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(09/20/18 9:58am)
In the heart of the brutalist bunker that is the Johnson Memorial Building, a small collection of thought-provoking paintings and ceramics can be found. “Portraits of Power” is a formidable exhibition of work by the students of Jim Butler’s Portraiture in Ceramics and Oil Paint class. The works span a range of topics, from violence to religion, and a myriad of styles, from abstract impressionism to realism. They are united by their representation of that which is uncontrollable yet which controls, that which may inspire fear or reverence or revolt, in short, that which is powerful.
Take, for instance, one painting hung on the south side of the gallery. It portrays an expressionless Christ as he condemns a man to hanging and damnation. Unlike in traditional representations of a vengeful god, here the man found guilty is no obvious sinner, no demonic form of evil, but an average, sweater-and-jeans-wearing guy. Despite his apparent lack of incriminating evidence, there is no hope for appeal, no ability to persuade the blank face of his judge. The man’s fate is in the hands of the supernatural.
And yet, even Christ has a hint of powerlessness. The leaping flames, a violence reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards’ famous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon, are mirrored by the streaks of fresh blood running from Christ’s own wounds reminding viewers that he too was executed by vengeful judges. In this depiction, even the son of God cannot escape the seemingly arbitrary judgement that plagues humankind. One wonders who controls our destinies — is it the god from whose hand we dangle or from some other, unforeseen force that punishes our gods?
On the opposite side of the gallery sits another image, less concrete in its depictions and yet perhaps more primal than the first. A serene expanse of blue, like the night sky as seen through a distant metropolis, spreads across the canvas, interrupted by a fiery intrusion of hot pink and yellow. There is a tension that ebbs between these two forces, and an electric dynamism plays across the image. Each field is poised to overpower the other, and yet they are balanced. The colors take up nearly even amounts of the canvas with equal force. They seem to be perpetually in turmoil and yet always held in equilibrium.
SILVIA CANTU BAUTISTA/THE MIDDLEBURY CAMPUS
Although modern in look, this piece seems to draw from the same primal idea from whence came the Yin and Yang and the Tao Te Ching. Conflict and turmoil, it seems, is an omnipresent fact of reality. Always in balance, always present, yet constantly shifting and changing. Nothing stays the same. As Robert Frost said, “Nothing gold stays,” or in the immortal words of Marx and Engels, “All that is solid melts into air.” This piece seems to be a glimpse of a truly frightening yet familiar sense of the universe that makes one wonder: what can be done when the whole of reality is always churning in an equally destructive and productive rage? How do we weather the perpetual storm?
In the back, on the east wall, stands another image of a slightly different nature. Both realistic and abstract, it leaves behind the tension and drama of the aforementioned pieces for the sort of calm of promised but insofar unspoken wisdom.
A young woman, perhaps a student (the distinctive boots suggest a member of our own campus) leans against the frame, gently clutching a novel at the edge of a field of constellations. It is a simple, contemplative piece that resides in the gray area between uncertainty and certainty. Is she lost in the disorder of an ever-churning universe or has she come to peace with her place among the stars? Is the title of her book a plea for “just ‘A Little Life!’ Please?” or is it a contented acknowledgment of the little life that we each have? Do the stars stretch between her fingers at her command or has she simply come to grasp her place in relation to them? These questions remain unanswered, but the possibility of answers is enough to give one hope that there is indeed a way to make peace with the powerful forces that overshadow our lives.
The diverse pieces in this exhibition number just a few, each representing its own unique perspective on life, power and ourselves. These artists have inventively combined various media including oil paint, ceramics, and paper, to form truly wonderful pieces of art. Beyond that, they have embraced vulnerability, peered into often uncomfortable truths and created an exhibition that, if not directly instructive, is certainly inspiring.
(09/13/18 10:00am)
This is the question we have been asking ourselves since we assumed these roles last spring.
The Campus is unique. We are a weekly paper, run 100 percent by students. In many ways, we are the college’s journalism program, where students teach students. While we would not change a thing, this makes us prone to mistakes — we learn on the job.
It is important to recognize our own limitations. We are not the New York Times, nor do we wish or strive to be. Our Arts writers are not interested in tearing down the work of student performers. Sports reporters do not file 1,000-word diatribes on a player’s failure to perform at a certain level. And we do not see Old Chapel as our version of the Trump Administration.
We see ourselves first and foremost as a community newspaper. If we are to succeed, The Campus must be an active stakeholder in the broader Middlebury community, working to inform, and tell the stories of, its readers. We are not stenographers or cheerleaders, but journalists working to capture and understand what life is like here in this moment.
Our goal: if someone were to open up the pages of this paper 50 years from now, they would be able to take an accurate glimpse into what students, faculty and staff were thinking, feeling and doing at that time. We accomplish this by telling both the good and bad at Middlebury.
Like all journalists should, we believe our role here is to hold those in power accountable for their actions. When administrators go back on their word or the Student Government Association passes resolutions that do not serve the interests of students, it is our job to ask the tough questions, spend time understanding the history of the institutions and, yes, be adversarial when need be.
However, it is also important that we recognize the role The Campus plays as one of the largest and oldest student groups on campus. We as editors should not sit in our office and type stories about a community from which we have detached ourselves. On the contrary, when it fits our mission, we are willing and able to be a partner and participate in initiatives that bolster dialogue and community building on campus.
We recognize that our position atop this masthead is fleeting. After this issue, we will go to press a mere 24 times this year; considering the 218-year history of the institution, and the 113-year history of this paper, that ain’t a lot.
This paper is more than just those who write for and edit it. The Middlebury Campus holds meaning for many people: those who read, submit op-eds, respond to our emails and share their stories, and especially those who have written, are writing, and will write in its pages.
As temporary stewards of this paper, we will strive to be fair, accurate, collaborative, committed and unrelenting over the coming months, to be a paper worthy of this community.
(09/13/18 10:00am)
A Talenti gelato tub-turned-coin jar and a Chicago flag lamp sit on the desk of Student Government Association President Nia Robinson ’19, two items not unlike their owner, straddling the line between two identities.
Robinson remembers watching The Rosa Parks Story as a child with her grandmother while eating saltines and drinking Lipton tea. She also recalls the way that her cousins would make fun of her for “being so dark, but talking so white.”
Moving to school in the suburbs in fourth grade, Robinson began to grapple with the concept of race. She would receive questions about her white stepfather when he arrived to pick her up after school or why her speech did not match her skin tone. “You’re just trying to be white,” Robinson recalls the accusations, “Why don’t you talk like how you are supposed to?”
This sense of in-betweenness was the focal point of Robinson’s TEDxMiddlebury Talk in the fall of 2017, where she discussed the feelings of otherness that have lingered since her childhood.
“Most of my life has been spent in predominantly white schools. Half of my family is white and eventually everywhere I went, I was the other,” she said. “Even when I was surrounded by black people, I was the other.”
In that same speech, Robinson described that same sense of otherness at Middlebury. She remembered her unease at the pauses and stares she and her family received when they entered Mr. Ups restaurant, and the stream of questions from parents about “her experiences.” Despite being a student for two and a half years, looming reminders such as the portraits of past presidents seemed to remind her that she did not belong.
Yet in her confident words to the audience on the TEDx stage, Robinson concluded that “we are not as lost as we think we are.” In fact, Robinson later recalls that the conference itself was a turning point in the trajectory of her Middlebury career.
“I will be clear and also candid, I had a really rough time my first two years here.” said Robinson. “I think it was through TEDx that I worked through a lot of my issues here.”
Most importantly, she walked away with a visceral understanding of both the amazing capacity of empathy to mend and of vulnerability as a medium for understanding.
“You need to be the person that you needed when you were younger, and I think about that all the time,” she said. “I kind of need to be the person that I needed for my first and second year for other first years.”
This deep empathy is what colors all of Robinson’s actions and what she strives for in her leadership. As a former member of the college’s Community Judicial Board and a former co-president of the Black Student Union, Robinson has incorporated this sense of deep understanding for others to be a key liaison between the community, faculty, administrators and students.
It is this experience that prepared Robinson to build her platform in the 2017 SGA Presidential race. She won 66 percent of the vote, with 687 more votes than the runner-up.
“She listens. She speaks hard truths in a way that people can hear. She stays connected,” said President Laurie Patton. “When I first met Nia in 2016, we began by talking about poetry. Then we talked about the Black Students’ Union. Then the overall student experience at Middlebury. Then the pursuit of sociology. At ease with each one of these topics, Nia showed that she was wise — empathetic and critical at one and the same time.”
Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, spoke to Robinson’s incredible talent for connecting with almost any individual. After coincidentally running into Tate and her masters swim team, Robinson immediately forged a friendship with the entire group of middle-age swimmers. She continues to join the group for their 7:30 a.m. post-workout gathering - regardless of her busy academic and work schedule.
Robinson’s ability to connect deeply with others extends well beyond Old Chapel and the faculty. Clark Lewis ’19, a fellow Posse scholar and close friend, recalled their final interview for the Posse scholarship. In an atmosphere of intense competition, finalists boasted about their academic achievements and brandished their extracurricular activities.
“Then, there was Nia,” Lewis said. “While the rest of us were trying our best to answer the judges’ questions, Nia instead got up in front of the group and sang a song. It was ‘Three Little Birds’ by Corinne Bailey.” Everyone in the room was stunned silent, Lewis said.
Since stepping foot on campus, Robinson has seen vulnerability as a power rather than a flaw, using her deep understanding of others to connect with people regardless of their labels and tags. Robinson has used her experiences of being lost to help others be found. When asked whether she believes in the power of vulnerability, her eyes welled up before she nodded and broke into one of her classic smiles.
(09/13/18 9:58am)
Editor’s Note: In this weekly column Charlotte Frankel will “review very important things on campus, such as the doors to Proctor (they should not have a double-entryway — this is dangerous and unnecessary!), the chairs in that one classroom on the first floor of Gifford, and much more."
Salutations, and welcome to the best day of your life. Although I have assured the editors of this fine newspaper that an introduction is not necessary, for I am very famous, they have told me this is neither ‘factual’ nor ‘appropriate.’ No matter, if you all must know who I am, so be it.
My name is Charlotte City-born of House Frankel, the Sunburnt, Queen of the Campus and the First Febs, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea (Battell Beach), Maker of the Inane, Mother of Wagons. You may feel free to use any of my above titles when addressing me.
I have been tasked with reviewing the most important happenings at Middlebury College for my remaining time here. I will bring you along on my journeys, as I stand between the two doors at the entrance to Proctor to see how many times I get hit (this is a safety HAZARD, and I am determined to prove it in an upcoming installment). Are you interested in the likelihood of being smushed betwixt the electronic racks in the bowels of the Davis “FAMILY” Library? I am, as well. In short, these in-depth reviews will be weekly examinations into the contemporary Middlebury zeitgeist.
Now that I have laid on my plan of attack for you, let my first official assessment commence. If I am to spend my remaining days passing judgment over others, then it is only fair that I begin by taking a hard look within myself. I shall do this, as is only appropriate, in sonnet form.
There exists a girl whose name is mine. She
Excels at enjambment. Some may think her
‘Foolish,’ but more like, from Shakespeare. I see
Myself for what I am: an amateur
At life, wading through the endless atoms.
I am, like you, recycled stardust. We’re
All the same, defined by local stratum.
My reflection is yours in the mirror.
Nature is cyclical. I once was. Now
I am rearrangéd, but here still. There
Is nothing in us inspiring a “Wow,”
More than anything that breathes the same air.
“Too serious,” you say, so I’ll tell you what,
I’ll end it with my favorite word: “butts.”
I found this process to be rather enlightening, and I hope you all did, too. Anything you would like to have reviewed or any inquiries, personal or otherwise, you may have can be directed to my manager, who at this point is also myself, at cefrankel@middlebury.edu. I look forward to changing the very fabric of this campus through the power of my words, and I am glad, nay thrilled, to have you all along for the ride.
Charlotte Frankel is a member of the Middlebury College class of 2018.5
(09/13/18 9:57am)
In the middle of February in my senior year of high school, my twin sister and I met for an interview with a Middlebury alumna in a Starbucks crowded with tourists in ski gear. When she asked us what drew us to Middlebury, I did what any overworked 18-year-old would do and I racked my brain for anything that sounded vaguely informed and intelligent.
“The School of Bread Loaf,” I’d said.
When I was accepted to Middlebury, I did a better job of researching the options open to English majors at the college. The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference really did end up drawing me to the school, as I always knew I wanted to write and the conference looked fun and valuable — not to mention the cost of attendance is waived for a select few Middlebury students. I can remember talking with my mom as a first-year and telling her my plans to apply as a junior and hopefully attend in the summer before senior year.
My acceptance two years later felt like things were falling into place and reminded me that, while Middlebury has had its ups and downs, this college was definitely the best choice for me.
My first day at the conference was hot and anxious as I sat in my room in the Inn waiting for my mystery roommate to appear. I knew what to expect because I had worked with Jason Lamb and Noreen Cargill (coordinator and administrative director, respectively): readings, dinners, classes, workshops, but I did not know how I, a quiet and reserved sort of person, could handle ten days of noise and events.
Evidently, I had forgotten that most writers are also quiet and reserved and in some ways being around such like-minded people brought out in all of us an eagerness to introduce ourselves to strangers, chat about college in the Barn and inquire about each other’s lives and work.
Really, attending Bread Loaf is a lot like experiencing a collective fever. Rarely do we get the opportunity to isolate ourselves on a mountain with 200 people who also desire above all to spend their time writing in the hopes that someone will read their words someday.
There is a joke amongst Bread Loafers that Robert Frost’s ghost haunts the writers’ conference. I am inclined to believe it, if only because of our habit of discussing him as if he were there made it seem like he really was inescapable. Frost, whose legacy (and Ripton home) are closely tied to the conference, attended Bread Loaf 29 times — so in some ways he haunted it when he was alive, too. Other writers to earn fellowships or faculty positions have ranged in genre and style from Toni Morrison to George R.R. Martin, John Irving to Eudora Welty.
It is a place that doesn’t really let you forget those who have come before you, not simply because we all want to stand in awe of these writers, but because, sitting in the little theater where our literary heroes have also sat, we can more easily imagine ourselves writing something great (maybe even something good).
“It was really enthralling being part of a tradition and history of quality writers,” Steve Chung ’21 said. “If you’re a poet like me, for example, mingling with fiction writers or nonfiction writers was a really wonderful experience. There were so many experiences that people brought to the table.”
I imagine there are as many answers to the question, “What was the best part of Bread Loaf?” as there are attendees, but I am sure that many people would agree with me in saying that it felt like both a relief and an inspiration to be surrounded by so many writers. Maybe we aren’t so crazy or deluded. Or at least, we are not alone in our craziness and delusions.
For the most part, Bread Loaf was simply fun. From the dances to the readings, the workshops to the hayride (apparently the only accurate part of “The Simpsons” episode parodying Bread Loaf), the Conference participants delighted in the warm weather, new friendships and joy of writing.
“Definitely apply,” Chung said when I asked him what he would say to anyone interested in the conference. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Nowhere else do you get to meet so many writers in one place. Even if you don’t necessarily think you’re going to go into writing professionally, you should apply.”
What I experienced at Bread Loaf represents the most valuable time I have had at Middlebury and I imagine many years from now when I look back on the time I spent in college, I will remember the August skies of Ripton and fields of goldenrod as vividly as I will recall the flurries of snow and late nights in the library.
(09/13/18 9:56am)
The Media Portrayals of Minorities Project is a research lab working to uncover the ways that media outlets cover minority groups around the world. Erik Bleich, professor of Political Science, has been researching this topic since 2012, using tone analysis and computer programs to study the different ways that minorities are represented in the print media.
Along with Bleich, Professor A. Maurits van der Veen at the College of William & Mary is a co-director of the project. The project also includes undergraduate student researchers, who can take a Winter Term course to study the methods and technologies necessary to conduct this work. Many students choose to continue their work in Bleich’s research lab during the academic year.
On the project’s website, staff write that the goal of their work is to “track and explain how and why media representations of groups shift over time, vary across place, or compare to one another.”
Previous topics that the project has studied include an analysis of the differences in the reports on sexual violence and misconduct during the so-called Monica Lewinsky scandal, and the varying words that media outlets use to describe Jews and Catholics.
At the moment, Bleich and members of the lab are writing a book about the way that Muslims are portrayed in the United States and across the world. They use newspaper databases like Lexis-Nexis, Factiva and ProQuest to gather articles, which they then run through a computer program to identify articles containing keywords associated with Islam.
Then, they study the tone of articles and determine whether they are positive or negative. This allows them to identify trends related to the overall portrayal of Muslims, or any minority group, in the media.
Bleich was inspired to start this project when researching Islamophobia and was curious if there was a way it could be quantified in media outlets. After he began working with students on this assignment, they were motivated to use their techniques to study other groups on a broader scale.
Asked about the media’s impact on people’s perceptions of minority groups, Bleich said that “most citizens do not have frequent or meaningful encounters with people that are very different from themselves, so their impressions are often formed primarily through the media.” He further explained that often these impressions “shape the interactions we have in society as a whole.”
Julien Souffrant ’19 said that his work at the project “was rewarding in the fact that it allowed me to do work that I believe could serve as a significant contribution to the field of politics and towards the conversation of media’s representation of minorities.”
While the Project has been working on some of these topics for many years, their evidence suggests that the media’s depiction of some minority groups has not changed much since the program began. Bleich said that articles about groups such as Muslims and Latinx people have not altered drastically over time, while articles about sexual assault have seen great changes in wording and tone since the time of Monica Lewinsky.
According to the piece on sexual violence and misconduct posted this month on the Project’s website by Mira Chugh ’20, news outlets are now more frequently using language that “frames [sexual violence] as a more systemic issue,” rather than an incidental one.
Bleich said that often their end results are often different than they originally anticipated. Given that members of the lab are constantly surprised by the outcomes, Bleich hopes that students can learn from their work that “all of our assumptions need to be tested before we can be sure they are right.”
More info on the lab can be found at mediaandminorities.org.
(08/29/18 4:33am)
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We spotted the marker of the day’s purpose to the left of the giant stone gates, a sign inscribed in black Sharpie: “Cheese Festival SOLD OUT."
We had decided some weeks before that a summer spent in Vermont called for a quintessential end. Attending the 10th Annual Vermont Cheesemaker’s Festival was our celebratory send-off. I had been studying French at one of the college’s language schools when I learned of the cheese event and immediately thought of my friend Griffin — a fellow French student, cheese lover, and a begrudging lactose intolerant. I sent him a text message with a picture of the poster, a quasi-ironic invitation that somehow evolved into our investing a New York-music-festival amount of money, all to indulge in a ritual well-suited to the state with the highest number of cheesemakers per capita.
The event was held at Shelburne Farms, which sits on 1,400 acres overlooking Lake Champlain. We quickly came to the realization that the ticket price wasn’t the only element of the Cheesemaker’s Festival that mimicked a music festival: with deft arm movements, volunteers directed vehicles to park in meticulous rows while colorful wristbands indicated the various tiers of prestige.
The leisurely hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. left many festival goers, like ourselves, rolling into the event about an hour late; sampling cheeses and ciders for six hours on a humid mid-August day seemed like overkill.
The shuttle bus rattled over the estate’s dirt paths, guiding us along the lake to the cavernous Coach Barn, a temporary temple of cheese. Dismounting the bus, we promptly received a branded tote bag and glasses for sampling wine and beer throughout the day.
Entering the first of two steamy tents and overtly overwhelmed, we were approached by an enthusiastic volunteer. “Not sure where to start?” he inquired. Nope, no idea. Hoping he would tell us there was some structure to the swarms of people flooding the nearly 200 vendors, we were told instead that there wasn’t a clear way to tackle the crowds or the cheese. “I’d suggest heading to a corner and just working your way through,” he offered.
We started at the far right with Jasper Hill Farm. The Northeast Kingdom producer is renowned for its on-site “cellars,” a 22,000-square-foot underground facility devoted to cheese maturation, also known as affinage. Its selection of a dozen cheeses ranged from the spoonable Harbison, a runny substance swaddled in strips of the innermost layer of tree bark to the nutty Haley Bazen Blue, which I deemed one of the day’s frontrunners.
Despite the volunteer’s advice, the crowd was no more penetrable at the far end of the tent. Fifteen minutes in, we had already brushed against a few too many sweaty shoulders for our liking. The aisles were congested and the cheese patrons overly excited. It was the dairy equivalent of a mosh pit.
But I was undeterred. My lifelong love affair with cheese dates to my earliest months. My first two-word combination, in fact, was “more cheese,” and by age four, I was attacking tubs of cream cheese with a spoon. In middle school, while other kids were stuck on Swiss and American, I was consuming ripe slabs of sheep’s milk cheese from the Hudson Valley and stinky rounds of aged goat from southern France.
Despite my amorous relationship with cheese, I was out of my league here. This event was filled with professional cheese purveyors who had come from across the country to sample potential candidates for their shelves. As we ducked out of the tent in search of fresh air, we made our way into the Coach Barn, which had workshops and seminars led by experts in the field. Intrigued, I leaned through the doorway during “The Future of Cheese with Rory Stamp,” only to hear him discussing something along the lines of “prime time cheddaring.” Other seminars included “Cheese Science 101” and “What is a Cheesemonger?”
The festival went well beyond cheese and beer to encompass other forms of dairy. In the courtyard of the Coach Barn, Griffin and I stumbled upon a homemade butter demonstration. Gripping clear, round basins, children churned handles round and round, turning cream into butter. A woman behind the stand offered us sweet-peppercorn and chive butter created moments earlier.
Of course, if anything can reinvigorate two overwhelmed cheese tourists, it is soft butter and fresh air. We were finally ready to head back into the tent. This time, we had a clear goal of finding the makings for a picnic. We spotted Red Hen Baking’s stand, a bakery located just outside of Montpelier, and were instantly allured by the bread’s offbeat ingredients. The company adds polenta or potatoes to bolster flavor and texture.
Adjacent to Red Hen Baking’s stand, family-owned Parish Hill Creamery handed out cheese samples while explaining the unique source of its milk. Co-owners Rachel Schall and Peter Dixon use cream produced at the Putney School’s farm. In keeping with the school’s philosophy, students not only study agriculture but also handle chores on the farm, which include milking cows. That leaves them with a surplus of fresh milk. Parish Hill transforms this raw milk into memorable cheeses, with whimsical names like Humble, Reverie and West-West Blue.
After sampling a dozen more cheeses, we were feeling more than a little sated as the crowds began to thin. At this pause in the action, Griffin remembered to take another lactaid pill. Then we walked past the V.I.P. area where we spied a man, semi-comatose, sprawled on a lawn chair sleeping with his mouth wide open. Hoping to avoid the same fate, we walked toward the lake. As the buzz of cheesemongers faded into the background, the lake’s surface mirrored the gathering clouds above. Griffin waded in up to his knees and, without saying a word, dunked his head in the water.
(05/09/18 11:53pm)
Last weekend, the Middlebury Theatre and Dance Department presented “Fifth Planet,” the Senior 700 acting presentation of Eliza Renner ’18 and Connor Wright ’18. Katie Mayopoulos ’18 directed the play as part of her Independent 500-level Theatre Project.
The piece was written by Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright David Auburn and was published in his book “Fifth Planet and Other Plays” in 2002. Since its premiere at Beowulf Alley Theatre in Tucson in 2008, the play has been staged by many production houses across the country.
“Fifth Planet” explores the story of two observatory workers, Veronica (Renner ’18) and Mike (Wright ’18). The show is staged on a hill and the scenes move from non-communicative dialogues between the two to an unlikely friendship blossoming from their love for the stars and the discoveries that the cosmos hold for them. Despite their initial setbacks, the two finally turn to each other to find comfort in their lonely lives.
“This play reminds us that while we may be literally star-struck by the cosmos above us, perhaps what is most deserving of our attention are the people around us,” Mayopoulos said,
Indeed, the production not only showed the importance of exploring the unknown but also showed the audience the need to explore human relationships deeply, no matter how familiar we consider them to be.
The play begins with Mark, a janitor for the observatory, setting his telescope on the top of a hill. It is then followed by quick darkness, signaling the ending of the scene. These initial scenes of Mark, solitarily standing on the hill, peering over his astronomy books are then followed by quick encounters of a busy Veronica, on her way to work at the observatory. The two only begin to exchange words after the fifth scene, when Mike looks at her confused, to which she says,: “I’m on my way to work.”
Over the span of 65 minutes, this initially awkward relationship progressed into a friendship with its fair share of fights and misunderstandings. An arrogant Veronica and a misunderstood Mike clash when he loses his job due to her lack of trust in his abilities and her overestimation of the abilities of her other colleague and friends.
As the show progresses, Veronica begins to trust Mike, acknowledging his efforts to track down an unknown object as exemplary, a 180-degree flip from her first comment about his inability to understand the stars as he lacks a graduate degree.
Auburn includes many aspects of a working experience in this play that are often pushed aside. Veronica grapples with her lack of recognition as a female scientist in the male-dominated field of astrophysics while Mike faces the difficulties of marriage for an unemployed man. These narratives are relatable for many individuals across working contexts.
“Through the play, Auburn implores that individuals constantly revise their opinions as he contends that ‘you have to track something to know what it is.’” Mayopoulos said.
Aside from the relatable storyline, the set of “Fifth Planet” was indeed a marvel. With lights attached to strings that glittered as stars and differently elevated circles that symbolize a hill, Grace Zhang ’18 showcased a masterpiece for her 500-level Independent Project in lighting.
“Fifth Planet” demonstrates what unlikely friendships arise when we take the time to communicate with people outside of our comfort zones. This play reflects how admitting our mistakes and swallowing our pride helps mend broken lives as well how one friend can become a source of comfort and light through life’s perils.
(05/09/18 11:16pm)
“To be perfectly honest, given the talent on both teams, I think the match could have gone either way,” said Christina Puccinelli ’19 after the women’s tennis team’s 5–4 loss to Williams back on April 7. “They happened to come out on top this time, but we came away from the match with absolute confidence that we have what it takes to win in the future.”
On Sunday, May 6, the two teams met again, this time in the Nescac championship at the Bay Road Tennis Club in Amherst, Massachusetts. Once again top-seeded Williams (18–0) prevailed, this time by a score of 5–3, to win its third consecutive conference crown over second-seeded Middlebury (14–3).
But Puccinelli’s words rang true once again on Sunday. Despite losing the match and being swept in doubles, the Panthers outscored Williams because all their singles wins came in straight sets, while their losses all went down to the wire, requiring the full three sets to finish.
Trailing the Ephs 3–0 after doubles, the Panthers mounted a comeback, winning the first two singles matches to pull within one. All at once, Middlebury had fought its way back into the contest. Christina Puccinelli ’19 and Maddi Stow ’18 bounced back from first-set losses to win their second sets, and Catherine Blazye ’20 won her first set in dominant fashion, 6–1.
For the second time this season, the match between the conference’s best could have gone either way, but Williams outlasted Middlebury to win its sixth championship in the past eight years, riding its doubles’ dominance to victory even after the Panthers’ surge in singles play.
Going into the playoffs, the Panthers knew they had some work to do in doubles after losing two out of three against Amherst in the last match of the regular season.
“We did not come out as strong as we would have liked in doubles, so this week we are going to focus a lot on our doubles play,” said Katy Hughes ’20 after the Amherst match. “We want to — we must — have a stronger start.”
In their semifinal match against Wesleyan on Saturday, the Panthers came out stronger than they did against Amherst, winning two of three doubles matches — the only loss came to the reigning NCAA doubles champions, Eudice Chong and Victoria Yu, in the first slot.
In fact, just like in Middlebury’s first match against Wesleyan, Chong and Yu were the only Cardinals to score victories on Saturday, as the Panthers controlled the rest of the ladder to win 5–3 and earn a spot in the conference championship match the next day.
Stow and Catherine Blazye ’20 won 8–2 in second doubles, while Heather Boehm ’20 and Ann Martin Skelly ’21 remained undefeated as a pairing by defeating their opponents 8–6. Blazye, Boehm and Stow all won in straight sets to set up Middlebury’s match with Williams, who shut out Tufts 5–0 in the other semifinal to move into the championship.
Middlebury could not replicate Saturday’s doubles success against Williams on Sunday. The Ephs leapt out to what seemed to be a commanding 3–0 lead for the winners of 30 consecutive matches overall, a streak dating back more than a year to April 8, 2017, when Middlebury beat Williams 6–3.
But then the Panthers made a move of their own. Hughes made a statement by dominating Leah Bush 6–2, 6–0 in second singles. Then Boehm, after trailing 5–2 in the first set of her match with Chloe Henderson in the third slot, rattled off 11 straight games to win in straight sets as well. Both Hughes and Boehm pushed their doubles struggles out of their minds to bring Middlebury back within one match of Williams.
“It is really hard to lose all 3 doubles to a team as good as Williams,” said head coach Rachel Kahan. “But after the doubles points, regardless of who we are playing and what happened in the doubles, our mindset is that the match resets. We look to go out and win all six singles matches.”
Meanwhile, Puccinelli lost her first set 6–1 to Juli Raventos in first singles, as did Stow, 7–6, to Korina Neveux in the sixth slot. But both of them bounced back too, as Stow wasted no time winning her second set 6–1, and Puccinelli came back in her second set to win in a tiebreaker 7–6 (7–5).
Williams regained some hold of the match when Neveux beat Stow in the third set to put Williams one win away from the conference championship. But Blazye countered in fourth singles, winning 6–1, 6–1 over Mia Gancayco to keep Middlebury alive.
Raventos won Sunday’s decisive match, outlasting Puccinelli in a three-set victory, 6–1, 6–7 (5–7), to secure Williams’ third-straight Nescac crown. At that point, Skylar Schossberger ’20 led Julia Cancio 3–0 in the first set of their match, but they stopped when Williams clinched the match.
Since Williams last lost in that match to the Panthers over 13 months ago, the Ephs have won one national title and two conference championships, and will enter this month’s NCAAs 18–0.
But Middlebury inched a little bit closer on Sunday. The Panthers dominated three singles matches, led in a fourth, and lost in three sets in the other two.
“The team fought extremely hard, and I felt the belief that we could win through the whole match,” said Kahan. “Every match with Williams has been close and has come down to a couple of points.”
More than anything else, Sunday’s match demonstrated the fickle nature of sports.
“Once again, the results could have gone either way, and once again we drew the short end of the stick,” Puccinelli said.
She and the rest of the Panthers remain firmly convinced that they can beat Williams and any other of the top teams in the country. Simply viewing Sunday’s match as a loss is a waste of time because of how well Middlebury played.
“My team competed with energy, composer and grit, and I could not be more proud,” said Puccinelli. “We came out with energy and determination, and we did not waver in either throughout the full five-hour battle.”
Not only did the Panthers play extremely good tennis, they did so in the face of adversity after falling into a daunting 3–0 hole.
Middlebury’s full body of work this season is much more representative than one loss. And because of their hugely successful spring, the Panthers will host one of the NCAA Regional brackets, starting today and running to Saturday, May 12. The Panthers have a bye through the first round of the seven-team draw and will play their first match tomorrow. No. 18 Skidmore is the only other ranked team in the regional.
If the Panthers win on Friday and Saturday, they will advance to the quarterfinals which will be held in Claremont, California. The Panthers are one of five Nescac teams in the NCAA tournament, along with Williams, Wesleyan, Amherst and Tufts. And Middlebury and Williams are on opposite sides of the bracket, meaning a rematch between the two squads would not come until the national championship.
Middlebury has demonstrated throughout the season it is one of the nation’s top teams, having defeated No. 5 Wesleyan (twice), No. 6 Tufts, No. 7 Pomona-Pitzer and No. 8 Amherst, while giving No. 2 Williams two of the biggest challenges the Ephs faced all spring. And it’s become increasingly clear how little separates Middlebury from Williams, and the other two teams ranked ahead of them, No. 3 Claremont-Mudd-Scripps and No. 1 Emory. CMS beat Middlebury 7–2 on March 30, but that feels like the distant past, given how well the Panthers played in the Nescac.
“I believe that the results in the final rounds will simply come down to who wants it more,” Puccinelli said.
Sunday’s loss stoked the Panthers’ fire even more.
“Each opponent we face from here on out will be determined and resilient, since a loss means the end of a season,” said Puccinelli. “We love the challenge and want the title more than we ever have.”
In 2003, Middlebury qualified for its first NCAA tournament. Two seasons later, the Panthers reached the semifinals of the tournament, but then did not return to that point for another 11 seasons, when they were one of the final four teams in 2016. Last season, Middlebury reached the semifinals again, where Williams beat the Panthers. The Ephs have now beaten the Panthers in four consecutive matches, while CMS has defeated Middlebury six straight times and Emory has knocked them out of the tournament three times since 2013.
To put it lightly, the Panthers want to beat these teams ranked above them. And they have shown they can compete with them. Is now the time for the Panthers to finally conquer the perennially dominant DIII teams?
(05/03/18 11:49pm)
The women’s tennis team continued to roll in their last match of the regular season, when they defeated No. 8 Amherst 6–3 on Saturday, April 28, for their eighth straight victory. Now they turn to the Nescac playoffs, which the Panthers enter as the second seed behind undefeated Williams.
Even with Williams’ dominance this season and in the past, the Panthers firmly believe they can parlay the play that has led to their recent winning streak into the first Nescac championship in program history, avenging a loss to Williams in the process if necessary.
“We are very excited to have a potential Williams rematch,” said Katy Hughes ’20. “We lost in the regular season to Williams 4-5, so we are looking forward to this rematch. However, we are focusing on one match at a time. But if we do play Williams I am confident that we will win.”
Since its loss to Williams on April 7, Middlebury had won seven matches in a row leading up to the Amherst match last Saturday, playing its best tennis of the season to beat Quinnipiac, a DI opponent, No. 18 Skidmore, No. 14 Bowdoin and No. 5 Wesleyan.
Their match on Saturday provided the Panthers one more test before they enter the highly anticipated postseason. Amherst’s 10–6 record this spring was deceiving because the Mammoths had lost their matches to the other six teams ranked in the nation’s top seven besides Middlebury. Their No. 8 ranking spoke to how Amherst stuck with many of the nation’s top teams even though the matches ended up as losses. They lost to No. 1 Emory, No. 2 Williams and No. 3 Claremont-Mudd-Scripps 6–3, and No. 6 Tufts and No. 7 Pomona Pitzer 5–4.
The Mammoths leapt ahead of Middlebury on Saturday by taking two of the three doubles matches. Actually, Middlebury’s pair of Heather Boehm ’20 and Ann Martin Skelly ’21 swarmed Amherst’s No. 3 pair to win the first match of the day 8–2. After Skelly stepped into Christina Puccinelli ’19’s doubles spot in the middle of the season, she and Boehm are a perfect 6–0 in doubles.
“Although losing Puccinelli is definitely hard, Skelly has really stepped up to the task,” Boehm said. “As a first-year she shows no signs of nerves and plays all out. We are definitely now really comfortable with each other’s games and are confident going into the weekend with good results, despite the more recent switch.”
But Amherst’s first two doubles teams outlasted Middlebury’s top two pairs by scores of 8–6 and 8–5 to give the hosts their lead.
The Panthers know they cannot afford to come out flat in the postseason, when it is crucial to be sound up and down the lineup.
“We came out not as strong as would have liked to in doubles,” said Hughes. “This week we are going to focus a lot on our doubles play so we can have a stronger start.”
To win against the Nescac schools and the nation’s best teams, Middlebury must be prepared to pounce on opportunities at any doubles or singles spot.
On Saturday, that happened across the board in singles, where Middlebury took the match over. Maddi Stow ’20 finished first by dominating Avery Wagman 6–2, 6–1 in the sixth slot. Catherine Blazye ’20 followed up her teammate with an equally convincing 6–0, 6–2 win at No. 4, and Skylar Schossberger completed the sweep of the bottom half of the ladder by winning in straight sets, 6–1, 7–6 (7–4).
Ahead 4–2, Boehm clinched the match with her second win of the day in a 6–2, 6–4 victory in the third slot.
These four Panthers have not lost since Middlebury’s last loss, at Williams on Saturday, April 7, combining to go 21–0 in singles since that point to fuel the team’s winning streak.
“We have worked so hard this entire season and are thrilled to see that our efforts are paying off,” said Puccinelli.
Katy Hughes ’20 added one more straight-sets victory, winning 6–2, 6–4 like Boehm, at No. 2 for the Panthers’ fifth singles win on Saturday, before Puccinelli fell at No. 1.
Middlebury is very confident entering Nescacs, and rightfully so, given their play on Saturday and over the last month.
“While we’re still working on individual projects and improving our game on a day-to-day basis, we are all very comfortable with our level of play at this point in the year,” Puccinelli said.
That comfort level has become increasingly apparent over Middlebury’s latest run in Nescac play, which the Panthers attribute to their commitment since last season ended.
“After months of training and perfecting our fitness, we are now just enjoying the level of play that we get to see at practice every day,” said Puccinelli.
Middlebury’s comfort in their play on the court and confidence in themselves emerge in their words. But Hughes is also quick to point out the Panthers must take one match at a time, continuing to practice the way that brought them to this point.
“I believe that all of us are going to work very hard this week on and off the court,” Hughes said. “So we can go into Nescacs feeling confident.”
Middlebury’s confidence is not unfounded: it comes from their success thus far this season, their dedication to improving in practice and in every match, and their trust that a relentless work ethic will pay off.
“Even though we played great tennis this past weekend, we know that our best tennis is still ahead of us,” said Hughes.
Middlebury have a bye through the first round of the Nescac playoffs, which Amherst is hosting this season, and will play the winner of third-seeded Wesleyan and sixth-seeded Bowdoin on Saturday, May 5.
If the bracket holds, the Panthers will play Wesleyan on Saturday, whom they beat 6–3 in the regular season.
“After playing them two weekends ago, this is definitely not a team to lose sight of,” Boehm said. “They are loud and have strong games. We trust our singles but went down in doubles last time so we definitely have been working on that this week.”
If they win on Saturday, the Panthers will play for the conference championship on Sunday, May 6 at 9 a.m.
In the past two seasons, the Panthers lost to Williams in the Nescac championship. In 2016, Williams won 5–0, and in 2017, 5–4. Here’s to another rematch this season.
(05/03/18 5:29pm)
The women’s tennis team continued to roll in their last match of the regular season, when they defeated No. 8 Amherst 6–3 on Saturday, April 28 for their eighth straight victory. Now they turn to the Nescac playoffs, which the Panthers enter as the second seed behind undefeated Williams.
Even with Williams’ dominance this season and in the past, the Panthers firmly believe they can parlay the play that has led to their recent winning streak into the first Nescac championship in program history, avenging a loss to Williams in the process if necessary.
“We are very excited to have a potential Williams rematch,” said Katy Hughes ’20. “We lost in the regular season to Williams 4-5, so we are looking forward to this rematch. However, we are focusing on one match at a time. But if we do play Williams I am confident that we will win.”
Since its loss to Williams on April 7, Middlebury had won seven matches in a row leading up to the Amherst match last Saturday, playing its best tennis of the season to beat Quinnipiac, a DI opponent, No. 18 Skidmore, No. 14 Bowdoin and No. 5 Wesleyan.
Their match on Saturday provided the Panthers one more test before they enter the highly anticipated postseason. Amherst’s 10–6 record this spring was deceiving because the Mammoths had lost their matches to the other six teams ranked in the nation’s top seven besides Middlebury. Their No. 8 ranking spoke to how Amherst stuck with many of the nation’s top teams even though the matches ended up as losses. They lost to No. 1 Emory, No. 2 Williams and No. 3 Claremont-Mudd-Scripps 6–3, and No. 6 Tufts and No. 7 Pomona Pitzer 5–4.
The Mammoths leapt ahead of Middlebury on Saturday by taking two of the three doubles matches. Actually, Middlebury’s pair of Heather Boehm ’20 and Ann Martin Skelly ’21 swarmed Amherst’s No. 3 pair to win the first match of the day 8–2. After Skelly stepped into Christina Puccinelli ’19’s doubles spot in the middle of the season, she and Boehm are a perfect 6–0 in doubles.
“Although losing Puccinelli is definitely hard, Skelly has really stepped up to the task,” Boehm said. “As a first-year she shows no signs of nerves and plays all out. We are definitely now really comfortable with each other’s games and are confident going into the weekend with good results, despite the more recent switch.”
But Amherst’s first two doubles teams outlasted Middlebury’s top two pairs by scores of 8–6 and 8–5 to give the hosts their lead.
The Panthers know they cannot afford to come out flat in the postseason, when it is crucial to be sound up and down the lineup.
“We came out not as strong as would have liked to in doubles,” said Hughes. “This week we are going to focus a lot on our doubles play so we can have a stronger start.”
To win against the Nescac schools and the nation’s best teams, Middlebury must be prepared to pounce on opportunities at any doubles or singles spot.
On Saturday, that happened across the board in singles, where Middlebury took the match over. Maddi Stow ’20 finished first by dominating Avery Wagman 6–2, 6–1 in the sixth slot. Catherine Blazye ’20 followed up her teammate with an equally convincing 6–0, 6–2 win at No. 4, and Skylar Schossberger completed the sweep of the bottom half of the ladder by winning in straight sets, 6–1, 7–6 (7–4).
Ahead 4–2, Boehm clinched the match with her second win of the day in a 6–2, 6–4 victory in the third slot.
These four Panthers have not lost since Middlebury’s last loss, at Williams on Saturday, April 7, combining to go 21–0 in singles since that point to fuel the team’s winning streak.
“We have worked so hard this entire season and are thrilled to see that our efforts are paying off,” said Puccinelli.
Katy Hughes ’20 added one more straight-sets victory, winning 6–2, 6–4 like Boehm, at No. 2 for the Panthers’ fifth singles win on Saturday, before Puccinelli fell at No. 1.
Middlebury is very confident entering Nescacs, and rightfully so, given their play on Saturday and over the last month.
“While we're still working on individual projects and improving our game on a day-to-day basis, we are all very comfortable with our level of play at this point in the year,” Puccinelli said.
That comfort level has become increasingly apparent over Middlebury’s latest run in Nescac play, which the Panthers attribute to their commitment since last season ended.
“After months of training and perfecting our fitness, we are now just enjoying the level of play that we get to see at practice every day,” said Puccinelli.
Middlebury’s comfort in their play on the court and confidence in themselves emerge in their words. But Hughes is also quick to point out the Panthers must take one match at a time, continuing to practice the way that brought them to this point.
“I believe that all of us are going to work very hard this week on and off the court,” Hughes said. “So we can go into Nescacs feeling confident.”
Middlebury’s confidence is not unfounded: it comes from their success thus far this season, their dedication to improving in practice and in every match, and their trust that a relentless work ethic will pay off.
“Even though we played great tennis this past weekend, we know that our best tennis is still ahead of us,” said Hughes.
Middlebury have a bye through the first round of the Nescac playoffs, which Amherst is hosting this season, and will play the winner of third-seeded Wesleyan and sixth-seeded Bowdoin on Saturday, May 5.
If the bracket holds, the Panthers will play Wesleyan on Saturday, whom they beat 6–3 in the regular season.
“After playing them two weekends ago, this is definitely not a team to lose sight of,” Boehm said. “They are loud and have strong games. We trust our singles but went down in doubles last time so we definitely have been working on that this week.”
If they win on Saturday, the Panthers will play for the conference championship on Sunday, May 6 at 9 a.m.
In the past two seasons, the Panthers lost to Williams in the Nescac championship. In 2016, Williams won 5–0, and in 2017, 5–4. Here’s to another rematch this season.
(05/02/18 11:01pm)
CW: Domestic Abuse
Andrew Sebald:
I have one older half-sister, one younger sister, a mother and an abusive father. My mother is an alumna of Middlebury, which is what spurred my interest in Middlebury College.
When I was 14 years old, my mom and dad divorced. The separation was violent. My father had always shown abusive tendencies throughout my life, but his anger had intensified significantly the few months before. He started to physically abuse my mother and older sister, and verbally abused me when I even considered challenging his authoritarian control over my family. On the night before the separation, he called the cops on my mom. She had hidden his eleven guns somewhere in fear that he might transition from fists to bullets.
The police strongly encouraged my father to leave that night. For the sake of wanting to maintain our relationship, I tried my best throughout high school to make inroads with my father. All efforts were unsuccessful, but he still lingered in my family’s life. My mom has testified numerous times in court to prevent him from returning with his abuse and guns. He remains in our lives till this day, and I know he probably will be until my own death.
Middlebury Student Financial Services is complicit in that.
My background, although it may not seem to have much to do with my financial situation, provides necessary information for what later unfolded. By the time I applied for Middlebury my senior year of high school, I had not communicated with or seen my father for the better part of a year. I applied Early Decision 1 for Middlebury. My mom and I absolutely trusted that Student Financial Services (SFS) would grant us sufficient financial aid. There is a “need-blind policy,” after all. After I found out about my acceptance, my mother and I were ecstatic. We truly believed that we would qualify for the non-custodial waiver form for the College Scholarship Service (CSS) Profile.
A crucial part of the CSS Profile for any Middlebury student with divorced parents lies in the non-custodial waiver. When Middlebury SFS assesses the financial information for all students, they assess the income of both parents or guardians partly through the CSS Profile. If you have a non-custodial parent who is not in contact with you, getting them to fill out their part of the profile obviously becomes an issue. The non-custodial waiver’s purpose is to waive the non-custodial parent’s information from the CSS Profile, so that only the custodial parent’s financial information will be assessed. There are conditions, including: more than ten years have to have passed since the student has been in contact with their non-custodial parent. Since my father had abused my family in the last ten years, we didn’t qualify.
We filled out the waiver. We were devastated upon receiving a negative response. Student Financial Services contacted my mom and said that if my father didn’t fill out his part of the CSS Profile, I would not be eligible for financial aid, and therefore effectively enrollment at Middlebury for the 2015–2016 academic year. My mom desperately tried to explain to Student Financial Services that my father was not who he seemed to be. Providing court-ordered evidence, my mother informed SFS by email that “since [2012], my ex-husband has not been allowed to have further contact with the children. I do not know what other kind of documentation you need to consider me a single-parent.”
Student Financial Services ignored us. In an email dated Nov. 18, 2014, my mother offered to provide the 911 call record from when my father called the police on her, along with other reports made by therapists and a parent coordinator, to illustrate my father’s abusive nature. SFS never replied.
Instead, they asked to contact my father directly. My father stated he would “do his part” in paying the college for my tuition on the condition that I would meet with him to discuss my college plans with him. In an email dated Dec. 16, 2014, Student Financial Services instructed me to meet with my father and convince him to fill out his part of my CSS Profile. They apparently believed he had the best of intentions.
Due to binding Early Decision, I had no choice but to accept and meet with my father. We talked. The conversation was in public, so thankfully nothing happened. Still, he did not fill out the form until the day after he received news that I had seen a psychiatrist due to severe anxiety and depression arising from the uncertainty of whether or not I would be enrolled at Middlebury College.
Finally, we got our financial aid. My father had signed his name, so I could finally start at the school of my dreams. That was enough. After being forced to meet with him, attend follow-up counseling sessions, and tolerate anxiety-inducing waiting, my mom and I were glad that the process was done. But since we had not qualified for the non-custodial waiver, since I had been in contact with him during the “last ten years,” my mother would have to cover the family contribution burden for both her and my father’s incomes out of her one salary. She makes much less than my father.
My father, to this day, does not contribute a cent.
During the summer after freshman year, my mom informed me that I would have to take a semester off. Paying for the equivalent of two people had severely affected our financial situation. My mom and I called and emailed SFS. We urged them to revise our award substantially, so I could afford to continue attending Middlebury.
SFS wouldn’t budge. Even though my counselor, court-ordered family counselor, and our parent coordinator all showed evidence that my father was not fit to be a custodial parent, Student Financial Services simply said, “Unfortunately, we are not able to change our decision as your father’s information must be included in our decision for you” in an email dated July 6, 2016. They recommended I talk to my commons dean about taking a semester off.
In J-term 2017, we implored Student Financial Services again. My mom sent a letter to the dean of students at the time, Katy Smith Abbott, who was sympathetic to my situation. She met with me, and later contacted SFS’s Kim Downs-Burns to talk about my circumstances. I talked with Downs-Burns, and explained how significantly SFS making me go to meet my father had impacted both me and my family. I left the office feeling optimistic about the conversation. Maybe the situation would finally be resolved. But when I got our second financial aid revision back, we still were unable to afford the semester. The financial aid was not enough. To this day, I still don’t know why.
Thus, I was forced to take a “gap semester” from Middlebury in fall 2017.
In the end, none of our efforts made any difference. Repeated calls, emails and meetings, and yet we were back to square one. We had talked to the dean of students, a representative of the administration, and yet still ended with the same result of insufficient financial aid due to the refusal of SFS to consider my family’s special circumstance. The despair made me remember what a Student Financial Services employee had told us over the phone. I asked, “If my mom went to court with my father and proved that he was not paying child support, would financial services change my financial aid?”
The employee: “We don’t assess financial aid based on who’s paying for tuition, but the ability that both parents have to pay tuition.”
I would hear that same sentence countless times in the future.
Travis Wayne Sanderson:
The same sentence was said multiple times in Community Council, as well.
In early April 2017, Andrew approached me about his story. I urged him to present his case to Community Council (CC). The Council is the only real conversation body on campus that combines all constituencies — students, staff and faculty — and can summon staff members to report on their policies and activities in various departments on campus. We could get to the bottom of the issue. As Co-Chairs that semester, Katy Smith Abbott and I arranged times for both SFS and Andrew to speak to the Council.
On April 11, SFS’s Kim Downs-Burns and Michael McLaughlin were asked to come to Community Council to answer questions. They emphasized at three separate times that financial aid was assessed based on “ability to pay” and not “willingness to pay.” When asked why, the answer was always some variation of “it’s what our peer schools do.”
According to CC minutes, SFS said that each student’s financial aid case is looked at “individually,” each case taken into account as a “whole picture,” accounting for the “complexity in family situations accordingly.” Exceptions can be made, in theory, to stringent policies in the case of — for example — abusive parents. This was stated at 5:02 p.m. (just to be precise), April 11, and is on public record.
Their words are completely at odds with how they treated Andrew’s case.
On April 18, Andrew explained the above story to Community Council. On April 25, Maleka Stewart ’19 and Charles Rainey ’19 presented a recommendation on the matter of Student Financial Services and the non-custodial waiver. They recognized one of the main issues as the ten-year requirement, which Stewart described as “obscure and unattainable.”
SFS became defensive. On May 2, Katy Smith Abbott reported conversation she had had that week with Kim Downs-Burns to Community Council. According to that meeting’s minutes, Middlebury’s standards for financial aid consideration are mandated by its membership in the 568 Group consortium of “need-blind” institutions.
They reported that if willingness to pay is the rule, then anyone can take advantage of the system to get better financial aid. However, if SFS is indeed capable of accounting for the “complexity in family situations accordingly,” they can certainly distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims.
According to the minutes, SFS also informed Katy Smith Abbott that “[SFS’s] policies don’t need to be fixed.”
The 2016–2017 Community Council ended the year without passing the recommendation. We were prevented from action by a combination of time constraints and bylaws confusion. We officially asked the fall 2017 Community Council to review Middlebury’s financial aid policies, particularly the non-custodial waiver form, when the new semester began. Kyle Wright, the fall 2017 co-chair, agreed verbally to take up the case on May 8, 2017.
However, when fall came around, the council apparently had other priorities. According to CC minutes from Oct. 16, 2017, Co-Chair Wright only mentioned the issue in the context of reforming Community Council’s own bylaws. The non-custodial waiver problem itself was left unsolved, and SFS’s questionable policy and policy enforcement unpursued.
I prompted co-chair Baishakhi Taylor and co-chair Tina Brook ’18 to return to the case as co-chair Brook entered her position in J-Term 2018. Co-chair Taylor responded to me in an email dated Feb. 5, 2018, that she “understood Kim Downs-Burns addressed [the issue] when she came to CC last Spring and had a detailed conversation about it.” Co-chair Brook did not reply at all. It is quite possible that they had not read the minutes from spring 2017 that quite clearly illustrated the conversation remained unfinished.
In any case, Community Council also dropped the ball.
Andrew Sebald:
I felt manipulated and lied to by Middlebury’s Student Financial Services. As I stated before, both my mother and I did as much as we could to prove that my father was someone who was not interested in paying for my education, but for almost two years they seemed to brush our questions and qualms aside as if meaningless. Two years is an excruciating amount of time necessary in order to schedule and have a 30-minute appointment with the right person to tell them that the financial aid plan you have been given is thousands of dollars more than you can afford. Policy — which, as Travis noted, is questionably followed — was enough to force me to speak to my abusive father and continue to drain my family and my capacity to continue at Middlebury College.
This article is specifically a critique of the policies of Student Financial Services and how they are being enforced. It is also a critique of the actions of bodies complicit in the continued existence of this problem, like the 2017–2018 Community Council, which failed to take up the issue again until very recently. We hope that the Council follows through with the recommendation they are currently discussing, and returns to supporting students with non-custodial parents on financial aid more actively. The policy has a large impact on the lives of several students here on campus, and the problem cannot continue to remain unspoken within the sunken pockets of Middlebury College students and their parents.
We ask that Middlebury re-consider how it evaluates non-custodial waiver form requests. If “willingness to pay” is not an acceptable rubric, then we ask Student Financial Services to actually follow through on their policy to take the “whole picture” of a student’s complex family situation into account when approving non-custodial waiver forms. Since SFS already claims to do this, as they stated in Community Council, following through should not be an issue.
Secondly, we ask that Student Financial Services look into renegotiating the requirement that non-custodial parents and students not be in contact for ten years to qualify for the waiver. SFS — as well as the 568 Group generally — need to reform financial aid policies that have been put in place before to better suit the needs for students like me at their schools or they need to stop lying about successfully supporting a “need-blind” policy.
Finally, we ask Student Financial Services to reevaluate how they treat student financial aid cases. Instead of treating cases like mine as they do, they could make an active effort to maintain a good relationship with students with non-custodial parents on financial aid at Middlebury. The process is opaque, inaccessible, and decides like a divine force the entire college experience of many students on campus. I applied to this school thinking that our financial aid would be fair based on our circumstances. I applied to this school feeling that my mom would not have to take out loan after loan in order for me to attend here. Frankly, if I had known what was to come, I highly doubt I would have applied to Middlebury College.
(04/26/18 8:53pm)
On April 8, the SGA passed a bill requesting the addition of a second student constituent to the college board of overseers. This initiative arose in response to what the bill identifies as “limited and lacking student representation and consequential engagement with the Middlebury college board of trustees,” and aims to increase student involvement in the college’s decision-making process.
But the Patton administration has final say in the matter. In the spirit of collective governance, the administration should embrace the plan — but not just stop there. Inside and outside the boardroom, trustees need more points of contact with students, especially when they make decisions that impact the student experience.
Middlebury’s governance structure can be confusing, but in short the trustees oversee the institution’s long-term health. The board of trustees is split up into three boards of overseers: one for the undergraduate college, one for the language and abroad schools, and one for the Monterey Institute. Several trustees make up the college board of overseers, as well as one faculty member, one staff member and a number of partners.
As it stands, the SGA president serves as the sole student constituent to the college board of overseers enjoys no voting power. This bill aims not only to add a second student, but to grant both the ability to vote. In addition, the board of trustees has six standing committees: prudential, programs, resources, trusteeship and governance, and risk and strategy. If approved, the plan will add student representatives to the programs, risk and strategy standing committees.
On Monday, the editorial board met with the co-authors of the resolution, SGA president Jin Sohn ’18 and chief of staff Ish Alam ’18 to discuss the value of student constituents.
“Speaking from my own time on the board,” Sohn said, “I can attest to the fact that there’s not a lot of student representation.” Still, she went on to detail how her experiences with trustees have been positive.
“I feel as though they always want the conversation to keep going on,” she said, “like they’re genuinely interested in what students have to say.”
Still, the trustees can always benefit from firsthand input about campus life — input that extends beyond informal meals and into the boardroom itself.
The bill aims to increase the term length of student constituents as well, a smart way to better integrate students onto the board. Under the current system, the SGA president serves on the board for a single year (in other words, for three meetings). Under the new bill, this term would be extended to two years, such that student constituents overlap for a year. This is a sensible solution to ensuring the kind of continuity that faculty and staff constituents already have.
As the bill proposes, students should be better prepared for the processes involved with sitting on the board. They would be able to more effectively establish meaningful relationships with other board members. This is crucial; in the past, Sohn explained, the board has been against having a larger student proxy because board members have to feel comfortable in the room in order to engage in constructive conversations. With longer terms, both board members and students will feel more established in their roles, allowing each to speak freely.
This plan would make students privy to upcoming changes, and thus better able to stand up for student interests when it matters. This is particularly important with standing committees, where many of the ideas which actually come into effect on campus originate. For instance, when the construction of a new temporary building to house the computer science department was first floated, no student was present. Since such a change will affect students’ lives, this seems like an unacceptable disconnect.
Voting power is perhaps the most democratic way to give students more say in Middlebury’s governance. “There’s indisputable value when it comes to having a student in the room,” Alam said. While he and Sohn acknowledged that voting power may be a long shot with this administration, we commend the SGA for including the idea. Though it may seem ideal, it’s actually feasible. A substantial student voice in college affairs is necessary; even better if it were met with voting power.
The bill specifies the appointment of two student constituents. Indeed, it’s difficult to pick two students to stand in for such a diverse student body. We urge the SGA to consider carefully who would best serve as student constituents — students of color, for example, or those who have demonstrated a passion for Middlebury but might not be considered a “typical” student. Also, the two year term might eliminate juniors who want to go abroad. To that end, it might make sense to elect rising seniors, who could serve their last year and then the year after they graduate.
The SGA’s plan must be part of a larger project of widening communication channels between the board of trustees and students. This means more frequent events, both informal meals and focused meetings — not only with athletes or first-generation students but a wider sampling of Middlebury students. Before deciding policy on particular issues, like divestment, the trustees could even invite knowledgeable students to present in the boardroom — where the decisions themselves are made.
Finally, we call for more clarity and transparency within the trustees’ decision-making process. Adding student constituents to the board is a necessary — and long overdue — first step in putting governance at Middlebury closer to the students, but it should not stop there. We urge the administration to approve the SGA’s plan, and to work proactively to increase transparency on all levels between students and trustees.
(04/26/18 8:52pm)
Hi, I’m Jimmy. A straight, white male from a suburb of New Jersey.
My profile is very well-represented at Middlebury, and you may feel that my a perspective like mine does not need more representation in our paper. When I started to write this piece, I thought that I could divorce my profile from my perspective, and I found that, in practice, this was extremely difficult. With this in mind, I hope what I write draws as minimally as possible from my personal profile and approaches a more universal understanding. I hope this piece comes from a place of humanity: this distinction is what I identify with first and foremost.
I want to talk about generalizations. We generalize by taking inferences from specific cases and applying them to everything that fits that case. Sometimes, generalizations are spot-on: physicists are smart, sprinters are fast, musicians are musical. Generalizations unite large numbers of people, often through common characteristics, and help us better understand them as a group. Why do the generalizations I mention hold true in nearly all cases? Because having certain qualities is essentially a precondition to being certain things. One cannot obtain a PhD in Physics without a high capacity for quantitative and theoretical reasoning, nor can one be an Olympic sprinter without having the genetics and superior training to make one faster than everybody else.
But we can generalize where it is not appropriate. This happens by way of taking an insufficient number of specific cases and creating a generalization out of them. These types of generalizations are typically self-serving. They are not true most of the time, but they are true in enough cases so that those with a similar perspective will believe them, and espouse the same generalization. Liberals who call conservatives immigrant-haters and conservatives who call liberals snowflakes have made generalizations about huge groups of people that are largely false.
These types of generalizations tend to develop as the gulf between those with whom we disagree widens. Needless to say, they are everywhere at Middlebury. By the logic of these generalizations, it makes perfect sense to avoid certain people altogether. If I believe in a generalization that says a certain group of people are mean, why would I want to meet them, talk to them, or understand them? I already know all I need to know about them – they are mean, and I want to avoid mean people.
The problem with making such a generalization at Middlebury is that there is no group of students to which you could ascribe a characteristic which should preclude the possibility of understanding them on an individual level. You may disagree strongly with the beliefs or actions of a group of people, but I don’t believe that there is any group at Middlebury not worthy of understanding.
I understand that, on a larger scale, this argument may sound too accommodating, too permissive. There are groups of people in the world that, regardless of the individuality of their members, unequivocally spread violence and hate. Should we extend his argument to ISIS, the KKK, and Neo-Nazis, or more generally people that commit terrible crimes?
There is also the reality that racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination of all kinds still exist everywhere. Obviously, in this respect I am writing from a compromised perspective: I don’t understand the lived experiences of those who are discriminated themselves. It must sound naive to recommend that you shouldn’t generalize the same people who constantly generalize you, and cause you pain. But is it better to deflect these generalizations towards other members of our community, or share the pain of being generalized so that it can be understood and ameliorated at Middlebury?
We are individuals first. We are more than any characteristic that one could identify in a single word: gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, politics. If you decide to generalize a group of people based on any of these characteristics, take a moment and consider whether this was, in hindsight, a careful judgement or an easy one. You may find that in most cases we simply did not desire to know more about the people in that group, so we judged them and moved on. The practice, which I will certainly admit to, causes a lack of understanding of the people who form our community.
I think that the solution to this lack of understanding lies in getting to know people as individuals, and refraining from making generalizations about groups of people, be they friend groups, athletic groups, clubs, political groups, etc. You do not have to be friends with everyone, but we are compelled to give everyone the respect and understanding they deserve as a member of this community.
(04/26/18 12:56am)
MIDDLEBURY — The 9th annual Vermont Restaurant Week presented by Vermont Federal Credit Union and organized by Seven Days, a Burlington-based newspaper, began on Friday, April 20.
One hundred and fifteen restaurants from all over the state, including twenty first-time restaurants, are participating in this year’s event. Each participating restaurant offers a multi-course prix-fixe menu at $20, $30, or $40 per person.
Restaurant weeks happen all over the world, offering reduced or fixed price menus to customers, and nine years ago, Seven Days decided to organize a restaurant week in Vermont.
Corey Grenier, the Marketing and Events Director for Seven Days, said that the event is mutually beneficial for Seven Days, which covers Vermont’s food scene, and its clients and advertisers. The majority of the participating restaurants, she said, are year-round advertising clients of the newspaper. The event also occurs during “mud season,” bringing in crowds during a particularly slow time for tourism throughout Vermont, Grenier said.
In addition to the prix-fixe menus, restaurants and companies host special food-themed events throughout the week.
One new event this year was “Stretch & Sip Yoga” hosted by Soulshine Power Yoga and located at Switchback Brewing Co. of Burlington. On Sunday, April 22, twenty-eight guests enjoyed an all-levels yoga class in the tasting room. Through ticket sales, the event generated $560 for Vermont Foodbank, the state’s largest hunger-relief organization and a beneficiary of Vermont Restaurant Week. Last year, Vermont Restaurant Week donated $21,380 to Vermont Foodbank. This year’s target, Grenier said, is to beat that amount.
In addition to the proceeds from the special event ticket sales, eleven restaurants elected to donate $1 from each Restaurant Week meal to Vermont Food Bank. Additionally, City Market/Onion River Co-op, one of the festival’s sponsors, has a Rally for Change program which encourages customers to round up their bill at the register. For the month of April, City Market, which has two Burlington locations, will donate forty-percent of its proceeds from the Rally for Change program to Vermont Foodbank. Last month, City Market’s Rally for Change program raised $10,500 for its forty-percent recipient.
Seven restaurants in Middlebury are on the list for this year’s Restaurant Week, including first-time participant Coriander, which opened its Washington Street location last June. Coriander’s staff noted that the number of customers this past weekend wasn’t exorbitantly higher than normal for most weekend evenings, but on Sunday night there were customers who came specifically for the Restaurant Week menu. Still, participating in Restaurant Week is beneficial, they say, because it allows them to get the word out about their business to a larger geographic area.
Executive Chef and General Manager of The Lobby restaurant on Bakery Lane, Andrea Cousineau, agrees that statewide publicity is a major benefit of Restaurant Week.
“People get to see the menu online, and they come from all over the state,” she said.
The Lobby has been participating in Restaurant Week for three years, and from Cousineau’s experience, she believes the second weekend is usually the more highly attended by Restaurant Week customers.
Cousineau is excited to use this Restaurant Week as a testing ground for new menu items, and to receive feedback on the new dishes. One main dish on the prix-fixe menu, Masa-Crusted Cod, will appear on the Lobby’s main menu in the next couple of weeks. It comes with a side of garlic mashed potatoes, wilted kale, and gremolata.
Restaurant Week – actually a little longer than a week – wraps up this Sunday, April 28.
(04/26/18 12:40am)
MIDDLEBURY — “We are in a perilous place for journalism right now,” said Jane Lindholm, host of Vermont Public Radio’s award-winning program Vermont Edition, in this year’s Robert van de Velde ’75 Memorial Lecture. She laid out the need for greater transparency, diversity of perspectives and less self-righteousness as the only ways to survive this Fake News Era.
Lindholm, a Vermont native who has also worked as a director and producer for NPR, gave the talk, entitled “Objectivity in the Fake News Era,” on April 16 in Dana Auditorium.
Prominent politicians on both sides of the ideological divide tell their supporters not to trust “fake news.” President Trump’s hostility toward CNN, The New York Times, and other news organizations he disagrees with “has become a joke,” Lindholm said, but Trump is not the only politician manipulating his supporters. Even Bernie Sanders has disparaged outlets he opposes, she said, including Vermont’s alternative weekly newspaper Seven Days, which Lindholm considers a legitimate source.
Such misinformation leaves many Americans unsure who to believe.
“This propensity to discredit an entire organization, or even the entire industry, has been building over the last few years, to what is now a fever pitch,” Lindholm said. “Stories are not ‘fake news’ just because you don’t like them. And, frankly, it’s not a politician’s job to decide what is and what isn’t worthy of coverage.”
She added that overuse of the phrase “fake news” has left it “essentially toothless.”
Lindholm shifted her focus to Lyrebird, a program that claims its users can “create a digital voice that sounds like you with only one minute of audio.” The program’s generated results still sound somewhat robotic, but Lindholm said that before long, this ability to put words into any mouth will become a potential threat to democracy. Politicians will be able to take back anything they want to unsay — such as Trump’s 2016 “Access Hollywood” tape.
Another of Lindholm’s concerns is the 11 percent of young Americans who trust The Daily Show and The Colbert Report more than any other television sources. While comedy hosts try to tell their listeners that they are not journalists, they also present skewed versions of current events as apparent facts. In response to a later question, Lindholm acknowledged that comedy can do a better job of reporting specific issues. She does not see any problem with people watching comedy shows, but rather with those shows serving as their sole news sources.
“Real news is fake, fake news is real, and non-news is legitimate,” as Lindholm put it.
She added that on Twitter, no information can be verified in any breaking news situation. A single erroneous Tweet can result in the rapid spread of incorrect information. Today, in a world where 44 percent of all Americans and 74 percent of Republicans think the media is making up stories about Trump, “it is more important than ever to have the facts,” she said.
“Diversity” is another word Lindholm said has lost its meaning. She said news organizations need more people with differing backgrounds and perspectives in positions of power. Half of Vermont’s households have guns, yet 89 percent of Vermonters, including 82 percent of gun owners, say they support gun restrictions. Lindholm said she doesn’t think those voices are heard often enough. She said audiences should feel like they are “not just being spoken about, they are being spoken to.”
Yet although organizations must make sure people feel welcome, Lindholm said that they should not necessarily stay neutral. While it is impossible for a journalist to take their own perspective out of reporting, abandoning the point-counterpoint strategy that most journalists employed in the past can lead to deeper, more meaningful conversations.
Lindholm recognized that the prevalence of “fake news” can leave readers struggling to identify legitimate news sources. She offered three criteria that help determine whether a source is reputable.
First, said Lindholm, “Check the source. Do you know it? Do you know its perspective? Do you know whether this is a reported story you’re reading, with a byline of somebody whose name you can verify?”
Second, “Do a quick headline keyword source. Are other people reporting this news? Does it seem legit?”
Third, “Is it breaking news, and are you on Twitter? If the answer to either of those things is yes, please add an enormous dose of skepticism to whatever you’re reading and do some extra research.”
“We need more transparency, we need more diversity of perspective and experience, and we need less of our own self-righteousness if we are going to survive this moment in journalism and in our culture,” Lindholm concluded.
(04/25/18 11:43pm)
In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, dairying in New England was in crisis. Small farms were faced with a lack of demand for agricultural labor, according to Vermont Representative Peter Conlon, 53. Conlon, who was born and raised in Vermont, worked as a dairy labor specialist for ten years with Agri-Placement, a company that offers employee placement and support services for dairy farms.
“Americans have, by and large, walked away from doing this kind of job,” Conlon said. This has played out on many farms throughout New England and into the twenty-first century.
“It used to be that there was always somebody knockin’ on the door for a job — always, I mean constantly,” said Marie Audet, who owns Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport with her husband, Eugene. She manages the office side of the business — no small feat for a farm of over 700 mature dairy animals, categorized as a large farm operation in Vermont. Eugene, a “herdsman,” works daily with the cows.
Other members of her family occupy many different roles of the operation. Her nephew is a mechanic and works with tractors, her sister-in-law runs a day care for the children on the farm, and her son works with the baby cows.
“People just don’t stop in like they used to looking for work — it’s not happening,” Ms. Audet said. Her office walls are covered from floor to ceiling in framed photographs from years of cow show competitions. There are 29 employees in total at Blue Spruce Farm — nine of whom are part of the Audet family, although Marie tends to say that “it’s not a big farm; it’s a big family.”
“I think that’s important to know because you probably come here and see a large farm,” Ms. Audet said. “This [operation] was two people — and now there are 20 of us. We’re four generations. We want to continue working together but we need the business to be big enough to support all of our families.”
As domestic demand for farming jobs dwindled, small family farm owners — like the Audets — were left searching for help, says Conlon. Will Lambek, spokesperson and staff member of Migrant Justice (Justicia Migrante), a local human rights and food justice advocacy organization, contends that the dairy industry has been in severe distress for a long time now. U.S. dairy prices are tied to the global commodity market for dairy, which has meant wild fluctuations in prices that are based on world supply and demand. When milk prices drop below production costs, small businesses struggle to stay afloat and are often bought up by larger farms.
Over the past 50 years, this consolidation has caused the number of dairy farms in Vermont to decline significantly, from 11,000 in 1947 to 858 in 2015, according to an article published on Dec. 8 in Vermont’s Seven Days.
“Family farms have closed and larger, neighboring farms have had to buy them up,” Lambek said. “Because these larger farms can no longer sustain their business with just family employees. They need to look elsewhere to hire workers but they don’t have the capital to invest in dignified livable wages.”
According to Lambek, at the same time that global market forces and lack of domestic demand for agricultural labor were putting pressure on dairying in the U.S., forces of neoliberalism opened up the Mexican economy.
“Hundreds of thousands of rural Mexicans have been forced off of their land and then forced to emigrate to the U.S. to look for work,” Lambek said.
Word began to spread informally through the immigrant community, bringing a population of people, largely from Mexico, but also from other Latin American countries, to the Northeast, who were willing to supply labor. Tim Howlett, owner of Champlainside Farm in Bridport, has experienced this sort of network within the migrant community.
“These guys are really good,” Howlett said. “When they go home they usually give two months notice and they sometimes will say, ‘Hey, I know a guy looking for a job.’ If they can vouch for whoever is coming in, we say okay.”
“I’m here por la necesidad — out of necessity,” said Fide, 29, who has worked on a dairy farm in Addison County for seven years. “There are few jobs in my town and you can’t make a lot of money.” At one point, Fide returned home to Oaxaca, México, to work a job that earned him less than 25 cents an hour.
It was at this intersection of pressure and stress on dairying that the Audets began using Agri-Placement as an intermediary to find and vet workers. Supported and contracted through employment services, migrant laborers are crucial to the success of the entire dairy industry in Vermont.
“I want to say that in Vermont, the average person probably does understand how important immigrant workers are to dairy,” Howlett said. “I think that in the greater world where people can go weeks without even seeing a cow, they might not think twice about it. The milk is just in the store and that’s the way it works.”
Supply and demand for Vermont’s labor force still exists globally. The flow of migrant workers to the state does not seem to be slowing despite national xenophobia towards immigrants. But with increasing immigration enforcement at the federal level, the arrangement is being increasingly stressed.
“At the moment there is still a workforce, but that’s really being put at risk and there’s no substitute right now. There’s no clear alternative,” Lambek said.
Following the death of 18-year-old José Obeth Santiz Cruz, from Chiapas, México, on a farm in Franklin County in 2009, immigrant farmworkers organized to create Migrant Justice/Justicia Migrante.
“His death was an unnecessary death that could have been prevented by proper training and acted as a catalyst for immigrant farmworkers to come together,” Lambek said.
Surveys of more than 200 dairy workers across the state found systemic and abusive violations of human rights. Workers were almost entirely left out of the picture of Vermont’s dairy industry.
“They wouldn’t leave their farms for months at a time because housing was on site,” Lambek said. Immigrants were working seven days a week with no days off, no sufficient breaks for meals or sleep, averaging 60 to 80 hours a week, and returning to unlivable, isolated and overcrowded housing.
According to Fide, Migrant Justice has helped friends and coworkers get access to driver’s licenses, better pay, and housing despite their immigration status. “Here in this state, I know that there are organizations like Migrant Justice that can help many people,” Fide said.
He wants people to know that there are ways to get help and improved working conditions.
Although Ernesto and Jesús, two migrant farmworkers, may have the option to take occasional breaks during the workday or a full day off, they generally choose not to. And what would be the point? They are both here to earn money to support their families at home, not to build a permanent life in the U.S.
“I can speak for every immigrant here,” Jesús said. “No one is here on vacation. No one is here for any reason other than to work.”
And, Jesús reminds me, glancing down at his tall, mud-encrusted rubber boots, “Somebody has to do the dirty work so that milk cartons end up on grocery store shelves.”
Will Lambek believes that an incident in Franklin County last August between local police, ICE, and the two Mexican farmworkers was a clear instance of discrimination and in violation of the Fair and Impartial Policing (FIP) policy in place at the time. Despite this violation, the policy as a whole was very strong. According to Lambek, new changes to the FIP proposed by the Trump administration may create new loopholes that will make it easier for local law enforcement to justify collaborating with federal law enforcement.
In 2014, President Barack Obama ended the “Secure Communities” program, which upheld the random deportation of taxpaying, contributing community members who came to the U.S. illegally. Under the program, simple traffic violations were often catalysts for deportations. That same year, following the termination of “Secure Communities,” the Department of Homeland Security set guidelines intended to prioritize the deportation of people who are “threats to national security and public safety.”
In Vermont, the FIP was put into place to prevent police discrimination and profiling. Proposed changes would remove many protections for undocumented immigrants from the 2016 policy. They would allow local police to inform federal immigration authority — particularly active in Vermont because it is a border state — if they discover that victims or witnesses of a crime do not have legal documentation. Additionally, the new policy would allow police officers operating near the Canadian border to contact federal immigration authorities if they suspect someone has crossed into the U.S. illegally.
But Lambek and other activists returned from a hearing held on Jan. 24 feeling hopeful. The Committee on Governmental Operations said that it would consider legislation to push back the implementation date of the proposed changes to the FIP, saying that they would rather get it done right than get it done on time.
The isolation of undocumented workers is only furthered by fear and worry about the possibility of detention or deportation.
“I do get nervous when I go out, if I’m in a store or something and I see an ICE agent or something, I’ll try to leave pretty quickly and just come back here,” Fide said. “When I hear about people getting deported or arrested, I just hope it doesn’t happen to me. I think to myself, okay one more year and I’ll be able to finally go back home.”
For Ernesto, though, these worries have not increased noticeably under the new administration. Life in Addison County is “igúal.”
“It’s the same as it was before the new president,” he said. “I didn’t leave [the house] then and nothing has changed. Maybe it’s different for people who live in the cities. But not for me.”
“It does feel different now,” Jesús said, disagreeing with his coworker. “Maybe Americans haven’t felt much of a difference or had a change of heart, but immigrants have.”
Jesús continued: “There is more fear now. There has always been fear. We are illegals. We were illegals before and we still are. Whether we have a racist president or not, the fear was always present. But now we are more scared.”
In this state, losses of protection for undocumented immigrants, increased ICE activity, and collaboration with local law enforcement are changes that pose concrete threats to migrant workers, farm owners and Vermonters alike.
“The threat to their workforce is causing farm owners stress. When you look at organizations like the Vermont Farm Bureau and other lobbies, immigration is something that people are paying close attention to,” Lambek said.
But he qualifies that there are many different responses inside that framework. “Many farm owners voted for Trump,” he said. “They believe that undocumented immigrants should be sent out of the U.S. but they also want to protect their workforce. Political schizophrenia exists widely. People hold these contradictory opinions at the same time.”
Though some farmer owners align with Migrant Justice’s stance that a pathway to citizenship is needed, there are others who, according to Lambek, are hoping for an expansion of the H-2A visa program — a temporary form of documentation for seasonal workers. But dairying is a year-round industry.
“Temporary workers statuses tie people’s immigration status to them, which opens the door for abuse and exploitation. Migrant justice opposes any immigration bill that ties people’s specific employment to their immigration status,” Lambek said.
“One thing I want to say is there are a lot of people who come here to work,” Fide said. “There aren’t many opportunities to work where I come from and the jobs that exist don’t pay enough. We come here to work but we respect the law. This is not our country, so we know to respect the law. I think that it is really important for people to be able to get permits or visas to be able to come here and work. It is so important. Those who come here to stay are few. We come here to work and make money to support our families and then we go home.”
As turbulent as the situation for dairying and migrant workers appears to be, farmers and workers continue to wake up in the early hours of the morning to make the whole operation run.
“The day we take a break is the day the cow stops making milk,” Jesús said.
But early in the morning of Jan. 18, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement conducted a raid at a Days Inn Motel in Colchester, Vermont. This raid was the first of its kind in the state. Fourteen workers were detained and could be deported. The raid took place without any additions to immigration enforcement budgets. With an increase in funds and agents, such as what the Trump administration is proposing, ICE would have the power to undertake many more similar sweeps across the state.
(04/19/18 1:08am)
MIDDLEBURY — You can generally expect a distinguished professor from a neighboring university to headline the Environmental Studies Department’s Woodin Colloquium Series, a weekly forum for conservation research and discussion. Chris Kiely, last Thursday’s guest, doesn’t fit that description: he’s a licensed acupuncturist and founder of a Tai Chi school now based in northwest Connecticut.
His recent visit, which included a Tai Chi demonstration at the Knoll’s spring opening last Friday, represents the College’s small but growing recognition of Traditional Chinese practices of wellness (also called Eastern medicine in this article) in academic and student life.
Traditional Chinese Medicine includes practices of acupuncture, martial arts (Tai Chi among them), herbal and dietary therapy, among others. This article focuses on Tai Chi and acupuncture as Eastern practices that are making their way onto the fringes of campus.
During his Colloquium, Kiely asked his audience in the Franklin Environmental Center’s Orchard to reimagine wilderness as being within the self. He presented English definitions of wilderness and nature, highlighting the abstraction and disconnection that the words have undergone, forbidding us from linking our humanity and that which is wild in us and all around us.
His message reflected themes of Daoist thought: if the individual can achieve balance with their nature (wilderness) through cultivation and practice, the natural world will benefit equally, given that the individual and the “environment” cannot be separated. Achieving this unity at the level of humans, communities and societies is key to correcting the obvious environmental imbalances in our world today.
That’s a very different proposal for environmental solutions than past and future Colloquium talks about plastics pollution in the sea or urban redevelopment. It’s logic that’s easy for students and faculty alike to push aside, but Kiely wants to see subjective thinking be more welcomed. “Chinese medicine, for example, has just as good a track record of cure—but as far as most doctors are concerned, it’s just another sort of hypothetical, alternative medicine based on nothing . . . Even though it has 3,000 years of experience and research and development,” Kiely told this reporter after his lecture. “But a lot of that science is based on subjective findings: what you feel inside yourself.”
For years, Kiely taught a devoted group in a Mill Street studio in downtown Middlebury and in Bristol. Since moving to Litchfield County, CT, he continues to teach constantly and also provides acupuncture. He feels that our emotions get unfair treatment when they enter scientific conversation. “As a culture [we are] insanely subjective in a way—we love our opinions and thoughts. Yet at the same time we don’t give it any real power.”
Kiely’s life has been profoundly influenced by Qigong (chee-gong, “energy work”), attending his first Tai Chi class when he was in high school. “It interrupted, it gave me another path, another option,” he said. He slowly learned where that path led to a community of practitioners, and he had found his place. “It’s their life’s work, they’re happy, and they’re my neighbors.”
The life-altering possibilities at hand with Tai Chi are only available to those with intense commitment to both a practice and paradigm. “You can’t be looking outside yourself while you’re doing the movement,” so it requires effort to learn the physical sequences of slow arm movements, weight shifting and choreographed steps called “forms” that make up the practice.
The physical practice is one thing: “It’s that commitment to an ideology, a paradigm or philosophy of cure, that’s difficult.” That said, it doesn’t need to be your life’s work to be beneficial. “Most generally, people come to Tai Chi for healing or just relaxation in general. A little bit of tranquility.”
Rachel Edwards, a Provider of Acupuncture at Mountain Health Center in Bristol, stewards the slow integration of Chinese Traditional Medicine into the local system, and has specialized training in treating patients in addiction recovery. “[Acupuncture] has been around for so long, and there’s been enough studies done, and it’s so effective, that doctors are [referring patients to acupuncturists] all the time now.”
Acupuncture is a traditional Chinese practice of healing that, Edwards says, “uses needles to tap in to the body’s own natural mechanism for balance.”
Integrating Eastern practices with standard Western medicine means more than using different treatments; it embraces a new philosophy of care. “It’s a shift away from, ‘Give me the drug and I’m good to go,’ to ‘How can this medical center support you in your own self care?’” she explains. It’s all part of “empowering people to be their own agent for change.”
Edwards laments the absence of these values from Western medicine today, which is, according to her, “vacuous of mind-body connection.” Acupuncture is preventative at its best, and you don’t need a specific problem to take advantage of the care. The practitioner’s focus is bringing balance to imbalance wherever they may find it.
“I often liken a practitioner to a detective. So I’m looking for clues that will help me determine how I’m going to work with you. It’s looking at all of your system . . . your whole life really.” This imbalance may be physical or emotional; to the provider, it’s all connected anyway.
“There’s nothing that’s untouched by acupuncture, because everything’s connected. So for example, if you come in because you have headaches, the needles aren’t necessarily going to go into your head—you’re using points that will enhance the flow of a balanced energy to the head. If you’re having gynecological problems, digestive issues, different pain in the body—you’re addressing the pattern of imbalance to bring the body back to homeostasis.”
How do they do it? Oh, right, the needles. “The needles are tapping in to specific points along meridian channels that is a network of the whole body’s energy, of movement, of blood, fluids, nourishing, every cell in the body.” They are small, and you can feel them, but pain is not the right word to use. “There is sensation with the needles, and that’s good because you want to feel an experience of your body in a different way.”
The numerous college students suffering from very common mental health problems may find some relief with acupuncture. “Acupuncture is extremely effective for mood disorder. It depends on the nature of the depression/anxiety, if it’s long term, short term, episodic, we’ll vary the treatment, but it’s very effective.” It’s possible that regular treatment can help patients cut back on prescriptions with high costs, undesirable side effects, and other drawbacks.
Edwards is able to accept a good amount of health insurance plans and charges a discounted student rate at the Illuminate space in MarbleWorks on Tuesday afternoons, 3-6pm. Under the Daoist teaching of interconnectedness, the patient-provider relationship becomes one. “Keeping you healthy is keeping me healthy, and that is just how it is, it’s a principle of nature.”
The treatment takes about 45 minutes and, unlike Tai Chi, which requires immense focus, “you don’t have to ‘do’ anything.” Patients lie down with the needles in them for 20 or so minutes. Edwards explains that “it’s a time to rest, and tap in to your body’s own capacity for healing, and own desire for balance.”
The College has made small efforts to integrate Traditional Chinese practices into its offerings for students as part of general wellness and health services. Graduate Counseling Intern Brian Tobin offers Thursday night Relaxation and Meditation sessions in the Mitchell Green Lounge. Sue Driscoll, a Falling Waters instructor with Chris Kiely, offers an open Tai Chi hour on Fridays at noon.
According to practitioners in the College community’s periphery, there is earth-shattering potential for Traditional Chinese Medicine to alter one’s perception of reality. “You realize that you’re becoming closer to some authentic self that is beyond the world, actually,” Edwards describes. “You are transcending the world, the mundane, in order to experience a more cosmic connection.” Both hail the philosophy of a self-guided path to health.
Chris Kiely says to just try. “The description of it never really does it justice,” he says of Qigong. No matter your level, however, “you’re getting centered, you’re learning about yourself, you’re healing.”
(04/18/18 11:22pm)
On Wednesday April 4, the College held a special screening of the documentary film “Man on Fire.” Students, professors, visiting historians and town residents alike filled the stadium seats in Dana Auditorium for the presentation, which was sponsored by the Writing and Rhetoric Program and the Film and Media Culture Department.
The documentary is about Grand Saline, Texas, a 3,000-person town east of Dallas that has a history of racism that the community does not talk about. In June of 2014, an elderly Methodist minister named Charles Moore committed suicide by lighting himself on fire to protest racism in the town. This act of sacrifice is known as self-immolation.
He parked his car in a shopping center parking lot, poured gasoline on himself, then set himself ablaze. Moore left a typed note on his car urging the community of Grand Saline and the United States to repent for its racism.
The film compiles interviews of Grand Saline residents that illustrate a vast range of opinions regarding Grand Saline’s racist history and reactions to Moore’s demonstration. One interview mentions an area nicknamed “Pole town” referencing a place in Grand Saline where black bodies used to be displayed on poles after being lynched. Another interview mentioned the existence of signs that read “Don’t Let The Sun Set On Your Black Ass” and how rare it was to see a black person walking around town.
Other interviews provided an account in direct opposition. Most residents believed the town possessed absolutely no issues with racism and that Moore was unwarranted in his protest.
Strategically layered within these interview clips are graphic, yet artistically shot, clips that reenacted Moore’s self-immolation. The cinematography employs soft focus to mitigate the graphic nature of the content, but the heart-wrenching shots force the audience to confront the implication of Moore’s violent death.
A stirring moment in the film features an interview that claims Grand Saline does not need to have conversations about racism. Then, immediately following, is a series of skillfully constructed shots displaying a Grand Saline High School pep rally, in which people wear shirts with images and words associated with native people. These shots pass by beautifully and silently.
Special guests of this screening included the director of the film, Joel Fendelman, along with producer Dr. James Chase Sanchez. Fendelman has written, produced and directed a number of award-winning narrative and documentary films. His work has been screened at film festivals such as Tribeca, Slamdance and Montreal.
James Chase Sanchez is a native of Grand Saline, Texas and an assistant professor of writing at Middlebury College where he researches cultural rhetoric and public memory. He has been published in journals such as “College Composition & Communication” and “The Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric.” He wrote his dissertation entitled “Preaching Behind the Fiery Pulpit: Rhetoric, Self-Immolation, and Public Memory” on the Charles Moore incident.
“Man on Fire” affords audience members a story with a unique perspective on modern racism. This film elucidates how many in this country still believe that electing a black president has solved the issue of racism.
(04/18/18 11:18pm)
Had the entry fee for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize competition in music had been more than $50, Caroline Shaw might not have become the youngest person ever to win the prestigious award. Thanks to the Rothrock Family Fund for Experiential Learning the the Performing Arts, Annie Beliveau ’18 and Tevan Goldberg ’18, Middlebury College students had the opportunity to perform, discuss and get inspired by Shaw during her two-day residency in April 10-11, 2018.
During her time at the College, Shaw gave a talk about contemporary classical music, her journey through music and her group of talented classical musicians, Roomful of Teeth, a Grammy-award winning vocal ensemble. Shaw began her talk by playing her score, “Partitia for 8 Voices”, her composition for the Pulitzer Prize and “Passacaglia”, which included spoken word from Sol LeWitt and his points on the wall as well as vocal cords combined together in symphony. She proceeded to explain how her group always performs amplified as it allows them to create combinations of sound that would otherwise not be possible, along with the fact that it “made them feel like rock stars.”
On discussing her work with Kanye West, she describes how he asked her to map out a piece on his grandmother’s death, which later became “Say You Will,” a minimalistic piece that fuses classical orchestra, the work of Shaw, combined with West’s electric sound. The piece was written by Shaw while she “was sitting down in her grandparent’s place and tried to replicate the peacefulness of the river she was watching.” As Shaw delved into her origins of music, she expressed her love for the violin, an instrument that audiences could see she had a deep connection to and mastery of.
Being a classically-trained violinist since her childhood, her musical inspiration came from hymns, church choirs and her family. Currently, she plays the violin with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. Nonetheless, her music still reflects an attachment towards classical sounds of the opera and low bass voices in a choir.
The question: “What are the things people around the word are doing with their voice?”, is one Shaw is continuously exploring through her art and her vocal group, Roomful of Teeth, was mainly founded to study the different vocal techniques from around the world.
Shaw’s characteristic ability was to empathize and connect with her audience through her music and her presence. Through her charismatic dialogues with the crowd, she performed a vocal fry experiment that involved pulse register, creak, croak and pulse phonation with the audience in Axinn 229 in The Donald E. Axinn ’51, Litt. D. ’89 Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Starr Library.
This ability was further displayed during her concert, where Shaw showed immense mastery of classical composition and musical ability through her interactions, violin performances, and her ability to play electronic music through a mixer and a keyboard. “Electronic music is something I am still exploring and learning,” Shaw said, “It is a lot easier to execute as opposed to writing score.”
Shaw, dressed in a modest stripped shirt and jeans, captivated the full-house in Robinson Concert Hall on Wednesday Apr. 12. As the lights dimmed and the audience resonated, she opened the concert with different vocal tones and symphonic voices on an electronic keyboard. The performance was accompanied by student voices while Shaw mixed electronic music on her sound mixer board. Following the act, she explained how the songs she was going to perform was a compilation of new and old.
She performed her song, “Stars in my Crown,” a buy-buy song, where she mixed different hymns, melodies and lyrics from pre-existing musical pieces. The song was a highly personalized piece that she wrote for her friend in Vancouver about wide horizons and clear skies. The melody of the piece was accompanied with the violin, which she played sans bow, in a delicate manner while singing to the lyrics. The piece was deeply moving and spoke of her journey with the Lord.
Shaw was a joy, finding every opportunity to connect with her audience, through her magnetic delivery of her pieces as well as by making them sing alongside the music through a ‘repeat-after-me’ technique. The beauty of her improvisation showed her musical prodigy and as a choir leader would, she directed the audience, with the help of two Middlebury students, to a musical symphony of togetherness and synergy.
Synergy was correspondingly displayed in her piece with Matthew Taylor, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music in Middlebury College. Shaw was the voice to Taylor’s trumpet, her notes included gasps, popcorning and laryngealization, a technique used when pronouncing sounds with a constricted larynx. The performance seemed like a conversation, a dialogue between two individuals trying to get to know each other through music.
Without a doubt, Shaw’s pieces were highly connected to her life and choral experiences. Although she played across instruments, she was most comfortable with her violin, her first instrument, which she played with or without a bow.
A native of North Carolina, Shaw began playing the violin at the age of two. Her passion followed her to receive a Bachelor of Music in violin performance from Rice University where she graduated with a Watson Fellowship before going on to receive a master’s degree in violin from Yale School of Music in 2007. She then entered the PhD in composition from Princeton University.
In the end, Goldberg ’18 was right when he described her as “very forward-looking, very actively playing and composing and works in different genres.”
