere, you may need an absentee ballot, which can be requested on a state-by-state basis. Unfortunately, it may be too late to request one in the mail from your home state. Luckily, if you’re still determined to vote in the primary, Vermont has same-day online registration available to all residents including students.
Who can I vote for?
Whether you’re registered to vote in Vermont or another state, the primary ballot will look relatively the same. Vermont is an open-primary state, which means you don’t have to declare a party affiliation beforehand and can choose to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary at will. If you choose to vote in the Democratic primary, you can choose from the eight remaining viable candidates or a write-in, including Vermont’s own Senator Bernie Sanders.
Town meeting in Middlebury: Australian Ballot
Polls for the Middlebury “Australian ballot” will be open in Middlebury on March 3, 2020, from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Recreation Center, 154 Creek Road, Middlebury, Vt.
What is the “Australian ballot”?
The Australian ballot is a part of Middlebury’s annual Town Meeting Day, though there’s no meeting involved. Unlike the “floor meeting,” the ballot is a paper yes-or-no vote and will take place alongside the presidential primary vote at the Middlebury Recreation Center on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020.
Who can participate in the Australian ballot?
Any voter registered in Middlebury is eligible to cast a vote. Residents are not required to have attended the Town Meeting Day “floor meeting” to vote in the Australian ballot.
What will be on the ballot?
The town of Middlebury released a “warning” for the six issues that will be presented on the ballot. They are as follows:
- Should an amount of up to $2,500,000 be issued to finance construction of water system transmission and distribution improvements surrounding the Court Square area?
- Should an amount of up to $2,000,000 be issued to finance refurbishment of flood resiliency measures?
- Should an amount of up to $850,000 be issued to rehabilitate the former wastewater treatment facility and related surrounding amenities?
- Should an amount of $5,000 be issued to the Turning Point Center of Addison County to assist them in aiding Vermonters in recovery from substance abuse and addiction?
- Should an amount of $5,000 be issued to the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity (CVOEO) to assist them in aiding town residents in need of support regarding housing, fuel and food?
- Should nominees for town official positions be elected as required by the Middlebury Town Charter?
Hattie LeFavour ’21 is a local editor for The Campus.
(02/27/20 10:55am)
Exploring the role of education in a time of global uncertainty, an interdisciplinary panel and Q&A served as a follow-up to writer and climate activist Naomi Klein’s Feb.13 talk. Moderators Hannah Laga Abraham ’23 and Ivonne Serna ’23 asked five faculty members from across the disciplines — Carolyn Finney, scholar in residence in environmental affairs; Jamie McCallum, professor of sociology; James Sanchez, professor of writing & rhetoric; Kirsten Coe, professor of biology; and Tara Affolter, professor of education studies — to discuss their fields’ relevance in the midst of the climate crisis.
The event aimed to create an ongoing dialogue on environmental issues. The overarching question guiding the conversation was, “Why are we here?”
“Being at an institution that is deeply enmeshed in the systems perpetuating this crisis doesn’t give us an excuse to avoid these conversations,” Serna said. “It makes it our responsibility to have them.”
Dan Suarez, professor of environmental studies, opened the panel by asking what exactly it would mean to reform institutional pedagogy in light of the increasing severity and scope of compounding environmental changes.
Affolter and Finney both discussed the importance of intersectionality in engaging with issues of climate change.
“We first need to look at whose voices matter, who’s in the room to ask the questions, and who’s not here and why,” Affolter said. “Part of the importance of our place here is to decenter ourselves and learn to care beyond what we know and understand.”
Finney urged her colleagues and the audience to consider the history of marginalized groups — many of whom are now disproportionately affected by climate change — in environmental discourse.
“I keep hearing the term, ‘state of emergency,’ but there are people who have been living in a state of emergency for the past 400 or 500 years,” she said.
McCallum emphasized the importance of including the sociological lens in climate change analyses. “There is a social crisis that has to do with alienation, isolation, division, and loneliness that is influencing the climate crisis,” he said.
Sanchez spoke about the impact of rhetoric in environmental discourse.
“There’s a difference between being convinced and being persuaded,” he said. “I could be convinced that climate change is real, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to actually get out and do anything.”
Finney said that persuasion will only come by making climate change personal to everyone. She said that means finding emotional links with others who may not agree.
“If someone told me they were skeptical about climate change,” she said, “I wouldn’t ask them why — I would ask them what they value and what they prioritize,” she said. “Skepticism from climate change arises because people have fears about something else in their lives.”
During the Q&A, the panelists responded to questions about how to move from white guilt to white accountability.
“I see moving from guilt to accountability as a personal question, but also one that can be reflected in our pedagogy,” Coe said. “I think it has to do with investigating and understanding the origins of our privilege and being interested in those questions.”
(02/13/20 10:59am)
I expected to write this column under vastly different circumstances. Today, Thursday, February 13, should have marked the start of Middlebury’s semester-long study abroad programs in the bustling Chinese metropolises of Beijing, Hangzhou and Kunming. Over two weeks ago, I finished a month-long intensive language program and was looking forward to traveling with my classmates on our new year holiday break and visiting the Snow and Ice Festival of Harbin and the ancient Mogao Grottoes of Dunhuang.
Instead, I sit writing this piece at home, having repatriated back to the U.S. and a week into self-quarantine. The new year travel period, known as chunyun, is usually the largest annual human migration in the world. Normally, close to 3 billion trips are made over the 40-day period as workers across the country return to their families to celebrate the new year. And yet my new year holiday, like many others’, ended only two days after it started, train tickets refunded and plans upended.
Beyond holiday cancellations, the spread of the coronavirus has invoked a sense of fear and xenophobia towards Chinese around the world, causing division and provoking often discriminatory attitudes in shops, restaurants and college campuses. As countries have closed their borders to those from China in an attempt to halt the spread of the virus, disinformation spread through the media has resulted in a perceived global crisis.
So how did we get here?
On Jan. 16, Middlebury students studying abroad in China received an email from Global Rescue, indicating that the “U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ha[d] issued a Watch Level 1 Alert.” We were advised to “be aware and practice usual precautions” for an “outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, preliminarily identified to be caused by a novel (new) coronavirus.” It was not until the following week, however, on Jan. 21, when I began to focus on the coronavirus outbreak shaking China to its core. The virus was and is believed to have originated in Wuhan, the sprawling capital of central China’s Hubei Province and home to 11 million residents.
I visited Wuhan in the summer of 2017 and had fond memories of my time there. Under the blazing heat, I enjoyed dishes of reganmian — hot dry noodles — as I climbed the Yellow Crane Tower for a view of a city larger than New York or London. More than 500 Americans have been evacuated from that same city since the beginning of the outbreak.
From our position in Beijing — over 600 miles away — our group initially felt a sort of immunity to this new disease that few could confirm exact details as to its source and spread. And yet as cases began to pop up in Beijing and throughout the country (as of now, the virus has spread to every region in China), we began to echo the sense of fear and paranoia felt by our Chinese counterparts.
During the final week of our J-term program, residents of Beijing donned masks and started to cancel new year plans. We watched as a typically joyous time transformed into a grim one. Wuhan and the surrounding area went into lockdown and quarantine. Residents in Beijing rushed to the supermarkets and pharmacies, buying every face mask and hand sanitizer in sight. The Chinese government China made an impressive response to the coronavirus’ spread, shutting down tourist attractions nationwide and attempting to limit travel on the country’s extremely popular rail network. The effects of the virus were felt on a person-to-person level as well. On the eve of Chinese New Year, I had the privilege to be invited to a local friend’s celebration banquet. A depressing undertone filled the air of a usually lively restaurant, as the family next to us removed their masks only to eat.
The following day, I made the decision to continue with our small group’s trip up north to Harbin. After analyzing the situation as it stood at the time, I believed that the risk of anyone in our student group contracting the virus was still quite low. However, the country remained on high alert. China’s supply of thermometers seemed to quadruple as in every public place, temperature checks became ubiquitous. Even outside walking around Harbin’s Snow and Ice Festival, tourists wore masks as security guards pointed thermometers at every entrance.
Still, a day into our trip we received an email from Middlebury’s study abroad office, instructing us to return to Beijing and gather in our dorm hotel to await further instructions. The rapidly changing situation meant that each day brought new restrictions nationwide — intercity bus services suspended, the official new year holiday extended, schools and universities cancelled until further notice. Many of our Chinese counterparts spent upwards of a week at home, with friends in Harbin cancelling dinner plans in fear of spreading the virus. Upon arriving back in Beijing, myself and my classmates were all placed in separate single rooms to undergo 14 days of health screening, since we came from outside Beijing. This consisted of three temperature checks throughout the day: one in the morning, one at noon and one at night.
On the few occasions I ventured out during those days, I saw a city unlike the Beijing I had seen before. China’s capital had begun to show early signs of a “ghost town.” Many gated neighborhood communities in Beijing sealed themselves off from the outside. Taxis and cars sped along Beijing’s usually congested streets, with most people inside in fear of spreading the virus. Restaurants closed and dozens queued outside one of the only open eating establishments, hoping for a supply of fresh vegetables to bring home.
On Jan. 29, we woke up to notice from Middlebury that the college had made the decision to suspend all programs in China for the spring semester. The days that ensued consisted of trips to the bank and cell phone store, closing accounts and refunding phone plans. Our group of 24 dwindled as students left on flights operated by airlines that were constantly announcing cancellations. On campus, movement became more restricted as security guards required us to register and inform them of our whereabouts whenever entering or leaving campus. Fast food and takeout became the norm for meals, as they were the only establishments open and involved minimal amounts of close contact. Takeout drivers crisscrossed the city as bags of food piled up in restaurants, waiting to be delivered.
After 37 days in China, I was among the last Middlebury students to leave. On the final night before my repatriation, I walked around an eerily quiet dorm building. I mentally prepared to cut my semester abroad short by more than three months and wondered when I would return.
Leaving China is a privilege. I know that for many in the country, leaving is not an option. Many of my local counterparts have friends and family affected by the coronavirus epidemic. People who have visited mainland China in the past 14 days are currently unable to travel to the U.S. Fear around the global spread of the coronavirus has fueled racism and xenophobia around the world. These thoughts are misinformed and those who believe them fail to understand the vibrancy and diversity of China, its culture and its people. After completing my 19th trip to the Middle Kingdom since 2006, I have every motivation to return. Why? Because this country has given me hope, opportunity and energy, and we should give it the same.
Benjy Renton ’21 was The Campus’ senior local editor this fall.
(02/13/20 10:57am)
Since the arrival of Andrew Cassel, the college’s new director of social media and content producing, Middlebury’s social media platforms have taken a step closer to the everyday lives of its students, professors and staff. Cassel arrived at Middlebury after 11 years of experience as a higher education social media director at the University of Alaska, with a philosophy of connecting followers with the everyday happenings on campus.
“My tone is what people are doing here, to find the day-to-night life of someone at Middlebury,” Cassel said. “I look to tell authentic stories about what goes on every day. This helps prospective students see themselves here, and graduates see their giving efforts continue on.”
Since his arrival, Cassel’s emphasis on authenticity has been particularly evident on Middlebury’s Instagram page, @middleburycollege. Previously, the page curated occasional posts from professional photographers who mainly shot images of the college’s architecture, celebratory achievements and important announcements. This January, under Cassel’s, the page featured more casual images and videos from a J-Term class in which students explained a project they were working on. Another post captured a message, “I’m sad sometimes,” scrawled on a wall in BiHall, with a caption reminding students to seek counseling help when necessary.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B78-tsRBjAk/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
https://www.instagram.com/p/B7eDOvkBI8T/
Cassel says he tries to post raw and relatable content, which he hopes will speak, in particular, to prospective students.
“It’s making a student, no matter where they are in the world, see themselves here in this school,” Cassel said. “They should be able to see someone doing something they’re interested in who looks like them.”
To find worthy content within the community and also gauge interest from his target audience, Cassel uses a skill he calls “social media listening,” where he actively seeks users’ engagement with Middlebury to find issues to address.
“I look at what people are saying about Middlebury on various platforms,” Cassel said. “If there’s an issue out there that needs to be addressed, then I pass it along to the people who need to see it.”
However, Cassel’s more personal approach is not reflected well through social media algorithms such as “likes” on Instagram, which have significantly declined under his watch. He says he is not defeated, though, and is persevering with the outlook that value in social media comes from more than superficial engagement through likes .
“Personally, it bothers me, but my experience tells me it’s just an algorithm,” Cassel said. “Even if it’s only 500 people who like it and not 1,200, I know these people saw it and engaged with it, and that meant something to them. It’s not how many people see it, but the value of these people seeing it.”
One of the projects Cassel feels most passionately about is Energy2028, which Cassel believes best exemplifies the value of his work.
“Middlebury is on the forefront of movements such as Energy2028,” Cassel said.“And it’s a project that I can use the institutional accounts for, to focus all the efforts, from students, faculty, and staff, and share the message out.”
Cassel is the first director of social media and content producing at Middlebury. Before his arrival, many people shared the responsibility of managing the college’s social media. His role falls under the purview of the college’s Office of Communications, which is based in Kitchel House on College Street.
Cassel’s influence on social media strategy, particularly Instagram, has received mixed responses from students. Some find the familiar approach to lack aesthetic qualities of professional photography.
“While the new content is interesting to current students because we see our classmates featured, prospective students want to see professionality exemplified in a college’s social media, and curated content can achieve this,” Abby Schneiderhan ’23 said.
Other students appreciate the content’s intimate perspective into daily life at the college.
“I always read the whole caption on Instagram posts because it’s about something I wouldn’t have known otherwise,” Niamh Carty ’23 said. “I think finding a balance between professional and community content is important to creating a well-rounded image of the college.”
Cassel hopes that students can engage with Middlebury’s social media by using #middleburycollege.
