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(04/15/15 3:57pm)
You are dropped suddenly into a strange Tim Burton-style world with nothing but empty pockets and one objective: survive. Welcome to Don’t Starve.
Don’t Starve is a survival horror game that was released in 2013 by Klei Entertainment. The goal of the game is given in the title, and also includes avoiding the insanity that slowly creeps on at night and fending off the creatively horrific creatures that hunt you in this new world. The realm of Don’t Starve is a beautifully dark place. Just about the only thing in the game that doesn’t look like it wants to kill you are the Beefalo herds which later serve the player as a source of protection and warmth.
Don’t Starve is a refreshing look at the survival genre because it keeps its initial level of difficulty well into a play through. Getting your character to a spot of relatively comfortable living takes a significant amount of time and is no simple feat to complete before the fall of the first winter. This maintained focus on survival is a nice contrast to other survival games where the goal switches from surviving to flourishing after a relatively short period of time. Even after you establish a sizeable group of farms or animal traps around a base, a lot of your time is focused on maintaining those resources. I also enjoyed that the game allows you to implement multiple modes of survival. For example, you can grow your own food by building small farms. However, these are of no use during the harsh winter when everything stops growing. You can also build a system of traps for small animals like rabbits and birds, but these require a lot of maintenance and need to be checked often. The last and probably least efficient way to feed yourself is the way of the hunter-gatherer. This mode requires you to travel the world searching for berries, carrots and smaller monsters that you can easily kill (there are not many of them).
Don’t Starve presents players with plenty of challenge, which is why many people like the game. However, I thought they went a little overboard in some areas. For example, combat is simply unfeasible in most situations you find yourself in during the game. The enemies need only two or three strikes to kill your character and the click-to-swing combat system does not leave you enough mobility to defend yourself from their attacks. This means you often simply have to run to the nearest group of Beefalos to transfer your enemy’s aggression onto another target. There are other ways to get around this difficulty, but they all involve indirect combat and something else fighting your battles for you.
As much as I enjoyed the extended survival phase of Don’t Starve, it runs into the same problem that all other survival games do and that is almost definitive to the genre. This is the problem of what to do once you can survive comfortably. After a while you are just walking around collecting more food for yourself. The sense of urgency is lost because you have growing stockpiles of provisions for yourself. Minecraft and similar games deal with this by offering the player the freedom to build things. Don’t Starve attempts to solve this problem by introducing more complex recipes for magical items that can act as weapons, reduce hunger, etc. However, the raw materials for these items are extremely hard to come by and will most likely result in the end of your game at the hands of a very large nightmarish creature.
This past December, Klei Entertainment released a multiplayer version called Don’t Starve Together. This brought me back to the game because I greatly enjoy playing with other people. I played a lot with friends over the past February break and this collaborative version did not disappoint. It removes a lot of the urgency from the experience because you can do twice the amount of things in the same amount of time. This removes a lot of the anxiety from the first winter, which can be quite daunting in the single player version. It also frees you up to attempt some of the harder feats without fear of bringing your character to an early end.
I really enjoyed Don’t Starve for its fresh look at the survival genre and its high level of difficulty. Its strange world drew me in and challenged me in ways other games did not. Its multiplayer expansion only made the game more fun. Overall, I give Don’t Starve an 8.0 out of 10 and Don’t Starve Together an 8.5 out of 10.
(03/18/15 5:28pm)
This past Saturday, March 14, downtown Middlebury was transformed by thousands of people who gathered for the Seventh Annual Vermont Chili Festival. Chili Fest has been ranked one of the Top 10 Winter Events by the Vermont Chamber of Commerce. The event went from 1p.m. to 4p.m. Proceeds from this event support Better Middlebury Partnership and the Vermont Food Bank. The chili was provided by over 50 restaurants and caterers from around Vermont. To enter as a chili booth, teams had to make at least 15 gallons of chili.
Activities included chili tasting, balloon animals, street performers, a beverage tent and live music provided by The Grift.
Participants in the event paid $7 at the door ($5 in advance, children under eight were free) and received a voting token and a spoon. They then were able to walk down Main Street and sample chili from the many different booths there. After deciding which was their favorite, participants were able to vote with their token for the People’s Choice Award Winner.
A panel of six chili judges were also at the event, and they voted on six different categories of chili which included: veggie, beef, chicken, game, kitchen sink and pork. Winners all received cash prizes and then competed for the Best Overall category, which received a cash prize of $1,000.
Judges for the event rated chilis on a score sheet that included criteria such as aroma, taste and texture.
“It’s tough,” said chili festival judge Bill Snell, owner of Tourterelle. “There’s a lot of good ones.”
For Sarah Pollack, a judge from Burlington, last Saturday was her first time judging the Vermont Chili Fest, however she had previously judged an indoor chili fest.
“I do make chili at home,” said Pollak. “My daughter tells me that…my epitaph is going to read, ‘Has never gotten chili right.’ That makes me quite the qualified judge.”
This year the Vermont Chili Festival was extremely popular, and noticeably crowded. “The event was too crowded for our liking this year,” said Peggy Sax, from Cornwall, VT. Sax has attended three chili festivals, and also commented that this year seemed like a younger crowd. Duncan Levear ’15, a three-time chili festival participant, also noticed a crowd increase. “I think there are more people here this year. It’s more popular. I think the lines are longer.”
Although teams needed 15 gallons of chili to enter in the festival, several ran out early on in the event. The Fire and Brimstone booth made close to 15 gallons, and ran out by 2:30 p.m. G.W. Tatro Construction, Relay for Life, Connor Homes, WhistlePig and the Bearded Frog all also made around 15 gallons and ran out before the event was over. Rosie’s made 30 gallons, 15 of both of their flavors, and also ran out.
“I’ve never dished out 15 gallons of chili in an hour and a half,” said Cody March, who was working at the G.W. Tatro Construction booth. “I’ve never dished out 15 gallons of chili period.”
Some booths anticipated large crowds and made much more than 15 gallons. Our House (Twisted Comfort Food), made 120 gallons (20 gallons for each of the six categories).
Todd Raymond, who was working at the Two Brothers booth, said that it took the restaurant three days to make their chili, and that probably about six people were involved in the process.
Some organizations use the popularity of the Vermont Chili Festival for publicity. Casey Harlow, for example, passed out beads for Relay of Life. “I’m here to publicize for our event on April 11 and help pass out the chili,” said Harlow.
Kris Lawson, owner of Curve Appeal in Middlebury, had a sign up advertising free bathroom use during the Chili Festival to help publicize her store.
“I went to Costco and got tons of toilet paper,” said Lawson. “A lot of people will maybe come in and go, ‘Ooh, I didn’t know that this was here.’ Or my other hope is that the conservative people who are a little frightened and don’t know what it is and don’t want to walk down the big scary steps will come and go,‘This is nice.’”
The Vermont Chili Festival had a large showing both from students and local families. Activities such as balloon animals appealed to a younger crowd, while the beer tent was only open for those over the age of 21.
“The beer was good,” said Arnav Adhikari ’16. “They had Drop-In. I love Drop-In.”
Middlebury College students also have a tradition of being involved in the Vermont Chili Festival. Last year the winning team was the men’s cross-country team. The festival also draws on students for volunteers.
Kyler Blodgett ’17 was a volunteer this year. “My job involved being at the check-in table for tickets, marking people off the prepaid list and doing cash for tickets that are being bought right now, giving them their chips and their buttons, telling them how it’s laid out,” said Blodgett. He found out about the volunteer opportunity through a Middlebury Community Engagement email.
The Vermont Chili Festival in Middlebury allows students from different regions than New England to sample Vermont chili.
“Coming from the West Coast, I’ve never really experienced a real chili like they have here at the chili fest,” said Henry Thompson ’17. “I like how it’s such a celebration of a folky, you know, agricultural, community based food.” Thompson has been to the Chili Festival for both of his two years at Middlebury, and says that he plans on making four out of four. “Honestly, chili fest is the highlight of Middlebury spring every year.”
(03/18/15 1:56pm)
Nobel Laureate Carol Greider gave a lecture last week on how she helped solve one of molecular biology’s fundamental mysteries: why are germ cell lines immortal?
In the 1960s, biologist Leonard Hayflick noticed that adult human cells in a Petri dish can only divide 40 to 60 times until they stop growing. This discovery uncovered a paradox: we are all products of cell lineages that go back millions of years and cell divisions, but our adult cells can only divide a limited number of times. How do germ cells, which are the reproductive cells passed on by parents, reset this ticking biological clock?
Carol Greider discovered the answer in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley while working in the lab of Elizabeth Blackburn, who shares her Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Just before Greider’s arrival, Elizabeth Blackburn had discovered an important genetic element called telomeres.
Telomeres are protective sequences of DNA at the end of our chromosomes. Due to the peculiarities of DNA replication, the ends of chromosomes shorten every time they are replicated. Telomeres are a non-coding buffer zone; when chromosomes shorten, telomeres are whittled away instead of important genes. Telomeres also attract important binding proteins that prevent the ends of different chromosomes from joining, and stop harmful DNA enzymes from digesting DNA. Just as shoelaces begin to fray when their plastic tips fall off, chromosomes begin to decay when their telomeres shorten.
Elizabeth Blackburn’s observation explained why adult cells have a limited number of cell divisions: their chromosomes shorten and their telomeres disappear. But how are germ cells able to regenerate their telomeres and pass on healthy telomere fortified DNA to their offspring?
Greider hypothesized that there was an enzyme capable of elongating telomeres in germ cells. She investigated the elongation mechanism with the model organism Tetrahymena, a single-celled animal from the protazoa kingdom. To search for the enzyme she collected extracts from the cells, and added them to artificial telomere sequences (repeating TTGGGG nucleotide bases) to see if they were elongated.
“After about nine months of trying variations on experiments, we found our first strong evidence for telomere elongation,” Greider said. “An 18 nucleotide telomere ‘seed’ was elongated with a repeated sequence that was six bases long – precisely the length of the TTGGGG telomere repeat in Tetrahymena. Now we had a biochemical assay that we could use to determine if this was a new telomere elongation mechanism.”
Next Greider hunted for the telomere elongating protein’s gene and for its mechanism. She suspected it used DNA’s relative, RNA, as a template to extend the telomere ends. She added RNA degrading enzymes to the protein extract and tried her experiment again: the telomeres didn’t extend.
“The RNA experiments indicated that activity was eliminated when RNA was degraded, implything there was an RNA component,” Greider said. “Liz and I felt that the best way to really show that an RNA was involved was to find the actual RNA. So I went into the cold room to try and purify the enzyme.”
After several years of work at UC Berkeley and at a fellowship at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, NY, Greider discovered the structure of the telomere enzyme, its gene and its mechanism. For this she was awarded the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009.
Greider named the telomere elongating enzyme telomerase, an unusual name for an enzyme.
“We first called the activity we identified ‘telomere terminal transferase’ because it was transferred telomere sequences into termini, but later shortened it to ‘Telomerase,’” wrote Greider in her biography on the official Nobel Prize website. “My friend and fellow student Clair Wyman and I would joke around in the lab a lot. Claire pointed out the name was too long and suggested various humorous names as alternatives. Names were further discussed later that night over a few beers and telomerase was one Claire had proposed initially as a joke. She thought it was funny, but Liz and I both liked it.”
Greider verified her discovery of telomeres and telomerase through experiments with telomerase deficient mice. She created a telomerase “knock-out” version of mice in which they lacked the enzyme telomerase. The mice were able to develop and have offspring normally for the first four generations, but the fifth and sixth generations of mice had growth defects. The sixth generation was completely sterile. The results aligned with her theory. The telomeres of the mouse reproductive cells diminished in each passing generation, until they were too short and their genetic information was damaged. When she mated the fifth generation mice with control mice so that their offspring would have a version of the telomerase gene, the sixth generation of mice was able to regenerate their telomeres. The experiment neatly summarized her decades-long and Noble Prize-winning work on telomerase.
The College is fortunate to have hosted several excellent lecturers this year, including two noble laureates. It is incredible not only to learn about their discoveries, but also to see the people behind the science and hear the stories that led them to their insights.
(03/18/15 1:41pm)
It opens with a view of sand. Dark tan and flashing in the sun’s rays — this is clearly the desert. The camera pulls up and shows heatwaves emanating from the sparkling sand, and behind a hill the large sun beats down on the land. The yellow sky is striped with clouds. The camera then pans over the landscape and comes to rest on a small figure in a brown robe, face hidden in shadow. This mysterious creature stands up from his rest in the sand, and you take control, moving him over the sand that crunches and slips under his feet. You climb a hill and on top of that hill is a view of a massive expanse of scorched land. Rising in the distance, breaking through the layer of clouds, a mountain stands imposing with a light shining out of the top. No words are said, no text or instructions are given. This is Journey. Your only goal is to reach the mountaintop.
When I first bought this game in early 2013, it was already a year old. It had received critical acclaim and had won several Game of the Year awards from different websites. But I never thought to give this small game a chance. It doesn’t have intense gameplay or a huge, breathtaking story. It doesn’t have explosions or guns. It doesn’t even have a score, or anything that could be called a “traditional” gameplay loop. It has puzzles, but even calling it a puzzle game is a little too restrictive for what Journey is. It relies on being open-ended, presenting a world to the player without context or barriers. It wants you to explore the desert, to find the hidden secrets throughout it and to forge your own path toward the mountain.
But I didn’t think I wanted that. My exposure to gaming had been almost exclusively made up of well-defined games with traditional gameplay loops. The idea of an “art game” sounded foreign and unenjoyable to me. But I gave Journey a try anyway.
And what I found was not so much a game as a canvas. Journey’s world is unbelievably beautiful, especially for a game now three years old. It is, in a lot of ways, the PlayStation 3’s crowning jewel in art. Its desert feels alive in a way that I never expected, with the wind periodically whipping up sand and the desert ruins feeling appropriately weathered and ancient. Each area you go to has a different puzzle, and as you progress, you acquire runes that grow your scarf, permitting you to jump higher and reach even more interesting places.
But there is no backstory here. You never do learn who this little creature is, or why he wishes to travel to the mountain so badly. Everything is learned from small hints in the world. Perhaps you find a painting on a wall in a ruin, and you decide that the figure is a citizen of a past civilization, left behind after a calamitous event. Or perhaps you see the flying creatures and believe that your creature and these flying animals are partners in a nomadic lifestyle, searching the desert for sustenance and purpose.
The point is that there is no limit to the number of stories Journey can tell. Its storytelling is so effective because there is no one correct plot. This game succeeds because it gives the player the tool to make the world his own, to fill it with his imagination.
Of course, the game wouldn’t have a fraction of its impact without having at least competent gameplay, and Journey goes above and beyond here as well. Its puzzles are simple but striking, and its set piece moments create awe or even fear as you guide the creature through dangerous confrontations and environments. And after you complete each puzzle, you know you are moving ever closer to your goal. The mountain, invariably visible in the distance, stands as a constant reminder of your journey.
Sometimes, when you are in the midst of a puzzle, you will hear the telltale sound of one of the creatures jumping or activating a switch. It took me completely by surprise when it happened the first time, because there is no other indication that Journey is a multiplayer game. But indeed, when I looked around the world, I found another little figure bounding along and trying to solve the same puzzle I was working on. There is no way to communicate with another player except by emitting one single sound, and you never see the other player’s name. But this player and I decided to solve this puzzle together, and soon we became makeshift friends. It was a relationship that took us all the way to the end of the game, where it enhanced one of the most moving moments I have ever experienced in video games. In a game that empowers you to fashion your own story and fill out the world with your own thoughts, this sort of relationship becomes entirely your own, and not a tool of the game. It is unique in that way, something that few other games had attempted at that time. It makes you care about your partner in a way that games rarely do. That friend isn’t just a colleague of the creature in game — he is my friend, as well.
This is a game about life and death. It’s a game about finding your own path and about defining your own way through life even when the destination seems clear. This game is about the little moments in life when you discover something incredibly special just a few steps off the beaten path. It’s a story about rebirth and coming to terms with the fact that sometimes, in spite of all your efforts, you will fail. But Journey shows you that even in failure there is success. When you walk through the deserts of Journey, looking upon the ruins and the golden hills, you realize that the mountain really doesn’t matter all that much, after all.
(03/12/15 2:44am)
It was a harsh Vermont winter in December 1963 and, in the midst of the subzero temperatures, a landmark student life initiative had also frozen over. “The ‘question of honor’ at Middlebury College seems to have plenty of support as an ideal and not so much as a working system,” read a December 5 front-page Campus article. The article, which included student concerns about a code’s implications, foreshadowed the proposed Honor Code’s defeat in a student vote for the second time that May.
Over the past year, the Campus has investigated the untold story of the creation of the Honor Code. Although the story of the origins of the Honor Code at Middlebury is often that of a system fashioned by students and for students, the historical picture is much murkier.
A lengthy search in the College Archives and interviews with those who witnessed the process firsthand reveal that the Honor Code had a slightly turbulent history from the start.
It was a story that dominated the early 1960s at the College: a group of students and administrators who saw the Honor Code as an important opportunity for students to take ownership over their education. And yet, they received surprisingly strong pushback from students on the language and specifics of the proposed code.
The code’s proponents even dropped a compulsory peer-reporting clause, a hallmark of honor systems at Princeton University and elsewhere, from the Middlebury Honor Code in order to ensure its passage via a student vote. Moreover, after two failed student referenda on the Honor Code, evidence found in the Archives shows that at least one administrator recommended enacting the Honor Code without a student vote of support. However, in March 1965 the Code received sufficient support in a student vote to pass. Faculty opted for a streamlined approval process to avoid sending the Honor Code back with revisions to be subject to another student referendum, which they thought could be tantamount to its defeat.
The question of student votes on the Honor Code has renewed relevance of late. On Sunday, the Student Government Association (SGA) Senate voted in favor of amending the Honor System’s Constitution to put the code to a biennial student referendum with the options to maintain, revise, or eliminate the Honor Code. The amendment now must receive 2/3 of the vote in a referendum in which 2/3 the student body votes and must also be ratified by the faculty.
Change in the Air
Middlebury’s academic Honor Code, far from a lone initiative, was the product of social changes on campus that created profound shifts in student life during the 1960s. The College of the 1930s-50s was on its way out in several ways that precipitated the creation of an Honor Code.
Historians of the College have written much about the changes that took place in the 1960s. Among these reforms were major social changes to the institutional rules surrounding student freedoms. The influential Dean of Women Elizabeth ‘Ma’ Kelly oversaw a period in the ’60s when the ground shifted under students’ feet regarding their freedoms and rights as young men and women.
In the ’60s, parietal hours — the now seemingly antediluvian rules that governed when men and women could visit opposite-sex dorms —were gradually phased out. The College began to offer help to students with questions about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. Finally, the fraternities and sororities, long the bastions of the social life of yesteryear, became less and less of a mainstay of the campus party scene.
Historian of the College David Stameshkin said the ’60s were a period of remarkable change, bar none.
“Students wanted to be treated as adults. The administration wanted to treat the students as adults in certain ways but not others,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “It was incredible how things changed in the time [James] Armstrong was President.”
These changes, taken together, amounted to a climate of dramatically increased student responsibility in social life. Naturally, this trend simultaneously made its way into the academic realm.
As discussions were underway about a potential code, the Campus polled 254 students in October 1962 and found 80 percent approved of a code in theory. The newspaper also polled students and found that 35 percent of those surveyed had experience with an honor system at their high school. However, “a majority indicated they would not speak directly to a student if they found him cheating.”
The first instance of bringing the Honor Code to a vote occurred on November 19, 1962, when it failed. Harold Freeman ’62, the Student Association (SA) President, informed the Campus that the vote to inaugurate an Honor Code was defeated, 623-512, a combination of students voting “no” as well as “No-with-Qualification.” 235 voted no, 388 voted no with qualification and 512 voted yes. The students in favor did not reach the 85 percent threshold of “Yes” to send the measure to the faculty for a vote.
However, Freeman gave hints that the fight for a code was not over. “Freeman observed that by adding together the Yes and No-with-Qualification votes, almost four-fifths of the students were in favor of at least some form of Honor Code,” reported the Campus. Nonetheless, it would not be easy to convince the students who voted No-with-Qualification.
The SA, in a postmortem, theorized that a main cause for the defeat was the clause requiring students to report observed violations. This clause was considered a hallmark of longstanding honor codes at universities, including Stanford and Princeton.
Peer-Reporting Controversy
These qualms about the code reared their head repeatedly in the next two years. Surveys revealed approximately 80 percent of students supported an honor system as an ideal, but blanched at the proposal under consideration. “The main objection was to the obligation to report an offense committed by another person,” reported this newspaper.
Helen Gordon, president of the Panhellenic Council, “agreed that an honor code would be a benefit to Middlebury, but thought reworking of the ‘obligation’ clause necessary,” according to the Campus.
Gordon said, “It’s unrealistic to assume that human nature will [report others] but I don’t think they ought to leave out entirely this kind of an idea because it denies the opportunity to a person who’s really honest.”
The peer-reporting requirement would remain an issue through the end of the 1960s and beyond. As the clause became a sticking point in the debate, those in support of the Honor Code pushed back on the idea that peer-reporting meant “tattling” or being a “rat.”
In a December 1963 issue, Campus Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey J. Joseph opined that “whenever one brings up the subject of an Honor Code, the listener politely nods, makes a disparaging grimace, and quickly manages to say something like: ‘You going to the hockey game tomorrow night?’”
For all of the social life changes happening contemporaneously with the Honor Code debate, a large number of students felt comfortable enough with the status quo to stymie any efforts at instituting an honor system. Joseph explained that many students thought of the proposed Honor Code as either a way to end fraternities or to increase social code regulations and theorized that these factors led to its defeat.
“Let’s face it,” he wrote, “if someone wants to cheat, he cheats. If someone wants to ‘tell’ on him, he should be allowed to ‘tell.’ It is important to realize that a provision for ‘telling’ on someone is not included for the main purpose of making enemies out of friends. It is there to protect every honest student by presenting to the cheater a possibility that he will be caught. If you have any qualms about ‘telling’ on your buddy, keep your head down in your paper where it belongs.”
Despite the support of students like Joseph, the SA leadership began to contemplate foregoing the peer-reporting requirement. The Vice President of the SA was reportedly “willing to drop the stipulation that students report others, adding that ‘the maturity of Middlebury students ought to be able to make an honor code successful.’”
In December 1963, the chair of the student Honor Code Committee, Michael McCann ’65, cautioned against pushing the code too vigorously without almost unanimous student support. Two months later, the SA polled students on a potential honor code in what would be the run-up to a second push to pass it via a student body vote. A point of particular emphasis in the questionnaire was intended to gauge how students would feel about peer-reporting. The article stated that “McCann stresses the importance of questions dealing with student and faculty reports of offenders.”
The survey occurred concurrently with the 1964 election of a SA President, in which candidates weighed in on an honor code. Both John Walker ’65 and Peter Delfausse ’65 made an honor code a part of their platform.
Delfausse, who would win the election, said to a Campus reporter, “We on this campus are treated as adults in everything but the integrity of our academic work. Shouldn’t this be the first area in which we should be trusted? Nothing can force the student body into accepting something which isn’t wanted, but if an honor system is desired, we will find the right words with which to express it.”
Nevertheless, concurrent discussion about combating student apathy regarding the SA gives the impression that the Honor Code was an issue important to the members of its committee, but perhaps was less relevant to the wider student body. Richard Hawley ’67 was the Editor-in-Chief of the Campus, and said other issues captured the student body’s attention more than the Honor Code, particularly parietal hours — although he nonetheless appreciated the code when it was instated.
“I remember feeling a kind of relief,” Hawley said in an interview. “What a relief it was to take your exam to the library and do it there. I remember thinking, ‘This is wonderful.’ But I don’t remember student passion about it.”
Princeton on the Otter
Within the next few months, a figure who would be pivotal to Middlebury’s history weighed in on the code. College President James Armstrong, who had stepped into the position in 1963, approved of the proposed Honor Code in a meeting with McCann.
Armstrong said in a comment to the newspaper in April 1964, “Herding of students into the fieldhouse like animals, with proctors standing over them like jailkeeps, is not in keeping with the ideals of a liberal arts education.”
The influence of the college president and other key members of his administration may have been crucial to the Honor Code’s passage. Before arriving at Middlebury, Armstrong had spent his entire academic career at Princeton, an Ivy League school with one of the nation’s oldest academic honor codes — passed in 1893, with an obligatory peer-reporting clause. Armstrong earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton and then served as a faculty member and dean until he was appointed Middlebury’s 12th President.
“When Armstrong came as president from Princeton, he started bringing people from Princeton,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “In fact, the joke on campus was it was ‘Princeton on the Otter.’ That’s what they used to call Middlebury during the ’60s because Armstrong kept bringing people there.”
Another Princeton man, Dennis O’Brien was previously an assistant dean there before arriving at Middlebury in September 1965 to serve as the Dean of Men. His experience with the honor system at Princeton impacted his view of a potential Honor Code at Middlebury.
“Because myself and Jim came from Princeton, we had lived with it and we found it comfortable,” O’Brien told the Campus in a recent interview. “It seemed to establish a different relationship between faculty and students. Faculty were not always snooping over students’ shoulders to make sure they weren’t cheating; we were more like mentors. To suddenly switch over from being the person who is teaching someone to someone who is monitoring your honest behavior seemed not to be the image the faculty wanted to have.”
On top of a Princetonian as president, Middlebury’s stature as an institution was on the rise during the ’60s. O’Brien believes the Honor Code was part of the improvements.
“I think there was clearly a kind of an upgrade in terms of the quality of the students and the quality of the faculty that we were able to attract at that time,” he said, “and so it seemed like a much more senior, adult institution than one having proctored exams.”
The desire for an upgrade to Middlebury came from both above, with the administration, and also below, from students of the ’60s, particularly those who were tired of the fraternities’ hold on campus life.
“There was a genuine feeling that there should be more seriousness at the College intellectually,” Stameshkin said. “And the same thing was happening at Williams and other schools. This idea that there should be more intellectualism and more feeling of scholarship was also happening in the early to mid-60s.”
Nonetheless, the vocal support of Armstrong and O’Brien did not help the Honor Code at the ballot box at first. The proposed code failed in May 1964 to clear the 85 percent hurdle of students voting in favor, and the referendum did not receive even half of the student body’s participation. The result was devastating for those students who had worked tirelessly on behalf of a code.
“After two full years of preparation, an academic honor code was put before the student body Monday via a yes-or-no ballot – and failed to gain the needed support,” said a front-page article in the Campus. The measure received 69 percent “yes” votes from the 45 percent of the student body that voted. The rejected code included “that the test-taker pledge that he had neither given nor received aid” and that students report those they suspected of cheating within 48 hours.
The aforementioned Honor Code Committee displayed dogged, even stubborn, persistence to pass the measure. McCann told this newspaper, “This year’s balloting was far more encouraging than last year’s and there will be another honor committee next year trying to get this thing through.”
Victory, at a Cost
Despite McCann’s optimism, the outlook was grim: two votes and two defeats for an Honor Code within three years. But finally, in March 1965, the Honor Code was approved in a landslide. With 1,000 “yes” votes to 313 “no” votes, it was a marked improvement from the previous two tries in the fall of 1962 and the spring of 1964.
However, the code approved by students contained no compulsory peer-reporting clause such as that of Princeton, due to the fact that the committee viewed the clause as the reason for previous defeats. The Middlebury code stated that students with knowledge of an infraction should confront the student and if he or she does not report themselves to the honor board within 24 hours, the observer should. In O’Brien’s words, it was a passive reporting clause, with no teeth to punish a student who observes cheating and does not report it. The code that passed, unlike the previous versions, said students “should” report those they observed cheating, not “must” or “shall” of previous drafts.
The compulsory reporting clause had also been under fire in the opinions pages of this newspaper. In a Letter to the Editor on Feb. 25, 1965, William Michaels ’66 wrote: “Under the present system of exam proctoring, the College denies us the privilege of attempting to live up to the ideals of moral responsibility … this would also be the case if an honor code were passed which possessed a mandatory student reporting clause, since the student is not thus delegated the responsibility of looking after his own morality: it is merely shifted from the proctors to the other students.”
It was also a significant change that the threshold for victory was lowered to 75 percent from a lofty 85 percent, what it had been in 1962 and 1964. Some students grumbled about the idea of voting for an Honor Code for a third time, suggesting that other factors may have been at play in its success. A joke printed in the Campus poked fun at the code’s long-awaited victory. “Did you favor the Honor System at the recent election?” a student asks. His friend replies, “I sure did. I voted for it five times.”
President Armstrong was understandably pleased following the successful vote, as it was an initiative he had supported since the past spring, and he immediately set to work assigning administrators to it. In an October 1965 letter to the four members of the new subcommittee of the Faculty Administration Committee on the Honor Code, including Dean of Men O’Brien, Armstrong said, “Although I do not think you will be called upon for heavy duty quantitatively, I know you understand how important I believe the Honor Code is for the College and that a guiding hand from the faculty will be important and possibly crucial.”
Armstrong also probably worried that a lack of faculty support might end the last chance for the Honor Code to become a reality. He was present in a meeting of the Faculty Educational Policy Committee (EPC) in March 1965, after the code had been approved by the referendum.
“The honor code statement worked out by the students and brought to us with a large supporting student vote … was discussed,” states the meeting’s minutes. “It was felt best not to subject the statement to the scrupulous kind of inspection the EPC would normally employ in surveying a faculty document, but vote on it yea or nay as it stood; some felt that return of the document for a second student consideration and vote would defeat the proposal. Vote was a unanimous pro.”
It appears the EPC’s worries about the Honor Code failing in the student body led them to streamline its approval process, despite reservations that undoubtedly existed among the faculty.
The faculty also approved a key word choice in the code in April 1965. During the faculty meeting in which they approved the code, according to the article in the Campus, the faculty “did not demand a change to ‘must’” in the reporting clause.
Students Not Sold
There is a small piece of evidence that the College may have enacted an honor code regardless of the student vote. Dean of the College Thomas H. Reynolds wrote in his annual report dated July 1, 1964:
“There is an excellent chance that an almost unanimous student vote will be achieved next year. In the event that this kind of a program does not succeed next year, I recommend the College take some action towards bringing an academic honor system into effect.”
While Reynolds never ended up having to make that recommendation, O’Brien disagreed with his premise.
“I don’t think you should impose it without a successful student vote. I think that would have been a mistake to try to do that,” O’Brien told this reporter. “I think the whole idea of an honor code, to a certain extent, is to get away from the high school syndrome of, ‘You have to be proctored and not entirely trusted.’”
The following year, as new Dean of Men, Dennis O’Brien’s first annual report was pessimistic, illuminating the reasons why Reynolds or others might have pursued an Honor Code if the student body would not.
“By the time the student reaches the last half of his college career we have pretty much either got him involved intellectually or we have lost him for good … they may be active in fraternity life, extracurricular life, athletics, they may be valuable citizens in other ways, but academically they run along on minimal requirements seeking the gut courses and paying only lip service, if that, to the intellectual community,” wrote O’Brien in his annual report in June 1965.
He went on in that report to comment on the lackluster implementation of the Honor Code.
“The Honor Code was approved by students in early March,” O’Brien wrote. “I may have missed something, but I think no further initiative toward its implementation came from students until practically exam time, if then.”
O’Brien also observed how the administration was involved from the very beginning and that students were not yet invested in the code:
“Many students are far from ‘sold’ on the Honor Code. They feel that the Administration has been determined to have an Honor Code here no matter what and that the students finally let the Administration have its way. These students have a sort of uninvolved, ‘play it cool’ attitude. They intend to wait and see how ‘they’ will work it out. If students who felt that way could see the minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee on Honor Code for May 27, 1965 they would feel that their perception was largely confirmed. These minutes make it clear that the Honor Code Committee, chaired by the Dean of the College, consists of several professors and administrators and that to the meeting of this committee were ‘invited’ several specified undergraduates.”
O’Brien also cited a study from Columbia University that said for honor codes to be effective, the motivation should come from students and should appear to be coming from students. The difference between the honor codes at Princeton and Middlebury, he told this newspaper in October 1965, was not Princeton’s “obligatory clause for reporting, but a strong and firm belief in the system by faculty and students.”
Of the code, “it was held with a great deal of pride,” O’Brien said. “Most complaints of the new Middlebury system that I have heard have not been substantive, but procedural. And I think there are some false expectations about the system by a few students.”
A Reversal in Student Perception
Two years later in another report, O’Brien suggested that the honor code might have already backfired soon after its implementation.
“The Honor Code seems to be functioning well although there is still a certain amount of feeling against signing the pledge,” he wrote. “I personally feel that the distaste for the pledge grows out of a hypersensitivity on the part of students today that they are not trusted. As they are not trusted to close their dorm doors during parietal hours, so they feel they are not trusted in the matter of honor in examinations.”
This reversal in opinion was extraordinary. The push for the Honor Code, at least from students, was based on the idea that it would give the students more responsibility and was in the same spirit as a move away from parietal hours. Based on O’Brien’s report, the code had the opposite effect, making students feel like the administration trusted them less than before.
Whether the code was truly being followed is difficult to assess based on available records, but O’Brien writes that “a student was convicted of a violation of the Honor Code this year and suspended for a semester,” a low number of convictions by any standard.
Although during the 1960s the social rules at colleges and universities like Middlebury were being chipped away from all sides, it still took a great deal of effort on the part of members of the SA to pass an honor code via a student vote. Additionally, the faculty minutes and annual reports of the College show that at least one top member of the administration was ready to intervene to institute an honor code and held back probably because of concerns of its effectiveness if instated and operated by Old Chapel.
O’Brien’s 1967 assessment is revealing. There had been two unsuccessful votes from students amid vocal support from the administration and faculty; as a result, many students identified the Honor Code as an administrative device. A corollary explanation is that the social changes in the 1960s cut both ways on an honor system: while these sweeping changes helped make the code a possibility, they also changed the way a code was viewed in the years afterward. Increased freedom for students allowed them to pass the code; however, the perception of the code after 1965 was that it was an administrative measure — not a student-owned freedom.
“It’s very important that the students read the honor code as an administrative imposition as opposed to something that boiled up from the students,” Stameshkin said. “The students felt often as if the administration was kind of the enemy. They wanted to be adults and they felt the administration was treating them like children—you have to be in at this hour and all that — it wasn’t paranoia, but the students felt that way about a lot of things.”
The Campus reported in March 1968, three years after the code passed, that the student Honor Board was worried about the new system’s efficacy. The board had only heard six cases since 1965, and three of those were in the 1967-68 year. Two cases resulted in convictions, and only one of the six cases was because of a report submitted by another student. “This the board felt suggests either that only two students have cheated in the last three years, or that students have not accepted the responsibilities implicit in the system,” reported this newspaper.
The Honor Board, as a result, began to consider changing the constitution of the new Honor Code from passive acceptance of the code to hold responsible a student who did not report a violation.
A decade later, in January 1976, the student body approved by a landslide the revisions proposed by a committee on the honor system. There were dual changes: students now had a moral obligation to report cheating, moving away from the ambiguous language of the original code, and also proctors would be allowed in some cases with the specific authorization of the Judicial Review Board. Even under the best of circumstances, O’Brien said in a recent interview, getting students to report their peers may be asking too much.
“My guess is that [peer-reporting] never works terribly well, unless you’re in a highly codified organization like the military academy,” O’Brien said. “I’m not even so sure how well it worked at Princeton … it’s a nice thing to have: there’s a certain moral responsibility, and I love the idea of going up to somebody else and saying, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ But I suspect it doesn’t happen very often.”
It is difficult to assess whether the code cut down on cheating, as suggested by research that shows colleges with an honor code have less self-reported cheating by students. On that front, Emeritus Dean of Advising and Assistant Professor of American Studies Karl Lindholm ’67 said the Honor Code did not hurt and probably helped.
“I remember thinking it was a great idea. I don’t think there was any greater level of cheating than when the exams were tightly proctored,” Lindholm said. “It was almost a challenge to see if you could beat the system then,” with stories of notes written on hands and crib sheets hidden during an exam. “With unproctored exams, I don’t recall any greater level of cheating,” he said.
Approaching Another Vote
In a January survey by the SGA, 33 percent of the student body said they support the Honor Code in principle but that there need to be changes. 59 percent of the 1438 survey respondents said they support it in its current form and about 7 percent said they don’t support it.
Additionally, the Campus published (“Cheating: Hardly a Secret,” Oct. 30, 2013) the results of a survey by Craig Thompson ’14 for the course Economics of Sin where 35 percent of 377 students surveyed admitted to violating the Honor Code at least once in the 2012-13 academic year. 97 percent were not punished.
On Sunday, the discussion came to a head when the SGA Senate approved, in a nearly unanimous vote, the decision to move ahead with a bill that would subject the Honor Code to a biennial student referendum. Per the Honor System's Constitution, 2/3 of the student body must vote, and 2/3 vote in favor, for the change to take effect. The amendment would then need to be ratified by the faculty at large. If the amendment passes, a spring 2016 referendum would give students three options: to vote to maintain the honor code as it stands, to eliminate it or to revise it. A majority in favor of revision would cause the Honor Code committee to survey opinions during a two-week revision process. Students would then vote on the revised Honor Code to either approve it, to maintain the original code, or to eliminate the code.
Student Co-Chair of Community Council Ben Bogin ’15 was an impetus behind the SGA proposal and said fighting atrophy was a goal. “The idea behind our method is to encourage people to continue talking about the Honor Code after they sign it as a first-year,” Bogin wrote in an email. “The Honor Code only works if it’s a living, breathing document that people cherish and take seriously. We’re trying to breathe a little more life into it.”
SGA Director of Academic Affairs Cate Costley ’15 added that the idea is to reclaim the Honor Code as a document students care about and take ownership of.
“Through conversations and debates, we settled on a schoolwide vote to try to solicit the voices of our peers and to see what they think,” Costley said. “And having an edge to it with the possibility of eliminating the Honor Code is to say to people, ‘Let’s not take this document for granted.’”
Vice President for Student Affairs, Dean of the College and Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture Katy Smith Abbott said she believes discussion has also been sparked by the decision in the Economics Department to proctor exams in introductory classes starting last spring.
“It’s not that proctoring hasn’t been an option for faculty — it has been — but it’s required a certain kind of approval process that most people thought was not necessary or wasn’t in the spirit of the Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “And I think when that decision was made (thoughtfully, and at great length) by the Economics Department, it meant that a larger number of students were being exposed to the question of whether the Honor Code is working.”
Smith Abbott also said that the code could possibly fail in a referendum, based on what she has heard from students.
“I think some of my lack of a firm sense of how it would go is based on the variety of opinions out there right now about whether or not the Honor Code is working,” she said. “I think if we have entered into a period where more students, through their own experience or inherited wisdom, think the Honor Code isn’t working, we could see it fail.”
Several on Community Council, according to Smith Abbott, have raised doubts about the wisdom of a biennial survey in which the Honor Code could be eliminated.
“I think a lot of folks on Community Council — and I have mixed feelings about this — felt that those are insurmountable odds that, if two years later, you have two classes of students who have never lived with an Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “What’s their investment in bringing it back? Why are we putting that on them by saying, ‘[An honor code] worked for some people and didn’t work for others, but it’s on you to decide to overwhelmingly vote it back into existence?’”
Bogin, however, said that that he is not worried about failure and that the discussion of the code’s relevance is worth having through a referendum.
“I think that it’s incredibly unlikely that the Honor Code would fail in a vote. According to our most recent student survey, in which about 60 percent of the student body voted, 92 percent supported the continued existence of the Honor Code,” Bogin wrote. “I also think that it’s important to say that if something isn’t working, and everybody agrees, we should be able to get rid of it. It’s hard to say that the Honor Code is student owned if students don’t have the power to get rid of it.”
Hawley, who was at Middlebury during the Honor Code debate, said renewed attention to the code is not a bad thing.
“I think the cycle of concern is probably the best thing, whatever the outcome, because it’s heightening student awareness of how it’s my responsibility to do my own work. I don’t think there’s anything that would prove that a certain kind of honor code produces more honor,” Hawley said. “It’s sort of what Jefferson said about the American Constitution: it should be revisited; there should be at least a thread of revolution every 20 years to keep attention fresh on what the values are. I think raising the climate of concern about it is probably the most important thing with respect to honor, not necessarily what code you have written down.”
(03/11/15 11:14pm)
Every day we accelerate toward longer life, healthier life, fewer diseases, and better recovery from those diseases we can’t cure. Every single day our technology progresses, building on itself in all sorts of ways that we can’t imagine yet, slowly but steadily directing us toward an ultimate end point. Chances are, we will at some time in the future reach that point.
Among academics and enthusiasts studying the future, this point is referred to as a singularity. It is fully within the realm of possibility that within the not-too-distant future, we will cease to be affected by the forces of time or disease, and instead we can constantly revive our bodies indefinitely. Either by organ generation, artificial augmentation, or full mental transplantation, we might be able to transcend the natural state of human existence.
This is the goal of the transhumanism movement. And what an absolutely unbelievable achievement it would be! The goal of transhumanism plays into that most base of human instincts, the drive to survive. The conquest of death would fully absolve us of that innate, extremely powerful and primal fear of destruction. Such an achievement would grant the gift that countless religions have claimed to give, eternal life.
But we aren’t just animals. We aren’t just slaves to our innate desires. We have a huge, complicated, diverse structure of more high-level goals and dreams created by our mind. We have deep, troubling conflicts within ourselves not about the fact of survival, but rather about the spirit of living—we are the only living creatures to experience existential crises and to wonder about our place in the universe. Innumerable books have tackled how to live meaningfully and to extract every ounce of happiness and satisfaction out of the life we’ve been given. We know no other way to live, than to live respecting the inherent limits of our lives. To take down those limits would be to undermine the very fabric of our society and to throw into turmoil the decisions that we make every day. What does if mean to lead a “meaningful” life when that life is endless? How do you approach your career when you’ll be working for 400 years, instead of 40? How do you entertain yourself when you have more than enough time to do anything you’ve ever wanted, and to make the money to enable yourself to do all those things?
Transhumanism sounds ridiculous on face value, but the fact of the matter is, technology is creeping toward this point. It’s not too early to start really considering what will happen when our elders consist not of 80 and 90 year olds, but of bi- and tri-centenarians. And it’s never too early to start wondering if our currently accepted way of living needs a new coat of paint, or even an entirely new foundation.The pervading life philosophies all have something to do with striving to reach some greater goal. Whether that be happiness, joy, spiritual enlightenment, mental liberation, love, or anything else, the focus is almost always on the necessity of a journey toward some sort of awakening. We all have to strive for something. And even if the focus isn’t on the destination, import still weighs on the journey. After all, the oft-quoted statements does suggest that “it’s the journey, and not the destination, that matters.” This gets at a crucial element of truth: we must recognize the value in the present, in our current state of affairs, rather than always look down the road to our goals.
But the problem with this, and the reason why we often fear the transhumanist singularity, is that even this suggestion puts undue focus on the motion. No one ever tells us that’s okay to not even go on the journey in the first place. We rarely, if ever, get the acknowledgement that where we are, right this instant, without any regard to future goals or moving towards anything, is good and worthwhile for its own sake. We are uncomfortable with the notion of doing nothing. The idea of being, in a sense, sedentary—not physically, but rather mentally and emotionally—never receives its deserved consideration. There is something so beautiful and transcendental about the art of not moving. It represents contentment. Too often we forget to find and acknowledge when we are content. Too often we preclude ourselves from ever even feeling that emotion at all. To use an analogy: hiking is one of my favorite activities because it affords me breathtaking views and a rejuvenating exposure to nature, but I have found more joy and more peace during days when I allow myself to simply sit in a chair in nature, with no destination or even motion. I firmly believe that the ability to metaphorically sit motionless and be content is conducive to greater happiness and greater satisfaction with all of life. And life brings us countless moments for us to forget the goal and forget the motion and simply be. It takes an effort to pull the mind back down to the lowest level, to focus on the immediate and not the far-off, and to break day down into each individual moment, instead of allowing it to flow together and escape.
This is how we solve those moral quandaries of transhumanism. This is how we approach a world in which we live longer and healthier lives and where the specter of meaninglessness grows. It takes a refocusing of life onto what it means to be during each second, rather than what it means to strive toward something. But this doesn’t have to wait for scientists to develop the technology for us to live indefinitely. These existential problems are not unique to transhumanism, but are simply scaled up to fit the longer time frame. We face these issues every day. But we solve the issues of boredom and aimlessness by acknowledging the fact that we don’t have to aim anywhere. We don’t even have to move anywhere. We can just be present, comfortable in our situation, content with the world we make for ourselves.
(03/11/15 2:17pm)
Child of Light is a platformer role-playing game that takes place in the fantastical world of Lemuria. You play as the young girl Aurora, an Austrian princess who wakes up to find herself in a strange world with even stranger creatures. Over the course of the game, you meet the different characters of Lemuria, from the mouse-like Populi to the circus-performing Aerostati, and befriend all of them. You learn that things are not quite right in this country and that the malevolent Queen of Night is keeping the people captive through the use of dark magic and evil minions. Aurora must fight her way through this strange world to save Lemuria and return to her ailing father. Along the way, Aurora learns that to be a good ruler, she must often put the needs of others above her own desires.
Ubisoft Montreal, a big name company in the gaming industry known mostly for the Assassin’s Creed series, released Child of Light in April 2014. However, Child of Light is a step in quite a different direction for the developer. The game showcases an absolutely stunning animated backdrop. All of the different environments were carefully hand drawn and scanned into the game. The player feels as though they are walking through a painting as they traverse the beautiful landscapes of Lemuria. The artists did a fantastic job making the game feel just like a child’s dream.
Over the course of the game Aurora must face many dark creatures and servants of the Queen of Night. Combat in Child of Light is time-based. At the bottom of the screen during an encounter there is a time bar which all of the characters move along depending on their speed statistic and the action they are about to take. This is not a common style among these types of games – most similar games use a simple turn-based mode. Compared to the combat style, the time-based system kept me more involved with each encounter. While I was waiting for Aurora and her party to move along the bar, I was busy trying to slow my opponents down and timing my hits to interrupt their attacks.
Another thing the developers did well with the combat was making characters compatible with each other. You are allowed to have two party members on the field at any given time during a fight. Over time, I found that certain characters worked especially well together. For example, my favorite team consisted of Aurora and her sister. Aurora’s sister Norah has abilities that slow down her enemies while speeding up her teammates. This allowed me to minimize the attacks of the enemy while allowing Aurora to bombard them with her spells and sword.
The best thing the game has going for it is the storyline and the way it is presented. The entire game is presented as a poem. All narration and dialogue within the game follows a rhyming scheme. This aspect of the game was not only beautiful, but also very entertaining at times. One of the characters has an inability to rhyme and is often corrected by the others with a word that fits the rhyming scheme. The main reason I enjoyed the poetic narrative is for its originality. I have never played another game that has used this style of storytelling and I they did an excellent job with it.
I only had two complaints with Child of Light. The first was that the levels could become a bit grindy. I found myself running from one battle to the next with the same enemies which could get a bit tiring at times. My second complaint was that the puzzles they presented you with were the same every time. You needed to open a door to the next area, used Igniculus the firefly to illuminate a few panels on the door and voilà – it opened. However, given that the game is only about 13 hours long, these were minor annoyances which didn’t add up to much in the end.
Overall, I give Child of Light a 9.5 out of 10. I immensely enjoyed this game for its engaging story, original narrative and engaging combat system. While the game could be a little bit of a grind at times, the feeling never lasted too long and new developments in the story followed soon after. If you are looking for a good, story-centric game to play in between exam weeks or to play through over the upcoming break, I highly recommend Child of Light and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
(03/04/15 7:04pm)
In light of the recent release of 50 Shades of Grey and the upcoming Porn Party at the Queer Studies House, we thought a good topic for this week would be a list of porn and kink-related vocabulary and their misconceptions. Some of the terms you will find are very commonplace while others are not.
The reason we think this list is valuable is because what people find attractive and sexually enjoyable varies in many ways, aside from just sexual orientation. Sex positivity is all about remembering to respect everyone’s desires and sexual interests instead of shaming them. Context is a huge part of something being sexy or unsexy, and there are no rules to what should or should not enjoy. As long as everything is safe, consensual, informed and controlled, there is not a reason people should feel shame for how they manage their sex lives, from abstinence to pony play.
Kink and Fetish
The difference between a kink and a fetish is often unknown. A kink is more activity and behavior-oriented while a fetish is more focused on an object or part of the body. For example, a foot fetish is sexual enjoyment focused around a person’s feet and watersports refers to the fetish of sexual enjoyment focused on urine. Role play (where partners adopt personas that differ from their own) and enjoying spanking during sex are kinks, or can be described as kinky. While the two terms often appear in similar places they are not the same thing.
BDSM (Short for BD/DS/SM)
BDSM is usually regarded in society as a taboo practice because of its reputation for being dangerous and the result of trauma. However, liking BDSM is not the result of a trauma and, much like any other sexual practice, there are safer and less safe ways to do it. Many people engage in some form of BDSM, whether it is blindfolding or flogging. BDSM is all about deriving pleasure from pain and suspense. Consent is crucial to BDSM. That means having a safe word (a word likely not to come up in conversation during sexual activity, which alerts that a person is nearing or has reached their maximum comfort zone). Safe words are also great for communication in any sexual activity, not just BDSM.
Pony Play
A style of role-play in which the roles are divided into masters/riders and ponies. There are no actual animals involved; rather, the two roles reflect the power dynamic between horse riders and their horses. Many pony play activities also mimic those of actual horse riders and horses, such as washing or sex positions that resemble riding.
Strapadictomy
The act of strapping on a dildo in preparation for vaginal or anal penetration. Many people find using strap-ons to be an activity reserved for lesbian couples. However, many men (including heterosexuals) enjoy having their partners penetrate them anally, and may very well use a strap-on. Strap-ons and dildos are also a common tool used by transgender people.
Erotic asphyxiation
Arousal resulting from intentional restriction of oxygen to brain. Sometimes referred to as breathe control play, many people find erotic asphyxiation to be an exhilarating activity. As long as things are monitored appropriately, everything is consensual and there is not an excessive aggression with the restraints or forces used, there should be no sign for alarm. Caution is always advised, most especially with autoerotic asphyxiation in where the person restricts their own breathing and may be alone.
Masturbation
The act of giving oneself sexual pleasure. Many forget that masturbation, while commonplace in today’s American culture, masturbation was once seen as a sinful sexual deviancy and still is in many places in the world. Much like we have learned that masturbation does not prevent someone from being a happy and healthy individual we hope it carries to other practices society views as wrong and we can have open conversations about sex.
(02/26/15 1:54am)
I am not a fan of unsolicited advice, and with that in mind I am going to give some. This is the last generation of Febs I will be here to see before tragically graduating a little less than a year from now. While I will hopefully be ready to go by then, three years ago I could have used some frank advice because as most Febs know, the scariest part of being a Feb is not getting out and seeing the world, but finally getting on this campus. So keeping in mind the memories of intense insecurity, doubt and anxiety from three years ago, I know that my freshman self would have appreciated a little real talk. So listen up:
Like many febs I applied early decision, checked both the Feb and non-Feb boxes, got my acceptance, and waited for more than a year to get on campus. That was a long, long year. So long that I forgot much of what the campus looked like and why I had chosen to apply. I was absolutely sick of explaining people why I was going to be attending college a semester late. No, I was not a special student. Yes, I will graduate in four years. No, I’m not on any sort of wait list. After all this I had set my expectations high and envisioned my college experience to be some kind of blend between Animal House, Old School, and Good Will Hunting. While I would still jump at the opportunity to don a toga, Middlebury isn’t quite like the films would suggest. Middlebury is not going to exceed all your expectations. There’s going to be disappointment, hardship and lot of late nights. Don’t let that get the better of you. Make your experience your own; nobody is going to make it for you. Do things you love with people you love and don’t feel bad about it.
My second point of anxiety came with classes. It took me too long to realize what I wanted to study. I had vague intentions of “exploring my options,” and I took a lot of classes for reasons I don’t quite know. More than that, I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to declare a major as I saw my peers connecting with advisors and finding exciting areas of focus like, “Religion with an Environmental focus.” I also struggled with the pressure we have all felt to select a major that will “make us some money.” When it comes to a major, don’t worry about it. Majors tend to find the student, not the other way around. Pick a major where the classes do not feel like classes. Pick a major because it explains the world to you. Pick a major that won’t have you looking at the clock every fifteen minutes. Chances are you will be better at the things you enjoy and you can make some money doing it. Take your time, find your groove, there are too many incredible classes here to be taking classes you don’t enjoy.
Let’s talk about social life. How do you talk about something that so many Midd kids struggle to have a healthy relationship with? I remember looking forward to each weekend with a pent up enthusiasm that seemed to wane week-by-week as I realized that, despite what the movies had told me, college students actually do other things with their free time than drink. Not that there’s anything wrong with drinking. Give it enough time though and you will realize that weekends are commonly used as a way to “blow off steam.” While I’m all for having a good time, and you should have a good time, don’t change. Be the person at 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning in the Grille that you are Tuesday in class. No, don’t go drunk to class, but don’t use the weekends as an excuse to be a different person.
I could go on and on, but advice tends to lose it’s potency the more it’s given. More than anything, baby febs, it’s up to you. Things are not going to be fantastic because your tour guide or your orientation leader said so. Things are going to be fantastic because you make it so. So keep meeting new people even when you feel like you have your circle of friends, try new things even when you think you know what you love, and be confident with who you are. Everything else is really up to you; take it from an old guy.
(02/11/15 9:45pm)
When I peered into the stockroom on the first floor of Bi-Hall, Tom Sheluga and his assistant were hunched over a copy of the Middlebury magazine. He ushered me over and gestured at a picture of Roger Sandwick, a biochemistry professor. As I approached, I realized he was actually pointing at the bell on the shelf directly behind the photo. It was labeled as a superintendent’s bell once belonging to Sandwick’s grandfather.
“He says it’s a school bell,” said Sheluga. “But I’m convinced it’s a pirate’s bell, albeit a small pirate… [with] a rowboat type thing. He couldn’t afford anything better!”
You may not have met Mr. Sheluga unless you’ve broken enough glassware in Orgo lab to warrant being sent into the bowels of McCardell Bicentennial Hall in search of new beakers and test tubes. As the College’s laboratory stores manager and the safety director for the building, he is in charge of much more than showing clumsy students where to find replacement glassware. His day-to-day tasks include teaching safety classes, refilling tanks of liquid nitrogen, making deliveries when shipments arrive and greeting people who enter the stockroom in search of various items.
“Occasionally, we have a spill we have to handle. Occasionally, we have hazardous waste we have to take down,” Sheluga said. “[Otherwise] that should be the day unless something happens out of the ordinary.”
And things out of the ordinary certainly have happened while the stockroom has been under Sheluga’s jurisdiction.
He recalled one time, when they had “the explosive stuff,” chemicals disintegrated into what should have been highly explosive material. The college had to hire contractors to come (at 4 a.m.) to remove the chemicals from the stockroom.
Sheluga recalled, “I was so disappointed. The guy [who came to remove the chemicals] came in a pickup truck. We spent $5,000, and he came in a pickup truck. And then he told me I was his backup.”
But all of the concern turned out to be for naught, Sheluga explained.
“We thought we had something that was gonna go kaboomski. We had a little bit left, so we sprinkled it on the lawn and tried to ignite it. It didn’t ignite.”
There was also the mystery of the disappearing bovine kidneys.
“We put them outside, and then something took them. And it took them,” he snapped his fingers suddenly, “like that.”
“Now you know, a kidney, it’s a pretty good size, pretty firm. Something took them to eat them, we presume, although it might have played with them, I don’t know. We never saw those kidneys again. Still looking for ‘em. Now we leave them out there to see if something takes them, and they always disappear. So if you find those in the dining hall…” He winked.
Sheluga has held his position for 16 years, and was there for the science department’s big move to the then newly -constructed Bicentennial Hall.
“When we first set Bi-Hall up, we had to have a trapper in to get all the animals out. It was like an animal sanctuary. Now, of course, we’re just a regular metropolitan area here… a dramatic change from the Spartan days when we had to go to Freeman to go to the bathroom.”
Prior to coming to Middlebury, Sheluga held a position as Exxon Chemical Company’s Environmental Coordinator for the entire Northeast and oversaw the company’s activity in the United States, Latin America, South America, and Asia. But he never expected to have a career in the sciences; in fact, he claimed he “fell into it.”
“For a period, I was interested in girls,” he said frankly.
Sheluga more or less stumbled upon his current job.
“I was working as an attorney for the state of Vermont, and I kind of got disillusioned with the sense of justice. There just didn’t appear to be any. I was doing child support work, when this job came up. I didn’t hear anything [from Middlebury] for 4-5 months, and they called me in for an interview. Then, we were moving from the old science center to this building [Bi-Hall].”
Part of his job, too, is housing some of Bi-Hall’s stranger history. Sheluga directed my attention to two safes sitting on the stockroom floor, which he told me dated back to the 1860s.
“This one over here, which hasn’t been opened until recently, probably ten or fifteen years ago, supposedly has platinum in it. And it has a ball of opium, like the size of a softball.”
He once laid eyes on the opium, which had deteriorated. “I don’t know if that’s good for opium, or bad for opium, but there’s now an oozing black ball.”
Sheluga made sure I heard one last story before I rushed to class upstairs. There was a time when one of his student employees once hosted parties in Bi-Hall. In what was apparently a very lucrative setup, the student hid in the men’s room until the night watchman had left, and then brought in speakers, adult beverages, and charged five bucks a pop.
“Somehow they caught him, and he was never quite sure how they did that,” Sheluga smiled. “But I like the ingenuity.”
Although running the Bi-Hall stockroom involves an interesting and varied list of responsibilities, Sheluga described his job mostly as doing “things nobody else likes to do.”
“If you got a mouse in your room, we’ll come get it. If you’ve got a snake, we’ll come and take him away. If you spill something, we’ll clean it up. And if you’ve got too much trash, we’ll take it away. We’ll do anything you need to have done, as long as it’s not immoral, and I don’t know if anybody else does that,” he said.
(01/14/15 11:57pm)
Last week, Forbes released its third annual “30 under 30” list, highlighting young adults in different work fields. The list included three Middlebury alumni: Alexandra Cart ’08 and Emily Núñez Cavness ’12 were featured in the social entrepreneurs list, and Lisa Gretebeck ’10 was included in the healthcare list.
After graduating from Middlebury, Cart, Núñez Cavness and Greteback went on to found their own companies.
Greteback co-founded Pou Sante: Amar Haiti, which improves the health and productivity of the animals, thereby increasing the quality of life for families in Haiti.
Cart started Madeira Global, an impact-investing firm that generates financial returns by investing with companies providing social and environmental solutions. She was on campus in October as part of Middlebury’s Friday lecture series to provide students with her own insight about impact investing, the financial world and starting your own company.
Núñez Cavness started her company Sword & Plough at Middlebury with fellow graduates Cully Cavness ’09.5 and Haik Kavookjian ’09.5. Sword & Plough takes army surplus items and turns them into fashionable bags and accessories. The company provides manufacturing jobs to veterans for the construction of its products and donates 10% of the profits to veteran initiatives.
At a conference held by Middlebury College’s Center for Social Entrepreneurship (CSE) during Núñez Cavness’ senior year, the keynote speaker introduced to Núñez Cavness the idea of companies recycling materials into products. As a result, Núñez Cavness — who was raised in a military family and trained as a cadet for the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) while at the College — took inspiration from this and created Sword & Plough.
Soon after Núñez Cavness began brainstorming ideas for her company with the help of her sister, she entered into the CSE’s first business plan competition. Núñez Cavness earned the first place prize and was awarded a $3000 grant for her project.
Winning the competition was a confidence boost for Núñez Cavness. “It was so helpful to have this group of peers and professors who wanted to hear about my idea and who challenged me to develop it further,” Núñez Cavness said. “Mentors and professors like Jon Isham, Alan Hassenfeld, Liz Robinson, Susan Ross, Charlie MacCormack, Dave Donahue, MariAnn Osborne, Mike Kiernan and Heather Neuwirth all played a guiding role in Sword & Plough’s very first stages, and they continued tohelp me figure out my next steps for Sword & Plough after I graduated.” Isham, MacCormack and Ross all sit on Sword & Plough’s board of advisors.
After winning the CSE’s competition, Sword & Plough experienced tremendous success in other competitions. When Núñez Cavness and her team put the company on Kickstarter, a global crowd funding platform, their goal was to raise $20,000. They reached this goal in the first two hours. At the end of Sword & Plough’s month-long campaign, it had raised $312,161.
Núñez Cavness said, “[Sword & Plough] truly would not exist without Middlebury and especially the Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship.”
Last week, Sword & Plough challenged current MiddCORE participants to design a new product for the company. Núñez Cavness said, “I was blown away by their work. We will definitely be implementing the winning team’s idea and we’re hoping to eventually implement all of the designs.”
Elizabeth Robinson, co-director of the CSE said, “It’s great to be able to reach out to these creative and innovative young alums and bring them back to talk to students.”
“A really unique and special thing about Middlebury is the incredible support we give to students who have new ideas they wish to pursue. There is such value in helping students apply what they have learned in the classroom to real world challenges,” she added,
Núñez Cavness offered some advice for students.
“Throughout the start of Sword & Plough, there were many moments when I was out of my comfort zone, and I initially wasn’t sure if I had the specific knowledge to do it. One of the most important actions our team took was to acknowledge these moments, encourage each other to dive in and learn as we go. Don’t be afraid to step into something that is way out of your comfort zone. When you hear a great idea from your classmates, go beyond telling them it’s a great idea. Challenge others about how they’re going to take the next step and make their idea a reality. And if you have an idea, don’t be afraid to share it,” she concluded.
(12/03/14 10:30pm)
The terms “suicide” and “comedy” generally do not go well together, but Protocol, an entirely student-produced play that ran in the Hepburn Zoo from Nov. 20-22, managed to merge these two themes beautifully. As the audience followed the complicated lives of a group of twenty-something-year-old friends, it became clear that even in the darkest of times, it is perfectly okay to laugh.
The play, written by Erica Furgiuele ’15 and directed by Hannah Johnston ’15.5, begins on a rather heavy note as the troubled and sarcastic main character Harry, played by Boone McCoy-Crisp ’16, attempts suicide. Yet even as he pops pill after pill into his mouth, gazing intently into the audience with sorrowful eyes, his monologue gives way to bits of light comedy.
Life, Harry proclaims, is “one beautiful but deadly mathematical curve towards oblivion.” He then remarks, “Man, I should have been a poet. But I gave it up for my real love … auditing. I just do limericks on the side sometimes.”
This type of humor becomes Harry’s trademark throughout the play, which follows him and his friends dealing with the aftermath of his suicide attempt. As playwright Furgiuele explained, “The comedic mask that he puts on is how he hides his pain from other people.” Through moments of insecurity, tenderness and frustration, McCoy-Crisp’s poignant portrayal of Harry’s struggle to shed his mental-case identity and navigate his personal life showcased the incredible range of his acting skill.
Following the dark exposition, the rest of the play takes on a lighter note as Harry and his ex-girlfriend Meg, played by Joelle Mendoza-Etchart ’15, rekindle their complicated romance and their friends, Elle, played by Furgiuele, and Arthur, played by Michael McCann ’15, prepare for their wedding. Along the way, Meg seeks life advice from her witty, energetic and elderly chess partner Pierre, played by Jack DesBois ’15, fends off Elle’s incessant meddling in her love life and butts heads with Harry’s passive-aggressive brother Cole, played by Jabari Matthew ’17, who does not approve of her re-entrance into Harry’s life.
The flurry of intersecting events and relationships made for tightly packed scenes, which jumped from hospital rooms to coffee shops to a disastrous Christmas party involving burnt quiche. Through it all, Protocol provided a delightful and, at times, painfully accurate depiction of reality. As each character’s quirks, flaws and inner conflicts were exposed, emotionally charged confrontations and temporary falling-outs inevitably followed.
Furgiuele crafted the play with the multifaceted nature of humanity in mind.
“The most beautiful and the ugliest parts of us are inextricably linked,” she said. “When you know someone, you need to embrace all parts of them, no matter how hard it is. All of these characters are deeply flawed, but also very beautiful and very wonderful to behold.”
The actors, whom director Johnston described as “naturally funny,” delivered their performances with both honesty and likeability, fully enveloping themselves in the struggles and mindsets of their respective characters. Mendoza-Etchart’s earnest portrayal of Meg, who wanders through life with a fair amount of uncertainty, struck an affectionate chord with the audience, particularly as she anxiously voiced her inner monologue in preparation for her first post-breakup date with Harry. Meanwhile, the relaxed chemistry between actors McCann and Matthew set the foundation for scenes of comedic gold, namely whilst husband-to-be Arthur and his best man, Cole, frantically cobble together their wedding speeches.
The audience enthusiastically received DesBois’s performance as Pierre – Meg’s nursing home friend, chess partner and unofficial life adviser.
With his thick French accent, energetic stage presence and lush white hair, which let out puffs of baby power each time he kissed Meg animatedly on the cheek, Pierre provided a charming and hilarious distraction from the strife of the young adults. His role ultimately proved to be crucial to the plot, after his sage advice convinces Meg to reconsider her actions toward Harry.
From the director’s chair, Johnston struggled to set the right tone for the production.
“How do I make this a play that people know that they can laugh at, and at the same time not make light of the serious stuff going on?” she recalled asking herself.
In one of the most serious moments of the play, Harry confronts Meg about the empty medicine cabinet and questions her trust in him in the wake of his suicide attempt. McCoy-Crisp and Mendoza-Etchart executed the shifting dynamics within this scene brilliantly, creating a dramatic turning point within the story.
Furgiuele found this emotional interaction the most difficult to write.
“It’s easy to be funny and make jokes, but it’s hard to say what you mean because words are these flimsy things,” she said.
Despite the dark premise of the play – suicide, heartbreak and the severance of ties – a sense of hope and possibility pervades at the end, with everyone putting their disputes aside to celebrate Elle and Arthur’s wedding. In following Meg and Harry’s fumbled attempts to redefine their relationship through shared blueberry muffins, spilled coffees and difficult conversations, the audience gains a newfound appreciation for love and companionship.
“I hope audience members take away the idea that even though love is really difficult and most of the time doesn’t work out, it’s still worth trying for,” Johnston said.
The ultimate goal, she added, was “to make people laugh and think and go home a little happier than before.”
By striking the right balance between tears and smiles, melancholy and lightheartedness, this beautifully crafted suicide comedy managed to do just that.
(11/19/14 11:51pm)
Millions of years ago our common ancestor with chimpanzees made an extraordinary decision. It gradually took its knuckles off the ground and began to walk on two legs. Of course, this was not actually a conscious decision. Evolution selected for this occurrence because, for some arcane reason, it was more advantageous to be a biped than a quadruped. That’s one conclusion, but it’s not very satisfying so I’m going to pretend you’re interested and delve further.
Our quasi-chimp ancestor abandoned invaluable traits that benefit chimps. Those seemingly innocuous animals are much stronger than humans. They are also masters of climbing, which is an excellent evasion skill. With strength and the ability to evade predators, chimps do okay for themselves in the competitive animal kingdom. Thus, a frail biped must have some uncanny ability because evolution doesn’t make mistakes. Nature wouldn’t select for our bipedal predecessor if it couldn’t survive in its environment.
The transition from four to two feet brought about anatomical changes that may explain the bipedal advantage. Our early ancestor, known in science as Australopithecus afarensis, developed protruding butts, arched feet, and Achilles tendons. All these traits are lacking in chimps and superfluous in the process of walking. However, they are essential for running. Butt muscles give us power when we run, our foot structure allows for balance, support, and comfort, and Achilles let the foot flex freely throughout our gait. Furthermore, by standing upright, we began dissipating heat much more efficiently. We resided in a very hot climate several million years back and the sun’s rays struck the entire back of all our quadruped friends. But we, as bipeds, only felt the sun’s heat on our shoulders and heads. We were able to stay cooler much better and body temperature regulation is also crucial to running. This leads to the next clue: we can sweat and other animals cannot. Sweating is our homeostasis when our body temperature is getting too high, but all other animals have to inefficiently pant out the heat. It’s much easier to run if you can sweat than if you can’t.
In order to synthesize these random features into a meaningful claim, I’ll need to mention two other remarkable differences between Australopithecus afarensis (us) and chimps. Archeologists have found that as we stood erect our heads and jaws shrunk, our brains grew, and we began eating meat. Our new diet that included meat gave our brains nutrients for it to grow. Meat is also not as tough as the roots and herbs chimps eat so we no longer needed big heads and jaws to chew through those veggies. To eat meat we had to kill the meat, but archeological digs have determined that we did not create weapons for another million years.
The answer is persistence hunting. We chased animals over vast distances until they passed out. Our butts, Achilles, stature, sweat glands, and feet all enabled us to run very efficiently. We are better at distance running than any other animal. Running was the bipedal secret that gave birth to what distinguished early-man from its chimpanzee counterparts.
We evolved to run and use that skill as a predatory technique to help get meat, which made us more human than we could ever imagine. Our brains grew and our heads shrunk because of what we ate but we could only eat meat because we could kill prey by running them to death. Running is essential to our evolutionary history; it is part of our genetic code. There’s something undeniably natural and cathartic about going out for a few miles in the morning or a nice jog at sunset. Running is part of how we came to be and continued to thrive; it made us human.
Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
JOSH CLAXTON '18 is from Summit, N.J.
(10/30/14 2:45am)
er, peered out from behind the podium at Mead Chapel last Wednesday night, a small woman with a big afro and an even bigger passion animating her face and propelling her speech. Over 100 students, occupying the pews below, were there to discover what her intriguingly titled talk, “On Ferguson, Thug Kitchen, & Trayvon Martin: Intersections of [Post] Race Consciousness Food Justice, and Hip Hop Vegan Ethics,” would entail.
Harper shared her current book project, which applies critical race and black feminist perspectives to study black male vegans promoting veganism, gardening, societal stability, diet decolonization and race consciousness through hip hop. She explained how this social engagement breaks the stereotypes of vice that oppress black masculinity, as manifested in Thug Kitchen, a white vegan cookbook appropriating black profanity, and the murders of black teenagers, Travyon Martin and Michael Brown.
The lecture was part of the week’s events hosted by EatReal for this year’s MCAB fall symposium, “Food [In] Justice in the 21st Century.” Aiming to present as many sides of the food justice issue as they could, EatReal invited Harper because her extremely underrepresented lens, linked to multiple social justice movements, would widen the symposium’s discussion and audience.
“I believe this symposium has broadened our duties as a student activist organization to include as many voices as possible,” secretary of EatReal Andrew Pester ’17 said. “Breeze introduced us to the power of narrative, which I believe will be a big part of our future here at Middlebury.”
“I believe it was incredibly successful because I saw many new faces that I have not seen in the context of food activism,” he said.
Despite her moral opposition to causing creatures suffering, Harper’s focus on the intersection of race, gender, hip hop, social justice and ethical consumption was a refreshing, thought-provoking departure from the discussions of animal rights and environmentalism dominating veganism.
“It’s about a lot of post-racial white vegans not really understanding how thug is being used in Thug Kitchen and why that’s a problem, why there seems to be no solidarity in understanding that you can’t just be anti-speciesist and a vegan, and pretend to live in a post-racial age or pretend that things like Ferguson and Travyon Martin don’t affect black and brown communities who are trying to get food security, social justice, as well as racial justice,” Harper said. “They don’t realize [racism] has shifted to structural, systemic processes.”
“My biggest takeaway is how intrinsically linked the topic of racism and differences in socioeconomic classes are to food justice and problems with the food system,” co-president of EatReal Lucy Reading ’17 said. “We want to continue working with other student groups like Juntos to continue addressing these social issues when working on EatReal initiatives in the future.”
“Something that I found particularly interesting was the meaning of hip hop: higher inner peace, helping other people,” Priyanjali Sinha ’18 said. Sinha is a vegetarian and she attended the talk because her Food Geographies class has interested her in social issues surrounding food, and because she wanted to make sense of the colorful, multifaceted title. “It was interesting to see how a certain culture — in this case, hip hop — can be misunderstood, misrepresented and also changed with time.”
Sinha continued, “The most significant part of the talk was that there were people who were reclaiming hip hop, like DJ Cavem, where he took a popular hip hop song called “G’s Up Hoes Down” by Snoop Dogg and made his own version where a G is not a gangsta, but a grower of food; and a hoe is not a misogynistic term to refer to a woman, but an actual implement to farm with.”
Although her talk seamlessly interwove various social angles together with the thread of veganism, Harper did not address some positions that could be brought into the conversation.
“We hoped she might touch a bit more on other perspectives in the black community about perspectives on veganism from someone that isn’t a vegan or health conscious,” Reading said.
“I wouldn’t say she is a vegan activist, but rather someone who brings to light the consequences of our consumption behavior,” Pester said when asked about the significance of Harper’s exploration of vegan food justice. “As a Middlebury College student, it is incredibly important to be able to see the consequences of our consumption and try to minimize the impact, both internal and external, of the food system.”
(10/30/14 2:44am)
Let’s just say that in the time you are reading this article, you have five thousand dollars magically appear in your bank account. Rational college student that you are, you have to spend it, as your terrible fear of hyper-inflation is driving you mad. Good news, you’re logical: you should spend that five grand on some killer wheels for college.
Alright, maybe a car isn’t the most prudent of purchases, but if you do have five thousand dollars that you want to spend on a car, you have far more and far better options than you might think. Using an incredibly advanced, top-secret algorithm that combines fun, reliability, practicality and economics in perfect harmony, I shall produce a list of the three best cars for you, the Middlebury student, readily available for $5,000 or less.
Disclaimer: These cars are not necessarily going to be the three best options for you. I don’t need that kind of liability. These cars are also not necessarily going to be the most mainstream of options, but c’mon, you’re more interesting than a used Toyota Camry aren’t you?
Subaru Outback/Legacy Wagon. Do you have the desperate urge to blend in with approximately 50 percent of the drivers in the beautiful state of Vermont? Then a Subaru is the car for you! There’s a reason so many people buy them around here. The cars are well built, reliable and even a little fun. I’m recommending the wagon versions of the Subaru midsize platform because who doesn’t want to fit just a little more junk in their trunk? Seriously, I personally don’t get why anyone would pick a sedan over a wagon. But anyway, they all come with four-wheel drive and “I’m a Vermonter” basically smeared in massive letters all over. Most 3rd and some 4th generation Outbacks and Legacys should be available on EBay or Craigslist (especially VT Craigslist) for around $5,000.
Charlie’s ideal choice: Subaru Legacy GT Wagon (4th Generation) with manual transmission.
Essential stats: Carrying capacity of 5 adults or 7 college students. Approximate ly 24mpg (depends on the model chosen). Trunk space for approximately 49 30-racks of Natty Ice. Liebowitz-o-Meter: 4.5/5 Rons.
Mazda 3 Hatchback. If you find yourself favoring more of a smaller car, you really can’t go wrong with the Mazda 3. Get the hatchback version because I said so. The 3 has been one of the perennial favorite steeds of our friendly northern neighbors for a while now. It’s consistently ranked as one of the best small cars because it’s fun (for real, just check out the demonic smile it has glued on its front) and efficient. For whatever reason however, no one in this country seems to get the memo and buys worse cars instead. The previous generation hatchback is just starting to dip into the $5,000 range and a hatchback from two generations ago can be easily picked up with that money.
Charlie’s ideal choice: 2nd Generation Mazda 3 5-Door S with a manual transmission.
Essential stats: Carrying capacity of 4 adults and a child or 6 college students. Approximate 29mpg average. Trunk space for approximately 25 30-racks of Natty Ice. Liebowitz-o-Meter: 4/5 Rons.
Swagger Wagon (Volvo V70.) I, of course couldn’t go without recommending my own magnificent beast. This brick-shaped tour-de-force is in many ways the ideal college car. With space for a traditional sized black bear family and a box of Twinkies, the V70 is fully prepared to take your two-months worth of dirty laundry back to your mom on breaks. While not always the most reliable, it does come decked out with a luxurious dead-animal interior, and I mean really, what more could you want? A V70 in pretty good shape can easily be purchased with $5,000 or the rights to your first-born son.
Charlie’s ideal choice: Volvo V70 R, good examples are hard to find for $5,000, but it’s just too cool not to put on the list.
Essential stats: Carrying capacity of 5 adults or 7 college students. Approximate 25mpg. Trunk space for approximately 55 30-racks of Natty Ice. Liebowitz-o-Meter: 5/5 Rons.
So there you have it, the authoritative answer on what you’ll spend your $5,000 on — if only that $5,000 existed.
(10/09/14 2:48am)
A petition to ban drone-assisted hunting in Vermont is making its way through the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife. The state of Vermont could become the latest state to ban hunting with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles following Montana, Alaska, Colorado and New Mexico.
Early this year, Eric Nuse of Orion, the Hunter’s Institute and Tovar Cerulli of the New England Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers submitted a petition to the board of Fish and Wildlife arguing that the use of drones to track or conduct reconnaissance leading up to a hunt violated the rules of fair chase and provided unfair advantage to the hunter. The board accepted the petition and began drafting a new rule to ban such practice.
Drone-assisted hunting has not become a problem in Vermont, but the board is nonetheless expected to implement the rule by the end of this year to ensure that it does not become a problem. A hearing, as part of the rule-making process, is scheduled for Oct. 21.
Fair chase is “the ethical, sportsmanlike, and lawful pursuit and taking of any free-ranging wild, native North American big game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage over such animals,” as defined by the Boone and Crockett Club. This club is a hunter-conservationist organization founded in the United States in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt. It is named after two hunter-heroes of the day, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, whom the club’s founders viewed as pioneers who hunted extensively while opening the frontier, but eventually realized the consequences of overharvesting game.
“Drones are just an overwhelming technology that have no place in hunting,” said Nuse, a former executive director and current board member of Orion, the Hunter’s Institute.
“Up until that point, the animal should be able to escape and be able to use all of its senses to survive,” Nuse said.
Hunters must rely primarily on their senses, too. “They have to be skillful, they have to be patient, and they have to put forth the effort. That’s what modern hunting is about.”
“Even though my ultimate goal might be to get freezer meat, we really do this for the enjoyment of the hunt,” he said.
“As states consider legislation, it is our position that manned and unmanned aircraft should be treated the same, focusing laws on the particular action in question, and not on the platform being used,” a statement from the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International said, without specific mention of drones for hunting. According to the statement, drones do have many beneficial uses, such as assisting in search and rescue, helping to fight wildfires, monitoring crops for disease and surveying wildlife populations.
“We are just saying you can’t use this device for hunting and scouting and that’s just not consistent with Vermont hunting traditions,” said Catherine Gjessing, the General Counsel of the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
(09/25/14 1:00am)
“Panda hat kid just dropped the top scoop of ice cream off his cone, caught it, and put it on #likeaboss.”
“Panda hat kid talked to the tour group!”
“Beginning to question whether Midd’s mascot is the panther or panda hat kid.”
“I nominate Panda hat kid as Liebowitz’s replacement #VotePHK.”
I was initially unimpressed by the size and style of junior Ruben Guzman’s panda hat. It just seemed like any other fleece hat with a panda face. It seemed out of proportion to the attention he’s drawn on campus in the last couple weeks. Frankly, I had pictured a fluffy panda ski mask with large mitten paws as tassels, a full-on face mask disguise for the robber who eats shoots and leaves.
Sitting in Crossroads on a Friday afternoon with a whole sweet potato pie to share between us, Guzman ’16, however, did not fail to impress me with tales of personal significance behind his hat that went viral with social media app Yik Yak.
Though the panda hat was probably made in China, Guzman is a native of Sanger, California, a town he described as very different from Middlebury, which made adjusting to his first year of college difficult.
“You know how people fall back on certain things that are comfortable to them? For me, I fell back on hats and childhood,” he said. “Pokemon, Digimon, cute little animals. That was a way for me to cope with being uncomfortable. The hat became a natural way for me to do that.”
Though Guzman’s panda hat is hands-down his most famous hat, he has a collection of 10 other animal hats, including a chicken, an owl and a fox. He wears his panda hat the most often for pragmatic reasons.
“My panda hat is the best-made one. It’s the one in the best shape and protected me from the cold the best,” he said.
Guzman purchased the hat in San Francisco at a meet-up for prospective Georgetown University students.
“This is supposed to be Giants [baseball] fan-wear. After I bought the hat, the morning after, I got the acceptance letter from Middlebury. I was like, ‘Oh wow, it’s a sign!’
“Middlebury is so different from where I’m from. In my city, there are drive-by [shootings] that happen every week or so. Someone dies. And then people talk about that stuff. That was so normal to me. The openness. The whole showing vulnerability. The fact that a lot of people from where I’m from look very much like me: Hispanic.
“I came from that to Middlebury, where everything is calm,” he said. “There’s not a lot of craziness happening here. The craziness here is just academic, or somebody overdrank, and that wasn’t relatable to me. I don’t know what to tell you, I don’t know how to approach people, I don’t know how to understand why it is such a big deal. Why is it that getting a B on a test is a big deal? It’s just a B.
“I understand pain and suffering is, to people, relative. But, when you’re a first-year, you’re like, ‘People are so … I don’t understand that.’ That’s where the panda hat came in,” Guzman said.
“The hat is very representative of how I am. Very silly, very goofy, like life is so short. Middlebury is such a privileged place in good and bad ways. I feel like we all get caught up in the little bad stuff.” He smiles. “What’s the problem? Let’s just have some fun.”
Guzman, currently a First-Year Counselor in Battell, attributes his rise to Yik Yak fame to the first-years on his hall, Battell second floor center.
“The first person who showed the Yik Yaks to me was a first-year. I feel like Yik Yak is a big thing with the first-years. It was perfect timing. The incoming first-years came in, and, as an FYC, I was one of the first people they saw on campus and could attach some sort of significance to.”
“My nickname [as Panda Hat Kid] is chill. It’s definitely a thing,” he said, laughing. “[As for the Yik Yaks], it’s super hard to offend me. The closest one to being offensive was, ‘Panda hat kid makes me want to interbreed.’ I was cracking up. This is just hilarious!”
Guzman believes the campus’s infatuation with “Panda Hat Kid” along with his “five minutes of fame” will eventually die down.
“And I’m totally okay with that. As long as I’m perceived as someone that people feel comfortable around, that’s what really matters to me,” he said. “[As an FYC], whenever I see first-years, I like to ask them how they’re doing, and how they’re adapting to life at Midd. I feel like I’ve made a lot of connections with first-years who aren’t in my hall because of that.”
He tugged on the baseball tassels. “It’s only five minutes, and you should do the best you can with the five minutes you got.”
(09/10/14 2:10pm)
The College is a surprisingly busy place during the summer, with its hodgepodge of researchers, employees, Bread Loaf students, and language learners. This summer, 11 students attending the new Middlebury School of the Environment also joined the mix. The program ran for six weeks, from June 20 to Aug. 1.
The School of the Environment is the brainchild of its director and Professor of Environmental and Biosphere Studies Stephen Trombulak. Trombulak initially proposed the idea of a summer school in the late 1990’s. After years of planning, the Middlebury board of trustees approved the school in the spring of 2013.
Trombulak thinks the College is uniquely positioned to start a successful environmental summer school because of its long history of summer programs, large network of alumni in environmental careers and strong, pioneering environmental studies department.
“Middlebury has had an environmental studies program as part of its academic curriculum for almost 50 years,” Trombulak said. “In fact, Middlebury’s program in environmental studies was the first major anywhere in the country, founded in 1965. We have worked tirelessly over the years to build a program that highlights the best of what is needed to offer a full spectrum of exposure to the study of the environment.”
Despite being the school’s first summer, students thought it was a success.
“It was an amazing summer,” wrote Isaac Baker ’14.5 in an email. “Given that it was the first year of the program, I had my reservations, but the faculty really showed up and put in the time to make it an incredibly immersive and valuable experience.”
Students took three courses. Two courses, including Sustainability Practicum, equivalent to Middlebury’s Environmental Studies Senior Seminar, and Understanding Place, a course focusing on Lake Champlain as a case study, were mandatory. The third course was an elective. Kaitlin Fink ’16 explained they were not typical college courses.
“I came into this program thinking that I was enrolled in three environmental studies courses; what I came away with was a whole new method of approaching complex systems in general – not just the environment – and a set of skills that has given me greater confidence in my ability to hopefully affect broader change in the future,” she said.
Baker agreed that the courses were more hands-on than normal college courses.
“We had reading, and plenty of it, but most days were spent doing things like working on a project, going to a museum, taking a historically-oriented hike, interviewing folks a few years into their environmental careers, or taking core samples on the College’s research vessel [The RV Folger],” he said.
For a four-week project in their Sustainability Practicum course, students were tasked with identifying problems the College could face in the future because of climate change and formulating solutions. The School of the Environment will consider and possibly implement their ideas.
“We chose to propose the purchase of a high-voltage generator for extended power outages, the burial of all above-ground power lines on campus, and the implementation of a rainwater collection system for several of our campus buildings” Fink said. “It was amazing to get to have this sort of ‘real world’ experience. I’m hoping to continue to work on our proposals throughout the rest of my time here at Middlebury, and maybe help to push along the path toward implementation.”
On a typical day students were busy from nine until dinner with breaks in between. Fink found that the small size of the school had several benefits.
“We were all taking the same set of courses, so, unlike during the standard school year, we could draw on ideas or readings from one course in discussion with another. Our conversations in class would spill over into our meal periods, which our professors attended with us, making for an incredibly rich intellectual environment where it was entirely normal for dialogues about Marxism or animal rights to exist alongside standard lunchtime chatter.”
The school had ten visiting speakers - called “practitioners in residence” - come to talk about their experiences working for positive environmental change. The speakers included Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben, renowned activist and founder of 350.org, Gus Speth, environmental author and former member of the President’s Task Force on Global Resources and Environment, and Alden Woodrow, business team leader for Google’s Makani airborne wind turbine project.
“What’s really unique about the school and what makes it so exciting is that we’re embedding not just information about the environment, but the skills necessary for students to become leaders in the field and to do something with the information,” Trombulak explained. “[The practitioners in residence] will not just talk about the skills in theory but how those skills have played out in their own settings and their own sectors they’ve been working in.”
Baker agreed that the visiting fellows were a highlight of the program.
“The mix of people the school brought in was what kept each long day feel manageable, while also making it exciting and meaningful,” Baker said.
The school was located in Middlebury its first summer but Trombulak thinks it will eventually move to a different location.
“There are many exciting possibilities,” Tromhulak said. “We could establish a campus in a city to explore issues associated with urban studies, or hold the school in a coastal region to explore curricula associated with marine studies.”
For Fink, her summer at the school was a motivating experience.
“The School of the Environment reignited my passion for the environmental challenges facing our world today, and I feel like I have started to develop the tools that will enable me to dive in somewhere and be able to effect positive change,” she said. “I don’t have all the answers yet – I don’t think I ever really will - but I know that I care, and now I at least know how and where to start.”
(05/07/14 3:59pm)
Straight
This is what you go through, the thumbing through the hand of cards to see what you’ve got and what you can do with your hand. You’re gonna get sadness in spades. I’ve seen enough boys walking bulldogs on ropes and Global Health girl Facebook photos of unvaccinated children in Cambodia and New York Times notifications buzzing on my phone at 4 a.m. telling me about 200 abducted girls and trailers for movies about pretty people with cancer and heard enough rape jokes and hiccupy laughs from genuine alcoholics and read enough Buzzfeed lists and terrible poetry to know that the crumminess out there is endless.
Flush
The very first piece of advice my mother gave me when we were on the road towards Middlebury (with faint urgency and hysteria in her voice because she was realizing the length of the list of life lessons she had forgotten to teach me including how to shoot a gun and how to operate a chainsaw) was “don’t get involved with a professor.” Holds up, I hear. But you should get in with a professor. Find your mentor, your expert, your spirit guide. You can have more than one. I have developed almost irrational loyalty towards professors on this campus, probably unbeknownst to them. Screw course evaluations. Go into that person’s office hours and talk to them. Write them a thank you note at the end of the semester. Figure out a research project that they would be jazzed to advise. Learn how to navigate a professional collaboration. It’s cliche to cry in a professor’s office. Do it anyway if you feel like it. Some of them will blink at you calmly and think about how many more papers they have to grade before they get to go home to a six-pack of Longtrail. That’s what I’d do if I were a professor.
I sat in Timi Mayer’s office at the end of my sophomore spring and said, “I can’t do anything for anyone else in this world. Why do you keep doing this? What’s the point?” I was crying like a chump. I saw her whole face soften. “All I can do is teach,” she said. “All I can do is try to make students think. Critically think.” I knew this already. I knew why I was kicking my own ass, bending over backwards for seemingly little payoff and a pile of debt to get myself a liberal arts education. I know I am not worthless, that I have something to offer, that I am not yet a broken person. But I often need someone other than my paid therapist (who I absolutely do not believe for a second) to tell me to my face. Those moments of rhetorical validation, between you and the professor you respect? Irreplaceable. Don’t write that paper so that your professor gives you grade A. Write it so you can stretch your fingers and toes as far as they reach from your body, so that your professor can see that you are not just college student, you are a person who is trying, a person at work.
Three-of-a-Kind
Isn’t it funny how often this pricey (we/I love to talk about $$$) experience often feels just so cut-rate? Like at the end of a paper or a party, I feel post-coital but still unfulfilled? When my mother comes here she walks around campus, re-upholstered in new grass and spotless branding and sighs in jealousy. I am never going to have this place and time again, this bargain brand form of adult lite stocking a country club bathroom, these rooms of rampant, brambled, fumbling gecko children all squawking for attention or fetal positioning to disappear. I am trying to see the beauty in the final lo-fi montage of belly buttons and blinking cursors and coffee breath and dorm room bed flops and Proctor oatmeal. Somehow try to remember, even if this seems like a disappointing Woody Allen film times racism times rape culture divided by old-fashioned animal cruelty projected on the shiny carapace of the self you thought you were going to be (an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life) that it’s also the soft carousel of your friend taking all the dishes to the conveyor belt or solidarity in the basement of the film lab at 3 a.m. or the Gampitheater with a vase of lilacs and strawberries and OutKast playing from an iPhone for a birthday breakfast or an entire discussion class gaining fast on a desert mirage called cultural collective memory.
Full House
When it’s the first snow I sit in Johnson Memorial Building’s lounge, and stare up at the skylight in the honey-wood ceiling. Proctor Booth room is best before 9 a.m., soundtracked to VPR Classical and water with lemon. There is an ice cream machine on the sixth floor of Bi Hall as well as the greenhouse. Go there in the dead of winter for oxygen and chlorophyll and chipwiches. I was once told that you can get inside the organ chamber in Mead Chapel through a little door, though I have never tried it. You have to be in the library very early if you want to claim the SSR (Secret Study Room) in the back right corner on the ground floor. Sama’s has the cheapest coffee. Use the Bike Shop. Hillcrest air feels like the Fiji water of airs. Use the outhouse in the Organic Garden. Use the craft supplies in the Crest Room. Sleep on as many couches as possible. The first time I saw Facilities edging all the sidewalks, I just stared and stared. That is a crazy thing, to edge all these sidewalks! That is a beautiful, insane task! Admire the edged sidewalks. There are a lot of things happening “behind the scenes.” Figure out what they are.
Four-of-a-Kind
Here’s a good game to play: search your email inbox for instances of the word “stressed” or “panic attack.” You’ll realize you’ve been here before. Some selections from a four-year stint:
December 2013: And maybe I’m just writhe-ing and circular-stress-thinking more than usual because 40 assorted pages due by Thursday will not get done and definitely not ease the minds of people who I think I’ve let down and betrayed because they maybe saw potential in me and I am systematically failing them or “not enough sleep and too many drugs”
May 2013: My harddrive crashed! I am back from sea which was nice but I am dumped back into stressland again because today as I got in on the night bus, I came down with a miserable fever. Ideal. And everyone is gone on spring break except for my one roommate who was tripping balls all day in my house on LSD while I lay in bed and shivered to the tempo of Pink Floyd or whatever
December 2012: wildly frustrated on verge of tears and hyperventilation in the GIS lab, no can do.
September 2012: i almost had a mini panic attack and then on my way home i stopped off at weybridge to say hi to bekah and on the way there i saw a sad bro chasing after a very unrelenting and prim girl who was stalking away angrily and he was calling and calling “Louisa! Louisa!!!! WAIT PLEASE DON’T RUN AWAY FROM ME!” and it was quite tragic.
March 2011: i skipped class today to work on the three essays i have due tomorrow. IM SO STRESSED. I NEED THIS TO BE ENDING. nose to the grindstone until fri...here we go.
September 2010: I almost have a panic attack every day just thinking about how much amazing stuff is offered here and that it is not humanly possible to take advantage of it all in just four years.
Hang in there, lil’ buddy. You’re gonna be fine.
Straight Flush
My friend Bekah brought this term into my life: “Big Feelings.” She stole it from one of her friends in Seattle who works at a preschool with little kids, many of whom have been abused or neglected. When the kids are experiencing an overwhelming emotion-cloud of feelings they can’t process, understand or deal with in an effective or socially great way (good or bad)...they call that having Big Feelings. Your Big Feelings are valid, and you don’t have to answer to anyone. No one ever has to ruin everything, not even me. Some things you can just enjoy and let run through your hair like Moroccan oil and pour into your heart of Spring Breakerz embers and spread and fizz like a mimosa.
Royal Flush
I rediscovered my mother’s other classic piece of advice when I was playing that email inbox game earlier — in response to some minor crisis, she wrote back: “You should, as I still like to say, put your hair in a pony tail, splash cold water on your face and get real.”
Artwork by CHARLOTTE FAIRLESS
(04/30/14 10:59pm)
The Rotten Tomatoes description of Noah says that it succeeds in “… bringing the Bible epic into the 21st century.” That’s a case of damning with faint praise if I’ve ever seen it. What does it mean to “modernize” an old, canonical story? What sorts of prejudices are inherent in that kind of project? The recipe for Hollywood modernization often reads something like the following. Begin with the basic outline of a very famous story, preferably one that might inspire controversy so as to attract attention. Contort the story’s structure to fit a conventional action-movie plot-arc. Cast attractive people, preferably very famous attractive people. Saddle the thing with as many banalities and love scenes as it can handle before it collapses under the weight of its own clichés. For example, look to Dante’s Inferno, Beowulf, that Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters thing from last summer and so on.
I would have immediately assumed that Noah would follow the above checklist – where “modernize” is a synonym for “let’s make this story super badass, bro” – if not for the bizarre fact that Darren Aronofsky, of all people, is Noah’s director. Aronofsky is a man who made his name with the hallucinogenic math thriller (math thriller?) called Pi, which cost him a whopping $60,000 to make. Aronofsky has since directed strange, personal movies like Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan. With Aronofsky at the helm, Noah is at least willing to take some chances here and there. It’s in the first 10 minutes that we are introduced to a gang of giant rock men, fallen angels called “the watchers,” who appear precisely like you’d imagine Bible-era megatrons to look.
This degree of outlandishness proves good for the film. Certainly one of the appeals of Noah is the slow unveiling of the original tale: how it depicts the actual arc-building and the animals boarding the arc. These revelations are more interesting when mixed with Aronofsky’s strange vision. At the same time, because we do know the basic narrative, the obligatory sweeping battle scenes exist purely as visual spectacle. Noah will build an arc and the animals will board the arc, regardless of the fight’s outcome. These enormous battles simultaneously lack drama and feel totally irrelevant to everything else in the film.
The world of Noah, like the battle scenes, strongly resembles a fantasy epic à la Tolkien, but the film’s visual tone is inconsistent. In one breath we get the giant rock men grunting and lumbering around with a huge sense of scale, and in another we are snapped back towards a claustrophobic, faux-documentary handheld style that recalls Aronofsky’s unique imagery in Pi. The contrast is jarring, as if the bizarre fantasy that Aronofsky wants to make is at war with another, more standard special-effects driven epic. This feeling colors most of the final product.
To its credit, Noah does gesture in the direction of Genesis’ themes, particularly in the characterization of Noah the man. Russell Crowe seems like an inescapable casting choice as Noah, but his presence forces the character out of the stereotypical noble and upright caricature that we’ve seen in other retellings of the flood story. Instead, this is a narcissistic, broken man who believes that the human race deserves to die. More than that, there is no woman who might bare children to begin humanity anew; humans have wrecked the earth completely and utterly. There is a very clear attempt at a statement about climate change with Noah. However, we only see the bones of themes like this, or of any real artistic vision, because they are buried beneath computer generated images and genre conventions.
So I suppose Aronofsky has succeeded in modernizing the Noah story, which essentially is to say that Aronofsky has succeeded in producing a loud, hulking Hollywood action movie with just the occasional glimpse of imagination to pull us along. The movie is obnoxious in parts (many parts) and just kind-of boring in others. Now here I am complaining about an action movie starring Russell Crowe being loud and obnoxious though. It is what it is. It could have been much more than what it is, but if you want an action movie you’ve got Noah, which is no more interesting or insipid than the rest.
