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(05/07/20 10:00am)
Like the class of 2019.75, the class of 1918 was forced to leave Middlebury early. Just before the end of the fall 1917 term, The Campus reported emergency schedule changes that would reduce Christmas vacation by a week and move the class of 1918’s Commencement from June to early May of the following spring. This was to allow students to return home to their farms in time for the spring planting season. Farm workers, as with all types of workers, had been in short supply since the U.S. joined the war in Europe in 1917.
This was just one of many changes that the war would require. The college was raising $400,000 to secure it against wartime changes just as the men’s college senior class was “suffering depletion continually” as “one by one they drop out” to enter military service, according to a December 1917 Campus report. Nonetheless, campus life carried on. KDR continued to hold notable parties. The Campus exchanged heated op-eds about current events.
Little did they realize what was waiting for them when they returned.
The so-called Spanish Flu had been spreading across Europe since the spring. Vermont Secretary of Health Charles Dalton, like many of his counterparts across the U.S., knew it was only a matter of time before the deadly influenza pandemic would reach his state. Finally, it hit Vermont in September 1918, just as students were returning from their homes across the country. By Sept. 21, 40 “Middites” were sick. Five days later, student Charles Thompson had died. His death was followed a week later by that of another student, Charles Dana Carlson. The College implemented a quarantine and, a few days later, the state banned all public gatherings.
Initially, college officials were not overly concerned with the cold-like symptoms displayed by students. Yet, they quickly reversed course as Thompson’s health rapidly declined. The college converted Hepburn Hall, already commandeered for the new Student Army Training Corps (SATC), into an infirmary. Townspeople had set up an armed guard to ensure that students stayed on campus. The town itself was struggling to meet the medical needs of its residents, ultimately leading to a high death rate.
“[W]ires to Middlebury from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and other states nearby were kept hot with anxious messages,” reported The Campus. “[F]athers and mothers came to town, and all was alarm.”
Middlebury’s quick and thorough response proved crucial; one student complained that six doctors visited her in a single morning. The (delayed) first issue of The Campus on Oct. 16, 1918 reported that the quarantine might soon be lifted. In the meantime, quarantined students were entertaining themselves: Marion Young, the physical director of the women’s college, organized daily hikes, exercises and soccer games for the residents of “Pearsons and Battell Cottage.” The men’s college organized an intramural football game to replace the canceled game against Williams. Classes resumed on Oct. 25.
Despite two deaths and the “military quarantine,” the flu wasn’t the only news story of the day. The SATC had taken over Starr and Hepburn halls. Their Oct. 1 induction exercises took place in a modified, pandemic-response form from the steps of a one-year-old Mead Chapel. Armed, uniformed students could be found patrolling campus day and night for the rest of the semester.
Effects of the war were felt in more subtle ways as well. A myriad of fundraisers, including the continuing endowment fundraiser, the United War Work Campaign, and a collection to eliminate The Campus’s debt, were continuously promoted — all had a connection to war disruptions. Those who remained on campus wished they could “get into the game” in Europe, as a Nov. 1918 Campus editorial read (FOMO, apparently, was as strong then as it is now).
Nonetheless, the college was slowly regaining a sense of normalcy. Although November’s Charter Day festivities had to be reduced, quarantine was lifted only two days later. This prompted an impromptu “visitors’ day on the Hill,” full of friends and family who were finally allowed to visit students.
By the next week, rumors began to spread of peace in Europe. Lieutenant Miles Jones, commandant of the Middlebury SATC, banned the SATC from celebrating until the official declaration of peace the following Monday, Nov. 11. Former college president Ezra Brainerd gave the benediction at chapel services that day. Classes were canceled and the study body flooded into town to celebrate. The troubles of this unusual semester seemed to be firmly in the past.
Now in 2020, as we wait for stay at home orders to end, for vaccines to be developed, for good news regarding our summer and fall plans, we can find comforting words in a December 1918 Campus editorial. “Middlebury faces almost daily changes. It is with a feeling of wonder as to what will come next that we greet each day and it is not strange that under such conditions the student body should be unusually restless and undecided.” Even after the war ended and the campus recovered from the pandemic, change was the rule of the day.
(05/07/20 9:51am)
Just over 16% students — 204 total — of the 1,245 Zeitgeist respondents were varsity athletes. According to statistics on the Athletics Department’s website, nearly 27% of Middlebury students participate in varsity sports.
One dominant stereotype of athletes is that they “work hard, play hard.” When rigorous academics meet a big time commitment like a varsity sport, it “can definitely lead to finding a form of release elsewhere,” according to Munya Ra Munyati ’20.5, a member of the men's track team. We wondered if varsity athletes really do “go harder” than non-athletes.
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On average, athletes get drunker than non-athletes, according to Zeitgeist data. About 48% of non-athletes said they tend to “get drunk” when they consume alcohol, compared to 58% within the varsity-athlete population. For some athletes, drinking is a coping mechanism. Varsity sports take up roughly three hours a day — and some athletes recounted the toll that a demanding academic schedule coupled with athletic commitments takes on their mental health. “The more stress that builds up, the more people drink,” said Ra Munyati.
There also seem to be systemic practices that lead to an increased consumption of alcohol. Like most clubs on campus, varsity teams encourage their members to pay dues, the money from which is often used to provide people with hard alcohol. “Freshmen on teams are also given access to alcohol in a much larger capacity than most freshmen,” said women's track member Kiera Dowell '20.
Additionally, varsity athletes are more than twice as likely to “black out,” with 11% reporting it is a regular occurrence. “We like to push the limits of how much fun we can have,” said Pete Huggins ’21. Huggins, a member of the football team, also said that sometimes going out and drinking would turn into a competition of sorts between teammates, something he said was meant all in good fun. Dowell recalled a party after NESCACS her sophomore year that was “was absolutely insane,” but remains adamant when she says that ultimately celebrations like these are “not the leading cause” for the patterns of drinking followed by varsity athletes.
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We also asked where respondents were most likely to spend a Saturday night on campus, and allowed people to pick up to three options. The data elucidated that, generally (and unsurprisingly) much drinking is happening at Atwater. Nearly 83% of athletes reported that on an average Saturday night, they would most likely be found in an Atwater suite, almost three times — 270% — more likely than non-athletes. Put differently, while varsity athletes only made up about 16% of respondents, they represented more than a third — 34% — of Middlebury students who spend time in Atwater suites on the weekends.
Varsity athletes are also more likely to spend time at off-campus locations on Saturday nights. This is not entirely surprising, since senior members of varsity teams often apply for suites and houses and opt to hold team parties there.
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Men's hockey player Mitch Allen '20 felt that Atwater’s popularity among most varsity teams was due to a lack of other options, though he said that it was a less than ideal space. He mentioned that his “team has had an off-campus house for the past two years and that is very much preferred to anywhere else.”
Huggins also said the Atwater trend could be due to tradition. “A team will get a suite and everyone knows to go there,” he said. “There is a small bonding or celebratory aspect to it.”
Varsity athletes also differ from non-athletes in their sexual/relationship encounters. The survey results suggest that athletes were 12% more likely than non-athletes to have experienced a one-night stand. Furthermore, athletes were more likely to have engaged in consensual sexual activity with more partners. 38% of athletes said that they had engaged in consensual sexual activity with 2–4 partners in the last 12 months, compared to 30% of non-athletes. Additionally, 14% of athletes reported that they had abstained from consensual sexual activity in the last year, compared to 23% of non-athletes.
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Nearly 41% of non-athletes at Middlebury have reported being in a committed relationship. That number slinks back to just over 32% among the varsity athlete population. In other words, athletes were also 20% less likely to have been in a full-fledged committed/monogamous relationship while at Middlebury.
Some student athletes find this data surprising. “At least for track, there is sometimes inter team hookups but often that turns into dating.” said Marisa Edmondson '20 of the track team. “ A lot of my teammates date each other. I’d say as far as I know more people end up dating each other then casually hooking up,” Edmondson continued.
(05/07/20 9:50am)
The Campus asked Middlebury students to participate in the second annual Zeitgeist survey in November, looking to gain insight into campus culture by asking the questions that are often not discussed. This year’s survey included an exploration of love, relationships and the ever ill-defined “hook-up culture.” A total of 1,245 students responded — nearly 48.25% of the student body.
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The vast majority of Middlebury students — 90.82% — prefer a romantic relationship to a hook-up, according to the second annual Zeitgeist survey.
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Despite this indicated preference, 50.44% of respondents said that they have had a one-night stand in the past and 43.53% reported having had an, “unspecified, slightly-monogamous ‘thing.’”
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About 55.37% of respondents, or 686 students, reported having been in a committed romantic relationship before starting at Middlebury. However, only 39.43% of students, or 491 respondents, reported being in a committed/monogamous relationship at Middlebury.
Athletes are 7.09% more likely to have partaken in a one-night stand and, on average, have a higher number of sexual partners than non-athletes.
Students identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community are equally as likely to participate in all forms of relationships and sexual activity as non-LGBTQ+ students.
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When asked about their satisfaction with the romantic scene at Middlebury, 46.01% of respondents answered that they were somewhat dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied, 30.41% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, 23.58% said that they were somewhat satisfied or extremely satisfied.
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The length of relationships for students have varied. 34.90% of respondents said that their longest relationship lasted over a year, while 22.35% have never been in a relationship.
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More than one in ten students — 10.17% of respondents — said they have cheated in a romantic relationship.
Respondents were asked how many partners they have engaged in consensual sexual activity within the last 12 months. The most common response was 2-4 partners, with 386 students. 263 students reported they had not engaged in sex within the last year. Respondents who identified as cisgender female were more likely to have not engaged in sex compared to their cisgender male counterparts: 24.25% compared to 16.26%.
Despite the fact that many students have participated in hook-up culture to some degree, it is not clear what this term actually means. Students attempted — and struggled — to define “hook-up” in the survey. 1,130 students heeded the call to demystify the ambiguous (and popular) term.
“Hook-up is a deliberately ambiguous word in English that can connote anything from just making out to full-on sex,” reads one response, adding that “hook-up” is not a term they use when speaking of their own encounters. “I believe that encounters of any sexual nature would constitute a hook-up, but I’d be wary of defining mine as such because of the social implications this term carries.”
Many responses stated that hooking up is the range that begins with making out and ends with sex. Some designated hook-ups as an act that must occur privately, while others included infamous Dance Floor Make Outs (DFMOs) in their definition. Many others explicitly defined hook-ups as, “anything more than kissing”, requiring some sort of sexual encounter.
One respondent wrote that hook-ups are, “Something sexual in nature that can turn into something more, but [that] doesn’t necessarily have too much meaning or … emotion.”
The word “party” appears in responses 40 times. One response says that hook-ups are “having sex with someone after a party and then not getting into a relationship for more than a couple weeks or so afterward.” The words “casual” and “casually” appear 66 times in responses. “Spontaneous” and “spontaneously” appear seven times.
A common theme in the responses is a lack of emotional connection or significance. As one respondent puts it, hook-ups are, “Having a sexual relationship with someone without necessarily the need for an emotional/romantic connection or committment to that person.”
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For those involved in the romantic scene at Middlebury, survey respondents were given a range of options to select how they have met romantic partners. The most popular option was through mutual friends, with 527 people, followed by on nights out (495), extracurriculars (275) and through residence halls (225). Respondents also pointed to orientation and on-campus jobs as places they met romantic partners.
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The data also shows that Middlebury students tend to download dating apps during their later years at Middlebury. The percentage of students who use dating apps increased as students aged, with only 17.25% of the class of 2023 respondents having used a dating app at the time of the survey compared to 44.19% of the class of 2022, 48.36% of the class of 2021 and 57.32% of the class of 2020.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in The Campus' April 23 Love Issue.
Riley Board and Caroline Kapp contributed reporting.
(04/30/20 10:00am)
A global pandemic is not an ideal time to make major life decisions. Yet graduating high school seniors across the country are deciding where they will spend the next four years of their lives.
Middlebury’s Preview Days, originally scheduled for April 18–20, were canceled along with all other on-campus spring programming, and campus is closed to all tours. As a result, many seniors are now unable to visit the schools where they were admitted. For the 70% of prospective Middlebury students who have not visited campus, these factors compound the difficulty of an already-fraught decision.
“The tours that I did go on gave me a really important sense for the energy of the campus that you’re not able to get over a Zoom call,” said Carly Cairns ’24 from Phoenix, Ariz. “That was definitely difficult [not to have that] and not being able to see the location. Because Middlebury is in the middle of nowhere, it’s a leap of faith that I'll like it.”
“I personally feel that any aspect of a school cannot be fully expressed online, even with detailed descriptions and virtual tours,” wrote Scout Santos, from Seattle, Washington, in an email to The Campus. “In particular, the ‘vibe’ of the student and local community is something you can only get a true sense of by visiting the college in-person.”
The admissions office has ramped up its virtual programming, coming face-to-face with the challenge of marketing the college to prospective students who are restricted to the confines of their homes. In addition to connecting current undergraduates with prospective students, the admissions office senior fellows’ been hosting frequent Zoom information sessions. Several high school seniors considering Middlebury said they have attended every session.
However, for some, even the increased online presence and outreach is not enough.
Charisma Hasan, an admitted student from Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, is the child of South Asian immigrant parents who “have a strong prestige mentality” and want her to attend a larger, more well-known university. Hasan was planning on visiting Middlebury and using the occasion to convince her parents of the value of a liberal arts education. She says she’s tried everything to sway them, from attending the online webinars to arranging virtual meetings with professors. A week before the deadline to commit, Hasan was resigned to having to enroll elsewhere and losing the opportunity to study at her dream school.
“I definitely think if I got to visit the campuses [it would be different],” she said. “Personal connections drive many decisions in people's lives. I know that I would be strongly swayed by them, and I think it would be able to sway my parents too if they got to talk to more professors in person and meet the people who I would be interacting with.”
With unemployment rising rapidly over the last month, many families find themselves in dramatically different situations than when they applied for financial aid several months ago. Seniors are having to sit down with their parents and have difficult conversations about money and the affordability of Middlebury, whose full tuition, room and board costs $71,830.
Margaux Eller is an admitted student from Seneca Falls, N.Y. Her father, an architect, still has intermittent work as some of his job sites remain open and the firm he works for received a small business loan. However, her mother is a wine salesperson whose main commissions come from restaurants. Middlebury is the top choice for both her and her twin brother. But with a now uncertain family income, Eller worries that it is now outside of their price range.
The family of Nikash Harapanahalli ’24, from Dallas, Texas, has also lost half their income for the foreseeable future. His mother worked as a dentist, but the office had to close due to a shortage of supplies and extra difficulties surrounding social distancing orders. She is now facing unemployment for the coming months.
Harapanahalli decided to commit to Middlebury despite the cost, but with no end to the current financial difficulties in sight, he worries that his family will be unable to afford his education. He petitioned Middlebury for more financial aid but was rejected.
Harapanahalli has since begun to investigate private loan companies and work study programs to try and offset the costs.
“I had to choose between making a financially sound decision or a decision that makes me happy,” he said. “I ended up choosing the latter.”
The worries of precarious financial situations are only compounded by the logistical uncertainties of the coming academic year. There is still no official word from the college about the status of the fall semester, whether students can return to campus or will continue their education remotely.
Several seniors said that they would defer their admission if classes continue online in September, either by a semester or by a whole year. For international students, the dangers of travel in the midst of a global pandemic and the uncertainties of when travel restrictions will lift make a gap semester particularly attractive, according to Hanwen Zhang ‘24 from Shanghai, China.
Others remain committed to enrolling in the fall no matter what.
“I’m lucky to still be here, be safe, be healthy, and if that means going to college online, so be it,” said Harapanahalli.
All of the high school seniors who spoke to The Campus cited the uncertainty as a factor compounding the difficulties and stresses of this major life decision.
“It's horrible. It's soul wracking, nerve racking. I hate it,” said Harapanahalli. “This whole process over the past month has been the hardest in my life. It was really hard to make such a big financial commitment, such a big emotional commitment [in the midst of this uncertainty]. It's still weighing hard on my parents.”
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Life isn’t over. This isn’t the end of the world. There are still amazing things to look forward to that are still going to happen at some point once things start to become safer.[/pullquote]
For others, their impending enrollment offers a welcome sense of hope and something to look forward to in the midst of the current crisis. Eller has taken a lot of comfort from attending the webinars and learning about Middlebury’s various programs and offerings.
“Showing that things will go on despite what everyone’s going through right now is definitely very hopeful,” she said. “Life isn’t over. This isn’t the end of the world. There are still amazing things to look forward to that are still going to happen at some point once things start to become safer.”
(04/30/20 9:59am)
We all remember learning about the discovery of penicillin in grade school. Perhaps you remember the thrilled look on your seventh grade science teacher’s face or the pride you felt reporting this story to your parents at the dinner table. Science, society and history are as intertwined as the threads in your science teacher’s Alexander Fleming puppet, and as the world changes, it has become ever more vital to understand the ways in which they intersect.
As the academic year rockets to its close, forces behind new beginnings have been hard at work. Professors of History Febe Armanios, Rebecca Bennette and Ian Barrow have created a brand-new track within the college’s History Department: the History of Science, Medicine and Technology (HSMT). This academic pathway opens up the gates for students to investigate the development of science in relation to society over time and across the world. The hope is that students will explore how governments, societies and individuals that have influenced — and been influenced by — science, medicine and technology.
Middlebury is the first leading liberal arts college to have a HSMT concentration within its History Department. The track requires students to have a core focus of five HMST-specific classes, as determined by the Department of History. Students who declare the HMST track will graduate as History-HSMT majors.
HSMT is a well-established scholarly and academic field that dates all the way back to the 19th century. There even exists a professional society that represents this field called the History of Science Society, which was established in 1924.
“Courses on this track will range from a broader history of medicine, the history of science in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and the development of medicine in the Islamic world to the abuses of science and technology in Nazi Germany, health and healing in Africa and medieval science and alchemy in Europe, among many others,” said Armanios, one of the track’s founders and one of two co-directors of the Axinn Center for the Humanities.
“HSMT will also help students cultivate a historian’s strong methodologies of research, analysis and writing,” she added.
What, exactly, sparked the creation of this innovative addition to Middlebury’s academic repertoire? Armanios said she, Bennette and Barrow developed the track through a Fund for Innovation (FFI) grant awarded by the college in the fall of 2018.
“However, the idea was planted long before that,” she said. “In recent years, I’ve worked on two books related, in different ways, to religion, health, science and media technologies in the Middle East. Ian Barrow is an established scholar of the history of mapping and related technologies in British colonial India. And Rebecca Bennette has been working for a few years on a book project related to the medicalization of conscientious objection in Germany during World War I.”
Armanios also noted that the History Department had already been regularly offering a few classes on HMST-related subjects, specifically a course by medieval Europe by Louisa Burnham and one on African history by Jacob Tropp. “So we started to have broader conversations with our department colleagues about how to turn this growing pedagogical interest into a specialized major,” she said.
This FFI grant has given these three professors the opportunity to observe how the University of Chicago, Yale and Johns Hopkins have long-ago integrated successful HSMT majors at the undergraduate level. These visits provided them with information on how to structure the courses within the track, how to reach prospective students, and the crucial nature of co-curricular programming. In Armanios’ words, colleagues at the three institutions “were very encouraging about our plans at Middlebury and gave us enthusiastic support and encouragement to launch HSMT.”
These professors believe that Middlebury’s HSMT track will prepare students for a diverse variety of professions. For pre-med and pre-health students, this track ignites intellectual curiosity, creativity and empathy through the history courses coupled with scientific content. Recent studies by the Association of American Medical Colleges reported that — as a percentage of applicants — U.S. medical schools admitted more humanities majors, like history majors, than those who majored in biological or physical sciences.
“Students will be able to see the complex relationship between science, medicine, and technology on the one hand, and the larger historical-societal contexts in which these exist in a variety of settings,” said Bennette.
Armanios added that the creation of the track is timely.
“Our discussion with several students in recent years showed that HSMT might be that critical bridge between STEM and the Humanities,” Armanios said. “In the age of Covid-19 and of growing interest in understanding illness, pandemics, medicine, science and their relationship to history, society, religion, and humanity, HSMT will appeal to all students looking for timely, original, and relevant content.”
(04/30/20 9:56am)
Early this fall, on a quiet evening, Community Council Co-Chair Roni Lezama ’22 was in his dorm room doing homework when he received a call from Baishakhi Taylor, the dean of students and Lezama’s fellow Co-Chair of Community Council.
“Where are you?” he recalled her saying. “Come to Old Chapel.” Lezama, fearing the worst, hopped on his bike and zipped across campus as fast as he could, just as the sun was beginning to set. But when he arrived at Taylor’s office, it was clear that no school-wide, calamitous emergency had taken place. Instead, Taylor just wanted Lezama’s advice to ensure student voices were represented in the midst of confusion and pushback in response to the announcement regarding the installation of new security cameras.
To Lezama, this immediate inclination has characterized Taylor’s overarching mission as Middlebury’s Dean of Students — to have each and every voice within the student body inform her decisions. Known for responding to emails in mere minutes, she has been described by those who worked closely with her as exceptionally communicative and uniquely receptive.
“I can’t even put into words how accessible she was to students,” Lezama said. “There was a sense of urgency, but not from an optics perspective. She actually cared about what students were thinking about.”
Such instincts, in essence, make clear the sorrow that many are feeling in response to the news of Taylor’s departure. President Laurie Patton, in a school-wide email earlier this month, announced that Taylor would be leaving Middlebury to assume the position of Dean of the College and Vice President of Student Life at Smith College, a private women’s college in Northampton, Mass. and member of the Seven Sisters, effective July 1. As an assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and the faculty mentor for the BOLD Women’s Leadership Initiative, women’s education has been paramount within Taylor’s own life.
“I came to the U.S. to study women’s studies,” Taylor, who grew up and completed her undergraduate education in India, said. “More than ever, I would like to focus on women leadership at an institutional level, and I’m grateful that Middlebury prepared me for that.” She also cited accessibility to her family as another motivation for the transition. The majority of her family lives in India, and proximity to a major airport — Boston Logan in this case— has proven to be even more critical in the context of her father’s passing last year. Her husband works in Washington, D.C.
Before coming to Middlebury, Taylor served as the Associate Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University, where Patton was her mentor and supervisor. Taylor was also a faculty member at the Duke Center for South Asian Studies and the program in Education.
A focal point of Taylor’s tenure at Middlebury has been fostering a productive, harmonious relationship between academic and student life. Once a week, she fielded advice and facilitated conversation with her student advisory group, which is composed of students representing different grades, interests and backgrounds.
“No process is perfect, but I’ve tried to get us to a more student-centric approach,” she said. “It’s about how we continue to meet student needs in a holistic and integrated way.”
Student Government Association President Varsha Vijayakumar ’20, who worked closely with Taylor, expressed gratitude for her insight and support during her presidential term, specifically citing her balanced feedback, institutional knowledge and general openness.
“She’s really good at tapping into our thoughts and is really keen on listening to our fears and what excites us,” Vijayakumar said. “She harnesses that and truly takes it into account.”
For Vijayakumar and Lezama, Taylor has stood out as a member of administration who has routinely kept them and other students in the loop regarding the goings-on in Old Chapel. While Taylor may have paved the way, they hope this precedent will continue.
“She was not afraid to separate her role as an administrator and [her role], dare I say, as a friend,” Lezama said, also noting her consistent support for first-generation and low-income students. “She just wanted to care for and support you, and if she couldn’t do it through her powers as an administrator, she would use whatever devices she had.”
Vijayakumar also believes that having closer, more personal relationships with administrators will only serve to help promote more productive and empathetic conversation.
“[Baishakhi] should be the rule, not the exception,” Vijayakumar said.
Lezama believes that the next dean of students will have big shoes to fill when it comes to student advocacy and administrative clarity. “I’m really going to miss her,” he said.
Meanwhile, Taylor’s advice for her successor is simple: “Listen closely to the students.”
(04/30/20 9:55am)
After outcry from seniors at the news that two small senior houses were allotted to rising juniors in the superblock process, the assignments may now have been revoked, according to students involved.
This year’s superblock process was initially expanded to include Turner House and Homer Harris after the Office of Residential Life received an influx of applicants for superblocks. The reassignment, however, angered many seniors who had been assured that Turner and Homer Harris would be available in the general housing draw.
Rising junior Brooke Laird ’22, the coordinator for the applicants allotted Turner House, told The Campus that her group’s housing assignment was revoked on April 16 through a Zoom call with Assistant Director of Residential Life Kady Shea.
“She has notified us that due to the original statement in the housing information, Turner will go back into the regular room draw process for seniors,” Laird said in a statement to The Campus. “This was obviously incredibly hard to hear, because we were enthusiastic about bringing our superblock plans into this space.”
Sophie Hochman ’22, a rising junior in the group previously assigned to Homer Harris, received similar news in a Zoom call with Shea and the members of her applicant group.
“Basically, as of now, we are not attached to that location,” Hochman told The Campus. “[Shea] very much framed it as ‘putting Homer Harris on pause’ and talked about the many new spaces they are exploring for housing on campus and how they need to do a full survey of those before we can talk further.”
The news follows a barrage of objections about the assignments from the rising senior class, many of whom expressed through memes and vitriolic emails to the housing administrators that Middlebury’s senior housing options are already limited. The other superblock assignments at Jewett House, 97 Adirondack View and 48 South Street (KDR), which are traditionally included in the process and were not subject to student protest, remain unaffected by the changes.
Shea could not be reached for comment. Associate Dean of Student Life AJ Place did not corroborate the students’ claims and instead told The Campus in an email that no decision had been made regarding the two houses.
“We are exploring options based on the feedback from seniors,” Place said. “We will share out all the information we have about available properties when we release the updated room draw calendar.”
Although no official announcement has been made regarding the tentative reallocation of Turner and Homer Harris, an email sent to all rising seniors on April 9 and co-signed by Shea, Place and Senior Associate Dean of Students Derek Doucet addressed student outrage over the initial superblock process. The email also addressed the erroneous statement left on the 2020-2021 informational website claiming that Turner and Homer Harris would not be available as superblocks, which served as a catalyst for student anger after it was retroactively removed.
“We recognize that some of you would have preferred to receive this information ahead of time, and that we inadvertently left text on the room draw page indicating that these spaces would not be offered as superblocks,” the email read. “That was an oversight we acknowledge, and for which we apologize.”
As uncertainties surrounding student enrollment this fall have forced Middlebury to rethink its housing conventions, the email also claimed that previously unavailable locations may be added to the senior housing draw for the 2020-2021 year. A following email to all students on April 13, also co-signed by Shea, Place and Doucet, doubled down on this proposal, though a timeline for the remainder of the housing process has not yet been determined.
“We will expand housing options for students, which may include both small and large houses not offered before,” the email read. “These spaces will be available and selected in the room draw process based on seniority.”
As housing reconfigurations take place, the groups originally assigned to Turner House and Homer Harris hope to find other locations to pursue the superblock themes proposed in their applications. Turner was originally planned to center around relationships, care and consent, while Homer Harris was to be focused on sustainable design.
“We have gotten word that we might be reassigned but have very little information on where or when,” said Hochman.
Laird’s group is in a similar position. “We are hopeful that we can work with Kady to find a place for our superblock within the new potential housing options that are being investigated,” she said.
(04/27/20 10:00pm)
The last time I walked in Toronto — and I mean real walks, not those trips around the block you take on school breaks — it was summer. I didn’t look around much then. Now, wandering neighborhoods in a self-isolated, distraction-starved state, I absorb it all; my gaze is practically greedy as it settles on pastel awnings and construction scaffolding, on small dogs wearing leopard-print booties and middle-schoolers tripping over razor scooters. I read every street sign, relishing place names that aren’t “upstairs” or “the kitchen”.
I’m not the first to find catharsis putting one foot in front of the other. In her recently published memoir, Rebecca Solnit invests even aimless wandering with a sense of purpose (“it felt,” writes Solnit of strolls taken in her twenties, “like I was getting somewhere”). And Virginia Woolf’s 1930 essay “Street Haunting” builds on an expansive tradition of literary flâneurs, exploring the figurative escapes offered by city streets. In leaving our house, writes Woolf, we “shed the self our friends know us by... When the door shuts on us, [the limits of our identity] vanish. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken…”. Out walking, Woolf claims, “we are no longer quite ourselves.”
I’ve struggled with mental health for years; it takes a lot less than a pandemic for my personal shell-like covering to prove suffocating. Six weeks of sheltering-in-place haven’t helped. By this point, I’m pretty desperate to be anything but quite myself — and so I take Woolf at her word, and begin to walk.
It works. Tracing the tall, dense streets of Toronto’s Annex, I seek out an escape which Woolf hailed the “greatest of pleasures”. Unlike Woolf, though, I don’t swap the “straight lines of [my] personality” for new, imagined identities. Because I don’t want to “put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others” — not really. When I street-haunt, I shed the current version of myself for former, freer ones.
I find them, too, on sidewalks and outside stores they used to frequent. Here’s an old me, for instance, on a street I canvassed last summer in anticipation of Canada’s federal election. Over the course of those humid nights, my gloveless knuckles knocked on hundreds of doors. Most people were out of town, so even a sneezing or coughing stranger formed cause for excitement; any anxiety stemmed from trying to remember political talking points, not calculate the probability of airborne Covid-particles. Two metres’ distance was the last thing on my mind (unless, of course, whoever answered the door was voting Conservative).
And there: another old self by the Dupont Food Depot, on the doors of which now clings a precarious cardboard sign. 11a.m.–10p.m., reads the ballpoint scratch. 12 ppl max.
Normally, the Depot is open 24 hours. I know because it was well past midnight when I’d stop last August, en route home from my hostessing shift. These days, the older man behind the cash looks stressed. Last summer, he’d smile when I set my signature purchase — a half-pint of Kawartha Dairy Moose Tracks ice cream — down by the register. He didn’t flinch, either, if I fumbled around in my backpack for spare loonies and toonies, opting to pay in grimy, potentially virus-carrying coins rather than tap my card.
Now, I marvel at that germ-ignorant irreverence. I’d come straight out of the subway, slick with sweat and grease from bussing empty pizza plates — and not once did I wait the five-minute home trip home to wash my hands. Instead, I pulled the lid off my Moose Tracks as I walked, licking freezer burn from the ice-cream’s surface and rooting out peanut butter cups with a plastic spoon.
I meet yet another summer self on the Rosedale railway tracks. That version of me was driven up here by a different isolation, the kind which follows breaking off a four-year relationship.
That sounds sad — I didn’t come to the tracks to wallow. I came to sit cross-legged on the warm asphalt and work through the remaining pages of my watercolor sketchbook; to listen to Supertramp and the sound of car horns on nearby Avenue Road. Back before an uncompromised respiratory system became my most prized possession, I’d even enjoyed the rare cigarette. Watching Joan Mitchell-esque scribbles of smoke rise up from the orange tip, I wondered, lazily, what senior year at Middlebury would be like. I imagined how good it would feel to take muddy runs along the TAM, to drink endless, watery mugfuls of Vermont Coffee Company Medium Roast alongside friends in Atwater dining hall. I looked forward to lectures, to late nights in Davis library writing my thesis on “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse.”
A kid skipping virtual high school streaks by on his bike, much too close for Covid-age comfort. When he looks back, I give him the finger. And then I feel bad. It isn’t his fault I’m finishing my undergrad over Zoom. I can’t blame him for being up here, either. By now, the remote workday has ended and the sidewalks surge with runners, making effective social distancing impossible. It’s time to head back.
I dread going home. Still, street-haunting helps. If nothing else, it reminds me that I’m not “tethered to the single self” who, minutes from now, will resume her station on the living-room couch — at least, not forever. Life post-Covid will come, and, when it does, a future version of me will enjoy all of the same vivid colors and textures which marked old experiences. New ones, too.
With that in mind, I mount the steps of my father’s front porch. And — am I imagining it? Or is my heel-dragging punctuated by a kind of gratitude? Because I’m lucky, really, to find “the usual door… the chair turned as I left it”. Lucky to have a kind, comfortable home to self-isolate in, to have a family who can work from the safety of their dining room tables. Lucky, even, that the pain returning to my chest is only anxiety (rather than a sign I’ve contracted Covid).
I’m grateful, too, for the essay underpinning my new survival strategy. Nine decades before I’d heard the term “coronavirus,” Woolf anticipated not only the necessity of escaping, but the literal and figurative refuge found by returning. Because as I “approach [my] own doorstep again”, I take undeniable (albeit grudging) comfort in feeling “the old possessions fold me round…” — in feeling the “self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many [suddenly, temporarily] inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed.”
Ellie Eberlee ’20 is The Campus’s senior Opinions editor.
(04/27/20 3:00am)
Middlebury featured a photo of a student protesting Charles Murray’s 2017 campus visit in a promotional Instagram story last week, sparking anger among current and former students who accused the college of attempting to rewrite a painful chapter of its history for marketing purposes.
The Instagram story was posted Wednesday as part of the college’s “Midd Daily” campaign, which aims to give prospective students a taste of campus life. It featured a photo of Austin Kahn ’17.5, originally taken by Michael O’Hara ’17 on assignment for The Campus, protesting Murray’s visit in Wilson Hall. In the photo, Kahn holds a sign reading “this is an appropriate response” in front of the livestream of Murray’s conversation with Political Science Professor Allison Stanger. The Instagram story bore a caption that read, in part, “Social Justice and Activism: At Middlebury, we don’t just talk about social justice; we also act on it.” It was deleted later that afternoon.
In the hour before O’Hara took the photo on March 2, 2017, protesters shouted down Murray as he attempted to deliver his talk in Wilson Hall, forcing him and Stanger to livestream their conversation from a different room. Stanger was later severely injured by protesters while leaving the building.
Kahn was one of 74 students sanctioned by the college that spring for his role in the Murray protests (he did not reply to requests to describe the extent of sanctions he received as of press time, but has written publicly about being sanctioned on social media in the past). Severity of sanctions ranged from probation, which stayed on students’ records until the end of the semester, to official college discipline, which would remain on students’ permanent records.
If it intended to embrace a longstanding part of campus culture, the Instagram story of Kahn also prompted anger that Middlebury was using an event for which students were disciplined as part of an advertising campaign.
“Funny that you would punish students for protesting and then use their protest as part of an [sic] big advertising ploy,” wrote Cora Kircher ’20, a member of the environmental activism group Divest Middlebury, in an Instagram story of her own on Wednesday. Divest Middlebury later shared a screenshot of Kircher’s story to its Facebook page.
The Campus previously reported on the lengthy disciplinary process Murray protesters faced, which in part used photo and video evidence of the protests to pinpoint who was involved. That process garnered criticism from people on many sides of the free speech debate, with Murray lambasting the punishments meted out as "pathetically” insufficient while others decried the “terroristic” effects of a disciplinary process meant to “satisfy national audiences,” in the words of a professor.
“The funny thing is that after these protests, Middlebury launched an investigation where they used images like the one neatly featured on their account to discipline dissidents among the student body and intimidate sympathetic faculty,” Kahn wrote on his own Facebook page Thursday in a post that has since been shared 26 times.
In an email to The Campus, Social Media Director Andrew Cassel acknowledged criticisms of the Instagram story as “fully justified.”
“When we realized our mistake, of course we were concerned about any hurt it would bring to our community,” Cassel wrote. “In this case, both the admissions and communications teams recognized that we had made this oversight, and deleted the post.”
Kahn said he saw the promotional intent behind the posting of the photo as stripping away the “socio-political context” of the protest it captured. “The phenomenon of removing that meaningful act from its context totally perverted it and makes it meaningless,” he said. “It’s absurd.”
In what he saw as a silver lining, Kahn received a “wave” of messages from friends, many of whom had gone through the disciplinary process with him, notifying him that the image had been used in the college’s story on Wednesday.
O’Hara, the photographer, said that the Office of Admissions previously asked him permission to use the image, which he granted, but that he “was not provided context for how the photo might be used.” He granted permission under the assumption that the image would be included in #SixtyScenes, a collection of photos documenting campus life separate from the “Daily Midd” series that are shared as Instagram posts, not stories.
Cassel, who began as the college’s social media director last December, previously told The Campus that photos featured in the “Midd Daily” series are chosen collectively by multiple members of the admissions and communications offices. Midd Daily and #SixtyScenes fit Cassel’s vision of giving the college a more personal social media presence that better captures day-to-day realities of campus life, goals he described in a recent Campus profile.
Debate over Charles Murray’s work and his right to a platform at Middlebury had revived at the college in the months prior to Kahn’s surprise shoutout: Murray was scheduled to speak in Wilson Hall on March 31 on a new invitation from the College Republicans. But Covid-19 led to the cancellation of his visit, which would have been his third to Middlebury since 2007, along with the rest of in-person spring programming.
(04/23/20 12:58am)
The Campus asked Middlebury students to participate in the second annual Zeitgeist survey in November, looking to gain insight into campus culture by asking the questions that are often not discussed. This year’s survey included an exploration of love, relationships and the ever ill-defined “hook-up culture.” A total of 1,245 students responded — nearly 48.25% of the student body.
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The vast majority of Middlebury students — 90.82% — prefer a romantic relationship to a hook-up, according to the second annual Zeitgeist survey.
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Despite this indicated preference, 50.44% of respondents said that they have had a one-night stand in the past and 43.53% reported having had an, “unspecified, slightly-monogamous ‘thing.’”
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About 55.37% of respondents, or 686 students, reported having been in a committed romantic relationship before starting at Middlebury. However, only 39.43% of students, or 491 respondents, reported being in a committed/monogamous relationship at Middlebury.
Athletes are 7.09% more likely to have partaken in a one-night stand and, on average, have a higher number of sexual partners than non-athletes.
Students identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community are equally as likely to participate in all forms of relationships and sexual activity as non-LGBTQ+ students.
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When asked about their satisfaction with the romantic scene at Middlebury, 46.01% of respondents answered that they were somewhat dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied, 30.41% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, 23.58% said that they were somewhat satisfied or extremely satisfied.
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The length of relationships for students have varied. 34.90% of respondents said that their longest relationship lasted over a year, while 22.35% have never been in a relationship.
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More than one in ten students — 10.17% of respondents — said they have cheated in a romantic relationship.
Respondents were asked how many partners they have engaged in consensual sexual activity within the last 12 months. The most common response was 2-4 partners, with 386 students. 263 students reported they had not engaged in sex within the last year. Respondents who identified as cisgender female were more likely to have not engaged in sex compared to their cisgender male counterparts: 24.25% compared to 16.26%.
Despite the fact that many students have participated in hook-up culture to some degree, it is not clear what this term actually means. Students attempted — and struggled — to define “hook-up” in the survey. 1,130 students heeded the call to demystify the ambiguous (and popular) term.
“Hook-up is a deliberately ambiguous word in English that can connote anything from just making out to full-on sex,” reads one response, adding that “hook-up” is not a term they use when speaking of their own encounters. “I believe that encounters of any sexual nature would constitute a hook-up, but I’d be wary of defining mine as such because of the social implications this term carries.”
Many responses stated that hooking up is the range that begins with making out and ends with sex. Some designated hook-ups as an act that must occur privately, while others included infamous Dance Floor Make Outs (DFMOs) in their definition. Many others explicitly defined hook-ups as, “anything more than kissing”, requiring some sort of sexual encounter.
One respondent wrote that hook-ups are, “Something sexual in nature that can turn into something more, but [that] doesn’t necessarily have too much meaning or … emotion.”
The word “party” appears in responses 40 times. One response says that hook-ups are “having sex with someone after a party and then not getting into a relationship for more than a couple weeks or so afterward.” The words “casual” and “casually” appear 66 times in responses. “Spontaneous” and “spontaneously” appear seven times.
A common theme in the responses is a lack of emotional connection or significance. As one respondent puts it, hook-ups are, “Having a sexual relationship with someone without necessarily the need for an emotional/romantic connection or committment to that person.”
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For those involved in the romantic scene at Middlebury, survey respondents were given a range of options to select how they have met romantic partners. The most popular option was through mutual friends, with 527 people, followed by on nights out (495), extracurriculars (275) and through residence halls (225). Respondents also pointed to orientation and on-campus jobs as places they met romantic partners.
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The data also shows that Middlebury students tend to download dating apps during their later years at Middlebury. The percentage of students who use dating apps increased as students aged, with only 17.25% of the class of 2023 respondents having used a dating app at the time of the survey compared to 44.19% of the class of 2022, 48.36% of the class of 2021 and 57.32% of the class of 2020.
Editor’s Note: All the results from the second annual Zeitgeist survey will be published on May 7, in the special Zeitgeist issue.
Riley Board, and Caroline Kapp contributed reporting.
(04/23/20 12:00am)
Boy, what a ride it’s been.
When we first got to campus as doe-eyed teens, I don’t think any of us knew we’d be signing up for a rollercoaster ride. Within our first three months, Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States. Shortly thereafter, anti-Muslim hate speech was found on a classmate’s whiteboard and a swastika on the door of a Jewish congregation in town. Our second semester was marked by Charles Murray’s infamous visit and all the protests, multiple racial profiling cases and ensuing sanctions. It was a jarring start to our college careers, to say the least.
Sometimes I think back to when the letters of the word “RACIST” were spray painted across the pillars of Mead Chapel back in late 2017. Honestly, I think that image perfectly encapsulates Middlebury. That graffiti was a stark reminder of the not-so-pretty side of our school, that we have a long way to go; at the same time, Mead Chapel is also an edifice of hope and opportunity and celebration.
Late one night after I learned that the college would close early because of the pandemic, I found myself sitting at the steps of that very building. I stared out at our dimly lit campus and suddenly began crying uncontrollably — not because of all the sh*t we’ve gone through, but because of how we’ve persevered and even found some beauty along the way.
I’m thinking about the excitement of Preview Days, or the first time we experienced the Winter Carnival bonfire and fireworks in all their glory. I’m thinking about how we didn’t always have to swipe in to get into the dining halls, and how the lines would be out the door just for black pepper tofu or Midnight Breakfast. How every weekend the Grille would be packed after Cafe con Leche, and how at least one person most definitely lost their jacket or student ID along the way. Free & For Sale, anyone?
And then there was the snow. Do you remember that one tree on Mead Chapel hill that was always decorated like a Christmas tree around the holidays? Random snowmen and the occasional igloo would pop up all around, new playthings for our feisty campus squirrels. MiddKids are generally really smart, but for some reason we would always try to cut across Battell beach even though walking around would probably be much faster.
With the chilly winter of our third semester, though, came The List. Our campus plunged into conversations about just how widespread sexual violence is at Middlebury. But it also inspired our community to gather more intentionally around It Happens Here, a storytelling event that centers on the voices of survivors of sexual violence. There were only about 20 of us in Wilson Hall the year before. After The List, I couldn’t even get in.
We protested the Muslim ban and spearheaded divestment. We cheered on our peers at dance and cultural performances, a cappella concerts and comedy shows. We learned to tell when it’s spring because everyone would start walking around in shorts, even though it was still 50 degrees outside. And soon enough, students would pull out their hammocks as Facilities set up the outdoor dining tables. Even Sean Kingston was excited about warmer weather at Middlesbury.
But we weren’t so excited about a chemistry test question referencing Nazi gas chambers, or a slave trade joke in a geology class. And before we could catch our breath, the invitation of Ryszard Legutko threw us in for another loop. Just like that, our junior spring, too, was marked by controversy.
In moments like that one, I would dream of eating too much at the all-school barbecue, of milling around campus late at night during Nocturne, of throwing paper airplanes in BiHall, and of seeing President Patton’s adorable dogs. Sometimes I even missed the carillon chiming away for what sometimes feels like hours.
But back to reality. We learned of Charles Murray 2.0 (technically 3.0) near the end of this past J-Term, and it suddenly felt like we were time-travelling back to our first year. But we were ready this time. Many of our peers had worked alongside the administration to revise the protest policy. We saw the creation of the Black Studies major and got to talk about the 1619 project with Nikole Hannah-Jones. We mobilized in a way that recognized the past and looked to the future.
And of course, just when we thought we could handle everything that came our way, Covid-19 forced us to abruptly leave behind everything we knew and held dear.
There’s no denying that we’ve been dealt a pretty sh*tty hand. Yet somehow, despite it all, we’ve made the most of our time at Midd —our response to the pandemic is proof. In just a few days, we developed an abridged Senior Week, cheekily hung up crush lists and took a good look at that beautiful Middlebury sunrise one last time.
These are the things that shape who we are, seniors, and I don’t want you to forget it. I want you to remember just how excited you were when you first got here, and I want you to take a deep breath and celebrate the fact that you’re almost done. Maybe we don’t get to walk down the stage in a cap and gown come May, but our accomplishment is so much bigger than that because we’re true Midd Kids: quirky and resilient, no matter what life throws at us. And when it comes down to it, that is what we will be remembered for.
I love you so much, class of 2019.75. Maybe we’ll be reunited someday.
Varsha Vijayakumar is a member of the class of 2020 and this year’s SGA president.
(04/22/20 12:00pm)
We interviewed seven Middlebury couples for another story this week and we were so pleased with all the wonderful anecdotes they shared with us. But unfortunately, we had a word limit.
So here’s an addendum, of questions we asked in every interview and then each couple’s answers. Interviews were all conducted separately, and we condensed responses for brevity.
Check out the companion story first to learn more about the interviewees.
Middlebury Campus: How would you describe the dating scene at Middlebury during your time as a student?
Grace Vedock ’20: I think the queer dating scene is a totally different beast than the straight dating scene. It’s smaller, and it can feel competitive … It feels like there’s always people taking sides. If straight people think that [dating at Middlebury] is hard, I think they would be surprised or humbled by the queer experience at Middlebury.
Julie Parker ’54: Very controlled. There were rules, confines, parietal hours. But any couple that was passionate had plenty of occasions to “mess up,” especially with a car. Sex was feared because pregnancy was such a taboo. Still, a few couples were known to be sexually active, and there were undoubtedly a few pregnancies hastily terminated, or sudden marriages.
Dula Dulanto ’20: A lot of people don’t know how to navigate relationships. It’s easy to brush something off, to disregard others and their feelings. It’s an environment where you don’t have to engage with someone if you don’t want to. It creates this repertoire of mess up and move on to the next person.
Pete Johnson ’62: Archaic.
Janie Johnson ’63: [Laughs.] Archaic is right.
Pete Johnson ’62: I mean, it was different then. The women were very closely monitored and chaperoned. The men, not so much. We pretty much had free run of the campus at the time.
Mary Clermont ’54: The dating scene at Middlebury was very important. It was the social life, really. I always felt bad for the girls who sat alone in the dorm on a Saturday night. You wouldn’t really have big groups of [female and male students] mixed. There was nothing to do [if you weren’t dating someone].
Nancy Hunt ’93: I think there were a lot of people who dated long-term at Middlebury. That's not to say that people weren't also "hooking up" at fraternity and social house parties. That happened all of the time, too.
Don Hunt ’92: The social scene was very much focused around social houses, most of which were fraternities at the time. It was definitely a drinking and hook up scene.
MC: Do you think anything about Middlebury specifically has contributed positively to your relationship?
Pete Johnson ’62: We both moved around. My family moved all over New England. Hers moved because her dad was a professor at several different universities. And so, we never had a longstanding hometown. Middlebury has kind of become that for us, because that’s where the friends that we both know [are from], who knew us when we were in our twenties or younger. That’s sort of our hometown.
Dulanto ’20: Midd brings all these students from diverse backgrounds and equalizes all of them, so Midd provided a platform for us to interact … I immigrated to New York when I was young. My parents don’t speak English. My family has 10 to 15 different aunts and uncles. There are cultural, language and socioeconomic differences [between Melanie and me].
Julie Parker ’54: It has given us shared memories and background and friends that have known us both, cementing the bonds.
MC: Conversely, have there been challenges that you think are specific to Middlebury?
Cece Wheeler ’19: It’s sort of hard to measure a given relationship at Midd, because you’re likely not living together and your time is spread between classes, homework, sports, friends, clubs etc., so that you can “date” someone for a year and in reality not spend that much time together. That’s probably one of the bigger challenges at Midd — just making time for everyone in your life.
Nancy Hunt ’93: I think the challenge with a college like Middlebury, at least at the time we were there, was the lack of diversity. Additionally, there is a challenge that goes with any small school in a rural area and that is the lack of people.
Vedock ’20: I think visibility is a double-edged sword. We’re very visible because we’ve been together for a long time, but that’s not something everyone in a queer relationship necessarily wants or has the luxury of having. That’s something I struggled with at the very beginning, because I was not out when I came to Midd, and not out to my family when we started dating. Feeling very visible in that way was intimidating. Now I don’t feel any pressure or feel scared when I walk around on campus.
MC: What does love mean to you?
Taite Shomo ’20.5: I think love is about knowing that Grace is going to be there for me and I’m going to be there for Grace, and having that constant in my life.
Melanie Chow ’22: I think it just means feeling completely comfortable in your own skin, not having to hide anything. Knowing that no matter what you do or say, that person is still going to be there and want to be with you.
Dulanto ’20: I think of it as an active choice. You don’t make it once, you make it every single day. You’re always wanting to choose the other person for everything they are.
Wheeler ’19: It means that John still hasn’t commented on the cat I brought home six months ago but [he] wakes up at six every morning to feed her.
Parker ’54: I feel an almost mystical connection to Peter, as if cosmic forces operated to bring us together. So Middlebury was the “mise en scène” for one couple's drama.
Pete Johnson ’62: There’s sort of a comfort zone where you can say what you think and be who you are and know it’s going to be okay.
Janie Johnson ’63: Pete was in the military during the Vietnam War. And again, there was no communication, this was way before there were cellphones. He wrote me a letter every single day for 365 days.
Clermont ’54: I don't think I have ever sat around thinking about the meaning of love. It has so many facets and degrees. I remember my mother telling me not to use the word "love" unless whatever you were referring to could return love, so you couldn't love "pizza." So I guess love means, “listen to what your mother said.”
(04/22/20 10:01am)
In the spirit of the Love Issue, I wanted to share one of my favorite recipes. It was at Middlebury where I discovered how food could be a conduit of love and that it allowed me to create and foster spaces for my friends to find quiet moments together. I first discovered these moments when I lived in Hepburn my sophomore year. I lived in a suite on the first floor with this tiny little kitchen which had a stovetop, an oven and a counter the size of a small cutting board. My room was 107 square feet and shaped like a coffin.
I was taking a class called “Food in the Middle East” at the time and for the class, we were reading a cookbook about Turkish food. I impulsively decided to, in my tiny kitchen, cook one of the recipes for my friends. My room was so tiny that we had to sit in the hallway of the suite, legs overlapping in a giant pile to eat. There was something magical about the splayed limbs, the laughs and the smiles shared over something that I had spent so much time and effort creating. The food didn’t matter, what mattered was everyone simultaneously pausing their busy day and sharing this moment.
I wanted to share my recipe for chocolate chip cookies with you all because it is my absolute favorite thing to make and the easiest way to show someone you love them without words. My approach to love is a lot like making chocolate chip cookies. I love making them because of how happy they make other people. They have a way of slowing time, creating moments of quiet in the midst of an insane day.
Since living in Hepburn, I have come to believe that it isn’t just cooking for someone that shows you love them, it’s putting aside your own stuff to let someone know you care about them, whether that is ignoring homework to spend time with them, going out of your way to walk them home or the most delicious option, making them dinner or chocolate chip cookies. I hope that you enjoy this recipe and that you share it with the people you love.
Ingredients:
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon of salt
¾ tablespoon of baking soda
1½ sticks of unsalted butter (step 2 in the directions)
½ cup brown sugar
1 cup of cane sugar
2 large eggs
2 egg yolks
3 tablespoons of vanilla extract
½- ¾ cups chocolate chunks
1 cup of rolled oats
Directions:
Mix together the flour, baking soda, salt, oats and chocolate chips in a small bowl and set aside. Preheat your oven to 350.
Add the whole stick of butter In a small pan over low heat on the stove. This will take about 4 minutes but you are looking for the butter to take on a golden color and for the milk solids (the flecks in the butter) to take on a golden color as well. It should smell nutty and the butter should be completely melted.
Once the butter has browned, transfer to a heatproof, large bowl. Into the bowl, add the cubed ½ stick of butter and stir until it is melted.
To the butter, add your sugar and mix to combine. Then add your two eggs, and the two egg yolks (separate over another container if you want to save the whites). Add the vanilla extract to the mix as well.
Gently stir in the dry ingredients to the bowl with the wet ingredients. Mix until you don’t see any bits of dry flour. Cover the bowl with a dish or tea towel and place it in the fridge. Ideally, this should rest overnight or for at least an hour. It’s important to let the flour hydrate and to let everything come together. But that being said an hour in the fridge is fine!
Grease a sheet pan and form the dough into roughly two-tablespoon sized balls. Place them on the sheet with plenty of room for spreading. These are meant to be tall, gooey on the inside cookies. Bake for 8-10 minutes, checking at 8 minutes for whether the top of the cookie is golden brown. Let sit for 2 minutes before eating so they can set.
(04/22/20 10:00am)
For the Campus’s “Love Issue,” I am listing below some really compelling nonfiction books that involve matters of the heart. As always, I hope you are all staying safe, and that reading this piece might offer you a few minutes away from the grim reality of April 2020. Let’s get to it.
1) “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” (2019) by Patrick Radden Keefe
“Say Nothing” tells us about several intertwining stories set during the Troubles, the violent sectarian conflict between the largely Catholic Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the two mostly Protestant loyalist gangs, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and British Army. The main plot line is about the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of nine children. Unfortunately for her, IRA intelligence suggested that McConville was an informer for the British. The last pages of “Say Nothing” deal with finding out who abducted and murdered McConville.
But the wildest section of “Say Nothing” focuses on the romance between convicted IRA bombmaker Dolores Price and her Protestant husband Stephen Rea, a Belfast actor who starred in the psychological thriller “The Crying Game” (1992). (Also: See “The Crying Game!” It’s definitely in my top ten movies, probably just below “Paddington 2” (2017)). Particularly interesting is how Rea balanced his acting career — where he often, ironically, ended up playing IRA militants — with his marriage, which slowly dissolved after Dolores, then bombmaker emitra, became an alcoholic. All in all, “Say Nothing” is a profoundly melancholic thriller, and a weary meditation on the horrors of sectarian violence. The story’s first half in the early 1970s reads like a Bond novel: Keefe writes about car chases, Guinness binges, double-crosses, gunfights and getaways. But the book gets bleaker once the IRA’s leadership realized that winning the Troubles probably would not happen. The author suggests that it was every man for himself on the Republican side once the more pragmatic Sinn Féin party broke away from the IRA, abandoning fighters who for years had robbed and murdered for a united Ireland. To make matters even more shady, Keefe reveals that at least a third of those fighters might have been “assets” for the British at one point or another. Barack Obama said “Say Nothing” was one of the best books of 2019. I couldn’t agree more.
2) “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo” (2012) by Tom Reiss
I remember as a tween reading the “Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas and wanting to be the novel’s protagonist so badly. Monte Cristo’s a master sword fighter, stock-market manipulator and wine connoisseur; he owns an island and becomes the toast of Parisian and Roman café society; the Count dispatches evildoers with ruthless aplomb and has a photographic memory. Monte Cristo is even more fascinating when you learn that the novelist essentially based the character off of his own father “Alex” Dumas, who was a French general in several Napoleonic wars.
But what makes Reiss’ book, a biography of Alex Dumas, father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, really incredible is that Dumas was the son of an impoverished French nobleman and a black Hatian female slave, and was himself in bondage up into his teenage years until his father bought his freedom. Once Alex Dumas arrived in Paris, he excelled in the military and was especially noted for his bravery and decisive leadership of his troops during the Napoleonic Wars, despite the myriad racist officials in the French military and government. Reiss confidently unravels Dumas’s surreal transition from Hatian slave to battle-winning aristocrat, and deftly captures its central figure’s ambition.
The most touching moments of “The Black Count” show us Alexandre Dumas’s occasionally inaccurate but heartfelt biography of his larger-than-life father, who passed away when Dumas was only four years old. The book tells a compelling chronicle of warfare and racism, but nothing competes with the novelist’s vignettes, which Reiss includes. My favorite of these is when a four-year old Dumas, brandishing a sword, vows to kill God after his mother tells him that the Almighty has taken away the titular “Black Count.”
3) “Talking to Strangers” (2019) by Malcom Gladwell
Malcom Gladwell’s books generally provide me with ample facts and stats to use during Ross Dining Room debates. “Talking to Strangers” is no exception: I nowadays probably quote this book with the same frequency that Paul Ryan brings up “The Fountainhead” (1943). Gladwell’s latest covers a lot ground: he gives us a chapter on why some people make bail when others don’t, anecdotes about how CIA spies failed to spot Castroist moles that were hiding in plain sight and even an analysis of characters’ facial expressions in the show “Friends.” (I’m not entirely sure why Gladwell added this last part, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.)
The author centers his research on the thesis that the ways humans communicate with strangers are highly flawed — which, if that sounds a little vague, that’s because it is. But who really cares? Not this critic. In the individual chapters of this book, Gladwell provides so many fascinating true stories about lie detection and miscommunication that a thoughtful reader, I think, can draw their own conclusions about this book’s gist.
To conclude, “Talking to Strangers” is a fascinating read that highlights Gladwell’s love of historical and present-day case studies. And if my use of the word “love” sounds like a tacked-on way to recommend this book in The Campus’s Love Issue, then you, my friend, have judged this stranger quite accurately.
(04/22/20 9:55am)
Two months into my freshman year at Middlebury, I got mono.
It was … well-deserved. (Sorry, mom.)
During the day, I was intimate with my essays and readings, delicately stapling printouts and color-coded notes. On weekends, I wasted my time at parties kissing guys who, after sticking their tongues down my throat, would lean in and whisper, “Hang on. Gotta piss.”
If that isn’t classy, I don’t know what is.
One night stands should not exist at Middlebury. Frankly, the framework that underpins casual sex is incompatible with Midd’s whopping 2,500 students (give or take a few). Small colleges prevent anonymity — a staple of random hookups elsewhere — and muddle otherwise impersonal sex with interconnected, complicated social undercurrents. At Middlebury, both casual and committed relationships are limited by friendship dynamics and calling arbitrary dibs on class crushes. But these factors alone are not enough to preclude relationships.
On numerous Saturdays nights over the past three years, I have wondered if it finally snowed enough to break all the cell towers in Vermont. That could be the only logical explanation for why my male peers, rather than sending me a text composed of simple words and sentences, opt for a tasteful Snapchat: “roll thru.”
It’s pathetic, but genius.
Snapchat has eliminated the discomfort of expressing interest, enabling men and women alike to send bold, visual messages that disappear within seconds. After a message is opened, recounting the conversation becomes hearsay, protecting the sender’s interests and invalidating the recipient’s claims. In a small university, the app thereby reduces the accountability involved in romantic pursuits, contributing to the uncertainty inherent in intimacy.
Despite these gray areas, many claim Midd is a relationshippy school, citing the recycled admissions statistic that 60% of alums marry each other (the real number stands at 17%, although I’m willing to believe in fairytales if you are). I admit, there are pockets of committed couples (see: much of my friend group). An arguably more relevant dialogue, however, deals with “pseudo-relationships,” a term coined by Leah Fessler ’15 in her thesis, “Can She Really ‘Play that Game Too?’”. Fessler uses “pseudo-relationships” to refer to partners continuously hooking up, oftentimes only with each other, without commitment or emotional investment. Of the 75 Midd students polled, Fessler found only 8% of women surveyed were satisfied in their pseudo-relationships. The majority of male respondents also felt insecure in ambiguous romantic arrangements; despite favoring committed relationships, most men felt their masculinity was judged on the number and attractiveness of their partners. And yet, in an environment where relationships are stunted by booze, insecurities and a rigid social life structure, no one feels comfortable asking the “what are we?” question, much less answering it.
This past fall, I studied abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Compared to Middlebury, St. Andrews is a traditional relationship school; there is a distinct “get to know you” culture centered around (relatively) sober courting. Most refreshingly, I went the entire semester without hearing the phrase “Snapchat message.”
I refuse to believe that I magically became more appealing the minute I went abroad. Sure, I had a “cute” American accent, but I was still loud, bad with rules, and prone to eating food in the grocery store before paying (sometimes I have to scan an apple core at the self-checkout line). These tendencies are wholly un-Scottish, which is why it surprised me that I was disproportionately (not to mention soberly) pursued across the pond.
Unlike Americans, Scots and Brits do not walk on eggshells. There is little space for Middlebury-esque pseudo-relationships in a culture that barely tolerates ambiguity. Once, a British guy I was seeing felt compelled to inform me — unprompted, no less — that he had enjoyed getting to know me but solely wanted a physical connection. Although I liked him and was bummed, at least I wasn’t left wondering how he felt. When we consequently broke things off, it was cordial.
By comparison, defining relationships at Midd becomes a painstaking process of obscuring and ignoring emotions (or the lack thereof). To this date, my personal favorite euphemism for “I just want to sleep with you” — which I received from a male friend during my second year of college — remains, “I’m in love with you but have a lot on my plate, so let’s hook up and talk about it after.” Good one.
To be fair, it isn’t entirely Middlebury’s fault. In many ways, St. Andrews has superior dating conditions: a larger student body, more cafés, a drinking age that permits controlled alcohol consumption in pubs or bars. Still, just like Midd, the town itself is a “bubble,” and so should theoretically incubate the lack of romantic privacy we say prevents “traditional dating” at Midd. And yet it doesn’t.
Hook-up culture is not an inevitable product of 20-something-year-olds, hormones and empty beds. We’ve created it.
The shortcomings of Middlebury’s romantic environment have more to do with the current, limited dialogue surrounding intimacy than an explicit desire for commitment. This is a loss: no matter how casual a fling, everyone wants to be respected. We might take a page out of the Scottish playbook. There is something undeniably sexy about being honest about what you want.
Maria Kaouris is a member of the class of 2021.
(04/22/20 9:54am)
I went through a breakup, right after Feb break. I promise I don’t intend to use The Campus opinion section as Tinder. I just want to share some reflections from my experience dealing with sadness at this insanely busy place (now, figuratively).
The break up happened on a Tuesday night. My agenda for the night included finishing newspaper layout, conjugating Arabic verbs and converting Cartesian coordinates. Dealing with grief was not included. Rather than feel sad, I intended to drown myself with work as a distraction.
It worked. Well, kind of. Wednesday through Friday, my friends and I chatted about stupid TV shows, upcoming primary elections and the weather — typical topics. (Looking back now, I miss in-person communications so much.) Whenever my friends checked in with me about the breakup, I said, “I’m over it.” Still, they seemed concerned, wanting to know if I were truly alright and offering to talk if I needed to. In response, I simply waved my hands and joked about being a strong and independent woman.
I thought I would be able to pretend nothing was wrong forever. Fake it ’till you make it, as people say.
And yet, unfortunately and fortunately, my body finally gave out that weekend, exhausted. It was not the kind of exhaustion which follows a 10k run, but rather emotional vanity. I could barely feel anything. When I tried to talk, a mixture of Chinese and English nonsense would come out, something that tends to happen when I am extremely upset. The more I tried to pretend I wasn’t sad, the more my sorrow festered inside until eventually, while I was trying to print readings for class, the pages fell from my hands scattered everywhere on the Davis floor. I started crying right there, in front of the printer. The person behind me was shocked. Still, they quietly helped me gather the reading and whispered, “It gets better.” (Even though I never learned your name, kind printer person, I’d like to thank you.)
That’s when I was forced to come face-to-face with my feelings. I recognized how unhealthy my coping mechanisms up until that point had been. I mean, I wasn’t even coping, I was only feigning being okay.
And so I decided to spend some time alone. Even knowing it would be helpful in the long run, I felt guilty canceling plans with friends. Would they be disappointed if I told them I needed more time to figure out my emotions about my past relationship? What if they thought I was dramatic and weak? No one did. Instead, I got hugs and sweet texts containing words of comfort.
That was the hardest, most rewarding weekend I have ever had. I tried new things: I spent hours listening to podcasts, attended my first ever spin class and went on an aimless, spontaneous walk. Scariest of all, I did all of these activities solo. As I watched “Criminal Minds” alone on Saturday night, I wondered if I was missing out on what could’ve been the best night of the week. And then I realized, I was having the best time. Solitude is not shameful. In fact, often it is enjoyable. (Thanks to that experience, self-quarantine for 14 days at a medical facility upon my return home a month ago became a lot easier).
The following night, I attended an editorial meeting in which we discussed how some people don’t enjoy J-Term as much for a variety of reasons. I realized that I wasn’t the only one who was obsessed over the thought of being engaged in a variety of activities and to be constantly busy. That night, I learned that other Middlebury students also had those wishes which led to more pressure and stress. It seems that I finally found the reason behind my stubborn determination to hide my pain. I mistakenly felt that I should have been ashamed of my misery since I was supposed to be enjoying myself like everyone else around me. But then, I thought, what if that’s why people around me are only showing happy and smiley faces instead of those of stress and worry?
As cliche as it sounds, I think sometimes we all need a reminder that we are entitled to our feelings. In the wake of my breakup, I felt anger, shame and guilt. I was too afraid to confront these emotions because I didn’t want to admit to others that I was an emotional wreck. It took an awkward encounter with a stranger to shatter my facade; still, the facade didn’t have to be put on in the first place.
I’m not suggesting that there is a linear healing process to sadness, because there isn’t. As my math professor has told me on several occasions, linear things are nice, but they rarely exist. I still feel doleful every so often. But, when I do, I stand up to those feelings with strength gained from a mixture of company and solitude. By allocating time for myself, I allow others to help me. By allowing myself to feel bad, I allow myself to feel better.
Rain Ji ’23 is one of The Campus’s Arts & Academics editors.
(04/17/20 1:37am)
Editors’ note: This op-ed was originally shared as a Facebook post by the author. The original post has been adapted for publication in The Campus.
After reading the open letter to faculty on the opt-in policy yesterday, I felt the need to respond with counter-arguments, drawn from both #FairGradesMidd communications around this issue and my own opinions. I’ve also admittedly talked way too much, virtually, with friends about this topic on both sides of the debate.
I’ll start off with a concession:
Neither universal pass/fail nor opt-in pass/fail will be the best grading system. The perfect grading system simply does not exist when students have to quickly leave campus and move to remote learning while also dealing with the impacts of a pandemic. In any system, some students will benefit and others will not.
Now, onto my juicy hot takes in response to the open letter:
Yes, a universal pass/fail system will disadvantage students who could have used this semester to raise their grades. However, I also acknowledge that this inequity is by no means parallel with inequities faced by students who simply won’t have the time, resources or space to focus on courses which I have the privilege to enjoy.
To the point that an opt-in policy respects choice: inequities dictate who has the power to make those choices. If some students have the ability to social distance, stay healthy and dedicate their normal amounts of time to school work, but other students do not because of circumstances at home, then that is inequitable. Theoretically, any student can then choose to pass/fail a course, but, in our current system, students facing challenges lose out on the theoretical “GPA boost” that the authors reference.
Not only that, graduate schools like Georgetown Medical School have stated that they will continue to “highly prefer” applicants who take all prerequisite courses for grades if given the option. So, a student who might receive a C while taking courses remotely — even if they normally earn As — has to make the catch-22 choice of taking a C so they can still apply to top-tier graduate schools, with a lower chance of success; or taking the pass and also lowering their chance of acceptance.
More offensively, the notion that some Middlebury students “slacked off” during the five weeks we were on campus while others “worked diligently,” in the words of the letter’s authors, is blatantly false and uninformed by the reality of who Middlebury students are. We have a stellar graduation rate, high average/median GPAs and excelled in high school to gain admittance. Who among our peers are the slackers?
In their second point, the authors contend that grades serve as a form of motivation or underpinning to college scholarship. However, grades do not and should not underpin academic scholarship, nor should they be the sole motivation to engage in this scholarship. If the loss of a letter grade causes a student to spend less time on academic work because they suddenly lack the motivation, then we have a deeper issue to address about why students engage in academics. But I do not believe most students will lose motivation.
The authors also point to the further confusion that may arise from the change in policy. But just because a policy has been in place is no justification for that policy to stay in place, especially policies instituted without significant consultation with faculty or students. Furthermore, an unignorable student-led campaign for alternative grading policies has existed nearly from the very first day that the college announced its policy, so I for one was never operating under the assumption that this policy was set and fixed.
To call a poll of 1,843 students (roughly 70% of the student body) irrelevant simply because it included an option that turned out to be unviable for accreditation is a blatant error. Even when removing that option, universal pass/fail still has more first choice votes than opt-in. To insinuate on a clerical error that the student body has not vastly voiced support for an alternative grading system is a blatant and intentional misreading of the data leveraged to serve the authors’ own opinions while silencing the vast majority of students.
In closing an email I sent to my current professors — something I encourage every student to do, no matter which policy you support — I said the following and I think it fits here as well:
“Though apparently some of my peers might argue that people should be allowed to ‘write their own stories’ about how they persevered through this time, let those stories be about persevering over a virus by contributing back to society through extra volunteer hours or aiding their family when family members fall ill or lose their job — not about persevering by getting that A in that one class because Middlebury continued to enforce artificial and inequitable grading standards.”
Mendel Baljon is a member of the class of 2021.
(04/16/20 10:00am)
This work represents the most enrapturing audiobook vocal performance I’ve ever encountered. “A Brief History of Seven Killings” came on my radar after I interviewed Dr. Kemi Fuentes George, professor of political science at the college, for the In Your Own Words oral histories project (go/inyourownwords/). I asked him what works he might recommend to someone wanting to learn more about diasporic blackness, and he suggested it. Taking some real life events and creating others, it’s a fictionalized and revisionist re-telling of the zeitgeist surrounding an attempt made on Bob Marley’s life in 1976. But it’s really much more than that. The most engrossing parts of the book are the glimpses readers get into the social stratification of 1970s Jamaica and the suggestion that non-governmental entities ran the country. Moreover, while Jamaica is but one Caribbean island, the people and culture it has produced have strong impacts all over the world. We see this, for example, in the plentiful nurses and domestic care workers “exported” from Jamaica to New York. From commentary on the 1960s’ Bay of Pigs Invasion to references to the popular television series “Starsky & Hutch,” Marlon James revives the ’70s from its crypt and highlights the international reach of U.S.-based media and the rise of Jamaican reggae. Unforgiving druglords, unpredictable addicts and regular bouts of gun violence run all throughout the pages (or soundbytes, if you’re listening) of this work.
It was the extent of the homophobia, however, omnipresent throughout the work, that I found the most relentless of all. James makes a diligent effort to shed light on the virulent attitudes towards homosexuality that remain alive in Jamaica today. Readers will need to negotiate the parts of the story that they believe and can rely on. While certain cultural products and chronologies are true, others are figments of the author’s imagination. As is repeated multiple times throughout the work, some Jamaicans say that “If it not go so, it go near so” — some recounting of history is tremulous and uneven, but its shakiness isn’t an invalidation of its veracity or near accuracy. For more works that treat similar themes, I recommend Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds,” which also takes an actual historical time period, its politics and accoutrements, and remixes its narratology. Television series like “Hawaii Five-0” and “Three’s Company” also gesture towards capturing this era.
(04/16/20 9:58am)
After weeks of impassioned discussion and a number of all-school emails, the debate over Middlebury’s grading policy for the spring term has generated many questions regarding the decision-making process. Among them: who will have the final say over grading?
Reinforcing opt-in
The ad hoc academic continuity group, composed of administrators, faculty and staff from various departments and committees, formed to address academic policies on an accelerated schedule after students left campus in March. It made the original decision to enforce an opt-in Pass/D/Fail system and then revised the policy on April 3 to extend the deadline to invoke the option, a decision that Dean of Curriculum Suzanne Gurland said involved responses from several groups of students and faculty.
“There were compelling arguments on all sides of the issue, with students who wanted a binary or Pass/D/Fail system offering strong arguments for that, and students who wanted letter grades offering strong arguments for that,” Garland said. “There seemed to be no one perfect solution for everyone. The fairest way forward still seemed to be a system that would allow each student to go with what worked for their needs.”
The group hopes that extending the deadline will allow students to obtain more information, such as feedback from professors and greater insight into how circumstances at home will affect their academic performance, before deciding to invoke Pass/D/Fail.
Separately, the SGA met with both the organizers of #FairGradesMidd and #OptInMidd on March 29 to hear their platforms. They sent out an all-student survey on March 31 in hopes of getting feedback about which campaign to endorse, then agreed to wait on a formal decision when they found out dual A/A- was not a viable option and when the administration seemed to have made a final decision, said Senior Senator John Gosselin.
The academic continuity group made the updated decision before receiving the SGA survey results; thus, the data on student opinion was not included in the decision.
“Although the survey results might have provided interesting information, as professional educators, we took into account a variety of factors, including the extraordinary nature of the current moment, the issues of access students are experiencing, and equity considerations in determining what might be best for all our students’ education,” Gurland said.
She added that the group was created specifically to make academic decisions like these on an abbreviated timeline due to the Covid-19 emergency, and that faculty were consulted extensively in the original process.
A new option
The Campus reported this Friday that faculty were set to vote on a new motion — a proposal for a mandatory credit/no credit system. The vote is scheduled for this Friday, April 17. One of the qualms made in the motion is that grading policy is an issue that should be decided on by the faculty at large. Accordingly, if this motion passes a majority vote on Friday, the proposed mandatory credit/no credit policy will be instituted for the spring term.
Following this proposal, the SGA voted to endorse the mandatory credit/no credit resolution this past Sunday. Thirteen senators voted in favor, with one voting against and two abstaining.
The resolution, which encouraged the faculty to vote for the mandatory credit/no-credit proposal, was co-sponsored by Junior Senator and Speaker John Schurer ’21, Sophomore Senator Paul Flores-Claval ‘22 and Wonnacott Senator Myles Maxie ’22. While it does not have any formal influence over the decision, it is meant to indicate student opinion — something for which faculty have been asking students as they prepare for the Friday vote.
“Central to all of our deliberations on this topic is this: how can we approach more equity while also staying attuned to what is feasible?” Varsha Vijayakumar ’20, president of the SGA, said in an email to The Campus. The SGA began talking about endorsing #FairGradesMidd.
“This issue goes beyond just the grading system; it is also an issue of how the college responds to information from students,” said Maxie, who has been active with #FairGradesMidd. “In my capacity as a senator, I will be pushing to hold our college accountable in hearing student voices and weighing those accordingly.”
The SGA also voted in favor of a bill that advocates for accessible and equitable online learning, co-sponsored by Community Council Co-Chair Roni Lezama ’22 and Feb Senator Mistaya Smith ‘21.5. The bill outlines several steps that they hope the administration and faculty will take, which aim to address issues of equity in remote learning. It includes asking Middlebury to provide resources and information to students that would expand access to online classes, and it encourages faculty to be flexible with assignment deadlines and class attendance.
The bill also requests that professors send provisional grades to students by May 5 so they can make an informed decision on whether or not to invoke the optional Pass/D/Fail before the May 8 deadline.
Abbie Chang ’23 contributed reporting.
Correction: A previous version of this article failed to name one of the SGA resolution's sponsors, Sophomore Senator Paul Flores-Claval ‘22. The article has been updated to include that information.
(04/15/20 10:44pm)
Even in the midst of a global pandemic, the Student Government Association (SGA) elections are moving forward. The three presidential and two Community Council (CC) co-chair candidates on Thursday’s ballot engaged in a live-streamed debate via Zoom on Monday evening.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/axTvLqT2hgg
They have also been campaigning remotely, creating websites and posting on social media to communicate their platforms and generate support. The five candidates shared their ideas and spoke to their qualifications in Zoom interviews with The Campus.
For SGA president:
Arthur Martins ’22.5
Hometown: Brasília, Brazil
Martins, co-president of the International Students Organization (ISO) and co-founder of #FairGradesMidd, said that he wants to make SGA more proactive and engaged with the student body. Martins is the only presidential candidate who has never held an SGA position. However, he has worked closely with members of the organization in past initiatives such as seeking SGA endorsement for #FairGradesMidd and working with senators to draft legislation supporting an ISO house.
As ISO co-president, Martins helped restructure and expand the organization’s executive board this year, creating what he calls a “student-centered bureaucracy.” He also co-authored a letter to the Senior Leadership Group advocating for international students in the wake of the campus closure this spring. While working on #FairGradesMidd, Martins gathered dozens of student testimonials and restructured the campaign’s platform in accordance with feedback from other organizers. Martins said he has been involved in activism work at home in Brazil as well.
“In my experiences as a grassroots organizer, as a community organizer, I've seen how powerful students can be, how much we can come together and truly rally behind causes that we believe in and make them happen,” he said.
Martins said he’s hoping to bring this type of leadership and activism to the SGA. He broke down his platform into three parts: advocating for student rights and resources, creating a strong college community, and putting students first. He wants to improve mental health resources, residential life training and support for underrepresented communities. Martins also explained his belief that the SGA is not transparent or accessible enough to the student body and is too bureaucratic.
“Everything has bureaucracy in life, but how can we make sure that the bureaucracy doesn't detract from the mission of being attuned to students, but that it lends itself to it,” he said.
His website proposes office hours and greater online outreach as a means of remedying the transparency and accessibility issues he sees.
Myles Maxie ’22
Hometown: Upland, California
A two-year SGA member, Maxie is the current Wonnacott senator and has served on several SGA committees. This is his first year as a senator, though he was involved in cabinet committees last year. Maxie has worked on creating student advisory councils for all academic departments, making the Gamut Room more accessible to student groups and providing more information about textbooks before registration. Maxie also co-sponsored a bill supporting changes to the grading system this spring. As a member of the Academic Affairs Committee, he has collaborated with faculty in an ongoing effort to revise the course credit system.
Beyond SGA, Maxie is also the social house secretary for PALANA and an admissions office student ambassador. In his role as chair of the Wonnacott Commons Council, he said he has discussed ways to continue supporting students after the dissolution of the commons system with his commons coordinator.
Maxie’s platform emphasizes greater outreach to students for ideas and feedback. His website relays his plan in acronym form, using the letters of the word “focus.” He said he believes SGA’s initiatives should be founded upon the concerns of its constituency.
“I have a bunch of student-generated issues that I want to address next year and that I'd brainstormed with students on effective ways to solve,” he said.
These include keeping laundry free or low cost, increasing transparency about SGA initiatives and providing better representation for student organizations. Maxie explained the broad objectives of his potential administration.
“It'll be about being actionable when we're faced with a problem and communicating what we're doing, having a plan for how we're addressing a problem and collaborating with others on it,” he said.
John Schurer ’21
Hometown: Glenview, Illinois
Schurer, junior senator and speaker of the senate, said he was “the most excited person on campus” when he arrived for his first semester, but soon discovered the campus was not as tight-knit as he had hoped. He attributed his involvement in various Middlebury organizations to a desire to create the community he had initially expected.
This is Schurer’s third year as a class senator and his second time as senate speaker. He is also a marketing executive for Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB) and producer for the Middlebury Moth-Up, an organization that puts on live oral storytelling shows. Some know Schurer as the founder of MeetMidd, an Instagram-based compilation of brief student profiles, which he launched when the current juniors were first-years.
Schurer has also worked in several roles in residential life. His time working in the Student Activities Office even led to a brief stint as the Middlebury Panther, an experience which he said motivated him to push for a new costume that increased both school spirit and comfort. On SGA, Schurer has aimed to make student resources more accessible and affordable, co-founding MiddBooks and supporting a bill that established financial aid for Snow Bowl use.
Schurer also worked with trustees to create plans for a new student center, an effort he said he wants to continue. Some of the other initiatives included in his platform are creating a co-curricular transcript and acquiring athletic trainers for non-varsity athletes. Schurer said he wants the SGA to better represent all students.
“We get a lot of bright minds who come into SGA and want to make a change, but we don't often enough get students who feel like Middlebury isn't built for them,” he said.
He highlighted collaboration as an important aspect of his platform, and noted how he has already named his two chiefs of staff, Sophia Lundberg ’21.5 and Roni Lezama ’22, whose qualifications are listed on his website.
For Community Council co-chair:
Christian Kummer ’22
Hometown: Southbury, Connecticut
Kummer, who served as a first-year senator last year, said that he based his entire platform on student input, soliciting feedback in the form he used to collect signatures.
“I was really hesitant to be super prescriptive, because the entire point of the co-chair is to be a voice for student concerns, not to push your own agenda,” Kummer said.
Kummer is committed to reforming mental health resources and said he wants to work with Barbara McCall, director of health and wellness education, and Gus Jordan, executive director of health and counseling services, to redesign the approach to mental health. He hopes to push for hiring more counselors and counselors who specialize in particular areas.
Kummer expressed interest in increasing access to campus resources and programs, suggesting greater funding for First at Midd, as well as tackling environmental sustainability and vandalism issues. He also wants to provide better support for survivors of sexual assault and take greater steps in regard to preventing potential assaults.
On SGA, Kummer served on several cabinet committees and worked on initiatives such as the snowbowl financial aid bill and the reinstitution of 10 o’clock Ross. As co-director of the first-year committee, he collaborated with the Center for Careers and Internships to create a first-year internship workshop. Kummer’s website lists the positions he has held beyond SGA, ranging from membership on the Community Judicial Board to PALANA to the Dance Company of Middlebury.
“I love working with people in pretty much every aspect of my life at Middlebury, both in student government and outside,” he said.
Joel Machado ’22
Hometown: The Bronx, New York
Machado’s website divides the initiatives in his platform into pillars. Some of his intended objectives, such as a push to end the waste of dining hall dishes, connect directly to his earlier efforts in SGA and Community Council roles. Machado has been outspoken about campus issues in the past. His Spencer Prize Championship speech criticized the school for being “an institution of higher learning second and a business first.”
Machado is a first generation college student and said his personal experiences and those of his family members have fostered his passion for combating inequality.
“Like any other leadership role, the most important experience needed is having a real reason to care about what you are doing,” he said in an email.
Machado noted the additional responsibilities of next year’s co-chair, who will play a role in familiarizing the new Dean of Students, who serves as the other chair, with the campus culture and outlook.
Polls open Thursday, April 16 at noon, and close the following day at noon. Vote at go.middlebury.edu/vote/.
