1000 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(09/12/19 9:59am)
SPECS (Sex Positive Education for College Students), a student organization focused on sex positive peer education, initiated new programming for this semester’s first-year orientation week on Sept. 4.
The group hosted an information table in Axinn with boxes of condoms, lubricant, dental dams, and different contraceptive devices and safe sex devices, according to MiddView Orientation Intern Niki Kowsar ’21.5.
“You generally see condoms and know what they are but for other products you might not know much about it,” Kowsar said. “It was really interesting to learn more about them.”
The event was one of 13 optional activities for incoming students, and was aimed at spreading the word about what resources SPECS has to offer, Peer Sex Educator Emma Brown ’21 said.
The impetus for SPECS came out of a class project and first became a club in 2017, said Peer Sex Educator Anna Durning ’19.5. The group underwent several iterations before becoming a group under the supervision of Barbara McCall, Director of Health and Wellness Education.
“Sex positivity is a counter approach to mainstream shaming and abstinence-only sexual health education curricula,” McCall wrote in an email to the Campus. “It means acknowledging that sexuality and sexual expression can be a normal, healthy part of people’s lives.”
SPECS delves into subjects, like pleasure, that may have been ignored or brushed aside in high school or previous sex-ed experiences, Brown said. She also emphasized the group’s focus on consent and sex education beyond the traditional, heternormative curriculum.
However, the discretionary, drop-in format of the orientation event did not allow for substantial programming, and only four new students visited the table, Durning said.
“I was really excited to learn that SPECS was given permission to participate in orientation, but disappointed when I found out that our event had to be during the optional, drop-in activity time,” Durning said
SPECS members felt that orientation would have been an opportune time to institute a mandatory sex ed workshop and reach more new students.
Said Durning, “Given the nature of the workshops, students can find it embarrassing to choose to attend them so making them mandatory would erase the social pressure that keeps people from turning up.”
But the group was still able to have productive conversations with students and put together a “build-your-own safer sex kit” activity at the event, Durning said.
Ella Houlihan ’21, another Peer Sex Educator, was also disappointed that SPECS did not receive mandatory slots for this year’s first-year events but remains optimistic about the (sex) positive influence the group can have moving forward.
McCall did not comment on the details of how SPECS was designated an optional rather than mandatory activity for orientation, but said she would like to see the group continue to participate in the coming years.
“It’s important for every student to have medically accurate, non-judgmental and age-appropriate information about their bodies and safer sex practices,” McCall said. Students go to each other with questions first, she said, so SPECS gives peer educators a chance to address those concerns and provide resources.
Kowsar and SPECS Peer Sex Educators said they’re hopeful the student organization will take on a more significant role during future first-year orientation weeks.
SPECS plans to keep collaborating with ResLife and with the Student Government Associations’s Sexual and Relationship Respect Committee to make sure that all students can receive consent workshops, Durning said.
Students can expect to see other programming in the coming months, including pleasure and communication workshops and trivia nights in Atwater Dining Hall. SPECS will also conduct first-year dorm workshops and is accepting requests from sports teams, social houses and other groups on campus to facilitate workshops.
(08/07/19 3:35pm)
In his recent article for The Guardian, Jacek Dehnel recounts the hatred and violence he and others experienced as part of a Polish Pride Parade in Białystok, Poland, where marchers were outnumbered four to one by protestors. Dehnel describes images of men attacking marchers, burning rainbow flags, throwing bottles and other objects and yelling “f**k-off-fag-gots.” This played out despite supposed police protection.
At the same time, the Law and Justice party, or PiS, held a “family picnic” in the Białystok Branicki Palace gardens, ostensibly to diminish violence against marchers. More likely, the picnic was to show what PiS considers to be a legitimate family: one that is heterosexual. In fact, the local Archbishop reportedly told locals to “defend Christian values” by attending the picnic. This was clear to Dehnel as he tried to pass through the garden on his way out and was told that he and others from the march were not welcome there.
If you’re wondering why you should care about PiS and Polish citizens’ violent responses to Pride (besides, you know, a basic concern for humanity), I’ll tell you: Ryszard Legutko is a member of the PiS and a Member of the European Parliament.
In case you forgot from his visit to campus last April, Legutko described hate crimes against queer people as a “totally fictitious problem,” despite there being at least 120 queer-related hate crimes in Poland in 2014 (in addition to the many that go unreported). Instead, he claims, “Christians are the group that have been discriminated against.” Hence, I suppose, the heavily militarized “family picnic.”
But wait, there’s more! Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of PiS, has also said that queer identities are a “threat to Polish identity, to our nation, to its existence and thus to the Polish state.” The Independent reports that a PiS campaign advertisement made this belief clear when it showed an umbrella with the PiS logo sheltering a heterosexual family (an endangered species, I hear) “from rainbow rain.” Since this statement, about 30 Polish cities and provinces have declared themselves “LGBT-ideology free” zones, complete with stickers.
Now, hold on, you might be thinking to yourself. I thought we could disparage entire groups of people and claim that they are the downfall of democracy, but that it would just be theoretical. I thought we could just engage with ideas (that don’t affect our bodies or lives) and that it would be fun and have no consequences.
Hold your horses, brave defenders of … well, certainly not the right to safety. As you can see, harmful discourse of the type you love so dearly actually informs real life. I didn’t even need a PhD in political philosophy to figure that one out.
So here are my questions: Why are we legitimizing this hateful, harmful rhetoric by inviting Legutko to speak on our campus not once but likely twice, as Professor Callanan said he had? Why are we still so convinced that there is nothing dangerous about “the diverse thoughts and opinions of all our professors” that dehumanize marginalized groups of people who are literally being murdered? (Thanks to the Political Science Student Advisory Committee for that gem.) Why can’t we Google “critiques of democracy” if we want someone to talk about the flaws in the democratic system, instead of financially and ideologically supporting a bigot? We owe it not just to our community, but also to queer people being persecuted in Poland and everywhere, not to bring him back.
But look, I’m a realistic person. I know that the Alexander Hamilton Forum is going to re-invite Legutko, and, as far as I know, he will accept. It was exhausting and traumatizing and wholly disheartening to plan the protest in April. I lost my faith in the Middlebury College community for what felt like the hundredth time. But that will not stop me from planning and executing another response the next time Legutko steps foot on our campus.
And so, for myself, for my girlfriend, for all of the queer people at Middlebury who have to put up with this and for all of the queer people in Poland who have been hurt, I have this to say: Legutko, I’m ready for you. Who’s with me?
Taite Shomo is a member of the class of 2020.5
(05/09/19 10:00am)
This week, Middlebury is entering the final stages of its yearlong workforce planning process. On Tuesday, the college finalized employees’ acceptances of voluntary buyouts, which the college terms Incentivized Separation Plans (ISP), marking the end of a process that has been ongoing since early February.
Although an overview of which positions were eliminated and how each department is being affected has not yet been made available, the college has indicated that it is on track to meet its goal of reducing employee expenses by 10%, or about $8 million. The college plans to make an announcement about workforce planning after the Board of Trustees meeting in May, according to college spokesperson Sarah Ray.
President Laurie L. Patton notified faculty and staff on Feb. 4 that the college had identified 150 staff positions to be eliminated, while an additional 30 new positions would be created and filled as a result of the workforce planning process. Of the 150 positions identified for reduction, though, about 100 were already vacant through attrition and restrictions on re-hiring over the last few years. Around 50 occupied full- and part-time staff positions, including roughly 42 full-time positions, were set to be eliminated over the next few years, according to an email sent the following day to faculty and staff.
Because many staff share job titles, the college sent buyout applications to 80 employees on Feb. 8, although only 42 of their positions needed to be eliminated. Those employees had until March 11 to submit if they wished to receive a buyout. Staff members in affected positions were notified by their supervisors before receiving a buyout application from the college.
All employees eligible for buyouts were also granted access to a private job portal where they could apply to thirty new positions, which had been created as part of the workforce planning process, before they were made broadly available. This was part of the college’s effort to reduce the workforce and eliminate staff positions, while ensuring that the separation process was voluntary.
The second week of March, a few days after applications for buyout packages were due, official offers were sent out. In accordance with state law, employees had 45 days, or until April 29, to accept the buyouts. The exact contents of the package varied depending on salary and duration of employment at Middlebury. Following the April 29 deadline, staff were entitled to a seven-day period during which they could rescind their acceptance.
Although administrators will not know definitively until after accepted separation offers are finalized on May 7, college communications so far suggest that there will be no need for involuntary layoffs, which had been mentioned as a possible last resort if not enough employees took buyouts. Most recently, a March 15 email to faculty and staff said that the 47 buyout applications “put us on track to achieve our goal” of reducing employee compensation by 10%.
For some staff members, especially those already planning to retire, the buyout was a welcome opportunity. For others, the process has been draining, especially when paired with the implementation of Oracle, a new online financial platform that some staff complain is difficult to navigate.
“I’ve worked here for 18 years, and right now stress levels are the highest I’ve ever seen them,” said Missey Thompson, a staff council representative and box office coordinator at the Mahaney Center for the Arts.
Some staff who received separation offers but did not want to leave the college were able to find new positions, either within their old department or in a new one. Others have had more trouble.
One employee, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, currently holds a position slated to end in June. “I have been here over 31 years, and I cannot afford to take the buyout,” she told The Campus. The staff member, who applied to three newly created positions through the private portal, has been rejected from one and never heard back from the other two. Despite repeated assurances from the college that “individuals who are offered the incentive and do not take it will remain employed at Middlebury,” some staff are faced with terminated positions and limited options in the coming year.
Still, many staff appreciate the intentionality that has gone into this process, especially compared to staff cuts the college undertook in past years, which left crucial positions unoccupied or left longtime employees abruptly out of work. Nonetheless, the communication (or lack thereof) from leadership throughout the months-long process added an additional layer to an already nerve-wracking process.
On more than one occasion, staff learned details about the progress of workforce planning from media reports before receiving any communication from the administration. The all-staff email announcing that letters would arrive within the week notifying staff their position had been terminated, along with a buyout offer, was not sent until Feb. 4, five days after a Jan. 31 Addison Independent article containing the same news. And many staff had been unaware that up to 40 new positions would be created through workforce planning until The Campus reported that fact in February. That figure was eventually lowered to 30.
Staff also report experiencing limited communication across departments. Since each department had its own restructuring plan to eliminate 10% of personnel expenses, much communication about buyouts was left to individual department leaders — a decentralized approach that led to miscommunications and confusion as staff heard about reductions and changes in other departments through word of mouth.
Tim Parsons, the president of staff council, says this has contributed to a lingering anxiety among staff. “With differing levels of communications by department, the process did not go as smoothly as we had hoped across the institution,” Parsons told The Campus. “We’re still waiting to hear what the future state will be.”
The “future state” Parsons referred to is how work will be redistributed following the departure of those who accepted buyout offers. But without knowing exactly how responsibilities will be allocated, many departments are concerned that they will be expected to do the same amount of work with less staff. While the administration has repeatedly assured staff that this will not be the case, the lack of clarity on a future state has left some department heads and managers on edge. Staff hope the finalization of buyout offers this week will finally provide a clear picture of the composition of workforce planning going forward.
(05/09/19 9:59am)
I am a 2017 graduate of Middlebury and will matriculate at Harvard Law School in the fall. While at Middlebury, I co-led the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) club that invited Dr. Charles Murray to speak, and I was one of the two students heckled on stage by anti-Murray protesters during the event. As a future attorney and accidental free-speech advocate, I have been particularly concerned by Professor Kevin Moss’s recent false attacks on political science professors in the fallout from the Legutko lecture cancellation. What I read sickened me, not only for its inaccuracy, but also for what it showed me about the troubling state of intellectual life today.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]With fact-checkers like this, who needs fake news?[/pullquote]
Moss’s op-ed of April 25 was not the first time that he has played the polemicist in our student newspaper. Moss has not published an academic book in 20 years, but he has made time to criticize members of the Middlebury community. In 2017, he attacked Middlebury alum Professor Paul Carrese ’89 for stating the obvious: that Charles Murray was prevented from speaking at Middlebury. Moss, pointing to the inaudible live stream held in a private locked greenroom, “corrected” Carrese, and claimed that Murray was not prevented from speaking. With fact-checkers like this, who needs fake news? In 2016, Moss wrote in to scold a Christian student organization at Middlebury regarding its theological requirements that its leaders not support gay marriage. In 2007, The Campus reported on his failed effort to get the College to reject a two-million endowment in the name of the Chief Justice of the United States. Moss objected because he did not agree with the Chief Justice’s legal opinions. This sad and embarrassing attack on political diversity earned a sharp rebuke from then-President Liebowitz, printed in these very pages. Liebowitz wrote that Moss’s resolution “misrepresents and distorts the record of Justice Rehnquist.” That rebuke should not surprise anyone who has followed Moss’s recent contributions to campus discourse.
Moss’s attacks on members of the community are not confined to the pages of The Campus. On April 17, Moss created a bizarre meme calling for “a few poli sci professors” to “be fired.” This was set against a backdrop of fire. How clever. After Moss posted this online for dozens of faculty and alumni to see, it made the rounds with recent alumni, students, and other members of the Middlebury community. It was also mentioned in the Addison County Independent. This was a stunningly public and childish act.
In his op-ed of April 25, Moss offers the same kind of unsupported claims and distortions that earned his 2007 resolution a rebuke from President Liebowitz. First, Moss expresses surprise at Professor Callanan’s statement, in his open letter of April 15, that some of the Legutko quotations circulating campus were doctored or taken from context. As an alum with a deep interest in free speech, I kept a close eye on the campaign against the Legutko lecture. It is clear to me that Callanan’s characterization was entirely correct. Take for example the use of square brackets in the second quotation pictured in “College Braces for Right-Wing Speaker Accused of Homophobia,” published in The Campus on April 16, 2019. Compare this doctored version of the quotation to the original as it appeared in context in the Polska Times. In the original, Legutko was referring to same-sex marriage in context, not LGBT rights as a general class. The quotation was distorted through the insertion of inaccurate supplied words in order to make it more inflammatory. If a lawyer used square brackets in this manner in a submission to a court, he could face reprimand.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"] Moss’s op-ed trafficked in mischaracterizations and libelous ad hominem attacks.[/pullquote]
Another example is in the student protesters’ open letter itself. Although this letter only draws on a few of the many quotations put in circulation, even here they do not get them all right. Protesters insert the phrase “communist and liberal-democratic artists” as the antecedent of “they” in one of the pull quotes. Anyone who reads the sentence carefully can see that the letter’s authors got the antecedents of “they” wrong. The letter chops off the first half of the sentence, which makes clear that the antecedents of “they” are the various themes, tropes, and figures which function similarly in liberal-democratic and communist art. The protesters’ insertion completely distorts the meaning and context. There are other examples from emails circulating from the week of April 15.
After reviewing his writings, many will take issue with some of Legutko’s beliefs. When you set out to turn an entire campus against a visiting scholar, however, you had better be impeccably accurate in your presentation of the evidence.
Moving beyond his inaccurate discussion of the quotations, Moss further claims that Callanan’s letter contained “much more false information.” Unfortunately, Moss does not tell us what that information is. This is not because he will not, but because he cannot. In a world in which “fake news” is becoming more common, these types of attacks only serve to further degrade the situation.
It would add a great deal to the debate surrounding what happened to Professor Legutko and the larger issue of free speech on campus if Professor Moss actually presented an argument on the issues. That, however, was not in his interest, as it is harder than creating digital art or attacking someone’s character in a newspaper. Moss’s op-ed trafficked in mischaracterizations and libelous ad hominem attacks in order to assassinate the characters of people he cannot meet in open argument.
Moss’s attack on professors of great integrity and intellect was completely unwarranted. The proliferation of character assassination has made American society sick with the cancer of angry partisanship. No one is immune to its charms. It is all too easy to turn to when one cannot or will not address ideas. The result is that we are losing what makes us unique as human beings. What is clear is that Middlebury needs to take a closer look at its problems. The trustees should start seriously asking why Middlebury has not yet joined institutions such as Princeton University and Claremont-McKenna College in endorsing the Chicago Principles of Free Expression. Middlebury’s Trustees should endorse the principles at their upcoming meeting and incorporate them into the Handbook. Parents, alumni, faculty, and students should demand nothing less.
(05/09/19 9:58am)
Please take a moment to consider and appreciate what you are reading — not this specific op-ed, but the larger newspaper or website of The Middlebury Campus. This is the product of student journalism, created by a team of unpaid reporters, editors, photographers, and managers who spend hours each week working exceptionally hard to produce quality journalism on top of their regular academic obligations, activities, jobs, and personal lives.
We live in a historical moment where journalists are regularly disparaged and slandered as “the enemy of the people” by some political leaders, and even those of us who appreciate journalism are less apt to praise and pay for this work. So why would Middlebury students spend their scant free time doing journalism? We do not have a journalism major here, so working on The Campus is always going to be in addition to, and rarely integrated into, academic studies. While every student journalist has their own particular motivations, they are all committed to the shared mission of informing and engaging the Middlebury community around the issues that matter to us. They are working for us—and we should not take that for granted.
I serve as the faculty adviser for the The Campus, which is even more of a hands-off role than you could imagine — I only “advise” on the rare instance where a question of institutional policy emerges and I never engage in editorial decisions or priorities, functioning primarily as a required name on MiddLink. The Campus is one of Middlebury’s most robust sites of peer education and leadership, where cohorts of students learn from each other, passing along wisdom by training the next generation who will take their place on the masthead. For us faculty who often struggle to devise group projects where students can successfully collaborate independently and reconcile their differences to create a product better than the sum of individual contributions, The Campus is a model to emulate.
Longtime members of the Middlebury community should recognize that The Campus has recently embraced a different attitude toward its own journalism and relationship to the institution. Especially over the past three years, the paper has tackled some of the most difficult moments in Middlebury’s modern history with a dogged commitment to accurate reporting and investigation, and at times an adversarial attitude toward the powers that be. This year the paper has taken on big projects, producing exceptional special issues on the November election, staff anxiety in the wake of workforce planning, and last week’s Zeitgeist survey on student attitudes. They have covered controversies that have reverberated far beyond Vermont, always with a firm commitment to ensuring that no matter what our differences in opinion and perspective might be, we must have a shared understanding of relevant facts and contexts. In many instances, they have greatly outperformed the work of professional journalists.
For these many reasons, I urge you to take a moment to read the bylines and the masthead, identifying the people behind the words and images you’ve consumed this year. If you know any of these student journalists, let them know that you appreciate their efforts (and feel free to offer constructive critique too!) — I want to particularly acknowledge and give thanks to the graduating seniors who have led The Campus this academic year: Will DiGravio, Nick Garber, and Rebecca Walker. And if you’re a student with years left at Middlebury, consider joining this fine roster of journalists working to keep our community informed and engaged.
(05/09/19 9:58am)
After brainstorming different phrases that encapsulate personal power and potential growth, Julian Lopez ’19 decided upon the French word “illimité” for the name of his recently-launched company. Illimité, which is a clothing and novelty item brand, was created by Lopez in 2019 as a platform to support entrepreneurs in developing countries across the world. For every Illimité product purchased, profit goes toward supporting these business owners.
The name of the company reflects this idea, as it translates to “unlimited,” which Lopez says represents the unlimited potential of the entrepreneurs that he is supporting.
So how does it work? When you buy merchandise through the Illimité online store, the proceeds are invested through Kiva.org and used to aid entrepreneurs in the form of micro-loans. When the loans are repaid, the money is put back into the company to break even and then reinvested further. Online, Illimité merchandise ranges from t-shirts and hoodies, to iPhone cases and beach towels.
“For the most extravagant shoppers I even have a giant beanbag in stock,” laughs Lopez.
The products are designed with a simple red and black logo, which is reminiscent of the style of popular brand Supreme.
The idea for this company grew from Lopez’s previous experience as an entrepreneur, designing and selling t-shirts through Redbubble, a platform that enables artists to sell their creations without overhead costs. Like these t-shirts, all Illimité merchandise is similarly produced on-demand.
During the same time Lopez was designing Redbubble t-shirts last year, he was also enrolled in a class learning about the lack of capital markets in developing countries and the way this hinders entrepreneurs from creating successful businesses and earning a living. After combining these two experiences, the socially-conscious brand was born.
“My idea really started to take form after learning about the fact that there are companies out there called ‘drop-shippers’ that let you sell items on the spot without having overhead costs, and people in developing countries could really benefit from loans in order to get started or continue running their businesses,” says Lopez.
At its core, Illimité is a creative way to give back and support others, allowing all those benefiting to have the opportunity to develop their potential in a life-changing way.
When asked about his future as an entrepreneur, Lopez responded, “I definitely would like to start another project at some time. Hopefully one that is actually profitable, given that Illimité is really more of a personal project. As for Illimité, I’ll probably keep running it as long as I can keep breaking even and it continues to actually help people.”
(05/09/19 9:57am)
We, the members of The BTW Project, seek to trouble popular LGBTQ rights advocates’ ‘Born This Way’ narratives. You know these narratives. They are so prevalent that you may have internalized them without fully thinking them through. (Even Lady Gaga tells us that LGBTQ people are born that way.) Informed by readings we completed for GSFS 289: Introduction to Queer Critique, we propose a queerer alternative, one that does not pathologize queerness. We reject the commonly held belief that gay people are born gay—a belief that has spurred much scientific and medical inquiry into the ‘problem’ of ‘homosexual’ biology. The ‘Born This Way’ narrative inherently others queerness by defining it as something that can’t be helped, as something that some biological aberration has unfortunately predetermined; that is, it implies that if we could choose our desires, we would obviously choose not to be gay.
Our goal is to inform LGBTQ activism on this campus by generating discourse about the ways in which our desires are constructed, conditioned, and cultivated. We intend for this project to speak to LGBTQ rights- and justice-minded students across disciplines. In light of this, we hybridized our methods, to capture the attention of STEM students and humanities students alike. Our methods are multifaceted. We hope, for example, that this Op-Ed will encourage people to check out the resources on the website we created. There, we have collated media that challenges the ‘Born This Way’ narrative’s biological determinism: you will find a video essay we produced that reveals and interrogates how the ‘Born This Way’ narrative has permeated pop culture, PDFs of the artistic and provocative posters and fact sheets we designed and distributed, links to supporting scholarly articles, and detailed explanations of our motives. You may have noticed our posters around campus already. They intentionally deploy confrontational language that emphasizes (perhaps obliquely) the difference between sexuality and gender, the limitations of perceiving desire as compulsory and fixed, and the importance of dismissing a political narrative that suggests queerness is a problem to be scrutinized, objectified, and corrected.
We hope to complicate LGBTQ rights-minded students’ infatuation with ‘Born This Way’ ideas by presenting “queer” as a verb. Our “‘QUEER’ IS AN ACTIVITY” poster may be the most confounding, but also the most hopeful piece in our project, as we explain on our website:
Maybe it’s easier to rally conservative tolerance around a definition of “queer” as a thing someone immutably is, but this definition is pretty flawed. As sociologist Jane Ward points out, if sexuality is biologically predetermined, then why do even liberal parents worry their daughters will turn into lesbians if they get too into feminism in college? Why do they worry that allowing their kids to watch too many queer TV shows might “encourage” them to explore homosexuality? To some extent, we all know that our desires are socially-conditioned and cultivated—this doesn’t make them any less real[...] Acknowledging this opens up our understanding of “queerness” to include all those transgressive acts performed by people who didn’t identify as “homosexual” (let’s recall that the English word “homosexual” has only been around since the late 19th century, and that corresponding terms in other languages, such as Arabic, are even younger). If “queer” is something we do—if it’s defined by those acts we perform that resist heteronormative expectations—then suddenly our politics become much more active.
In short, our slogan asks viewers to think about how our politics might change if we defined “queer” as conscious behavior rather than a helpless, inherited burden?
You might be thinking: Sexuality isn’t just a “choice”! Or, How can we expect conservative homophobes to get on board with this?? To that we say, why not rethink the biology/choice dichotomy? And yes, why not rethink the whole conservative “tolerance” thing? (Don’t we queers want more than just recognition, anyway? What about economic justice for unmarried people, or better healthcare for trans or HIV-positive people?)
Our project doesn’t mean to just “call out” a narrative as “problematic;” it means to generate new and difficult conversations. In light of this, we want to hear from you. Comment below, and be sure to visit our website at go/btw.
(05/09/19 9:57am)
Tireless. This is just one word that describes Rachel Eldredge, the Assistant Director of Sports Medicine. She is an athletic trainer, a therapist and practically a mother to many athletes at Middlebury (the last two were conveniently left out of the job description).
Rachel, or “Trachel” for “trainer Rachel” to differentiate her from the Women’s Tennis Head Coach Rachel Kahan, is one of the main reasons that the field hockey, women’s ice hockey, and both tennis teams have achieved so much success both on and off the field, ice, or court. Eldredge has been a trainer at Middlebury since 2003, and just last year was promoted to her most recent role of Assistant Director. She was an athlete herself, swimming for the University of La Verne in California. Due to her modest nature, she would never tell you unless you asked.
Her job is made difficult when most of her athletes are unable to describe the physical problem. Sometimes her athletes come in knowing they are in pain, but not being able to describe where it is coming from exactly. With a few prods and pokes here and there, Eldredge is able to find the root of the problem. And, if on the rare chance that problem solving takes her more than five minutes, she transforms into a dedicated researcher. If she can’t locate the problem, she will find someone who can deliver her the answers. She will write a plan, construct a strict schedule and check up on her athletes every day to evaluate their progress. Everyone needs a “Trachel”; even her athletes have told her that she needs a “Trachel,” given how much she works with her body to heal others.
Maddi Stow ’20, a member of the women’s tennis team, has spent a large portion of her career recovering from injuries — meaning she has spent a lot of one-on-one time with Eldredge. Stow, coincidentally the Director of the SGA Health and Wellness committee, commented on the help Eldredge provides her off the court, “Rachel challenges us to make time for our self-care even when we are extremely busy. She is always there to pick up the slack (and pick up a snack) when our bodies start to give out on us. When I fractured my elbow freshman year, she would even put my hair in a ponytail when I couldn’t. Even while I was studying abroad, we were in constant communication with her giving me exercises and advice in order to make sure I was healthy when I came back.”
Eldredge’s dedication to the three female (and one male) sports teams she treats is unparalleled. Grace Jennings ’19, captain of the field hockey team, also spoke about her team’s tight-knit relationship with Eldredge. She reminisced about her junior year season and Rachel’s help along the ride. “My junior year I suffered an ankle injury after someone jumped on it off of the field,” said Jennings. “It was right after we had won NESCACs and we were heading into NCAAs. I couldn’t play in practice at all and was on crutches during the week. In order to play in games, we put probably two-to-three inches worth of tape on my ankle to keep it stiff. Especially in the semi-final game of NCAAs, my ankle was in a lot of pain and I was becoming more and more frustrated. But Rachel was there for it all. She worked with me to come up with ideas for how to keep the ankle stiff while not hindering my speed. Mentally, it was very challenging, but she calmed me down and made me focus on the game instead not the injury itself. And that’s what she always does. She takes care of our physical and mental wellness so that we can focus on our performance on the field.”
Athletes all know that in the training room, we have a friend and trainer in Rachel. And that relationship cannot be replicated easily. Junior Sidney Portner spoke of Eldredge’s help with the women’s hockey team over her past three seasons. “I think over my three years the thing that I have noticed and always gives me a good laugh is that she knows each of our very different personalities and she manages them so well,” explained Portner. “She loves that we all come in and heat or ice, and she always mentions how “we are so self-sufficient,” claiming that we make her job easy. This is pretty funny considering it in no way can be ‘easy’ to manage 25 different women, yet she does it every day for five months, excited every time we walk in that training room even if we don’t need her.”
What is most special about Eldredge is her ability to form personal relationships with almost every athlete she works with. You can see how much she values these relationships by her comments about the hardest part of the job. “The hardest part about my job is telling an athlete their season is over because of an injury,” said Eldredge. “No matter how hard I try to fix my athletes, there are certain situations where time or surgery are the only way to fix the injury. Whether they are a first year or senior there is nothing I can say to make it all better. The only thing I can do is to be there for them every step of the way and be as supportive as possible.”
We are lucky to have someone so dedicated to not only her job, but also the athletes themselves, helping them succeed wherever they go. Her love for her role and athletics is simply unmatched. “Being an athletic trainer at Middlebury and working with such talented teams has given me the ability to be a part of something great, pushed me to be better every day and given me such great purpose in my life,” said Eldredge. Eldredge is even willing to travel across the world for her teams. In just a few short weeks, she will accompany the field hockey team on a trip to Dublin, Ireland and Belfast, Northern Ireland.
(05/09/19 9:57am)
A committee of faculty, staff and students proposed a new college protest policy at the April 26 faculty meeting. They developed the new policy collaboratively in response to the unpopular draft protest policy published online last November. While the initial draft policy, written by General Counsel Hannah Ross, was criticized for its ambiguity, the new policy aims to be as clear as possible in upholding the three pillars of the college’s academic mission: academic freedom, respect and integrity.
“How do we experience freedom and express respect and have integrity simultaneously?” asked Michael Sheridan, associate professor of anthropology and a member of the policy committee, in an interview with The Campus. “By definition, protest is disruption.”
The committee is not attempting to define the right way to protest, Sheridan said, but is trying to reduce ambiguity through the creation of a space for things to be done right.
The goal of the draft policy is to determine what happens when the conflict mechanisms of non-disruptive protest are unsuccessful. The committee, led by Amy Briggs, professor of computer science, considers development of institutional mechanisms and protocol regarding policy enforcement to be a necessary next step, but sees it as something beyond the scope of the committee’s designated task.
Sheridan said the student members — Ami Furgang ’20, Lily Barter ’19.5, Taite Shomo ’20.5 and Grace Vedock ’20 — drew inspiration from out protest policies from Brown University and Colorado College, which they saw as especially “interesting and compelling and useful.”
The committee set out to “work through what a Middlebury-centric policy would look like, trying to capture the kind of clarity and the kind of issues that were in those other policies,” Sheridan said.
The modified draft that the committee developed after receiving feedback, and plans to present at the May meeting, is organized beneath five headers: “Protest and demonstration are rooted in our educational mission,” “Public speech must be consistent with academic freedom, integrity, and respect,” “Peaceful protest and demonstration are important forms of activism,” “All students and employees can engage in non-disruptive protest and demonstration,” and “Disruptive behavior will be subject to sanction.”
Though the committee’s new draft is more concise than Ross’s, it is still much longer than Brown’s twelve-sentence policy. Rick Bunt, professor of chemistry & biochemistry, said at the faculty meeting that the Brown policy was “pithy,” able to convey a lot of information in few words. He questioned whether shortening the new draft could make it even more effective.
Renee Wells, director of education for equity and inclusion, was the only staff member on the committee. Following faculty questions about what might be considered “demeaning” speech, condemned alongside hatred in the draft policy, Wells said that the goal was not to prohibit speakers or ideas, but to prevent speech that targets people.
The faculty cannot approve or reject the policy at the May meeting, but their vote will be considered representative of the collective faculty opinion on the proposal moving forward.
(05/09/19 9:56am)
“You know it’s okay to masturbate, right?”
These jarring words came from my mother while we were making sun-tea together in our kitchen. I was 14 and horrified. I uttered a curt “Yes, mom” to shut down the conversation as quickly as it had started. From my memory, her rhetorical question was brought on by no comment of my own. I was a private teenager and had less than no interest in talking to my parents about sex (along with most of America’s teens, I’d imagine).
Sun-tea unfinished, I casually, yet swiftly, left the room to avoid a very-much-unwanted continued conversation. All she had said were seven words. She clearly thought there was no need for an explanation (thank you, Urban Dictionary) as she knew that one sentence would do the trick in unwinding the bundle of prejudices I had held in regard to masturbation.
‘Masturbation is gross. Sacrilegious. Dirty. Un-lady-like. For boys.’ These were the sentiments that the vast majority of my female friends held growing up and that, unfortunately, some still hold.
My hometown was exceptionally progressive and homogenous, with only one outwardly conservative student in my graduating high school class of 138. Regardless of its supposedly liberal ideals, our public high school had its share of gendered afflictions, just like any other. And due to the hushed nature of sex, the problem wasn’t put into words. For girls, we didn’t know what we were missing because no one was willing to talk to us about it.
Starting in the final years of middle school, some boys were already joking about sex and masturbation at recess—normalizing the conversation from the outset. While boys learn from others at sleepovers, along with YouTube, Urban Dictionary, Pornhub and maybe even their overly presumptuous fathers, girls are left in the dark. According to Dr. Perri Klass in an Op- Ed from December for The New York Times, this isn’t just a problem in the social realm: there’s a complete deficit of conversations about masturbation in pediatricians’ offices as well.
And when these conversations do happen? “We do leave girls out of the conversation almost totally,” said Dr. Elizabeth Erickson, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Duke University, in an interview in the New York Times Op-Ed.
From conversations with friends, I am the only female I know whose mother even uttered the word “masturbation” while growing up. In hindsight, I was the lucky one. According to our friends at Planned Parenthood, masturbation also comes with a host of emotional and physical benefits: reduced stress, sounder sleep, improved self-esteem and body image, even “strengthened muscle tone.”
However, this is not a call for universal masturbation. It does not interest everyone and that is, quite honestly, not my concern. This is, rather, a call to normalize conversations about masturbation for girls as a means to enable them to take agency over their own sexual health at a young age. Masturbation can help girls learn about their own bodies before getting involved with anyone else’s.
When we don’t broach the subject, we risk creating power imbalances. When it’s normal for boys to talk about sex while the same conversations are stigmatized for girls, one sexual partner in a heterosexual relationship will be inherently more informed than the other. By “informed,” I mean to say that the sexual partner’s primary education may stem from porn sites and graphic boasts from pubescent peers. Heterosexual porn is infamous for focusing on the “male gaze,” which means that for the pubescent viewers, sex will appear to hinge on a female performance, as opposed to a reciprocal experience.
Telling girls that it’s okay to masturbate is also a way of fighting against what has become known as the “orgasm gap” that exists in heterosexual encounters and relationships. In one study that examined the rate of orgasming among couples, researchers found that among 800 college students, 91% of men reported orgasming nearly every instance of having sex, while only 39% of women did. This gap runs the risk of making girls feel as if they don’t deserve to be as physically pleased as their male counterparts, potentially contributing to a feeling of being lesser than. (For comparison, 95% of lesbian women report orgasming with their partners.)
Allowing girls to go ahead and discover what is pleasurable and comfortable before engaging in sex may strengthen communication with future partners and enhance overall well-being. And it will hopefully avoid instances in which she’s told what to do by a “more informed” partner wearing Vans and a snapback.
So why is masturbation still such a taboo subject? To put the topic in a historical perspective, U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders was forced to resign in 1994 by President Clinton after publicly saying that masturbation is “a normal part of human sexuality” and should be taught in sex-ed classes. This was only 25 years ago, just around the time that people of my generation were entering the world and our parents were mulling over various parenting tactics.
A close friend recently confided that she first learned it was okay to masturbate during her sophomore year of college in a “Gender and Women’s Studies” class when the professor insisted that every woman in the room buy a vibrator. At this point, my friend had already had a boyfriend for a year and a half.
Evidently, 20-something is too late to realize it’s fine to masturbate. Destigmatizing masturbation equips girls and women with the power of sexual knowledge from an early age. There are few greater gifts to a young girl than giving her the ability to take agency over her body; casually telling her it’s okay to masturbate may be the first step.
(05/02/19 10:00am)
“It ain’t feminism if it ain’t intersectional,” tweeted Ariana Grande this past March, garnering over 41 thousand retweets and 200,000 likes. Intersectionality, a term frequently promoted and used in hashtags across social media, has also become a buzzword in today’s political, academic and activist spheres. This year’s Gensler Family Symposium on Feminism in a Global Context, held last Friday, April 26, sought to understand and critique both the ubiquitous and celebratory nature of intersectionality’s widespread use in popular culture.
Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Professor Carly Thomsen and American Studies Professor J Finley are the architects behind the idea and organization of this year’s Gensler Symposium. The two, who also co-teach a class, entitled Beyond Intersectionality: Developing Anti-Racist Feminisms, had been looking forward to the date for around two years now.
“Some things said today will resonate with you, will anger you, will confuse you, will empower you,” presaged Finley in introductory remarks as eager audience members settled into their seats for the all-day event. The symposium kicked off with an introductory video made by GSFS major, Tate Serletti ’20, showcasing myriad deployments of intersectionality that began to problematize pre-conceived understandings of the term.
“What exactly is intersectionality?” Thomsen queried. She asked audience members to consider several questions including: “Is it a theory, an activist approach, a disposition? How do we do intersectionality and how do we make sense of competing definitions? How might intersectionality help us to create feminisms that operate in the service of racial and economic justice and how might it limit us? What do our affective attachments to intersectionality do? And what do they prevent us from doing?”
These are just some of the inquiries that have also been guiding Thomsen and Finley’s work. Because not only was the Gensler Symposium an event with a lineup of famous scholarly names in feminist and queer theory, but it was also, for Thomsen and Finley, a chance to introduce their research project — the first quantitative analysis of intersectionality’s circulation.
Nell Sather ’19 and Harper Baldwin ’19, research assistants who have been involved since the project’s genesis two years ago, presented the statistical findings from a survey of intersectionality’s use at Middlebury College at Friday’s symposium.
“It has been a blast and an honor to work so closely with Professors Thomsen and Finley on this project,” Sather said several days later. “It was particularly gratifying to share our research at the symposium after working on it for so long as a small team. The symposium felt like a uniquely embodied and social way to engage with scholarship relevant to our project, which was an element I really appreciated.”
85% of people at Middlebury College are likely to think of intersectionality in positive terms and though all of the day’s speakers recognized the benefits of and work done in the name of the term, they also engaged with its critiques. Some of these criticism includes, as outlined by Finley, the “sloppiness with which intersectionality is deployed in service of post-raciality” and its transformation into a conversation on marginalized identities rather than the structures that marginalize.
“Part of what has enabled us to ask the questions that we’re asking in this class, in our research, at the symposium, is that we do come from different disciplinary backgrounds but we have overlapping political commitments,” said Thomsen of her time working with Finley. “Also central to this work is really our friendship; we wouldn’t be able to ask the questions that we’re asking if we didn’t fundamentally trust each other.”
Many of the students who filled the RAJ conference room on Friday were members of the Beyond Intersectionality course and came to the symposium with some familiarity of many of the speakers. However, for many others, last Friday’s symposium was a completely new foray into the complex and peculiar lives of intersectionality, as described by Erin Durban, the first invited speaker of the day. An assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Durban discussed her experience of how the buzzword has been used in her own academic circles and questioned how the canon of intersectionality is policed and constructed.
Next, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor delved into a project of understanding the political invocations of intersectionality and the material conditions of the oppression of black women in the U.S.
Taylor underscored the importance of understanding the word’s particular historical and temporal construction.
Following lunch, Miranda Joseph, Chair of the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, presented concepts from Queer of Color Theorist José Muñoz’s work on the “commons” and her own on the role of accounting in describing gendered and raced social structures.
Often hailed as the most prominent critic of intersectionality, Jasbir Puar, Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, offered both an exploration of the “intersectionality wars,” or the back-and-forth discourse, theory and politics surrounding the word and a discussion of her theory of assemblage.
As the final speaker of the day, Jennifer C. Nash, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, concluded with a presentation of her new book, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Her work explores the affective relationships surrounding intersectionality and encourages as she writes, “a radical embrace” of criticism as a practice of love.
The event wrapped up with a round-table discussion between speakers and audience members.
“I think it was a really successful event because it brought together people on campus who, I think, consider themselves to really understand intersectionality and the work that it’s supposed to do especially in progressive terms,”said Finley. “Especially when it comes to how people who consider themselves to be liberal think about intersectionality. I think they came to the symposium and I think they had their ideas challenged.”
Part of this work of having their ideas challenged, Finley explained, is to consider in concrete terms how intersectionality circulates on Middlebury’s campus, which is part of what her and Thomsen’s research project aimed to accomplish.
“When we started this project two years ago, I imagined then that the symposium would be a kind of culmination of our work; now that the symposium is over, several new lines of inquiry have opened up that we’re having to grapple with. And that is really generative,” Thomsen told The Campus. Both Thomsen and Finley are excited to engage in these newly-inspired lines of inquiry.
“I think it’s rare that you can bring together — especially at the end of the year, at the end of April on a Friday — an all-day event like this, that you can get people to come and really want to think,” added Finley. “Regardless of what people did think of the talks, they came because they were interested in thinking about these ideas. So I’m really proud of us; I feel proud of us.”
(05/02/19 9:59am)
Posters came up, as they do for all events, announcing author and Holocaust survivor Lore Segal’s reading from her forthcoming book “The Journal I Didn’t Keep”. My attention was caught less than I now wish it would have been. Although I hadn’t realized it at the moment, I had recently read and thoroughly enjoyed one of her stories published in The New Yorker. Although she doesn’t consider herself a Holocaust survivor, she had narrowly fled Nazi Austria in 1938 via the experimental Kindertransport, which had, among other things, served as the basis for the novel that launched her professional writing career. This fact had been widely publicized, although she had not come to talk about the Holocaust, not directly at least. Rather, she came to read from her forthcoming collection of writing, “The Journal I Did Not Keep”.
On Tuesday, April 23, students and community members alike packed themselves into Hillcrest to hear the nonagenarian Segal read three stories spanning, as she described, when you are a “child, a woman, and when you are no longer here.” The room was enraptured. Both “Dandelions” and “Ladies Lunch,” stories she had previously published in The New Yorker, held the rare sort of eager silence most often found when reading to awestruck children. The same cannot be said for “Going to Hell,” her third story, if only because the intervals between peals of laughter were too short for any such silence. Segal is a talented writer.
In the days leading up to her reading, I found myself quickly enamored with Segal’s writing. A Pulitzer Prize finalist (an experience she described as “Irritating. You don’t want to be a finalist; you want to win it.”), she was described by the New York Times as “closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel.” Segal’s success enchanted me. Then, come Wednesday morning, I found myself sitting in the breakfast room of the Middlebury Inn with Segal, her daughter, and a list of finely crafted questions about life and writing. I pulled out my phone to make a recording, in part for reference but in large part for posterity.
Her thoughts on writing were much as one might expect from the writerly sort. “The real experience is the act of getting the words right so it means what I want it to mean.” She explained in a few different ways throughout our conversation. She made a point that writing is her goal, rather than some reward like, say, the Pulitzer Prize. “I’ll tell you what the satisfaction is in my writing. You get a review and somebody both likes it and understood what you meant,” with an emphasis on the latter half of that equation.
Before long, our conversation turned towards deeper questions. In reference to the state of the world, she said, “People argue with me and say the world is growing kinder and I think that’s probably true too but the rotten part is as healthy as it ever was and will continue to be so. I don’t think we’re improving, I don’t think we’re getting any worse. I think this is how we are.” Without the belief that the world can get better, I, perhaps naïvely, wondered aloud how she found meaning in her life. “Meaning?” she said, “Do you need it to have meaning? ... I enjoy life! My goodness look how pretty it is out there!” and she pointed out the window to a warm, gray morning.
I was similarly rebuffed when asking about her legacy. “I don’t understand about legacy. I would like to be remembered forever. Ah! Big deal!” she rattled out in her sharp, kind accent. “Is my life only worthwhile if I’m remembered? It’s worthwhile because it’s interesting. It’s like my little student who would like to get that first story into a magazine,” she then tells me, referencing an earlier point in the conversation when we discussed young writers. “It doesn’t change your life. It doesn’t make you into whatever it is you’d like to be.”
What does make you into whatever it is you’d like to be? “Writing a good sentence. A good sentence where the words fit and describe precisely and powerfully what the sentence is about. That’s really what I want to do.”
She sent me off, teasing, “I hope your life is meaningful and you leave a good legacy …. And I hope you write truthful sentences. I hope your words mean what you mean. That’s what I really meant.”
(05/02/19 9:59am)
The past two weeks have been mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting. As one of the main organizers for the protest against Ryszard Legutko’s visit to campus, and the person whose name is now splashed across the media coverage of the (non) incident, I have had very little time to focus on anything else. I imagine that many people across campus — students, faculty, and administration alike — have been feeling the same way.
I’m not interested in sympathy; I chose to dedicate my time and energy to what I believed to be a worthwhile and fulfilling cause. I don’t want to debate whether or not I or others think Legutko should have been invited in the first place, or if he should have been allowed to speak in Matthew Dickinson’s political science class or if he should come back. What I want to talk about is queerphobia, and specifically queerphobia at Middlebury (I want to acknowledge here that, for the sake of brevity, I am using ‘queerphobia’ as a kind of catch-all term for the various types of injury and marginalization that Queer members of the community face).
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]What I want to talk about is queerphobia, and specifically queerphobia at Middlebury.[/pullquote]
One of the resounding arguments in favor of attending Legutko’s lecture and hearing him speak has been that it would allow students to challenge him on his queerphobic and otherwise bigoted views. I support and applaud people who wanted the opportunity to do so — I personally did not see any value in engaging directly with him, but I appreciate that other people considered that a legitimate form of resistance and learning for themselves.
I do want to trouble the notion, however, that engaging with Legutko face-to-face is the only or even the best way to learn how to argue against his views more effectively in the future, particularly in the case of queerphobic, xenophobic, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments. I do not mean to criticize people who feel this way, but I do want to ask: why did it take an event such as this for people to learn how to advocate for Queer lives, or that this advocacy is necessary?
Mindful of the limits of strategically invoking one’s identity to make a political argument, I’m going to do it anyway: I am a gay person on this campus. I do not by any means speak for all gay or Queer people at Middlebury, but I believe that I can confidently say that most of us have faced queerphobia and other bigotry, sometimes on a daily basis, both outside of Middlebury and here on campus. For many of us, much of our lives has been an exercise in learning how to navigate unfriendly and dangerous environments and, indeed, in learning how to argue in defense of our own lives and rights. This is true for people who hold a variety of marginalized identities.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]I implore you to ask yourself why you could not effectively make these arguments already.[/pullquote]
Marginalized people did not need to engage with Legutko to know that Middlebury is often a hostile place, and we did not need to engage with him to “learn” how to argue against bigotry here or elsewhere; unfortunately, we already know how.
If Legutko’s visit was what it took for you to really cement your arguments for why Queer people should be given rights (and rights beyond just marriage), or why Muslims are not the downfall of Western civilization, then I implore you to ask yourself why you could not effectively make these arguments already. If Legutko’s visit was the reason you learned that Middlebury students experience Queerphobia, then I ask what that says about you, your priorities, and the people with whom you spend your time. And if you think that debating over people’s fundamental humanity is an interesting and engaging exercise or “practice” for other conversations, doesn’t that speak more to your own social positioning than to the actual benefits of doing so?
A sign made by Jess Garner in anticipation of the protest reads “They’re not “just words” if they have a body count: homophobia kills.” As we move forward in the wake of this newest rift in our community, I hope that we keep this in mind. For many of us, the sentiments that Legutko espouses are not merely offensive or controversial; they are indicative of a larger danger that threatens our bodily safety, not an opportunity for an intellectual debate.
(04/25/19 10:00am)
Last week, the administration canceled a talk by conservative Polish scholar and politician Ryszard Legutko due to safety concerns. Prior to the cancellation, students had planned a non-disruptive protest in conjunction with a queer pride celebration to challenge Legutko’s homophobia and misogyny.
The administration took two days to specify that student protesters were not the cause of their security concerns. Regardless of the administration’s good intentions, the lack of specificity about the threat subjected Middlebury and its student protesters to an unjust swarm of national criticism which understood protesters to be the cause of the security threat.
Many student organizers devoted hours to carefully planning the protest in accordance with Middlebury’s new protest policies. The protest had been meticulously set up to be non-disruptive and strictly non-violent; the student protesters did their part to adhere to college policy.
Middlebury, however, did not uphold its end of the bargain. The institution failed to provide an adequate space for free expression. Any vetting that took place was obviously not thorough enough to prepare the college to accommodate Legutko’s visit. Had the administration been more prepared, they could have hired additional security to enable both the talk and the protest to proceed as planned.
Although the public talk at the Kirk Alumni center did not take place, Legutko did speak on campus, to Political Science Professor Matthew Dickinson’s “American Presidency” seminar in the Robert A. Jones House conference room. While Legutko’s appearance there was initially private and restricted to the seminar’s nine registered students, the talk became somewhat public as word spread throughout campus and more students began to arrive. At the talk, asked about his views on homosexuality, Legutko replied, “Same-sex marriage is against the fundamental law of the human race.” His comment is disgusting, and would most likely lead to disciplinary action if said by a student in the classroom.
Because student protesters were not informed of this semi-private talk in advance, they had no adequate opportunity to protest or challenge Legutko’s ideas. This was partly due to their concern for their own safety. After the office of the provost cited unnamed “potential security and safety risks” in the email canceling the event, some students who had dressed for the pride event did not know whether they were safe on campus.
Although the cancellations of both the protest and the talk are regrettable, we disagree with the choice to give Legutko a private platform after student protesters had been denied a chance for public expression. Students have the right not only to hear and debate ideas with which they disagree, but also to protest them. The college’s handbook specifically states that students may express ideological opposition so long as their protests are non-disruptive and non-violent. Professor Dickinson has said it was a shame that the student protest did not take place, but the decision to invite Legutko to speak in R.A.J. showed disrespect and disregard for the students who had spent hours planning the protest.
Middlebury was deeply divided after the Charles Murray protests in 2017, but the college community is now largely in agreement that the Legutko protest ought to have happened. Student organizers deliberately planned their protest to accommodate college policy, but were robbed of their platform. The community could have benefited from the protest as well as the talk. The two events together would also have been a perfect opportunity to test the new protest policy.
In the future, Middlebury must seriously consider how it can simultaneously support both protesters and speakers in its quest for a robust public sphere; these two goals do not have to be at odds.
(04/25/19 9:57am)
In celebration of Earth Day, The Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG) and Sunrise Middlebury hosted an Eco Fair last Friday in Wilson Hall, followed by a Town Hall Meeting on the Green New Deal in Mead Chapel.
Eco Fair
Representatives from an array of environmentally conscious on-campus and local organizations sat at rows of tables at the Eco Fair, describing their forms of activism to interested students and community members.
Several of the groups that attended specialize in encouraging more sustainable dietary practices. MiddVegan, a club that started in the fall, promoted their monthly vegan dinners at their table. Weybridge House, the local foods interest house, explained their emphasis on sustainable eating; they purchase all of their food, except oil and spices, from within 70 miles of the college. The Environmental Affairs Committee (EAC) displayed a possible version of the reusable, fully recyclable and compostable to-go cups they plan to introduce in the near future.
Other organizations highlighted the less-obvious connections between their work and environmental issues. Members of Feminist Action at Middlebury, representing Planned Parenthood, emphasized the disproportionate effect climate change has on female and minority communities. Juntos talked about the impacts of of environmental threats on migrant farmworkers.
Some displays were more interactive. Students painted flower pots at a table labeled, “Plant a friend.” Luke Bazemore ’21 piled the Mountain Club table with sticks and challenged passerby to try starting a fire by rubbing the sticks together. Fortunately, nobody succeeded.
Haley Goodman ’21 ran a waste-sorting game at the Sustainability Solutions Lab table, asking students to determine which bins frequently-misplaced waste products really belonged in. “All of the disposable containers that you get from the Grille and Wilson Cafe, and our to-go cups, are all compostable, so that includes even things that look like plastic,” Goodman said. She said that plastic Amazon packages and bags are newly recyclable.
SNEG, Divest and Sunrise Middlebury, the college’s chapter of a national youth coalition combating climate change, shared a table with 350.org, the international climate organization founded at Middlebury in 2007. Across the aisle, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) discussed their effort to ban single-use plastic bags in Vermont.
Margie Bickoff from Huddlebury, a new Addison County group that also advocates for a ban on single-use plastic bags and sews reusable cloth bags from repurposed fabrics to donate to food shelves and businesses, said the project grew from its founders’ shared desire to make change after the Women’s March.
“We call them re-bags for ‘reduce waste, reuse and recycle,’ and the fabric that’s being used is recycled,” she said. “In fact, some people have brought in their old curtains.”
Town Hall
Sunrise Middlebury organized the Town Hall as part of a series of similar events hosted by affiliated groups nationwide to resolve misrepresentations and spark community conversations about the proposed Green New Deal.
Each of the six student presenters — Molly Babbin ’22, Phoebe Brown ’22.5, Katie Concannon ’21, Leif Taranta ’20.5, Emily Thompson ’22 and Olivia Sommers ’21 — began with their own reasons for joining the Sunrise Movement and organizing the Town Hall.
For Taranta, it was the devastating impact of fossil fuels on the air, water and people in their hometown of Philadelphia. For Babbin, it was witnessing the effects of rising sea levels at home in Connecticut. For Concannon, it was overwhelming climate grief following the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. For Brown, it was the impending loss of winter as it exists now.
They started the presentation with a brief history of the climate crisis and the influence of the wealthy on climate denial. A slide on ExxonMobil read, “They knew. They denied. They deflected responsibility.”
“I personally think money speaks louder than words,” Concannon said.
But unlike fossil fuel companies, young people have numbers, and “this system can’t stay up if we don’t let it,” Taranta said.
Over the next decade, the presenters said, the Green New Deal, aimed at combating climate change and economic inequality, will facilitate a just transition to a livable future through a national mobilization for all.
Using an interactive format that asked audience members to reflect on their own communities’ needs and to share those ideas with the people around them, the presenters introduced the three pillars of the Green New Deal — good jobs for all, a democratic economy and a good life for all — and described its plan to expand the lowest-carbon parts of the US economy to form an energy democracy and put wind and solar in the hands of the people.
“Green jobs,” they said, “have to be good jobs.”
They ran through a few frequently asked questions: “How will it become concrete?” Through future legislation. “Is it technologically feasible?” Yes. “How will we pay for it?” In response, Babbin read a quote from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to resounding applause “Why is it that these questions arise only in connection with useful ideas, not wasteful ideas? Where were the ‘pay-fors’ for Bush’s $5 trillion wars and tax cuts, or for last year’s $2 trillion tax giveaway to billionaires? Why wasn’t financing those massive throwaways as scary as financing the rescue of our planet and middle class now seems to be to these naysayers?”
“In some places, I wouldn’t just get cheered when I read the quote,” Babbin later told The Campus, referencing the cynicism many outspoken opponents of the Green New Deal have already expressed. “In other states, maybe they’re skeptical, but here people were so on board.”
During the Town Hall, Taranta emphasized the importance of talking about the Green New Deal and combating the widespread misinformation that it is not economically, technologically socially or politically possible. “The idea that this will never happen is a propaganda campaign used against us to discourage us,” they said. It can happen — it has to.
Members of Sunrise Middlebury and SNEG are also drafting a Vermont Green New Deal, which they plan to present to the state legislature in January, nearly a year before the national proposal makes its way through Congress.
The six students concluded the presentation portion of the Town Hall by inviting local organizers, many of whom presented at the Eco Fair, to join them at the front and sing, “Social Justice Song 2019,” composed by Bickoff, the Huddlebury representative from the Eco Fair.
Gabe Desmond ’20.5 was the first audience member to speak. “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been affected by climate change,” he said. Every hand in the room went up. Desmond talked about a time last summer when he was unable to finish a hike in Seattle, Washington, because smoke from wildfires to the north, east and south had caused Seattle’s air quality to be the worst in the world.
“I think the really scary thing about climate change, to me, is that it’s hidden,” Desmond said. “When something like Irene happens, you don’t always think about climate change as being the thing that floods your home, right? It’s the water. When I can’t breathe, ‘Oh, it’s the fires. It’s not climate change.’ But it is climate change.”
One community member, who said he graduated from college more than 50 years ago, said politicians are cowardly, and their constituents need to push them to do greater things.
Another said that people do things for two reasons: out of fear of loss and out of desire for gain.
“We keep living in the fear of loss,” he said. “We need to change our minds. We need to change our hearts.”
A self-identified baby Feb asked about the best way to reach a Representative. An email? A phone call? A letter?
Fran Putnam, a local resident closely involved with SNEG, answered, “All of the above.”
“In 11 years,” said a girl at the front of the room, “I will be 24 years old. And I am completely terrified and overwhelmed by that, because I will only have lived a quarter of my life, hopefully, at that time. And if this doesn’t work out—though I’m hoping that it will—that’s it for me.” Describing the renewed hope she gained while participating in the Next Steps Climate Walk earlier this month, she started to cry. Her comment received one of the longest rounds of applause of the evening.
“I was anticipating more questions,” Concannon told The Campus. “I was ready to answer questions about how to pay for it. I was ready to answer questions about, ‘Why do you need to include the social aspect with the environmental aspect?’”
“We thought we were gonna get drilled on the details, because generally when I have a conversation with a friend or a parent, they drill me on the details,” Babbin added. “But it seemed like the people who showed up there were already very much wanting large change.”
“I have struggled a lot with ecological despair, to the point where sometimes it just feels like there’s nothing to do about anything, and everything’s hopeless, and I just get in my head, like, why even try,” Sommers told The Campus. “Which I think is a more common thought pattern than we let people know. And I found that channeling that into activism and planning and this town hall, where I’m bringing awareness about the Green New Deal, and bringing people into that, is a way to deal with my climate anxiety, and hopefully make it productive.”
“Climate change isn’t always associated with strong emotions and grief,” Babbin said.
“But it is,” Concannon said. “It’s loss of life. It’s loss of place. It’s loss of home.”
(04/25/19 9:54am)
National politicians and news media have painted Middlebury as being at the center of an irreconcilable conflict of values. Freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, freedom of academic exploration are on one side — which require that even the most blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic speakers get an unqualified lecture platform. On the other side is the hope that colleges and universities will not sponsor such dehumanizing ideologies by giving their proponents this kind of unchallenged stage. Erik Bleich, the professor who approved the Legutko speech, reaffirmed this narrative in his Op-Ed, “A Tale of Two Worldviews.” According to Bleich, “we cannot function as an institution of higher learning,” unless each faculty member has the power to give any speaker they want the full, unqualified Middlebury lecture stage. The school cannot take direct action responding to concerns from the community about these talks — or else free speech and freedom of inquiry are done. Under this framework, one worldview or the other must win. There is no room for compromise.
What Bleich does not point out, is that this way of seeing the conflict is itself a worldview. It is a theory, a way of framing the drama. But that theory is constructed. It is not how we have to see the elements at play.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]We can host community events in a smarter way — in a way that doesn’t dehumanize people and cause campus-wide scandal. [/pullquote]
So the question is, is this framework a useful one? Is it a helpful way of seeing things, that allows us to find effective solutions? Well, let’s look at the results when the college buys into this narrative: a speaker, Ryszard Legutko, is automatically pre-approved for an unchallenged stage and a school sponsorship, regardless of who he is or what he will be talking about. The organizers of this event provide no information about the speaker’s views, not even to the Political Science department, until it comes out the week before the event that the core of this speaker’s philosophy is a position of anti-equality and anti-tolerance (“equality is the new despotism”). Many students and faculty, very understandably, feel threatened by the fact that the school would give these views such an unchallenged platform. Sure, we could “ask tough questions,” but this would not be a true dialogue — Legutko would only evade giving real answers (as he does in the live-stream of the private lecture he gave in RAJ), and would likely get away with false statements he makes to advance his position (e.g. his unchallenged claim, again in the live-stream, that Poland was a pure victim to Germany in World War II, despite the presence of professors who know better). Regardless of the loud presence of these community concerns, the framework prevents Middlebury from doing anything. The framework says that if the school does anything, it would be the symbolic collapse of free speech and inquiry. Tensions rise, until everything explodes into a haze of security concerns and weird secret lectures. Once the cloud of memes settles, everyone here is left exhausted and hurt.
So then why exactly do we keep using a framework that dooms us to fail?
I think it’s because we haven’t looked hard enough at exactly what the terms “free speech” and “freedom of inquiry” mean. We have mixed them up with something else. We are using the word “freedom” to mean the power to compel an institution to automatically sponsor any type of community event, regardless of all other concerns. This is what is creating our problem.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]We are using the word “freedom” to mean the power to compel an institution to automatically sponsor a community event[/pullquote]
Take free speech. The thing is, Legukto would still have free speech, with or without a Middlebury sponsorship and an unchallenged Middlebury stage. Freedom of speech guarantees that each and every person is able to openly express themselves. Nowhere, under any definition, does free speech require a private entity, like Middlebury, to automatically provide an unquestioned platform to any speaker who asks.
And freedom of inquiry? Keegan Callanan, the professor who requested the Legutko talk, has always been free to inquire, research, and publish about Legutko to his heart’s content. He is free to teach whole courses about Legutko’s stances against immigrant and minority rights. He can even get Middlebury grants to go to Poland and drink tea with the guy — and the thing is, he would have all these freedoms with or without the automatic power to get Middlebury to provide Legutko with a sponsorship and open stage. According to the Association of American Colleges and Universities, freedom of academic inquiry guarantees that professors are not restricted in what they are able to research, publish, and teach. Nowhere, under any definition of freedom of inquiry, is it required that a school automatically host a community event, simply because one professor thinks it’s a good idea.
If this is the case, then we can actually have both. We can have freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. We can study and learn about challenging and controversial issues. And we can host community events in a smarter way — in a way that doesn’t dehumanize people and cause campus-wide scandal.
What if, instead of automatically pre-approving Legutko for an unchallenged stage, the Political Science department took a look at his arguments beforehand? They could have realized that Legutko’s positions question the humanity of many community members. Recognizing the potential issue, they could ask for input from administration, or even from student leaders. Instead of blindly going with Callahan’s desire to format the event as a speech, the department could make the reasonable proposal — based on the highly controversial and potentially harmful nature of Legutko’s ideology — to host the event in the format of a panel or conversation. This would make sure there is proper contextualization of his views. It would provide a real challenge to Legutko’s assumptions, and an actual stated, scholarly, counterpoint (not just “tough student questions”). It would be excellent academic discourse. Or alternatively, maybe the department could propose a different speaker, one who would bring up the same intellectual issues of anti-tolerance and anti-inequality in Eastern Europe — just maybe not personally embody them. Callahan could accept or reject these offers, maybe propose something in return, until everyone could agree upon an event that is intellectually engaging and that doesn’t cause community chaos. If the sides really can’t come up with an event that fulfills Middlebury’s twin goals of academic inquiry and non-discrimination — then is an event that fails one of Middlebury’s core values really worthy for Middlebury to hold?
The week before the planned Legutko event, Middlebury hosted an event on a very difficult, deeply offensive, and dehumanizing ideology: the notion, which many in the world believe in, that some people can own and sell other humans. Did we have canceled student protests and Wall Street Journal Op-Eds? No. We had a panel, where different experts shared different points of view, all critically and respectfully engaging with the issue of human trafficking. Free academic inquiry and respectful concern for an issue that could be triggering for many. Beautiful.
Don’t let talk of irreconcilable values tell you that free speech and automatic and unqualified lecture sponsorship are the same thing. As long as we put just a little more thought into the kind of events we put on and how they are approved, then the crisis disappears. Middlebury, I don’t want to be writing this again next year. Your two goals are not incompatible world-views. Both of them are very, very, much within reach.
(04/25/19 9:52am)
Seniors at Middlebury will remember President Laurie Patton’s inaugural campaign to promote “rhetorical resilience,” whereby she urged students to engage with viewpoints they might find foreign, discomforting, or even outright repulsive. Joining the College in 2015, a year rife with controversy around “safe spaces,” Patton was quick to lay down her vision of free speech on campus, arguing, as she said in her inaugural address, that we should “have more and better arguments, with greater respect, stronger resilience, and deeper wisdom.”
The Charles Murray incident in March, 2017 offered President Patton a chance to solidify her stance on campus speech. In an op-ed submitted to the Wall Street Journal, Patton urged schools like Middlebury to “embrace freedom of expression and inquiry as an educational value for everyone, regardless of their background or political views.” In an even more poignant note, she urged students to “move beyond the false dichotomy between free speech and inclusiveness.”
Since then, President Patton has been largely silent on the issue. Perhaps she was discouraged when she saw that students had adopted her term—resilience—and turned it on its head. Soon after her campaign, campus leaflets urged students to be “resilient” in their politics; in other words, to concretize their dogmatic political beliefs in defiance of the administration’s rhetoric around openness. Students didn’t need to be resilient to ideas; they only had to be resilient to the “oppressions” of the administration.
Patton might have hoped that students would be more accommodating to diverse viewpoints after a steady diet of pro-discourse ideas. Last Thursday, MCAB hosted Rukmini Callimachi, a New York Times journalist with a unique interest in engaging with current and former members of the so-called Islamic State. In her speech, Callimachi’s words are striking for their radical embrace of discourse: “I firmly believe in speaking to the enemy, in listening to them, which is different than believing them, in trying to understand them, which is different than giving them a platform… In short, I do this in the interest of truth.” Students of all political beliefs rightly applauded Callimachi for her work.
In light of Callimachi’s message, the student-run protest of Polish academic and diplomat Ryszard Legutko is nothing but ironic. Students applauded a journalist’s effort to publish the personal accounts of some of the most evil people on the planet. Yet when given the option to discourse with (or, if they wished, to ignore) a controversial and highly influential member of the European Parliament, they extended no such courtesy. While students did not seek to disrupt the event, their act of protesting his presence sent a clear message: that they have no desire to listen to the enemy.
For an academic as serious and dedicated to truth as President Patton, it must be excruciating to witness such hypocrisy on her campus. Unfortunately, it appears that Patton feels she cannot change student opinion and deed. Patton seems resigned to let civil protest, rather than civil discourse, be the primary means of dissent at this institution.
I urge President Patton to reconsider such an attitude of resignation. To avoid irreparable reputational harm, the College must quickly recommit itself to the tradition of academic seriousness that defined it for most of the 20th century. We must follow the lead of Princeton and the University of Chicago, both of which passed official statements reaffirming their commitment to free expression. To do so, Patton must make clear to all students that the college quad is different from and independent of the arena of brass-knuckle politics. The goal at college is not to defeat and shame the “wrong views,” but to learn. Middlebury students are free and powerful thinkers who have the capacity to make great change through ideas. While students have every right to protest on campus, mob gatherings should not be their first line of action against an idea they find objectionable. Patton must urge students instead to express dissent through rational argument. If students were to follow her lead, they would allow the administration to resume its role as a body promoting academics, rather than one charged with the laughable task of maintaining physical security at a Political Science lecture.
Student support of civil discourse is not as scarce as it may appear. Take, for example, a group of political science students’ defiant choice to extend an impromptu invitation to Mr. Legutko, asking him to speak in their “American Presidency” seminar. This is a powerful indicator that, should Patton make a more sustained, bold stand for open and reasoned discourse on campus, many of us are ready to follow her lead. But we do need someone to lead.
(04/25/19 9:50am)
From the moment I became aware of Ryszard Legutko’s statements, I have shared them with the organizers and the sponsors of his talk. The context of the first statement I saw was a new turn towards homophobia in Poland’s ruling PiS party, a backlash against the Warsaw mayor Trzaskowski, who offered to extend protections to LGBT people. Legutko echoed the official party line, but added “These activists and organizations are very brutal. They have Bolshevik methods. If someone imagines these people as lost, abused by human prejudices ... of course not! These are the people who rule. They have behind them the most powerful means that exist.”
This is a common paranoid fantasy among the anti-gender and anti-LGBT activists I research. Gays are all-powerful. There is no need to protect them. They in fact oppress others. Legutko cites no evidence for his claim. Prof. Callanan thanked me for my “perspective,” but has never engaged with the actual quotations I pointed to or rebutted them.
When student organizers publicized quotations from Legutko’s book, as well as some from this more recent talk on Polish TV, Prof. Callanan did respond: in a letter to Political Science (PSCI) students defending Legutko, he says of these quotations, “Some are doctored and others accurate, some in context and others not.” Like Legutko, he cites no evidence for these claims. My colleagues and I have checked the quotations, and in some cases provided translations from Polish. They are accurate.
Prof. Callanan goes on to write, “For my part, I find in these quotations the words of a man who has been sharply critical of the methods of activists in the European Union, and who holds the same position on same-sex marriage once held by President Obama, President Clinton, and Secretary Clinton.” I am acutely aware of Obama and Clinton’s evolving positions on marriage equality. Never, however, did they argue that LGBT people were not discriminated against, but instead rule over others. In fact both supported extension of rights, more like mayor Trzaskowski than Legutko. Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Protection Act into law, something Legutko would vigorously oppose.
My first inkling of Legutko’s position came about as a result of a post by Polish feminist and scholar, Agnieszka Graff. She and the team of European scholars with whom I collaborated on Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe recognized Legutko’s rhetoric as typical of the anti-gender discourse of the far right. It is not just Catholic or just conservative, but part of a global attack on women’s rights, LGBT rights, and more. I spoke about this at last week’s panel on Populism, Homophobia, and Illiberal Democracy, a panel Prof. Callanan did not attend.
As student parodists have demonstrated in their annotated version (on go/beyondthegreen), Callanan’s letter itself contains much more false information than the quotations posted by student organizers, which were accurate. Yet student organizers have been harassed, first by some PSCI students who received his letter, and now by right wing trolls outside Middlebury. The students and I appealed to the PSCI department to correct the record early last week. I challenged Prof. Callanan last Thursday to provide evidence for his claims. Again he has failed to engage with the facts. Apparently he cares more about giving Legutko cover and protecting his own false narratives than about the pursuit of truth or about the welfare of our students.
(04/25/19 9:45am)
Editor’s Note: The below letter has been widely circulated among members of the Middlebury community. It was reprinted with permission on the Campus website on April 17, 2019.
Dear Middlebury Faculty,
Those of you who do not know me – my name is Thomas Gawel, I graduated from Middlebury last May. I majored in International Politics & Economics with Russian and minored in Film & Media. I was raised in rural Poland and had the opportunity to intern at the European Parliament two summers ago. Currently, I’m working towards my JD degree.
When I first saw that Mr. Legutko was invited to speak on campus, my reaction was not outrage. It was, quite honestly, a mere surprise. Perhaps Mr. Legutko is recognized in academia, but, in reality, he is one of the most unremarkable and boring political figures that Poland has ever produced. Why would he be worth flying into VT to give what is likely going to be a very boring self-promotion lecture, I do not know.
Leaving the issues that many students and some faculty rightfully raise aside, I want to point your attention to another one. What I personally find surprising about this event is that some of you fail to recognize that Mr. Legutko is a hypocrite. He represents Law & Justice, a party that works tirelessly to destroy what is left of Polish free media and rule of law. This party has fired virtually all journalists from public media, placed its former MP as the president of the largest Polish TV network, and daily feeds ruthless propaganda to millions of unaware Poles. They have illegally taken over the Constitutional Tribunal and the Supreme Court, for which there are procedures pending against the country at the European Commission. They did so to bypass the Constitution and transform young Polish democracy into a very dangerous hybrid of economic socialism and nationalism/xenophobia.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]You cannot and should not separate Mr. Legutko’s scholarship from his words and actions as a career politician.[/pullquote]
Yes, they won democratic elections. But they illegally reached for much more power than they had the mandate for, and, one day, they will be held accountable. Hundredths of thousands of Poles took to the streets over the past three years to protest this mockery of a government. This is a single best proof of how problematic Law & Justice is.
If you want to shake hands and take smiley pictures with Mr. Legutko while he promotes his book, go ahead. But, if you do so, at least acknowledge a whole part of his ‘legacy’ that shows his lack of basic integrity. Mr. Legutko is not an innocent scholar whose work is a prophecy; he is a ruthless politician that contributed to Poland’s downfall. If you do not think that you owe this truth to all Middlebury students, you should at least realize that you owe it to me and other Polish students, past or future.
You cannot and should not separate Mr. Legutko’s scholarship from his words and actions as a career politician. Your open letter to students, Mr. Callanan, paints a very positive picture of this unfortunate guest. But it is a very incomplete picture. Students should be told that the man that will lecture them about drawbacks of liberal democracy is working tirelessly to destroy one, just across the ocean. I find it outrageous that you would leave such an important part of Mr. Legutko’s ‘legacy’ out of your letter.
My country is going through quite a turbulent time; by giving Mr. Legutko a platform to promote his book, you legitimize the destructive party and government that he is associated with. As a Middlebury alumnus from Poland, I am truly hurt that you showed such level of insensitivity and ignorance.
I am all for Middlebury inviting speakers that hold views different than those of the campus majority. But you could at least seek speakers who are not bigots and hypocrites.
(04/24/19 12:06am)
At least nine Student Government Association senators have threatened to resign en masse if college officials do not meet a list of 13 demands, a decision that would effectively dissolve the elected body for the remainder of the academic year.
The demands were outlined in a letter emailed Tuesday morning to senior college administrators, including President Laurie L. Patton, with all students copied. Demands in the letter are wide-ranging, and include: “structural changes” to college policy aimed at increasing administrative transparency; “improvements to existing programs” like Green Dot and bringing all buildings into Americans with Disabilities Act compliance; and “new initiatives,” including the creation of an LGBTQ+ Center and a Black Studies department.
In the letter, senators also asked Patton to appear before students at a town hall on Tuesday, April 30 in Mead Chapel. Senior Senator Travis Sanderson ’19 told The Campus that the resignations would occur sometime after then, depending on how and if administrators respond to their demands.
“We just received the SGA communication and are reviewing it. Many of the concerns are already being addressed,” Patton told The Campus Tuesday afternoon. “For others, we believe we can find a way forward to work together. We welcome an opportunity for engagement with SGA and have already reached out to its leaders. We will be providing a response, which we hope we can work on collaboratively, next week.”
While not every member of the SGA Senate has promised to resign, all members approved sending the letter to administration, Sanderson said. The resignation of at least nine of the 18 senators would mean the absence of a quorum at all future meetings, and thus the effective dissolution of the elected body for the remainder of the academic year. With the threat of resignation, senators hope to send a message about inadequate student representation in administrative decision-making.
“It has become evident that the connection between the administration and students has been reduced to a one-way street,” they wrote. “The administration has failed time and again to listen to the desires of its students.”
Their demands, titled “Thirteen Proposals for Community Healing,” are aimed to improve student representation and promote community healing on campus, including several proposals that had previously been brought to the administration but were either tabled or overlooked.
“There is a long history of SGA recommendations being ignored,” Sanderson said.
As it stands now, SGA resolutions are mostly symbolic recommendations to college officials — no real student check exists on administrative authority. But in the letter, the senators claim a right to participate in administrative decisions.
“Our tuition funds the college, and the college’s purpose is our education,” senators wrote. “Middlebury College is first and foremost a school, not a corporation. Why is it that decisions are often made with little to no consent or involvement from us in our own school?”
In an op-ed published by The Campus Tuesday afternoon, SGA President Nia Robinson ’19 supported the actions of senators regardless of where they stand and promised to keep advocating for students in her role.
“For the final weeks, I will continue to support those who come to me and offer advice to any students who will listen. I will continue to advocate for them whether in trustee or SLG meetings when I am the only student in the room,” Robinson wrote. “My sole goal is, and has always been, to help leave this campus in a better state than I found it.”
Reaching a Breaking Point
The letter enumerates instances of administrative neglect of student proposals, from the failure to make Middlebury a sanctuary campus in 2016 to the recent cancellation and fallout from the the controversial scholar and Polish politician Ryszard Legutko’s scheduled lecture, which also resulted in the cancellation of a peaceful, non-disruptive student protest scheduled to take place outside. In the letter, senators condemn the administration for waiting until Friday, April 19 to unequivocally say that the student protesters were not the security concern. That delay, they write, caused misinformation about the protest to spread in the national media.
Senior Senator Alexis Levato ’19 said that the SGA saw the period following the lecture cancellation as an opportune moment to act.
“I think we cared about these issues as individuals, and cared about them as SGA, but didn’t feel there was a possibility of actually doing anything until this happened,” she said. “Which I think speaks to the way the administration is structured, that it only really allows students to be activists in moments in which it’s blowing up in their faces.”
Varsha Vijayakumar ’20, a junior senator and the SGA president-elect, also saw the moment as a culmination of SGA and student activists’ frustrations.
“I personally reached a point where I feel like the administration has been taking advantage of our empathy, and I think that’s unfair to put a disproportionate burden on students to work hard to make this place more like a home for students,” she said. “We’re at a point where it’s not just the SGA, but also a lot of student activism and mobilization that is pushing for change. And we want to support that.”
The letter alleges that it was only when administrators heard that senators were discussing dissolution that they said, in an email sent by Provost Jeff Cason and Dean of the Faculty Andi Lloyd, and forwarded to students by Dean of Student Baishakhi Taylor, that “our assessment of the potential safety risks of Wednesday’s planned lecture did not reflect concerns about threats from student protesters or students attending the event. Rather, we were concerned about the safety of those participants.”
“We are extremely disappointed that only after hearing threat of SGA’s dissolution did an administrator publicly clear organizers of blame as the unnamed security threat that led to cancellation of the Ryszard Legutko event,” the letter reads.
No member of the SGA reached by The Campus would comment on the record about the alleged interaction with an administrator.
Vetting Speakers
After The Campus posted the letter online Tuesday, debate ensued over the senators’ third proposal, which calls for the creation of a due diligence form that includes questions aimed to determine whether a speaker’s views align with Middlebury’s community standards, “removing the burden of researching speakers from the student body.”
The proposal also asked for each academic department to create a student advisory board that would have access to a list of invited speakers one month in advance in order to provide feedback when necessary.
“This is absurd. Students should relish the chance to research speakers, to interact with speakers, to debate with speakers,” Rich Cochran ’91 wrote on The Campus Facebook page. “I am shocked that the SGA would publish this list of unilateral demands.”
Sanderson clarified to The Campus that the proposal would not bar speakers from campus. Instead, the answers to the form would be made public to inform the community in advance of the speaker’s arrival.
“If anything, this ensures a greater degree of informed free speech and assembly,” he said. “Critics are arguing that we want to keep speakers from campus, which is incorrect.”
The Process
Senators first began to discuss what would eventually become the letter on Wednesday afternoon in the wake of the Legutko cancellation. Over the weekend, they began to gather feedback from student leaders, including the heads of cultural organizations and leaders of the Legutko protest. Some senators spent most of Friday drafting the letter, which they then shared with all senators.
Vijayakumar was one of the students who spent the better part of the day working on the letter. She was also notified around midday that she had won the SGA presidency.
“I celebrated for maybe 20 minutes, but that was not my focus,” she said. “It’s the last thing I’m thinking about. Even on Friday, the entire day, I was working on these demands.”
On Sunday, April 21, senators went into executive session during and following their regularly scheduled meeting to discuss the draft. The session lasted one hour.
The following night, senators hosted a student-only town hall in Mead Chapel to gather feedback on the letter and demands. Robinson opened the forum by reading the demands and introduced the senators’ proposed plan to resign. Then, attendees divided into focus groups to discuss further. Each group parsed the drafted demands and suggested modifications to senators, who led the groups. Senators then met later that evening to finalize the letter based on student feedback. According to Vijayakumar, they discussed the suggestions made on every point, and identified major trends in feedback in an attempt to incorporate as many as possible.
In an interview with The Campus, Sanderson stressed the senators’ desire to involve other members of the community in the draft. He said the SGA is only one forum in which students have tried and failed to work with administrators to address the concerns of the student body. Specifically, he cited the title of the letter, which was recommended by members of the community. They also received emails with suggestions and ideas from students who could not attend the town hall.
When asked about the college’s recent work with students to divest from fossil fuels by 2028, Sanderson said that the administration did not adequately credit student activists in their announcement.
“In the case of divestment, it was a massive student campaign for a long time, but it was co-opted by the administration in the end,” he said. The letter addresses this concern: “Students who work on these initiatives alongside faculty must receive credit for their work, and will not be excluded from these initiatives once faculty begin working on them.”
When reached for comment, Community Council Co-Chair John Gosselin ’20 said he supported some of the senators’ demands and disagreed with others.
“I disagree with the general strategy of demands and dissolution because it has forced the student government to express opinions too quickly and without any nuance, reflection, or evidence of serious discussion, despite the best efforts of the SGA meeting on Sunday and the poorly attended student town hall on Monday,” he said.
History Repeats Itself
In 1967, members of the Student Association, then equivalent to the SGA, took a similar approach to addressing feelings of powerlessness vis-à-vis the administration. Members saw the body as a mouthpiece for administrative decisions and doubted its own ability to advocate for students, and voted to hold hold a campus-wide referendum on the body’s dissolution. The proposal passed overwhelmingly among students, who voted 407-70 in favor. Two years later, the current iteration of the SGA, newly-endowed with more representative and legislative capacities, formed.
Today’s SGA is drawing inspiration from its predecessors’ decision.
“When circumstances mirror those faced by student leaders half a century ago, we must consider options similar to the ones they faced,” senators wrote. “In the words of Brian Maier, the equivalent of an SGA senator at the time, ‘we must take power rather than ask for it.’”
But senators are also wary of the unintended consequences their predecessors’ actions had on the student body. Last time, dissolution of the Student Association left student organizations without funding. This time, the resignation of senators would leave the other components of the SGA intact, including the SGA President’s Cabinet and the SGA Finance Committee, which allocates the student activities budget.
“We don’t want to hurt students and nullify all the projects they’ve spent a full semester working on. That’s definitely not our intent,” Levato said. “I think we’re learning from that decision in order to make sure that students are only positively affected by this.”
Senators still think, though, that the threat is substantial enough to warrant a serious response from the administration. Vijayakumar believes the student body is on board.
“We do feel like this is the most productive way to enact change right now on this campus,” she said. “We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t think so.”
