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(04/15/21 9:57am)
Last July, the United States celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), the civil rights law that sought to end disability-based discrimination and guarantee the right to accessibility in public spaces. Though the ADA was a monumental step forward towards disability justice, it falls woefully short of upholding the rights it promises. The road to true accessibility remains long and uncertain for those of us who have no choice but to continue to traverse it, even in a tight-knit college community that prides itself on its commitment to social justice.
As a Middlebury junior who is both physically disabled and learning-disabled, I have spent the last three years navigating my way through the entrenched inaccessibility of the spaces in which I live and learn. From struggling up the stairs of buildings without elevators to get to office hours to spending hours trying to justify my academic accommodations to professors, administrators and even the Disability Resource Center itself, I have experienced firsthand many of the ways in which life at Middlebury can make disabled students feel as though we are an afterthought — to be included only when it is convenient.
Though they may appear broad and unrelated at first, all of these accessibility issues stem from the same root problem: the ways in which we view accessibility and accommodation themselves.
When we think of accommodations or accessibility tools, we often think of things like wheelchairs, service dogs and extended time on exams. But what if I told you that we all use accessibility tools and accommodations every single day, regardless of our disability status?
I’d like you to think about the last time you wore a jacket. A jacket keeps your body warm when your surroundings are too cold for your body to do that on its own. This is, of course, no inherent fault of your body; rather, the cold temperature and your body’s natural need for warmth means that for a time, your body and the environment are incompatible. A jacket serves as a bridge towards compatibility — in other words, an accessibility tool or accommodation. The same goes for cars, glasses, computers and countless other essential tools we use on a daily basis.
You may struggle to think of these ordinary, everyday examples as "accommodations" because the word "accommodation" implies a favor — like someone or something is going out of their way to help you. But access to warm clothing is a basic human right, not a gift, so we don't usually think of a jacket as an accommodation. Why is it, then, that the only things we consider “accommodations” are accessibility tools that appear to only be needed by disabled individuals?
The perception of accessibility as a favor that one can choose to extend to others is at the core of many of the inaccessibility issues we face at Middlebury. Some of the academic accommodations I rely on the most, like occasional extensions on assignments, are considered optional; a professor is permitted to choose whether or not they personally feel such an accessibility tool is reasonable enough to implement.
I have spent hours listening to professors complain to me about how my accessibility needs will make their workflow more challenging or ruin their weekend. However, I can count on one hand the number of times I have heard it acknowledged that significant adaptations to the status quo are only necessary because the systems in place at the course, departmental, institutional and societal levels were not designed with disabled students in mind, thus hindering our ability to succeed.
Placing the blame on the student in these instances is not only harmful to a student’s well-being but also perpetuates the idea of accessibility as a favor that is being graciously granted to someone who should be thankful to receive any consideration at all. Furthermore, it excuses significant inaccessibility if eradicating it would take more than a minor effort by those who already have access to the spaces, learning environments and fields of study that so many of us are still actively excluded from; some of my disabled friends have even been told that perhaps Middlebury just isn’t the place for them.
But who, then, is Middlebury a place for? Who gets to belong here?
I’ll ask you to consider this: if someone's request for accommodation would cause you to change so much about the way you run your workplace, course, event or institution that it seems unreasonable, perhaps it isn't the accommodation itself but rather the fundamental design of your workplace, course, event or institution that is unreasonably inaccessible.
And though addressing those underlying barriers may seem like an extreme shift away from the comfort of the status quo, that is what it will take to dismantle a system of exclusion that digs its roots ever deeper the longer we continue to uphold it.
How can we move forward? As an institution, we need to immediately rectify the physical inaccessibility of many of our campus buildings; a quick glance at the pastel-green campus map we distribute to new students demonstrates that a significant portion of our buildings lack even a single accessible entrance, much less an accessible interior. We must also commit to offering remote opportunities for engagement even after the pandemic is over; recordings of live lectures and Zoom office hours should remain available for students who need them.
More broadly, professors and administrators must begin thinking critically about how to eliminate the underlying inaccessibility within individual courses, departments and campus life. They must also be given the training and resources to address these pervasive problems effectively and sustainably. As students, we can express the urgent necessity of such accessibility measures in our conversations with faculty, staff and — above all — the administration, demanding that significant funds be allocated to address systemic inaccessibility at Middlebury.
Perhaps we have long brushed aside Middlebury’s inaccessibility as an inherent, dismissible consequence of its historical charm and academically rigorous character. Perhaps we have never found the right time to address it sustainably, settling instead for short-term solutions and band-aid fixes. But the myth of a “right time” is just that — an illusion; it’s high-time we start taking accessibility seriously, and we need to do so now.
Isabel Linhares is a member of the class of 2022.
(04/01/21 10:00am)
Before April 1, the official Vermont state Covid-19 vaccine eligibility guidelines did not permit Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) to schedule a vaccination appointment unless they fell into other eligibility categories. However, a number of BIPOC students received contradictory information both by word of mouth and directly from Health Department call center workers and — believing they were eligible — successfully signed up for appointments for as early as April 6.
By Sunday, March 28, word had spread through campus, misleadingly, that all BIPOC students were eligible.
“I heard about it from my friend, who texted me saying, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you saw, but Vermont is vaccinating BIPOC residents,’” said Henry Ganey ’22.
Part of the confusion over BIPOC eligibility in Vermont may have arisen from language regarding eligible groups on the Vermont Department of Health and pharmacy websites.
Kinney Drugs, one of the pharmacies offering vaccination appointments, listed eligible groups on their website including a bullet stating “BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) Vermonters and their households,” seeming to imply that all BIPOC Vermonters would automatically be eligible. However, operators of Kinney’s vaccine hotline clarified to The Campus that only those living in a household with an already-eligible BIPOC Vermonter qualified.
The eligibility section of the Vermont Department of Health’s website read, “If you live with a person who identifies as Black, Indigenous or a person of color (BIPOC), including anyone with Abenaki or other First Nations heritage, and is eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccine, you can also sign up to get a vaccine.”
Although the site later clarified its language, many students were left with the impression that all BIPOC individuals were eligible, leading to screenshots of the page being shared widely on social media alongside guidance to book a vaccine appointment.
While the site did not state that BIPOC who were not otherwise eligible — due to age group, occupation or health conditions — could receive the vaccine, call center workers also repeatedly signed up BIPOC students and reaffirmed their eligibility solely by virtue of their racial identity.
Citlali Aguilera-Rico ’23 was uncertain whether a dorm could be classified as a household, so she called the Department of Health for clarification. “The language was pretty confusing on the website. I called, they went through the list of pre-existing conditions, and I said no to all of them. Then I said I was Latina, and the woman said ‘Yup, that makes you eligible,’” Aguilera-Rico recounted.
Aguilera-Rico shared that she was initially uneasy after realizing that she had actually not been eligible to make an appointment but ultimately feels the fault lies with the Health Department.
“After I found out I wasn’t eligible, I felt super guilty, but then people were telling me, ‘Don’t feel guilty, they’re trying to make this confusing on purpose,’” she said.
Maya Gee ’22, who is scheduled to receive her first dose on April 6, spoke about the mixed messages she encountered about her eligibility before she made her appointment on Sunday.
“At first, I thought I was qualified because I saw an Instagram story that said I was, but then I was told by someone else that I was not because it was only household,” she said. “But then, other BIPOC friends of mine who had signed up told me I was qualified, so I called the Department of Health.”
Ganey noted that the call center worker did not ask for any proof of eligibility or even seem to take the time to check the guidelines after Ganey asked for confirmation about his own status.
“I called to ask if I was eligible, and the person just started asking for my information and said ‘Alright, looks like you’re signed up for Tuesday the 6th,’” he said.
Rasika Iyer ’22 also successfully scheduled a vaccine appointment through the Health Department. But after hearing that she might not be eligible after all, she called the Health Department back the next day to seek clarification and spent about 45 minutes being transferred and put on hold before receiving an answer.
“I was connected to someone who told me that they were also confused about what eligibility is for BIPOC and that others had called to ask about this,” she said. “It seemed like I got connected to someone from a different call center because at one point they gave me the same number to the Health Department I had originally called and told me to ask the Health Department.”
Still unsure after the call, Iyer moved her appointment using the online portal to after April 19 — the date when all residents 16 and over would be eligible to register for the vaccine.
Ganey speculated that lack of training might be a reason for the inconsistency in vaccine policy.
“It seems like sometimes you’ll get a volunteer on the phone and then sometimes you’ll get an employee who actually knows the requirements,” he said.
Katie Warchut, public health communication officer at the Vermont Department of Health, could not offer an explanation with certainty for why some non-eligible individuals were given appointments this week.
“We work with a group of trained individuals who receive updated guidance on a regular basis on how to register people for vaccination. Current guidance is that if someone calls and says they are part of an eligible BIPOC household, they will be able to register,” Warchut wrote in an email to The Campus. “It’s certainly possible there was some misunderstanding or confusion that extended to the call center [over BIPOC eligibility] as policies evolved.”
Some white students were able to sign up for a vaccine appointment under the household rule. Mendel Baljon ’21, who lives in an on-campus suite with two BIPOC students, called the Health Department to confirm his eligibility shortly after his suitemates made their own appointments on March 28. Baljon said he became aware of his potential eligibility after seeing on Instagram that all household members of BIPOC were eligible.
“I called the phone number to make an appointment, I told them twice I was white but both of my housemates were BIPOC, and they had no issue with it,” Baljon said. “I figured they would turn me down over the phone if I wasn’t eligible, but the whole call took a minute.”
Other students have not been able to make a vaccine appointment so easily. Emily Ballou ’21 called the Health Department to check her eligibility as a permanent Vermont resident in a BIPOC household where one member — her father — was vaccinated because of his health condition. Ballou was initially told that both her parents needed to be eligible before she could also sign up for an appointment. Only after her mother became eligible on March 28 under the 50 and up age bracket was Ballou able to schedule her own appointment.
As a native Vermonter, Ballou expressed some discomfort with the reality that, due to the confusion, many college students have vaccine appointments scheduled for earlier than they were eligible — and many before native Vermonters who had been waiting.
“My mom called to register, and her appointment is weeks away. It does not sit right with me that a lot of students have used this loophole of using the college address to bypass so many Vermonters who have already been waiting,” she said.
Comments from various students about their excitement over receiving a vaccination soon, which sometimes seems to arise from a desire to return to normal rather than from actual health concerns, have increased Ballou’s frustration.
“I’ve been hearing Middlebury students say, ‘I’m so excited I’m getting the vax, this means I’ll be safe and can have actual fun for senior week,’” she said.
Starting April 1, the vaccine eligibility in Vermont is officially expanded to all BIPOC permanent residents ages 16 and up, and all permanent residents ages 16 and up will become eligible on April 19.
Even so, Gov. Phil Scott announced on Tuesday that out-of-state college students are not eligible to receive the vaccine in Vermont. This development has left many BIPOC students who are not Vermont residents unsure about the appointments they have scheduled in the coming weeks, as they worry about breaking the newly-revealed guidelines.
Emily Ballou is an Arts & Culture editor for The Campus.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Ballou's father was vaccinated because of his occupation. He was vaccinated because of his health condition.
(04/01/21 10:00am)
Derrick Cram turns to his side and looks at one of his co-workers. “You ready?” he asks.
Cram, the business manager of the Middlebury-owned Ralph Myhre Golf Course, is about to announce that the golf course will be open to students throughout the fall semester. He’s sitting at his desk in late summer, as nearby Middlebury students acclimate to a Covid-altered semester: Zoom classes, to-go meals, go/snitch — the whole shebang.
In the carefully-worded email, Cram writes that Middlebury students are welcome to the golf course throughout the fall semester — masked and socially distanced, of course — once they have cleared quarantine. It was a decision that necessitated hours of thought and planning, but ultimately one that the Ralph Myhre crew — and the administration — felt confident and excited about.
Cram hits send, knowing the next few hours might be a little crazy. He was right.
“I kid you not, as soon as I hit send, it wasn’t even two minutes before the phones started ringing,” Cram told The Campus. “We had three phone lines busy for no less than three hours.”
Many businesses have struggled to attract customers during the pandemic, but the Ralph Myhre Golf Course has not. Since they first opened during the pandemic on May 7, 2020, there’s been a steady flow of golfers, including first-time players, old faces who finally had time to golf again and, of course, the regulars.
Cram can’t say for sure, but last summer might have been the course’s most successful season to date; in his 23 years of working for the college, he can’t remember a year that compares.
“This summer was crazy busy,” Cram said. “This is the busiest summer I’ve ever seen. We did not expect this summer to unfold the way it did — we were blindsided by the amount of support and business that came through our course.”
While Ralph Myhre had to curtail about 30% of their tournaments last year due to Covid-19 — including college tournaments and shotgun-style tournaments, in which all the golfers start at once — the traffic remained incessant.
Business was booming, but it wasn’t without months of brainstorming, planning and flat-out waiting. When the pandemic first hit Middlebury in mid-March, Cram and his crew were kept at home for roughly a month, effectively sidelined until they received information on how to proceed from the state.
The first group of employees allowed back onto the course was the grounds crew, tabbed as essential workers by the state. Without their maintenance, after all, the course’s terrain would’ve incurred lasting damages.
Finally, on May 6, Gov. Phil Scott announced that golf courses would be allowed to open. After about eight weeks of static noise, Cram and his co-workers finally had answers.
“The switch was flipped and we had to have a plan the next day,” Cram recalled. “We were on location the next morning. It was myself, our golf pro Paul Politano and our grounds crew. And that’s how we ran for the first couple weeks since the procedure for how to staff safely was still in the process of being implemented.”
It might have cost the Ralph Myhre crew a bit of sleep, but they did it. On Thursday, May 7 — the day after they were alerted that they could reopen the course — Ralph Myhre opened to the public.
From the get-go, the operation looked different. For one, seasonal staff was prohibited from working per state guidelines, leaving a sizable hole in the crew. The solution? Sourcing displaced dining and custodial workers who were eager for work once students were sent home.
With a patchwork staff manning the day-to-day, golfers returned to the course, which sits adjacent to the football field and against a picturesque Vermont backdrop. At first, golf carts were prohibited, as was other shared equipment, like divot bottles, ball washers, rakes and drinking coolers. Guests were also asked to wear masks when they floated in and around the clubhouse, and the Pro Shop was closed per state guidelines.
Ralph Myhre’s staff also needed to reconfigure games with a shotgun start, like the popular member-guest tournaments. Given the risk inherent in inviting a flock of participants at once, the staff implemented structured tee-times, where players would arrive and tee off at staggered times.
Surprisingly, the new structure — although different — was a big hit among the golfers.
“People liked the tee times for the member-guest [tournaments] because they wouldn’t have to deal with the crowds,” Cram said. “It was more of a flow on the driving range, it was more of grab-and-go food, and it cut back the length of their commitment. They said it was actually nice to have shorter days.”
The check-in table, usually positioned in the Pro Shop, was also shifted outside, placed adjacent to the first hole. While it was an adjustment at first, it might be a change that’s here to stay, according to Cram.
Now outdoors, the check-in table allows staffers to have a better sense of how busy the course is, when to hold people back a few minutes and when there’s a chance to pair up solo golfers.
Throughout the summer, the Ralph Myhre crew had to tinker with regulations as Vermont and the college’s guidelines shifted. It was an ever-moving pivot, but as long as the course was operational, Cram welcomed the challenge.
“As the summer unfolded, procedures changed,” Cram explained. “Stuff just developed as the season unfolded. We actually became more stringent as things unfolded.”
Once August hit, for example, seasonal workers were able to return to work, relieving dining and custodial staff of their atypical duties. It allowed the temporary helpers to shift back to their regular positions, just in time to welcome the roughly 2,000 students who returned to Middlebury last fall.
Flash forward to the late-summer day when Derrick hit send on that email. Without NESCAC competition, access to the Peterson Athletic Complex or regular club sports, golfing offered an attractive alternative for cooped-up students.
And Midd kids were all over it.
Besides delineating the golf course’s plan for the fall, Cram’s announcement to students also included another attractive layer: golfing would be free for students that semester, excluding golf cart and club rentals.
It was an idea that had been floating around the administration for a while, Cram explained, and one that the administration felt well-positioned to pilot during a Covid-defined semester.
At first, students were only permitted to tee off during student-reserved time blocks, separate from those available to all other golfers. But once Middlebury transitioned into Phase 2, that barrier was eliminated.
As students were introduced into the fold, community members quickly learned to book their tee times far in advance, sometimes even two weeks ahead, indicative of the chaotic traffic at the course.
Like all other fall sports teams, the men’s and women’s varsity golf squads didn’t compete in the NESCAC last fall, but they still practiced daily at the course. There were noticeable changes to the day-to-day, though, including a two-person limit in the locker room.
Throughout the fall, students and community members alike flooded Ralph Myhre, filling days from morning to night. In some instances, students were booked to tee off in the late afternoon, just an hour or so before sunset.
It was a hectic season, and one that might repeat this spring. While the course hasn’t been open yet this semester — it was transformed into a cross country ski course for the first half of the semester — opening day is just around the corner.
Cram said he envisions April 10 as the tentative reopening date. Unlike last year, the vast majority of traditional tournaments and clinics will resume in 2021, including traditional collegiate golf meets.
As things stand, the course will host one collegiate competition on Saturday, May 8, when both the men’s and women’s teams will close out their five-match seasons.
While free golfing won’t continue this spring semester, it remains an idea that the administration could consider implementing long-term — and it might even extend to free season passes at the Snow Bowl, according to Cram.
If weather permits, the course will host their traditional spring clean-up day on April 10, an event that invites students and community members alike to bond and share stories from the winter.
“We’re going to offer a clean-up day on April 10, if weather permits,” Cram said. “We invite members and students alike to join in––it's a community-builder. After that clean-up, we have a little cookout with grab-and-go burgers and dogs, and we start tee times immediately following clean-up.”
(04/01/21 9:58am)
As graduation approaches, I find myself gripped by a painful nostalgia. It’s as if all of my regrets from the past four years have materialized in the form of an inescapable specter. Sitting in class, I suddenly see myself making a joke at someone’s expense. Eating lunch, I cringe recalling when I slept through a date. I dream about a conversation that ended a close friendship. Like a curse, these memories I have entombed during my time here have been reanimated to haunt my final semester. The past few weeks have been fraught with these afflictive recollections.
Reliving these memories has been an emotionally taxing experience. I oscillate between periods of guilt, melancholy and mourning. To avoid the flashbacks, I bury myself in my assignments or spend an inordinate amount of time at the gym. But they always return, accompanied by that same aching nostalgia.
In essence, I feel a need for closure. A yearning to travel back in time to undo my wrongs, to hold my tongue, to make amends before a relationship frayed. My powerlessness to change the past is agonizing. In an absurd way, I feel like an ill-fated criminal — wrongdoings permanent — being led to the guillotine. While my tribulations are those of an ordinary college student — and I face graduation, not a death machine — it feels like my troubles have existential weight.
But unlike the condemned, I may be able to redeem my mistakes. Though I have lost their friendship, those people are not gone. They live within shouting distance, frequent the same dining halls, and it would only take a simple text to meet with them to profess my remorse. Absolution may be an apology away. Why, then, do I feel paralyzed to reach out to those I have hurt? Why does gaining closure feel so unattainable?
To answer these questions, I decided to take a critical look at my conception of closure and what it means to “move on.” My first realization was that my idea of moving on is rooted in ego. Wrongly, I believed recovering from a loss meant I could think about it without a negative emotional response. If I did not feel pangs of guilt or longing when it came to mind, then I assumed I had successfully and completely healed. Yet closure is more than just emotional resilience. Even with callousness, vulnerability remains. Apathy toward a memory becomes an excuse to avoid it, or hide it away and leave it unresolved. My need for closure has permeated through this emotional armor.
Holistic closure is deeper, more intangible. It involves a comprehensive understanding of the causes of the loss: the nature of the relationship preceding it, the content of what was said, the emotions at play. One must estrange themself from their limited perspective and examine the event from afar. Since our memories are so intensely colored by personal biases, this dissociation is incredibly challenging. It often takes repeated contemplation and self-reflection to come to an adequate conclusion. Early junior year, some of my hurtful words resulted in the abrupt end of one of my closest friendships. It took me over a year to recognize the significance of what I said, to take a step back and measure the conditions that precipitated the event. After doing so, I feel closer toward coming to terms with the role I played in the damaged relationship.
Yet loss involves more than one person. Does this mean I should involve others in my search for closure? Should I reach out to those friends I hurt junior year?
Whether reaching out to those you’ve hurt is appropriate, or even intrinsic to gaining closure, is a difficult question. However, I believe wanting to reach out to those you’ve wronged is a natural impulse. Therefore, its implications need to be considered.
I have defined two ways to address this dissonance: one is active, the other passive. An active approach involves reaching out to those you’ve wounded. It appeals to a romantic ideal — that reconciliation can be achieved through a single act of profession. While a heartfelt conversation could conceivably lead to closure, I am skeptical of its reliability. Consider, for example, when someone says that they accept an apology. How do you know they truly mean it? The appraisal of their forgiveness may simply be a projection of one’s desire for closure. In this way, the catharsis of profession can be used to pretend closure has been reached, when the issue may remain unresolved.
On the other hand, the passive approach involves using artistic expression to reach closure. By manifesting one’s experience through art, it offers a sense of agency that alleviates the feeling of powerlessness. Through this process, one can close the book on past misdoings without having to confront the art’s muse. Personally, I do this by making playlists out of songs that I associate with a loss. The songs inspire me to think deeply, and sometimes a particular chord or rhyme produces a newfound clarity. As I have grown, so have the playlists.
But in thinking about reaching closure before graduation, I am left with one final question: is it even worth the trouble? I will probably never see the people I’ve hurt here ever again after departing from campus. I am reminded of the image of the guillotine — if execution is inevitable, why would the condemned try to right his wrongs? In the same way, closure before graduation feels absurd. If that lost friendship from junior year is irredeemable anyway, then why do I even care?
I still search for an answer, but one aphorism embodies my optimism. Albert Camus once wrote, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.” Even as graduation makes its unassailable approach, I feel compelled by a transcendent desire to prevail over the specters of regret. There is an underlying beauty to the struggle that goes beyond atoning for a short-lived friendship. Compelled by this force, inconsolable and hopelessly idealistic, I will continue my search.
Joseph Levine is a member of the class of 2021.
(03/28/21 10:10pm)
The Campus is excited to launch a new translation initiative with the aim of making its articles and content accessible to a broader community of readers whose preferred language is not English. Tapping into Middlebury’s robust language programs, the initiative involves translating important articles and op-eds into other languages on a weekly basis.
The Campus is looking to hire a Senior Translation Editor who will work closely with the leadership team to develop a translation framework, weekly workflows and translation team.
Initially, the Senior Translation Editor will be responsible for the following tasks:
Recruiting a team of translators in a variety of different languages, who will be responsible for translating at least one Middlebury Campus article per week
Liaising with Middlebury language departments, study abroad coordinators and first-year students to market the position and gauge interest
Researching what processes and frameworks to implement to ensure that articles are translated in an accurate, grammatically correct and ethical way
Coordinating with the Middlebury Campus leadership to create a plan for the translations team in future semesters
The newly hired Translation Editor(s) should have fluency in at least one foreign language. Experience overseeing teams or projects is preferred but not required. Interested candidates should submit a brief statement (200-300 words) to Editor in Chief Bochu Ding (bding@middlebury.edu) detailing the candidate’s interest in this position, relevant experience and how they would approach this project.
(03/25/21 10:00am)
Porter Hospital launched several diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in February in an effort to ensure more equitable healthcare for Vermonters.
One initiative involved the formation of the hospital’s first Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Council. “Porter did not have a formal mechanism for addressing DEI issues prior to the formation of the DEI Council,” said Dr. Francisco Corbalan, a member of the newly formed council.
In order to gauge the specific concerns of Porter employees, the DEI Council conducted an employee survey with questions such as “How comfortable do you feel at work?”, “How much do you think your voice is being heard?” and “Do you feel like you are welcomed and valued?” About 47% of the Porter workforce responded to the survey.
Based on the survey’s results, one focus of the DEI Council has become making the hospital more accessible and inclusive for Spanish speakers.
“Inclusivity often feels elusive when someone who doesn’t speak English walks into our hospital and can’t find the department they are trying to find,” said registered nurse Becci Gordon, who is also part of the council.
For this reason, the council is working on adding more onsite translation signs, creating phone options for Spanish speakers and displaying messages stating that discrimination will not be tolerated.
Last February, Porter also began displaying a Black Lives Matter flag at the facility’s entrance in celebration of Black History Month . The hospital is continuing to fly the flag beyond Black History Month “as an acknowledgement that [anti-racism] work must continue,” according to a press release.
“Our local focus on DEI was truly driven by the national response to the George Floyd death and other similar incidents,” said Ron Hallman, spokesperson for Porter.
Dr. John Brumsted, CEO and president of UVM Health Network — the larger network that Porter is part of — has made DEI programming a major priority for the entire network over the past year.
Dr. Brumsted said in a statement that UVM Health Network’s goal for its DEI initiatives is “to create a culture that is diverse, equitable and inclusive for our employees, patients and communities we serve.”
“Our very broad goal is to make Porter a more inclusive and welcoming place to both work and receive health care,” Dr. Corbalan said, echoing Dr. Brumsted’s statement.
Porter has also taken advantage of college-specific resources such as the Middlebury College Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (OIDEI), which includes the Anderson Freeman Center, Disability Resource Center, and the Civil Rights and Title IX Committee, among others.
Renee Wells, Middlebury’s director of education for equity and inclusion, spoke about her involvement in the hospital’s efforts.
“The Porter DEI Committee reached out to me last fall, and I met with them to talk about possible goals and action items they might focus on as they were launching their committee,” Wells said. She has been in contact with members of the council periodically since the fall, and she has been able to offer advice about DEI initiatives.
Hallman feels that the initiative is coming at a good time, considering the inequities Covid-19 has illuminated nationwide.
“The impact of Covid-19 on our greater population throughout the United States has once again illustrated the inequity and the uneven impact of the pandemic on different people based on their race and social/demographic profile,” he said.
Chief Medical Officer and DEI councilmember Anna Benvenuto feels positively about the change the DEI Council is enacting.
“I’m really proud of the work the council is doing. It’s foundational to our community, and it’s acknowledging the ways in which inequities and systemic issues — whether it’s racism or anti-LGBTQ sentiments — have created disparities in health care outcomes,” Benvenuto said to the Addison Independent.
Dr. Corbalan feels similarly energized by the work of the council so far. “The work has been humbling, challenging and inspiring,” he said. “Diversity, equity and inclusion are big words; translating those words into tangible, substantive actions is an incredibly delicate and complex process.”
(03/25/21 9:57am)
Do you ever think about the history of your state’s license plate? This topic came up when I was talking to a friend who grew up thinking that all license plates in the U.S. included the words “Taxation Without Representation” as a reminder of our roots. But over time, she noticed that this was unique to her city. The deep irony is that the city proudly displaying these words is also the only city in the United States of America that is taxed, controlled, and trampled on by the federal government without representation in Congress: Washington, D.C. Now, after decades of hold-up caused by split-party conflict and baseless debate, it is finally time to grant the District of Columbia state status.
The people of D.C. are taxed like all Americans — sometimes even more so — and yet they have no voting representatives in Congress. They are also the only city in the United States to have its school and city budgets, as well as almost all parts of municipal function, controlled by Congress. Moreover, D.C. has a population of over 700,000 people — more than both Wyoming and Vermont (which are, indeed, states). As tax-paying citizens, D.C. residents deserve to have their voices represented in Congress and to take control of the day-to-day operations of their own city.
The bill that has been introduced by D.C.’s delegate to the House of Representatives, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-Washington, D.C.), would give the District of Columbia state status while also creating special federal territories encompassing the Capitol, the White House, Supreme Court, and other federal buildings as special federal zones. This should make any people who are concerned about federal jurisdictions calmer.
Democrats have long advocated for D.C. statehood, and the latest election cycle has opened the door for its possibility. In a surprising upset in the Senate — with both Georgia seats won by Democrats — the party now holds legislative and executive control. But there is still one hurdle to clear: the Senate filibuster. The filibuster is a practice embedded in Senate rules that has opened the door to partisan gridlock, as a supermajority of 60 votes is necessary to end debate on any legislation.
Biden and other Democrats seem very eager to reform the filibuster. Changing Senate Rule 22, which affirms the necessity of this supermajority, would be the easiest way to curtail it. However, with a continued two-thirds majority necessary to end debate, this seems unlikely. The more complex but also more feasible option is to establish a new Senate precedent. Any senator may do this by suggesting that a Senate rule is being broken, and if the presiding officer agrees, this would set a new precedent. Many Senate rules are Machiavellian in nature, making any such move difficult. But if Democrats formulate a plan to tackle this barrier, they will be free to pass long-wanted reforms.
If Democrats are successful in ending the Senate filibuster and Rep. Norton’s bill passes in the houses, it will have a clear path to success in the Democrat-controlled Senate. With a Congress that is more open to statehood, it is crucial to end the filibuster and finally make the District of Columbia a full-fledged state.
Bruno Coelho is a member of the class of 2024.
(03/18/21 9:59am)
I fight for justice in Palestine for many reasons. On August 28, 1939, at the age of 16, my Jewish grandfather boarded a ship at Le Havre in Northern France bound for the United States. He was entirely alone. His family was already in the U.S., but he had waited months for his visa to be approved. In British-colonized Palestine, 1939 marked the end of what is termed the “Great Arab Revolt.” This three-year conflict left 10% of the adult male Palestinian-Arab population between the ages of 20 and 60 killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. My grandfather had a home waiting for him, but millions of Palestinians did not and still do not.
Growing up, many of my friends’ grandparents were also Holocaust survivors. As a child, I was routinely fed a narrative that Jewish statehood and self-determination were the only ways to cope with this trauma and to ensure safety. It is sadly unsurprising that I never learned about the occupation since educators in my hometown faced potential lawsuits for practically uttering the word “Palestine.” It was only after coming to Middlebury that I learned the severity of the misinformation I had been exposed to throughout my childhood. Studying in Jordan and making Palestinian and Arab friends pushed me to seek out the truth. No one told me of the innumerable house demolitions, massacres like that at Deir Yassin in 1948 or the horrendous violence Palestinians face daily at the hands of the Israeli state and settlers. I can barely even begin to scrape the surface of the terrors inflicted upon Palestinians over decades upon decades of ethnic cleansing. It made (and makes) me sick to think my grandparents’ trauma could even remotely factor into this violence. How could any Jew, with our history of violent persecution, commit such atrocities?
The simple answer to this question also emerged from self-education: Judaism does not equal Zionism. In fact, working with Jewish Voice for Peace and developing friendships with anti-Zionist Jews taught me that the conflation of a political and historically contingent ideology with systematic religious persecution is extremely dangerous. If we cannot discern the differences between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, then how can we effectively combat antisemitism globally? During the Jan. 6 insurrection, white supremacists simultaneously flew the Israeli flag and wore shirts saying “six million wasn’t enough.” How can we make sense of that if not by distinguishing between the two?
Reflection upon my identity as a queer individual has also significantly informed my relationship to Zionism. When planning to go abroad, many family members and friends expressed concerns for my safety in Jordan. In my Jewish community, an abstracted “Arabness” was marked as homophobic, while Israel was painted as queer-friendly. They appeared to believe that, the moment I stepped off the plane, I would be violently assaulted. For context, in 2009, the straight mayor of Tel Aviv participated in the “Brand Israel'' campaign that sought to portray Israel as a progressive, modern and democratic haven in the Middle East (Atshan, 3-4). Ultimately, this campaign aimed to whitewash human rights abuses against Palestinians. Central to that process was marketing Tel Aviv as a “safe haven” for LGBTQIA+ folx and a premier gay tourist destination. This is pinkwashing: the co-opting of queerness towards such malicious ends. I could not and will not stand for it. From there, my commitment to Palestine activism grew. Just as fighting misinformation became one of my primary concerns, so too did standing in solidarity with queer Palestinian folx.
When I returned to Middlebury last fall, I was eager to join Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for many reasons. For me, building SJP’s educational resource go/apartheid and writing the section on Zionism allowed me to provide individuals with some of the information I was not exposed to. Education was and is an act of radical solidarity. I want people to know that Zionism is not apolitical or ahistorical. Its contemporary iterations are rooted in European colonialism and they rationalize a system of apartheid and ethnic cleansing that shapes the lives of Palestinians. Plus, the abstraction of Zionism into the belief that Israel is the homeland for a supposed monolithic Jewish people also silences Jewish histories of resistance. The suppression of critiques of Zionism and Israel silences Jewish voices like mine. It silences queer voices like mine. And, thus, it inhibits me from weaponizing my privilege and bolstering marginalized Palestinians voices. As Jewish American lesbian feminist, author and activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz explains, “Solidarity is the political version of love.” This is why I fight for justice in Palestine.
Matt Martignoni is a co-President of SJP and a member of the class of 2021.5.
(03/18/21 9:59am)
The Middlebury chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has created a website that helps us understand the extent of the suffering of the Palestinian people currently and in the past. In this op-ed, I do not deny the merit of their arguments for the rights of the Palestinian people, but I do draw attention to a harmful blind spot in their activism.
The 21st century is, without a doubt, a frightening time to be Jewish. Antisemitism has increased exponentially in recent years; the FBI reported in 2019 that out of 1,521 anti-religion hate crimes in the US, 953 (62.7%) incidents were anti-Jewish. Taking into account the fact that Jews make up about 2% of the U.S. population, it is safe to say that American Jews face a dire threat. White nationalists use American Jews as an explanation for the growing agency and social equality of racial minorities in the U.S. Antisemitism in America fuels the fire of white nationalism like oxygen, hence the inherent antisemitic ideology of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and the swastikas and other anti-Jewish hate symbols among many insurrectionists and domestic terrorists who broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
Jews’ suffering is not limited to the contemporary US, however; in the pogroms of the 19th and 20th centuries the leaders of tsarist Russia suppressed the Bolshevik Revolution by redirecting the people’s anger toward Jews, which led to a catastrophe in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were wounded, raped, mutilated and slaughtered. As a result, millions of Jews were forced to immigrate westward. Out of the need to protect the Jewish people from such objectively horrific atrocities formed the movement known as Zionism. As if Jews hadn’t suffered enough, the Nazi regime in the 1930s blamed their social and economic quandaries on Jews, leading to the genocide of 60% of the world’s Jewish population, roughly equating to six million. Countless Jews were left without a home, for their communities from before the Holocaust were either occupied or demolished; This existential crisis for the Jewish people led to the heightened urgency of Zionism among Jews and those who sought to protect them. Any explanation of Zionism that doesn’t account for Jews’ indescribable torment in the past and present constitutes complacency with the forces of brutality and oppression.
Due to historical and present-day anti-Jewish violence, my description of which barely scratches the surface, the need for a safe haven for the Jewish people is more relevant than ever before. This, naturally, does not mean that we may not criticize the government of the State of Israel (in which I find appalling flaws); in fact, constructive criticism is especially beneficial in this area for the purpose of creating a more peaceful and equitable Israel/Palestine for all.
However, it is of the utmost importance that any critics of the State of Israel explicitly state their support for a safe haven for Jews because of the prevalence of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in the world. To my great dismay, the organization called Students for Justice in Palestine not only disregards the need to protect Jews in their condemnations of the State of Israel, but they also actively advocate for the dismantling of the Jewish safe haven with their support of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), whose co-founder (Omar Barghouti) claimed that “[Palestinians have a right to]... armed resistance… [Jews] are not a people.”
I argue that although criticism of the Israeli government does not necessarily equate to antisemitism, the unconditional criticism of the State of Israel without the explicit acknowledgement of Jews’ right to a safe space demonstrates a frightening lack of regard for the lingering effects of genocide and oppression against Jews. Additionally, by referring in their title to the entire area at hand simply as “Palestine,” SJP insinuates utter illegitimacy of the Israeli state. By extension, they perpetuate the antisemitic notion that Jews be denied a safe space, demonstrating complacency in aforementioned oppression and genocide.
The state of Israel was meant to provide a safe space in which Jews could flourish free of ethnic cleansing. However, I struggle to find the words to express my lamentation for the manner in which this was carried out; rather than creating a land of emancipation and equal opportunities, those who wished to protect Jews fought fire with fire, protecting the well-being of Jews at the cost of that of Palestinian Arabs who had largely inhabited the region beforehand. The rights of those Palestinian Arabs who did not flee in many manners were infringed upon, and these people have suffered unspeakable inequality and maltreatment for decades under various Israeli administrations. Notably, the current administration, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, has continued building settlements in Palestinian territory, disturbing the precarious situation and violating Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. Because of this, the International Criminal Court (ICC) based in The Hague, Netherlands, has rightfully opened a formal investigation regarding war crimes committed by the Israeli government in Palestinian territories.
By extension, I also deem rightful the objective of Students for Justice in Palestine to put an end to systemic discrimination against Palestinian Arabs in the land of Israel/Palestine by promoting peaceful activism against the Israeli government. That being said, SJP’s positions take into account neither the lingering effects of the Holocaust nor the anti-Jewish hatred which has persisted throughout the fabric of history — SJP claims that Zionism is nothing more than a colonialist ideology, going as far as entertaining the proposal that Jewish nationals return to the lands of Eastern Europe, whose peoples had so horrifically slaughtered their Jewish populations. As a result of this complacency and lack of consideration for the implications of their own demands, even if it is not their intention, SJP harmfully aligns itself with those who hope to cause the further oppression of Jews.
This brings me to my denunciation of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, a campaign which lies at the foundation of SJP. The third tenet of BDS calls for “the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.” If Palestinians Arabs inhabited the land of Israel/Palestine before 1948, and all Palestinian Arabs and their descendents are to return to their original homes, where are Jews to go as the cycle of anti-Jewish violence and antisemitism persists? As Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS movement said: “If the [Palestinian] refugees were to return, you would not have a two-state solution, you’d have a Palestine next to a Palestine.”
SJP does not even attempt to address this question; while their intention is righteous and ethical, the result of the policies it promotes is tolerant (or, dare I say, encouraging) of the hate that has universally plagued the Jewish people. The fulfillment of SJP’s demand for BDS, therefore, de facto amounts to the utter destruction of the state of Israel. Additionally, BDS completely disregards the fact that more than a fifth of the current population of Israeli territory identify as Palestinian Arabs; this tenet, were it to be fulfilled, would expropriate the land not only of Jews but also of countless Palestinian Arabs. The notion that Palestinian refugees be granted equal access to their homeland is a virtuous and respectable demand that I would support; the notion that Palestinian Arabs return to the exact residences in which they used to live, however, is logistically inconceivable and demonstrates an incomplete understanding of the situation at hand.
Finally, Middlebury SJP’s justification for their unconditional support of BDS — that Zionism consists of a “pernicious” instance of European colonialism — merely comprises a red herring designed to allow them to justify their harmful ideology by misleadingly comparing it to the malicious intentions of European colonizers. Although the British Empire’s presence in the Middle East may have embodied colonial interests to a certain extent, this explanation ignores the fact that the League of Nations precisely gave the British a mandate to administer the region. While Middlebury SJP’s definition of Zionism briefly mentions antisemitism, they fail to acknowledge the Holocaust or any form of anti-Jewish violence; ignoring these Jewish existential crises and by extension the humanity of the Jewish people exhibits blatant antisemtism. In short, the notion that Zionism is merely an embodiment of colonialism allows SJP to turn a blind eye to the need to protect the Jewish people, which is incompatible with SJP’s political agenda. In its current state, Middlebury SJP strays far from its pledge to “advocate for the rights, freedoms, and dignity of all people,” as promised on their official Facebook page.
In its neglect for the necessity of a Jewish safe haven and its support of the BDS movement, the organization called Students for Justice in Palestine treats the Israeli/Palestinian conflict like a zero-sum game: their demands imply that only one of the two peoples may inhabit the area known as Israel/Palestine. I urge activists for Palestinian rights, and anyone reading this article, to reject this misleading and injurious idea. The claim that anti-Zionism may not be equated with antisemitism is an utter falsehood, for it ignores the indelible fact that the two ideologies time and again come hand-in-hand. To those who virtuously fight for the human rights and equity of the Palestinian people: let us all unite against the structural inequality and atrocities committed by the Israeli government! I cannot stress enough, however, that in order for this cooperation to be feasible, I and many other Jews must know that we all agree on the legitimacy of the Jewish State and its reason for existence. As long as you support the BDS movement, which effectively advocates for the destruction of the Jewish State and thus constitutes an existential threat to the Jewish people, neither progress nor peace will ever be within reach.
Editor’s Note: Although Max Shulman-Litwin is a member of the Middlebury Hillel Board, he speaks only for himself in this article.
Max Shulman-Litwin is a member of the class of 2022.
(03/18/21 9:58am)
There is an old adage — as old as one about the internet can be — that a YouTube creator is judged not based on any individual video they produce, but by their entire body of work. This is not how the Neistat Brothers approach YouTube.
When Casey Neistat, the younger half of the Neistat Brothers, started his daily vlog on his 34th birthday in March of 2015, he set out to create one film for every day of the year. This genre of film has now become commonplace, but no one since has been able to replicate the magic of his daily vlogs. And the reason is simple: Casey intends for each daily video to be a full and complete film. Casey is not a YouTuber; well, he didn’t start as one. And because of that, his videos are not dependent upon any of his other videos — they are each films in their own right. His brother Van is no different.
Both Van and Casey were brought up in the Tom Sachs art school of functionalism; it is striking to see the brothers’ stylistic similarities to their mentor. Their production studios are unique — yet entirely homogenous to one another — and have sparked great intrigue by visitors. The walls are littered with boxes, labels, hooks and hangers, yet nothing is out of place. Everything is labeled — by hand — and there is a preference for built over bought. Why buy something that is close to what you want when you can build exactly what you want?
Casey’s office is adorned with a homemade Go-Pro security camera affixed to his door, running a 24-hour feed to an attached vertical monitor. Van’s office is much the same, yet in a distinctly more analog fashion. He clacks away at a typewriter with commonly misspelled words typed out on strips of paper and taped to the front of the machine for easy access. A wooden tape dispenser with an attached saw-blade is hooked to a shelf. And a mobile repair station with reversible tool access rests just under his desk.
In so many of Van’s videos, there is a distinct lack of reverence for the manufactured good. Tools are valued over made goods because tools can be used to make an infinite number of made goods. It is — to say the least — a playground for the Spirited Man.
“What is a ‘Spirited Man?’” you might find yourself asking. Well, it is the subject of Van’s “unlimited series.” It is hard to pin down precisely what it means to be spirited, but it is, in a word, play. The world is open for interaction, for change, for manipulation, and the Spirited Man takes advantage of that. “All children are spirited. All dogs are spirited,” Van Neistat says in the first installment of the Spirited Man series.
Van Neistat’s filmmaking style, however, strays drastically from Casey’s. While Casey uses tools as a part of the filmmaking craft — using them to create films on a lower budget — Van’s videos are about tools. He is, at heart, a repairman. His first video chronicles his life as a repairman, switching between stories of fixing a new, expensive German dishwasher with those of times he spent as a live-in repairman with Tom Sachs’ “Nutsy’s” exhibition, consequently also in Germany.
He self-prescribes his videos as “industrial essay films,” a combination of industrial films which explain a concept and essays that offer a point of view. “[It’s] sort of like a newspaper column, but with image and sound,” Van Neistat writes in the description of his Kickstarter for the series.
In keeping with this style, Van Neistat’s videos unfold like an instructional video. Van Neistat the filmmaker assumes the role of the omniscient narrator, providing a voice-over to the videos. He references Van Neistat the repairman only in the third person, mentioning him as “he,” “the repairman” and “the Spirited Man.” While his younger brother Casey’s films are intensely personal, and follow his life in an almost point-of-view manner, Van strays far into the abstract and the dissociative. There is little inflection to his narration; he uses only his iPhone to record and the videos are stripped almost entirely of significance, leaving the viewer to add it on their own. Do not be fooled, however, because Van Neistat is a seasoned filmmaker who crafts his videos with meticulous dexterity. There is a rhythm and a musicality to his editing that echoes his younger brother’s and has yet to be matched elsewhere on the internet.
The Neistat Brothers have once again set out to pioneer filmmaking, first with their HBO series “The Neistat Brothers,” then with Casey’s daily vlogs and now with Van’s unlimited series. The brothers are intensely creative, innate storytellers who are unrelenting with their ideas. There is a timelessness to Van’s videos that can also be found in Casey’s; it doesn’t matter when you sit down to watch their videos, the storytelling is just as relevant and captivating as it was when they were released. So, if you do not want to watch Van’s videos as they are being released, subscribe to his channel and watch them sometime in the future — they are more than worth your time. Casey Neistat rests atop my list of idols, and has consistently astounded me with the simple beauty of his storytelling. Now, I feel that his older brother Van is about to do the same.
(03/18/21 9:54am)
A set of three go-links — the online shortcuts accessible to those on campus WiFi — drew attention this week after they were discovered by the Middlebury chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The links — go/palestine, go/palestinian and go/sjp — brought users to an Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs webpage titled “Palestinian terror and incitement.”
The entries in the go-link directory indicated that the shortcuts were created by Benjamin Lesch ’24. Lesch later removed the go-links, according to an all-school email from the Community Bias Response Team (CBRT) on Wednesday. He did not respond to a request for comment.
The links were discovered soon after SJP shared their new informational website through a poster-based advertising campaign that featured the go-link go/apartheid. The link leads to the home page of the site, which reads “End Israeli Apartheid.”
SJP said the purpose of the website is to educate students and spread awareness, and that the use of the word “apartheid” was deliberate. “The term has increasingly been used by progressive activists in the U.S., Palestine, as well as Israel itself,” SJP leadership said.
Several go/apartheid posters across campus were also torn down, according to a post on SJP’s Instagram page. The CBRT email also noted that a student associated with SJP has received multiple indirect threats that the Department of Public Safety is now investigating.
The club responded to the vandalization of their posters and the creation of the go-links in an email to The Campus.
“SJP disavows any and all violence. Not only is this a discriminatory act that delegitimizes our club as we responsibly engage in social justice work and educational initiatives, but it also blatantly condones anti-Arab racism,” SJP leaders said.
Lesch has been placed on indefinite leave from the positions he held in Middlebury Consulting Group and on the Student Investment Committee, according to statements both groups gave to The Campus.
Laurie Essig, faculty adviser to SJP, said she asked Dean of Students Derek Doucet to address the creation of the go-links.
“I hope that some sort of restorative justice practices will be implemented so the student responsible can learn that disagreement does not mean we can harass and intimidate those with whom we disagree,” Essig said. “I do believe the symbolic weight for Palestinian persons on campus of being called ‘terrorist’ is a lot to bear and, as a community, we must all condemn this sort of harassment.”
Many students became aware of the go-links after SJP Co-President Kamli Faour posted a screenshot of a statement to SJP members on her Instagram story on Saturday.
“We do not take this discriminatory act lightly and are in communication with our club’s advisor, Laurie Essig, the Students Activities Office, and several Deans,” part of the statement read. “In the meantime, we would like to stress the importance of remaining peaceful and keeping SJP members, Palestinian, and other Arab students safe.”
On Monday night, a new go-link was chalked on campus pathways — go/jewish. The link, described in the go-link directory as “a letter that reflects how many Jews currently feel on campus,” was created by Eyal Yakoby ’24.
In the letter, Yakoby described feeling saddened and unsafe due to the events of the previous week and said that other Jewish students on campus felt similarly. He wrote that the Middlebury SJP chapter has “frightened many Jewish students here on campus” and listed examples of SJP chapters at other institutions who had reportedly targeted Jewish students or individuals on those campuses.
Yakoby also cited a go-link created by Matt Martignoni ’21.5, co-president of SJP. The link, go/antisemitism, previously sent users to a Google Doc about Zionism, but Martignoni said it was removed before Yakoby shared his letter.
“This link in itself is an act of anti-Semitism,” Yakobi wrote. “Indeed, the Google Doc has no mention of actual anti-Semitism in it, rather it mocks that which has plagued the Jewish community for so long.”
Martignoni said they created and used this go-link out of fear that it might be exploited by right-wing extremists to spread misinformation.
“My intention had been to write more extensively on anti-Semitism at a later date, but I linked it to the information that I personally wrote about Zionism as a placeholder since the nuance between it and anti-Semitism is touched upon at the end,” Martignoni said in an email to The Campus. “It should not need to be said, but Jews are not a monolithic group. I am a Jew who is deeply committed to the rights of the Palestinian people, but I do not speak for all Jews. No one does.”
At the end of the letter, Yakoby shared a list of eclectic “fast facts” about Israel — from the Arab representation in its government to Tel Aviv’s ranking as a “best gay city” to the country’s ban of underweight models from fashion shows — stating that he wanted to “attest that Israel is not the evil regime that SJP portrays.”
Yakoby also called for an open conversation between himself, other Jewish students and SJP leadership.
Yakoby declined to be interviewed by The Campus for this article.
On Tuesday night, the Hillel Board released a statement addressing the recent events to members of their email list. The email referenced the creation of various go-links and noted that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has generally not been a major feature of campus conversations in recent years.
The email also stated that the current discourse has brought challenges because of the small size of the college’s Jewish community and because Middlebury does not currently have a student organization that advocates for Israel politically.
“As an organization, Hillel’s role on campus is to support all Jewish students,” the Hillel board wrote. “There is a wide diversity of perspectives about Israel in our community, and we welcome this diversity fully. Conversing on the topic of Israel is part of our organization’s mission as it is tied to Jewish identity, however it is impossible for us to be a voice for the entire community at once. We do not wish to risk the cohesiveness of our Jewish community by doing so.”
(03/11/21 11:00am)
Many of us recall the turbulence and excitement of our first few weeks at Middlebury: struggling to memorize hundreds of new faces and navigate the campus and doing our best to settle in despite the seemingly perpetual chaos. Those transitions, as we know, already seem like more than enough to withstand. Yet when a new first-year Feb returned to their room in Forest Hall last week, the whiteboard on their door had been vandalized to display a homophobic slur.
Their first moments in a new home were tarnished by an anonymous and repugnant act, one that took five seconds to commit but may very well take interminably long to forget. As much as we’d like to steadfastly affirm that this isn’t who we are and that this event doesn’t represent Middlebury as a community or an institution, we know by now that hateful incidents are not anomalies here. During the fall semester, two students were called the n-word by a white peer while walking near Ross. Last week, transphobic comments were made in a Student Activity Fair meeting.
It’s time to call Middlebury what it actually is: a campus that prides itself on inclusivity and compassion while concealing a dark underbelly of entitlement, cowardice and hate. This is not a utopia, and we are not immune to these cruelties. Middlebury will always be a microcosm of a world beyond it — a world that frequently aims to berate individuals for the sole act of being who they are.
There is no plausible way to know who defaced the whiteboard of a new student who had been on campus less than two weeks. As an editorial board, we condemn the disgusting and callous act committed by an individual we can only describe as a reprehensible coward. Though we acknowledge the improbability of being able to hold this person accountable, it is imperative that we do not walk away from this and continue on as usual.
We as a student body have to own this and recognize how this event and others are embedded in the fabric of this institution we have all woven ourselves into. Moving forward, we cannot sit idly by while friends, roommates, and classmates suffer at the hands of their own peers. This is a failure at the community level — but this doesn’t have to be our reality.
Be vigilant. Challenge yourself and those around you to interrogate implicit biases and bystander behaviors. Listen actively and attentively to your LGBTQ+ friends, but don’t speak for them. Call out discriminatory comments and actions when you see them and not after the fact. And welcome new students the way we all want to be welcomed: warmly and without hesitation. It’s the human decency all of us deserve.
Resources for LGTBQ+ students:
The Anderson Freeman Resource Center (AFC), the Queer Studies House (QSH), the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (GSFS) department, Queer and Trans People of Color (QTPOC), and the Trans Affinity Group (TAG) offer a variety of resources for queer identifying students.
A list of non-residential gender-neutral bathrooms can be found here.
Learn about displaying your chosen name and pronouns on BannerWeb here.
This editorial represents the opinions of the Middlebury Campus’s editorial board.
(03/11/21 10:59am)
“Help a Trans Asian Man Attend Middlebury College,” reads the header of the GoFundMe page built for Lee (a pseudonym), an incoming student who had been told that he will have to pay $30,000 in tuition on his own. The situation: He lives in an unstable home with a family who refuses to pay for his college and plans to kick him out by the time he turns 18 years old, leaving him homeless. As the organizer of the page writes, Lee has attempted to explain this situation to the Student Financial Services office, but was answered with, “We cannot base our financial aid decisions based on a family's willingness to pay. We base our decisions on a family's ability to pay."
I am too familiar with this story. I heard this sentence for the first time in 2015, after I was accepted to Middlebury via Early Decision. When my mom and I filled out our part of the CSS profile and the non-custodial waiver petition, our waiver was rejected, and Middlebury ultimately forced me to meet with my abusive father to make him sign his part of the CSS profile. At the time, he was making much more than my mother was. Middlebury footed us a bill that was $30,000 more than we had expected, as per Middlebury’s need-based financial aid calculator. So I, like Lee, was legally bound to Middlebury because of Early Decision, and I, like Lee, found myself in a position that I had not expected to be in, strategically predicting that Middlebury would fit my financial needs proportionately.
In a Campus op-ed from 2018, I detailed how I spent two years desperately attempting to persuade Middlebury to change my financial aid package. I submitted all the legal documents I could, spent countless hours on the phone and attended multiple meetings with financial aid officers. I was forced to take a semester off since the cost was too much for my mom to bear. I talked to what seems like every staffer in the financial aid office, my Commons Dean and the Dean of Students at the time. Nothing changed. I was almost always left with the same response: “We base our decisions on a family’s ability to pay.”
Currently, Middlebury College claims that it meets 100% of students’ demonstrated financial need on its “Affordability” webpage. It lauds itself as being one of the few dozen undergraduate institutions that do. But how can Middlebury confidently say this for students like Lee, who are told they have to make $30,000 appear in Middlebury’s billing account in a matter of months? It is incredibly frustrating and difficult to understand how Middlebury gets away with this type of behavior, but truthfully, the answer is simple: Middlebury determines the need of every student. It is the financial aid office’s say, and not ours.
It is tempting to say that Lee and I were stuck between a rock and a hard place, but this sentiment implies our struggle materialized by chance or coincidence. Lee has lost the support of his parents, who are culpable in their own right. But Middlebury is the one holding the rope to help him out of the abyss — a rope that is worth over $1 billion, actually. But instead of throwing the rope down to help Lee, they expected him, an 18-year-old who is about to be driven to homelessness, to throw up a $30,000 check. In other words, Middlebury has the ability to pay for Lee’s education but is unwilling to do so.
Middlebury College has stated in these past years that it is working on increasing socioeconomic diversity on campus. In this area, Middlebury’s track record has been lacking.
The New York Times “Upshot” report from 2017 evinced that 76% of the Middlebury student body came from families belonging in the top quintile of the income bracket. Some efforts have seemingly made way for concrete action. Middlebury SGA passed a bill for JusticeProjects in September 2020, an initiative which reportedly aims to advance diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. But JusticeProjects only benefits students who have already made it to Middlebury College and have jumped over the hurdles of financial aid, not incoming students who are going through the financial aid process. The contradiction between a mission on increasing socioeconomic diversity and refusing to give more aid to a student coming from an unstable home situation only stands to demonstrate the institution’s apathy toward impactful, structural change.
Middlebury College’s dismissal of the financial concerns of students from households of divorce, abuse and estrangement lays heavy on us. Lee and I both specifically planned to apply to Middlebury College with need-based aid in mind, in hopes that our unusual situations would not just be understood but reflected in the financial aid package that would be given to us. However, the financial aid office persistently assessed us on our family’s ability to pay. Many calls for appeals were raised, but our financial aid packages barely changed. As a result, the office’s detached stance only drives us further into our traumas and burgeoning pressures.
As of this writing, Middlebury has reduced Lee’s tuition, but the price tag is still immense, given his current circumstances. The stress that Lee has to pay for his tuition this year is already large enough; the thought of continuing this on for three years is unspeakably daunting. On the other hand, if Lee cannot provide the money needed to pay for his tuition and cannot attend Middlebury, it will force him into homelessness.
Lee is stuck between a rock and a hard place, and Middlebury College is the last one standing with a rope.
Andrew Sebald is a member of the class of 2019.
(03/10/21 10:01pm)
Unprecedented. Challenging. Uncertain.
These words have become staples in the past year — so prominent and ubiquitous that they have almost lost their meaning. But, in truth, this year has been all of those things.
Some of us continue to grapple with the lasting pain of losing a loved one. Others are mourning the disappearance of the small things that color our days — impromptu visits, warm embraces and shared meals. Some have said goodbye to their families and left their homes for an indefinite amount of time; others are still separated from their loved ones and unable to return. For some, the pandemic has laid bare the structural inequities that engender violence and marginalization; for others, these injustices were — and continue to be — inseparable from their lived experience.
But for the first time in a long time, it feels as if an end to the pandemic is perhaps in sight. Covid-19 cases have finally started to decline, and the latest vaccine news predicts that most Americans will have access this spring. Many of us wonder if next fall will be a semester like the ones we remember from before.
As we approach what seems to be the light at the end of the tunnel, we should also remember some of the other words that rose to prominence in the past year: change, commitment and justice. These words remind us of the collective actions we took to keep each other safe and our dedication to building kinder, more equitable communities.
As we venture into our “new normal,” let’s not leave them behind.
(03/10/21 8:34am)
We asked Campus writers to tell us about their most 2020 memories — the anecdotes that could have only happened this year — in around 100 words. This is what they had to say.
Charlotte Crutchlow
In mid-July, I was in a slump. I was angry at Covid, the lockdowns and the entire world. One night, I answered my door and saw my best friend standing there with her car keys and a bag of Sour Patch Kids. We were going to see the sunset, she said; it was non-negotiable. After I reluctantly got in the car, we drove to a nearby park, laid a couple beach towels on a patch of grass, and waited. About 20 minutes later came the most incredible sunset I’ve ever seen. Looking up at that sky, I felt alive again.
Haley Hutchinson
Whether it be the pounding salty waves of the Pacific Ocean or the sterile clear of a tiled pool steaming with ribbons of chlorine in the wee hours of the morning, the water always brings with it a sense of calm; a reminder of my appreciation for its ebbs and flows and my love for swimming. But when pools remained shut down throughout the Covid pandemic, I had to find another way to connect with the water. A forgotten pond surrounded by grazing horses and orchards became my solace. I came to appreciate its algae greenery and the minnow schools that flitted about. And even when I returned to the natatorium on campus in the fall, I missed that little pond and the comfort it provided during those strange summer months of 2020.
Yardena Carmi
A week before being sent home in March, I went to a Middlebury College Organic Farm workshop on brewing ginger beer. Later, when faced with an unexpected wealth of free time, I knew what to do. After a couple weeks of weird odors and regular feedings, I produced a lively ginger bug (a living culture of wild yeast grown in a mix of ginger, sugar and water) that kept me company the whole summer. I brewed gallons of homemade soda at a time, experimenting with different fruit juices and spices. Some batches, left to ferment for too long, tragically turned to alcohol.
Michael Segel
A friend from home and I had both been stuck inside for a few weeks and needed something to do, so we decided to meet at a beach near my house. Out of nowhere, we began skipping rocks. This must have gone on for some 15 minutes. There was something therapeutic in repeatedly searching for flat rocks and seeing how far we could skip them. Little things like this helped me reconnect with nature and pass time when I was really looking for things to do.
Charlie Deichman-Caswell
Entering quarantine sometime last March, I made a choice. I was going to grow the most lush, sumptuous, magnificent, Ron Burgundy-level mustache ever seen. Naturally, my journey to bewhiskered brilliance took me until mid-April, at which point I at last sported the facial hair of fantasy, a magical mustache with professedly paranormal properties. It was an entity in itself; a living, breathing organism with dreams and emotions. But alas my stunning ‘stache met its demise in July when I accidentally glanced at a mirror and saw my mistake.
Julia Pepper
I’ve been going to Prospect Park my whole life. There are photos of me in red rainboots, stomping in puddles beside my grandparents. When I went there with friends in March I had no idea that I’d just finished my last normal day of high school. Sometimes reassuring and other times stressful, crowds in the park show how many New Yorkers have made it their haven. Over the last year I’ve gone on hot sunny walks and windy cold ones. I’ve run the park loop, sat on its benches and picnicked on its grass. The park has been a constant during uncertain times.
Roya Touran
One of the things I miss about pre-Covid life is driving to music with friends. One day, my friend Kate and I needed to pick up food during a distanced hangout. We had to be in separate cars but decided to put all our windows down and play Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” at the exact same time. We drove side by side, singing every word to each other through the car window and dancing at every red light. We got the strangest stares at stops. I would’ve hated us too, but it was truly the happiest I’d felt since the start of quarantine.
Edyth Moldow
There’s something about quarantine that truly makes you believe that caution belongs to the wind. On a folk music kick, I purchased a banjo from eBay and taught myself how to play it, though I focused primarily on “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Rock music on a bluegrass instrument never sounded so… well, it still needs work. The point is that 2020 inspired me to learn something new, something avant-garde, and take quarantine-blues into my own hands. Literally.
(03/10/21 1:16am)
I almost rear ended the car in front of me last week when I saw it on the back window — a “Middlebury Crew” bumper sticker.
You don’t see Middlebury memorabilia much here. I live in Kenai, Alaska, a small town three hours south of Anchorage on the world-famous Kenai River. It’s known for its salmon fishing, but there’s a lot more than fish here — the landscape is also dotted with active volcanoes, scalable mountains and offshore oil rigs. Kenai and its sister city Soldotna are on the road system, which makes them significantly more accessible than other Alaska towns and cities you can only get to on a plane or ferry.
It’s an incredible place for a journalist. Alaska is the size of almost 70 Vermonts but has just 100,000 more people than the Green Mountain state. There are debates over natural resources that play out in real time, both on the Kenai Peninsula, where I live, and in the state at large. Many of the people who homesteaded on the peninsula in the 1950s and 60s, back before it was a state, still live here. Their family names are on street signs.
Just a few months in, I’m subsumed by this place. That’s partly because I’m a reporter, so I have professional permission to meet as many people as I can and ask them nosy questions.
But I imagine anyone who’s moved far away from home knows what it feels like to shift the center of their universe — for me, from New York to Vermont to Alaska.
That’s not to say my life here is dissociated from my past lives. I’m starting to realize it really isn’t. Home is part and parcel of everything I do.
I started my job search in Alaska because a Middlebury friend, Hunter Graham ’20, clued me in to a journalism job opening in Skagway, where her grandmother lives. One of my closest friends on the peninsula is a mutual friend of Professor Sue Halpern — she introduced us virtually when I got up here.
Last week, I had dinner with a Middlebury alumnus who’s been here for almost 30 years. He lives in rural Alaska and races sled dogs but he also knows what the inside of Mead Chapel looks like. The world is so delightfully small sometimes.
There’s also, of course, that bumper sticker. I’m still trying to trace it back to its owner.
Perhaps the biggest througline between then and now is the pandemic. I’ll never forget those early days of covering the virus as it barreled toward Vermont. My clearest memory from March 11, strangely, isn’t getting official word from the school but getting a call from editor Ben Glass ’20.5, who was at BevCo — seniors were scrambling to buy all the Keystone they could carry, he said, before they were kicked off campus indefinitely. It was a lesson in how college students react when they hear the apocalypse is coming for them.
I’m still covering that pandemic. The tenor of coverage has changed, but I still think about the conversations we had as a Campus team when I’m writing stories of my own here, over 4,500 miles away.
The newness of life here is bespeckled with fragments of familiarity. And time has seldom seemed linear these last 12 months. Not to mention we’re not fully graduated yet — an in-person commencement is still a promise for the nebulous post-Covid future. I think a few more classes will be joining in our post-hoc commencement than we anticipated last March (sorry, ’20.5 and ’21).
Maybe we’ll even finally get our Gamaliel Painter Canes. I’m not confident mine will fit in an overhead bin. But it might make for good closure.
Editor’s Note: Sabine Poux is a member of the class of 2020 and was the 2019-2020 Editor in Chief of The Campus.
(03/09/21 8:08pm)
On Jan. 1, 2020, many of us rang in the new year with booze in one hand and our best friend in the other.
On Jan. 9, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a mysterious coronavirus related to pneumonia. This announcement proved an unassuming start to a devastating year.
On Jan. 21, 2020, the Center for Disease Control confirmed the first Covid-19 case in the U.S.
On Jan. 31 the WHO issued a state of Global health emergency.
On March 11 the WHO officially declared Covid-19 a pandemic.
On March 15, 2020, Breonna Taylor was murdered in her home.
On that same day, California became the first state to issue a stay-at home order.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered in the streets of Minneapolis.
People all over the country took to the streets, enraged by his death. Their peaceful cries were met by tear gas and rubber bullets from unmoved, unsympathetic policemen. Their calls and activism met with empty words by most of the politicians who claimed to represent them.
On June 2, 2020, most of you posted a black square on Instagram for Blackout Tuesday. That may be all that you did — the definition of performative activism. Now due to the circumstances that the world found itself in, posting may have been all you could do.
As the pandemic raged on, rushing to the streets became harder for people to justify. By fall, streets once filled with “BLACK LIVES MATTER” signs and people of all ages and races coming together for equality were empty.
On Dec. 11, 2020 the first Covid-19 vaccines became available. A return to normalcy finally seemed like more than a pipe dream.
Many of us saw this as the first steps towards the old lives we long for. Just over the horizon, we could see masks coming off; bars and restaurants reopening; flights to see our loved ones within reach.
Within many of us, there is probably a knee-jerk reaction to throw aside the year we have just endured and finally enjoy life. But if we have learned anything from 2020, it is that there is much work ahead.
On Dec. 22, 2020, Andre Maurice Hill was murdered in his car by police after a non-emergency 911 call.
On Jan. 6, 2021, the capitol was stormed by an angry, white, racist mob.
Donning shirts with anti-Semetic symbols and attacking the very blue lives they told us mattered more than our own not three week prior, these traitors were allowed to saunter into a woefully unprotected Capitol Building.
When I was there on June 5, 2020, the National Guard looked down from the steps of the Capitol Building at a crowd begging for equality. We walked for hours in the blistering heat, putting ourselves and our families at risk because our justice system had made it painfully clear to us that being Black is a crime.
They would not have hesitated to throw us to the ground, force us onto our knees and cuff every last one of us if we made one misstep. Even as I write this, I know that is a painfully optimistic view of what may have happened.
This is the America we live in today.
This is the America that will persist if we fail to take action. If we let our imminent freedom become more important than the lives of a suffering, silenced people. This is America’s normal.
I know I must sound like a broken record. But when the travel restrictions are lifted and the bars open once more, do more for the Black Lives Matter movement than a fist emoji in your Instagram bio.
Now that you can go back to work, try to donate what you can to organizations that provide legal aid and support to communities most affected by police brutality. Next time there is a Black Lives Matter protest: go! Walk to your state’s capitol, peacefully, and show your legislatures that this is a movement, not momentarily sparked by another tragic death of yet another unarmed Black victim, but an ongoing demand for justice. Get on your phone and call your congressman, your mayor, your local legislatures, and demand justice. Be aware of the legislative decisions being made in your community and do what you can, whatever you can, to make your voice heard.
You’re about to gain your freedom back. Do something with it.
(03/05/21 2:35am)
First-year Feb Isabeau Trimble ’24.5 returned to their room on Tuesday morning to find the contents of the whiteboard on their door edited to display a homophobic slur. A resident of Forest Hall, Trimble had originally written “FAQ” on the board followed by a few personal fun facts. On Tuesday, however, a portion of the letter “Q” in FAQ had been erased, turning it into a “G,” according to Trimble.
As a first-year Feb, Trimble had only been on campus for a little more than a week before the slur was put on their whiteboard. “It was really surprising to me that it happened here. I’ve been aware of the very open and very accepting culture that exists here and so it was surprising to me, obviously,” Trimble said.
Trimble, who uses all pronouns, immediately sent a message to the Forest Hall GroupMe, notifying their neighbors of what had just happened. “Everybody was like ‘Holy crap, this is hate speech,’ — which, like, it is hate speech,” Trimble said in an interview with The Campus.
“What surprised me the most was how everybody [in the GroupMe] reacted to it. I come from a very Trump-y area of Virginia and calling gay people that there is the norm and if you don’t laugh at it then you’re oversensitive,” they continued. “So it was refreshing to see that it was taken so seriously.”
Trimble was unaware they could file a formal complaint with the college until The Campus referenced the process in an interview. Nevertheless, they do not plan to file a complaint. “It’s annoying, for sure, and it would be really great if it didn’t happen,” they said. “Maybe I’m giving this person too much benefit of the doubt, but whoever did it probably had a middle-school mindset, did the little erase, went ‘hehehe,’ and left.”
Trimble explained that they did not want a potential formal investigation to damage the perpetrator’s academic career. “Should they have done it? Absolutely not. Should they feel bad about it? Yeah. But I don’t know exactly what the repercussions are here for hate speech but I imagine [the administration] probably takes it very seriously,” Trimble said. “I just don’t want to completely ruin somebody’s academic career over something like that, as annoying as it is to me that I had to put up with it.”
“I definitely would say that obviously to me that’s not representative of the whole group. It was a little surprising but overall it didn’t really affect how I view the community,” Trimble said. “If anything it was refreshing to see that it was taken so seriously, if anything it made me feel better about the community here.”
This is the second instance of hateful language being directed at students in as many semesters. In the fall, Rodney Adams ’21 and Jameel Uddin ’22 were accosted and called the n-word by a white student while walking near Ross.
Fellow Forest resident Jasmin Animas Tapia ’21, who sits on the board of Queer and Trans People of Color (QTPOC), wasn’t surprised that this had happened.
“I was disappointed but not shocked because Middlebury isn’t free from prejudice or discrimination and that people will let you know of this through their words and behaviors,” Animas Tapia said. “It’s just a tiring reminder that these things happen and that if you are openly queer or read as queer, you are never really safe.”
Forest Community Assistant Ben Beese ’21.5 was upset when he found out about the slur. “This is the sort of thing that you know happens in the world but my expectations of my peers and the people I live with is so much higher than that… I think it’s a sign of how much more work we have to do when it comes to building community.”
Beese says community as a concept is nuanced and complex. “We're talking about the difference between people living in proximity to each other, in physical co-incidence, and people who form an interconnected whole,” Beese said. “In community, people care about each other and, to a large degree, depend upon each other. I think an incident like we saw the other day demonstrates how that’s not the case here.”
Although they do not plan on filing a complaint with the school, Trimble still has a message for whoever directed the slur at them.
“Just because I’m accustomed to it and just because I wasn’t hurt that much by it, if someone else had been the target, they could have been impacted much worse by it,” Trimble said. “Just because some people are more used to it than others doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be vigilant in not-hating on people. Don’t be jerks, people.”
(03/04/21 10:59am)
With one exception, almost all of my favorite films released last year were hauntingly prophetic in the ways they tackled our country’s contemporary struggles. It is hard to believe, for instance, that “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and “One Night in Miami’ were shot long before the coronavirus pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the end of the 2020 election and the storming of the United States Capitol. This was a turbulent, brutal year whose films deftly reflected the anxieties of our everyday lives.
At the same time, however, none of the movies on my list sacrificed the pleasure principle — the axiom that stories are meant to delight and instruct. Bluntly, I learned a lot about RVs in “Nomadland,” and some parts of Christopher Nolan’s time-travel thriller “Tenet” could even be described as fun, albeit after a beer or two.
But, to paraphrase Matthew 16:26: For what is a movie profited if it is well-made, but has lost its own soul?
Without further ado, the ten best movies of 2020.
“Emma” dir. Autumn de Wilde
Autumn de Wilde’s take on Jane Austen’s “Emma” is my favorite film of the year. Bathed in dappled duds and emerald hillocks, the film’s direction channels Wes Anderson as much as it does the elegantly dense early 19th century novel on which it is based. Following the matchmaking schemes of protagonist Emma Wodehouse (Anya Taylor Joy), the film recounts the ways love misdirects itself.
All of the novel’s main players are perfectly adapted to the screen, but it is Anya Taylor Joy’s understated, blankly camp portrayal of Emma Wodehouse that puts this film in the top spot. How Joy details her character’s vanity through small moments astounds — a quick poke which opens up a carriage window, a sob after a nosebleed, the gnawing of a strawberry to express mild amusement. These are all perfect embodiments of Jane Austen’s most irritating and all-too-human protagonist.
I could go on about why I love this movie. Let’s give the last word to our leading man Mr. Knightley, instead: “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
“Martin Eden” dir. Pietro Marcello
“Martin Eden” is adapted from one of the seemingly few Jack London novels that doesn’t feature dogs, but there is a hunger in the titular protagonist’s sneer that certainly suggests something wolfish beneath his good looks. Luca Marinelli plays Martin Eden, a down-and-out sailor with a talent for social climbing in 20th century Italy. He falls for Elena, a débutante from a prominent Naples family. After Elena convinces Eden that he must become educated, Eden soon finds himself addicted to literature, eventually getting some of his own poems and short stories published.
Every 10 minutes or so in “Martin Eden,” a black-and-white vignette flashes across the screen: two children fox-trotting, bathers jumping off cliffs, the rolling of a train into a crowded station. But when we leave these fragments to return to the main story, director Pietro Marcello sometimes shifts the time period we’re in. Some moments suggest Italy in the 1950s or 60s — Eden watches cartoons with his nephew and later picks up a woman at a discotech.
Equally disturbing is Eden’s growing disillusionment with socialism in favor of something more sinister. He uses his talents as a writer to propose a political path forward for Italy that rejects “slave mentality” and — more explicitly — “usury.” Something is rotten in the state of Italy, and the sweet visuals and compelling love story at the center of “Martin Eden” never undermine the loss of its protagonist’s moral compass.
“One Night in Miami” dir. Regina King
“One Night in Miami,” directed by Regina King, recounts a party hosted by the civil rights activist Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir). The three other guests: Cleveland Browns fullback Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), soul singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and a certain boxing champion named Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), whose ruminations on a possible conversion to Islam (and a new name that floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee, etc.) take center stage in the film’s first act.
The four men meet in a motel. They enjoy vanilla ice cream. They drink. The party ends. Credits roll.
But, of course, “One Night in Miami” is really about its characters’ words, words, words. Equally deft when discussing politics and pop culture, King’s movie is the rare film based on a play that, like Malcolm’s party of four, doesn’t overstay its welcome.
“News of the World” dir. Paul Greengrass
Tom Hanks is, in many ways, the 21st century’s Cary Grant. In a career now spanning four decades, Hanks’ performances have been consistently likable, thoughtful and outright conscientious, even though they don’t necessarily flaunt their genius. He’s great, as usual, in “News of the World,” Paul Greengrass’s Western about itinerant former Civil War veteran Jefferson Kyle Kidd, who makes a living reading newspapers aloud to crowded town halls in Reconstruction-era Texas. By chance, one day, Kidd is asked to safely deliver an orphan named Joanna to her relatives. A story about the trauma of war, “News of the World” also functions as a meditation on the nature of storytelling in an era of fake news.
My other six favorite movies released in the U.S. during 2020, listed in no particular order, are “The Personal Memoirs of David Copperfield,” “Mank,” “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” “I Care a Lot,” “Les Misérables” (not the musical), and “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”
(03/04/21 10:59am)
When the Middlebury men’s lacrosse team routed Plattsburgh State last March, it could’ve been the last time senior Michael McCormack ’20 played collegiately. The game fell on Tuesday, March 10, just hours after Laurie Patton requested that all students evacuate campus due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In that moment, the future was ominous.
Would the season resume? Or had McCormack and his teammates just competed in their final match of the year?
A suspension in NESCAC play soon evolved into an outright cancellation, terminating the Panthers’ season. But McCormack, who was named team MVP in that three-game ‘season,’ was desperate to write another ending to his collegiate career. The star playmaker knew he still had gas in the tank, especially after taking the 2018–19 year off from school.
Fortunately, his wish earned a boost when the NCAA announced that all spring athletes would be afforded one more season of eligibility, circumstances considered.
“With the season last year and everything that happened, I really just wanted to look to find somewhere to use that last year of [NCAA] eligibility,” McCormack told The Campus. “[I] reached out to coaches at the Division I level because I knew that’d probably be the best bet [for] having a season.”
McCormack, who was a First Team All-NESCAC and Third Team All-American selection in 2018, was no average D-III player. The University of Vermont (UVM), a strong D-I program positioned 35 miles north of Middlebury, was quick to realize this.
“[I] had great conversations with the coaches at UVM and that made the decision pretty easy,” McCormack said.
After committing to UVM, McCormack made the move up to Burlington for the 2020-21 academic year. He enrolled in a graduate certificate program in Integrated Health and Wellness Coaching and found a place to live with another fifth-year student.
Once the fall preseason kicked into gear, McCormack quickly noticed differences between the D-III and D-I level. At UVM, the team practiced six days a week, lifted weights three times a week and conducted biweekly conditioning exercises. It was a big change from Middlebury, both in terms of commitment and seriousness.
“In the fall [at Middlebury], there's not really that [much] fall ball or training just because we encourage kids to do another sport or go abroad or put their time and energy into something else,” McCormack said. “Just coming to D-I level especially at UVM, it’s a lot more time and commitment in the offseason. That's the biggest difference that I experienced.”
After months of preparation, the UVM Catamounts (0–1, 0–0) finally took the field last weekend in its non-conference season opener. On Saturday, Feb. 27, the team faced off against Bryant University (2–1, 0–0), a talented program from Rhode Island. The Catamounts fell, 15–12, but it wasn’t all bad news for McCormack. The attackman netted a pair of goals and notched a team-high six ground balls in his debut.
His performance marked a strong start to his D-I career, but it didn’t necessarily catch him by surprise.
“I think the NESCAC is the strongest division in D-III and gets top-tier players,” McCormack said. “It's really good competition, so being able to play such top-tier teams and players in general has prepared me for this moment I’m in.”
This season, UVM will play 11 games over nine weeks, including duels against Syracuse, the University of Albany and Hartford. It’ll be a fast-paced next few months, but McCormack is eagerly welcoming the bustle. It’s time for him to make an impression, after all.
“I wouldn’t say nervous is the right word,” McCormack said. “I’m excited and I feel prepared just by the work I’ve put in throughout my life.”
