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(09/30/15 8:49pm)
Last week, students publicly demonstrated their displeasure with the recent John Doe v. Middlebury College ruling from the State of Vermont.
On Thursday night, the words “Doe must go, I stand w/ Jane” were chalked on the pavement leading up to Mead Chapel and the go/doe link was established.
The link — which leads to a simple and clear WordPress blog — allows easy public access to the court documents of Doe’s suit against the College. It also encourages students to send “a note to the Trustees, and take a stand on social media.” The call to students from the page is best summarized by the tag-line: “it’s time for us to determine what our standards are when it comes to sexual violence.”
In the John Doe case, a student was accused of sexual assault while on an SIT study abroad program in the fall of 2014. He was found not responsible by the program’s own internal investigation. Once he had returned to the College, the alleged victim reached out to the College, who then ran a second investigation that found John Doe responsible and he was to be expelled.
However, on September 16 when sued by John Doe, the College was ordered through federal injunction by a United States District judge to re-enroll the student, while the legal proceedings continued.
Whilst the campaign perhaps risks appearing as a witch-hunt against the alleged perpetrator — especially through the chalking of a public space — its organizer, who wishes to remain anonymous, states that it was intended more as a way of instigating important conversations.
“The John Doe case does a really interesting thing because it allows us to consider campus sexual assault without necessarily having to worry about the impact [on] the survivor because the survivor isn’t on this campus.”
Crucially, the John Doe v. Middlebury case did not actually explore Doe’s potential culpability. The student behind go/doe pointed out how possibly the most obvious victim, Jane Doe, was “symbolically annihilated” from the conversation.
“Go/doe is a moment that was spawned through some conversations through very few individuals just feeling that its really disrespectful that this campus is not feeling outraged by this and that there isn’t more attention,” said the anonymous student.
Criticism of the College’s handling of the John Doe case has also come from other sources.
The Campus critiqued the College’s responses to the initial investigations in in last week’s editorial.
The Student Government Association has also previously pressed for changes to the College’s sexual assault policies. Last year, an SGA resolution on sexual respect recommended that investigators record their work so that they can be held accountable through the process. No such changes have been made thus far.
Vice-President for Communications and Marketing Bill Burger says that there are currently no plans to update the Policy against Sexual Misconduct, Domestic Violence, Dating Violence and Stalking in light of the John Doe case.
Nonetheless, he emphasized that the College has not finished with the controversy: “Middlebury College will comply with order of the federal court in all respects even as we appeal the decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.”
(09/24/15 2:03am)
The Canadian diplomat looked relieved. As he staggered out of the blistering Jordanian heat, my boss greeted him effusively. The two experts were meeting at our office in Amman, the Arab Center for Security Studies (ACSIS), to discuss recent security developments in the region, and they allowed me to partake in the meeting.
(09/24/15 1:19am)
The news article and corresponding editorial discussion of the alleged sexual assault case involving John Doe has been one of the most difficult topics I have had to write about during my time with the Campus, and not one I expected to cover just two weeks into my role as Editor-in-Chief. I am writing this Notes from the Desk to shed some light on the difficult decisions the board made as we grappled with legal documents and the two very different stories presented by the accused and the accuser.
First, I say “had to write,” because I think there are some stories that deserve to be told. I believe the editorial board feels an incredible responsibility to its readers, and because of that we all decided to take on the role of trying to comment, meaningfully and objectively, on the sexual assault and federal lawsuit that the College is currently facing. These pieces are not intended to be insensitive to the parties involved, but simply to inform the community of the complex case and some of the questions it raises.
As we read the legal documents, we tried, though difficult at times, not to presume guilt or innocence. We tried to present the facts. We tried to be clear and precise in our arguments. In the editorial, we both criticize the administration for accepting SIT’s findings without review and commend it for re-opening the investigation when it learned that SIT’s investigation may have been flawed and there was in fact compelling evidence against the Middlebury student, John Doe.
This situation has lasting ramifications for everyone involved: Jane Doe, who has relived the emotional reiterations of her story for months, John Doe, who has been forced to endure an invasive investigation twice, the campus community, who must now co-exist with an individual that the College’s internal investigation deemed unfit for re-entry, and the College, which must defend its reputation and publicly support its decision to investigate. Often the tone of news articles and editorials suggests a lack of empathy. This is not reflective of the emotional reaction we experienced, nor of the compassion the board feels for the involved parties. Likewise, it does not convey the understanding we all have of the implications of our words and their lasting impact in a small community.
I believe the writing above reflects the gray and vague areas of this case and the profound difficulty the editorial board faced coming to a consensus that did not presume guilt while respecting every party involved. If nothing else, this speaks to the sensitive situations editors face. We are often privy to information and have the responsibility of telling a story as objectively as possible, while still being conscious of the size and tight-knit nature of our community, where anonymity is rare. My hope is that this prompts thoughtful discussion among our community and reveals the human side behind our editorials.
(09/24/15 1:14am)
In December 1989, delegates from 15 countries endorsed the Slow Food Manifesto, which began: “Born and nurtured under the sign of Industrialization, this century first invented the machine and then modeled its lifestyle after it. Speed became our shackles. We fell prey to the same virus: ‘the fast life’ that fractures our customs and assails us even in our own homes, forcing us to ingest ‘fast-food.’”
The manifesto then made a case for slow food, “to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment ... [to] let us rediscover the rich varieties and aromas of local cuisines.”
For the last 25 years, the slow food movement has grown and endured, dedicated to the proposition that by honoring traditional and regional approaches and celebrating food’s creation, we will enjoy it - and the company of others - that much more.
In September 2015, might the Middlebury community be ready to make a case for ‘slow learning’?
For isn’t it true that higher education has, in large part, fallen prey to “speed’s shackles”? Fast learning is all around us, an empty-calorie version of the way the liberal arts should be: too much reading, too many problem sets, too little reflection, too little time. Fast learning is advanced placement, double majors and extra minors, students on-the-go, cramming and then forgetting, professors who respond ‘busy’ and only ‘busy’ when asked how they are doing. Colleges and universities that have succumbed to the allure of fast education are (again from the Slow Food Manifesto) among “the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.”
And let’s face it: Middlebury at times falls into this multitude. Too often, we rush, we assign more, we expect more, we pursue more. And perhaps as a result, we learn less. And yet: haven’t many at Middlebury recently been planting the seeds of something else?
All around us in the fall of 2015, don’t we see the growth of a better way? Of slow learning, an approach that declares ‘less is more,’ that promotes the ‘read’ and then the ‘re-read,’ that brings mindfulness into the classroom, that honors students who unplug, reflect and actively raise questions about their own identity and agency in this complicated age.
Slow learning at Middlebury is the “Sophomore Seminar in the Liberal Arts,” in which students ask: “What is the good life and how shall I live it?” It’s a First Year Seminar that starts with ten minutes of silence. A quiet, early-morning trek on a crust of snow to gather bird-band data. A session of Aikido followed by a dinner in Atwater Commons. A hockey practice that begins and ends with a skate on a frozen pond. Slow learning at Middlebury is a timeless question posed by Professor Murray Dry.
In other words, slow learning is no mystery. It’s what we know how to do when we don’t succumb to the whipped-up frenzy of our time.
At the recent Bread Loaf faculty meeting, an experienced colleague called for a ‘culture shift,’ a kind of community reboot after Middlebury’s recent spring semester, so full of heartbreak and sorrow. How can students, staff and faculty help to effect this change? Each of us, for starters, can commit to the idea that less is more: joining less clubs, scheduling less meetings, placing less on the syllabus. Other steps are easy (OK, maybe they sound easy): turn off the smartphone, close the laptop, take a walk with nowhere in particular to go. (Too addicted myself to social media and electronic connectedness, I remain convinced that this can be done!)
Perhaps the most important single step that each of us can take is simple: to treat each other as human beings. Not as sophomores, not as assistant professors, not as custodial staff, not as deans, but rather as human beings. Human beings, with all of the complexities celebrated by Walt Whitman when he wrote: “I contain multitudes.”
For isn’t it true that human beings are the true ingredients of a community of learning? Thus, as the slow food movement celebrates timeless, local ingredients - heirloom tomatoes, crawfish, wild rice, native corn, spring lamb - shouldn’t we celebrate the golden stuff that we are made of? Earnest learners, celebrated teachers and researchers, dedicated counselors, thoughtful stewards, friends and allies; these good folks and more comprise our daily dishes. And critically, like even the best culinary ingredients, we humans have our flaws, our bruises. Let us celebrate and savor those too. To honor each human being among us, to savor the human experience ¬– this may be the essence of all great recipes for global liberal learning.
From slow food to slow learning: is this a good metaphor? If so, is Middlebury ready to take the lead?
Jon Isham is the Director of Center for Social Entrepreneurship (CSE) and Professor of Economics at Middlebury College.
(09/24/15 12:42am)
Family. Environment. Change. These are the three simple yet strong words with which award-winning director Chad Stevens describes his new documentary, Overburden, which was screened on Thursday September 17 in McCardell Bicentennial Hall.
The title of the documentary refers to all the material that lies above a coal seam: the rock, soil and organic matter that must be dynamited and removed to access the resource. The documentary follows two West Virginian women with dichotomous stances on coal as they come together and find common ground to challenge the irresponsible practices of Massey Energy, the country’s fourth largest coal company.
Dedicated grandmother and community organizer Lorelei Scarboro, who lost her husband to black lung, vehemently campaigns against coal mining because of the peril it poses to her family and neighbors. She leads a grassroots movement aiming to stop Massey Energy from exploiting Coal River Mountain, the last major intact mountain in the Coal River Watershed and a promising site for significant wind energy.
“This isn’t coal mining,” she said of mountain top removal, the brutal operation that has flattened hundreds of mountains and killed mineworkers in order to access coal more easily. “This is the rape of Appalachia!”
In the documentary, Lorelei finds an unlikely ally in Betty Harrah, a staunch supporter of the economic lifeblood that is coal in Appalachia. In April 2015, when Harrah received a call informing her that her beloved brother had perished in a massive mine explosion claiming 29 men’s lives, she bitterly realized that the industry prioritizes profits over people’s welfare.
The two women join forces to establish the first wind farm in coal country on the ridges of Coal River Mountain. They hope this will provide a safer, more sustainable economic foundation in Appalachia and bridge the intense divide over coal in their community.
Director Chad Stevens was inspired to produce Overburden by his experience photographing mountaintop removal sites and meeting people affected by them.
“The families living in the valleys below these massive mining complexes, I saw how their lives were changed, sometimes destroyed, sometimes ended too early,” he told students after screening the film. “This also changed me and ultimately led me to create this film that not only tells of the environmental destruction of coal mining but also the impacts on communities and families.”
The filming process taught Stevens that some narratives require time to be told with impact.
“It’s because I had time — nearly ten years — that I was able to create an intimate story that hopefully really takes viewers into the lives, struggles and joys of these families,” he said.
After watching the film, Human Ecology major Adrian Leong ’16.5 was struck by how such long-term journalism helps the storyteller and story evolve.
“Because [Stevens] stayed with the community he was reporting on for as long as he did, he changed; and because he changed, the story changed,” he said.
The most difficult aspect of creating the film, Stevens said, was obtaining the trust of the documented community, which is wary and defensive after past abuse by the media.
“It took years for me to build their trust and gain access to the families who eventually allowed me to tell their stories,” he said.
Even so, the director attributes the film’s realization to Lorelei and Betty.
“Any success the film may have, which I would define as creating empathy in those who see the film, is only because the subjects in the film were courageous enough to share their stories,” he said. “They are courageous, inspiring women, and I am forever grateful for their openness.”
With twice as many people now working for the solar power industry as for the coal industry, Stevens points out that coal is in terminal decline.
“That is also the challenge. What will happen to those miners who still need to feed their kids, take care of their parents and pay their mortgage? This is what I hope audiences take away from the film. It’s complicated.”
Overburden delivers a message of solidarity in the face of the complexity and contention surrounding coal.
“Even though from the outside it may be easy to declare right and wrong, when you are living it, and when, as a viewer, you are there with them as they are living this life, I hope that it becomes clear that we are all one, that we all want the best for our children and that we can learn from each other along the way,” Stevens said.
(09/17/15 10:31pm)
The end of my second week in England is coming to a close. I have started getting into a routine. I finally know how to walk from my building to Oxford’s library. Research has dominated most of my days this week; I have buckled down and started work on my first big project during my study abroad semester here.
I have also been able to experience a lot of English culture since I arrived. My friends and I have visited a long list of different pubs, I have had tea and biscuits in the early afternoon and my program has brought me to a couple of heritage sites, such as the cathedral at Winchester and the Roman structures at Bath.
It has been a fantastic experience so far, and I have already learned a pretty shocking amount about the country, the University and myself. But over the course of my time here I have struggled with a mounting pressure: the urge to do more, see more, achieve more, fill every waking hour with something new so that I get the absolute most out of this time abroad. In other words, it is the pressure to wring as much out of this short semester so that I feel like I have not missed anything.
What I am feeling certainly is not new; it is the perpetual traveler’s curse, the monumental task of trying to fit as much in as possible into an extremely limited time period. But I did not consider that it would affect me this much. After all, I am here for three and a half months, not three days.
And yet, it still nags at me. That voice in my mind that continually compels me to go see a new church, to visit a new part of town, to try a different beer at a pub that I have never been to. As a person who relies heavily on routine and who tries to balance each day with enough downtime to keep mentally healthy, this trip has been a shock to the system. I have been exhausted each day, too busy to sit down for thirty minutes and read a book in my room by myself.
But this week I realized that I cannot just keep going like this. I will burn out if I do. So, I accepted something that is extremely difficult for any traveler to acknowledge.
It is okay if you do not do everything, and it is okay if you do nothing for an hour or two every day.
Being able to sit back and simply be at peace with not doing anything is really tough. It is hard to just let the world go by. But I have found that it is also necessary.
Because traveling and studying abroad is not that different than, say, moving homes or starting a new school. It is really similar to what the Middlebury freshmen are going through right now. You get hit by wave after wave of new experiences, new acquaintances and new routines to establish. You must find that which grounds you and reminds you that things are not so different than they used to be. You have to remember that the mental overload of going to a new place or starting a new phase in your life does not mean that you are a different person or that you have to continually force yourself to explore the entire breadth of that place or phase.
It is okay to do nothing, to sit in your room alone with a book for a few hours, because that is how to find that grounding. I have made myself step away from all the activities and that compulsion to keep moving so that I can breathe and remember that I need to give my mind and body a rest.
After all, traveling, studying abroad and starting college are not about trying to do everything. They are about doing what makes you happy. I find that I am most content when I let myself go sit in a park for a while or read a book somewhere secluded. This allows me to appreciate those places I do want to go visit even more.
I have realized that I need to stop worrying about what I am missing or what I might not get to see, and instead focus on those places and people that I do see. I have to accept that it is all right that I will probably not go to Ireland or France while I am here, just as it is all right that I might not get to try out as many restaurants or pubs as I originally thought I would. What really matters is that when I actually go somewhere with my friends, I recognize the moment and experience that moment to the fullest. I should not worry about what is next. It is not the sum of all the different things that I do here that determine the worth of my experience, just like it is not the number of people you meet or things you do at college that decide college’s value. Rather, I have to remember that my abroad semester’s value comes from simply having a few meaningful experiences and appreciating each of those individually.
(09/17/15 8:49pm)
Welcome back to Midd. I am studying abroad this year, and this column will take a hiatus, but the Campus generously invited me to write a piece for the first edition. Feeling that a defense of the Iran nuclear deal would be overly dry, I will advocate – especially to first-years – on behalf of the liberal arts education.
These are complicated times. The upper class in America, still mainly white, controls more wealth than at anytime since the Great Depression, but the electorate is growing steadily more heterogeneous. Information proliferates, but old cultural polarities about race, abortion and economic opportunity remain as fixed as at anytime in the last half-century. These problems of a free society are of small concern to the rest of the world, most of which still lives under some kind of autocratic regime. America’s military has proved an imperfect midwife for freedom and democracy abroad. Access to digital networks and knowledge, however, could enable America’s military to better perform that endeavor. Yet technology has often only enabled the faults of human nature to be revealed on bigger stages: see the metastases of militant Islam or the mass surveillance of Chinese, British and American citizens. Perhaps the little green men of Kepler-452b are simultaneously facing the same problems.
Since coming to Middlebury, I have become convinced that studying the liberal arts uniquely equips students to deal with uncertainty and complexity. What colleges like Middlebury offer that the most competitive schools do not is the liberty to take what classes you like, across many disciplines, and then construct a network of interrelated ideas from whatever material intrigues, describes or inspires you. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Intellect” better expresses this process of intellectual exploration:
“The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity....We do not determine what we will think. We only open our sense, clear away, as we can, all obstruction from the fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought for the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own. By and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have seen, what we have seen, and repeat, as truly as we can, what we have beheld.”
How to attain the rapture of gazing like a child? “You have an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge,” says Emerson. “Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render it no reason. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth.” Take courses you are interested in! Last fall, I took Introduction to Political Philosophy, Shakespeare’s Histories and American Foreign Policy. The professors were excellent, the courses rigorous and I found that Shakespeare, Plato and George Kennan share some ideas, (although I was laughed down when I suggested that language in Henry IV Part I echoed language from the Republic, and therefore that Shakespeare must have read Plato.)
The revelation of truth, says Emerson, is “always a miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever familiarize. It is...a form of thought for now, for the first time, bursting into the universe, a child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genu- ine and immeasurable greatness.” Revelation is indeed the mark of the genius, says Emerson, but though the “composed attitude of library” does not alone spark genius, “the oracle comes, because we had previously laid siege to the shrine.” We only cannot predict when.
Surely the oracle of truth has use outside of the academy. Today we call it creativity, or innovation. If you take Emerson at his word, as I do, than the quality of being creative – eminently marketable – is no more than knowledge of the process of allowing your mind to combine dissimilar things –“the rubbish mats and which litter the garret.” There cannot be any better place in the world to tinker, to learn and to let your thoughts brew in latent ferment than a college like Middlebury.
The process is not easy. It is not for the man of repose, not for the seeker of “rest, commodity and reputation,” but for the lover of truth, (or, perhaps, of himself.) “He in whom the love of truth predominates,” says Emerson, “will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion.” Why would we ever submit to this “self-denial, no less austere than the saint’s?” Because we are obtaining the education to do so.
(09/17/15 6:39pm)
In her column in this week’s Campus, President Laurie Patton stresses the importance of resilience. “Resilience,” she writes, “is one of those words we think we know, but we don’t necessarily stop to reflect on.” Starting this year, she writes, the Middlebury community will “embark on a coordinated effort to reflect on the importance of these qualities and develop programs to enhance them.”
In addition to the qualities that President Patton attributes to the word, we at the Campus define resilience as how Middlebury prepares students for the world they will face after graduation. This requires the ability to engage with points of view that we disagree with, especially those that offend us or make us uncomfortable.
Some of the aspects of this community that we most pride ourselves on – our promotion of liberal ideals and emphasis on mutual respect and safe spaces – can have the effect of insulating us and stifling a diversity of opinion. The world-at-large is not Middlebury, and we fear we are leaving here unprepared for the “unsafe spaces” that await us.
We Middlebury students have a tendency to plug our ears and avoid listening to dissenting opinions instead of learning from them or challenging them. For example, in 2012, Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry was vilified for taking a legalistic view of affirmative action at a panel designed to showcase a diversity of opinions. A year later, the campus was in uproar over a lecture by University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Amy Wax, some students even opting to hold up signs reading “racist.” Similarly, some felt that Middlebury’s invitation to Harvey Mansfield last year was an implicit endorsement of his social views, even claiming he invoked feelings of fear. And when Chance the Rapper came to perform, we asked him to censor his most controversial lyrics, and then demanded a forum to debrief how the whole ordeal made us feel.
This tendency to react to the uncomfortable with outrage often takes the place of necessary critical discourse. Professor Dry is far from racist, though one could reasonably argue that the legal view he articulated (which is not necessarily the one he actually holds) has racist components. Amy Wax is decidedly less far from racism, but she is also a serious social scientist, and her findings deserve to be met with thoughtful discourse and criticism rather than blanket labels. Similarly, the seemingly endless conversation surrounding Chance the Rapper’s lyrics overshadowed a much more meaningful discussion that could have taken place about the pervasiveness of homophobia in Hip Hop music. We must learn to disagree without shutting down, refusing to listen and labeling.
Embracing discomfort is critical to our liberal arts education. The most important thing we will each take away from Middlebury is the ability to think critically and clearly communicate our ideas. In order to effectively hone these skills, we need our faculty to challenge the preconceived notions many of us hold and for students who disagree with the liberal status quo to be able to speak up.
In an era of extreme political polarization, it is more important than ever that we emerge from our cocoons of like-mindedness or the illusion of like-mindedness. We fear that students at many institutions have learned to change their language to conform to political correctness, without truly understanding what makes those very words offensive. It is only by engaging with ideas that offend us that we can learn and ultimately motivate change. We all agree that diversity is important, and now we must learn to make room for diversity of opinion. We all undoubtedly have a lot to learn from people who view the world differently than we do.
This is not to say that everything is in-bounds. Hate speech, threats and harassment have no place in this community, nor will they ever. Developing a better understanding of these concepts will make way for the conversations we so badly need to have on campus.
Ultimately, this culture of protectiveness is not unique to Middlebury. As the well-read Atlantic Monthly article, The Coddling of the American Mind discussed, it has developed at many colleges and universities across the country. Following the recent Atlantic and New Yorker pieces on the topic of political correctness gone awry, the conversation seems to be popping up everywhere. Many observers attribute this trend to the entitlement students feel as consumers of their own educations.
Somewhere along the way we lost our ability to engage in discourse, and it is doing us a disservice. As we usher in a new academic year and a new college president, we as an editorial board will be pushing the envelope a bit more. Our goal? To encourage disagreement and dialogue—and not the anonymous, online kind. We strongly urge all students to lean into discomfort, write an op-ed if you have something to say and have a resilient year.
(09/17/15 6:21pm)
On July 1, both the Vermont Sales and Use tax and the Meals and Rooms Tax were expanded to cover soda and vending machine purchases, respectively. The statewide sales tax of 6 percent on all drinks with added sugars is intended to discourage the consumption of sugar-added beverages and raise funds for efforts to combat obesity. Vermont is now one of 35 states with such a law. Snacks purchased through a vending machine will now be subject to a 9 percent Meals and Rooms tax.
The funds raised through this tax are intended to close the projected $113 million gap between state spending and revenue. The soft drink tax is estimated to bring in $7.9 million in revenue and the vending machine tax is estimated to make a revenue of $1 million.
While revenue is one reason to implement an excise tax of this sort, another reason is to disincentivize the consumption of unhealthy snacks and sugary drinks to reduce obesity. The idea behind an excise tax on sugar sweetened beverages is to raise the price so consumers will buy less of the product. High taxes of this sort exist on cigarettes, and according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the high tax on cigarettes has been the most effective policy in reducing cigarette use. New studies show that low taxes on soft drinks do not affect obesity rates, stated the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. However, revenue from the tax can still be helpful in fighting obesity in other ways.
Another common objection to excise taxes is that they are regressive, meaning that they disproportionately affect those with lower incomes.
In the past, “food and food ingredients” were exempt from the 6 percent sales tax in Vermont, but Act 57 of 2015 altered their definition. Act 57 states that “‘Food and food ingredients’ does not include alcoholic beverages, tobacco, or soft drinks.” Soft drinks are defined as “nonalcoholic beverages that contain natural or artificial sweeteners.”
The law does not apply to unsweetened bottled water, seltzer, alcoholic beverages, and any drinks bought through SNAP, known in Vermont at 3SquaresVT.
The 9 percent meal tax applies to all snack purchased through vending machines, but not to those same items when purchased at a grocery store.
As a member of the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement (SSTA), Vermont is required to use these definitions of products since they are consistent with other states’ definitions as used in their tax policies. As a result, many people believe the wording of the law to be unnecessarily confusing. This has led to problems in the law’s implementation, especially for small businesses that do not have point-of-sale software.
For example, some business owners are confused over which products require labels due to the complicated language of the law. Sam Frank of Orange told VTDigger that when he went to buy seltzer, he found that it was labeled with the 6 percent tax.
“It was kind of expensive, so I asked, ‘Why is this so much?’ and they said ‘Well, we have to tax it,’” Frank said. “I said, ‘I don’t think so.’”’
Jim Harrison, president of the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association, also finds the language of the law a barrier to its accurate implementation.
One of the problems lies in “a somewhat unclear definition where most iced teas are taxable—flavored, regular and diet—but not the ones that say unsweetened. Club soda is not a soft drink under the definition. Regular V-8 is not taxable, but V-8 Splash or Fusion is taxable. We could go on. It is confusing to customers as well as merchants, but we will continue working to get it right,” said Harrison in a statement on the Association for Convenience and Fuel Retailing website.
Director of government relations at the American Heart Association, Tina Zuk, was a proponent of the original bill proposed in January. The original proposal included a 2 cents per ounce tax on soft drinks, which would have been the first law of its kind in the country. She supports the tax as a policy to fight obesity.
“We’re really concerned about the obesity crisis in both the number of adults and kids, and we know that sugary drinks are a huge contributor to obesity so we wanted to discourage consumption,” Zuk told VTDigger. Zuk sees the tax as a way to change unhealthy behaviors.
(05/06/15 9:26pm)
The year before I came to Middlebury, I lived in Israel for ten months while studying on a college leadership program for North American Jews. In many ways that year, I was given a single story of what Israel was. I left loving Israel and wanting to move there forever. I still feel very connected to Israel, but my relationship to Israel, Palestine and Zionism has changed since then.
During my first year at Middlebury, I heard fellow students in casual conversation saying: “Well, Israel just shouldn’t exist” and “Israel is trying to take over the entire Middle East.” This saddened and scared me. I thought people here were smart ... how could they say that?! Throughout my four years here, I have been extremely disappointed in the discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Last fall, a burlesque performer named Una Aya Osato performed at Middlebury. Her performance touched on themes of sexuality, gender, carceral power, sex, gentrification and boycott of Israel. Two hours before her performance, I recited the Mourner’s Prayer for four men who were murdered in synagogue in Har Nof, Jerusalem earlier that morning. During her performance, Una put on an Israeli Defense Forces baseball cap, pointed a fake gun and shot it at random to audience members, threw the Israeli flag on the ground and flashed a poster reading “Boycott Israel.” Some audience members snapped in affirmation. These actions were offensive to me, especially considering the events that occurred earlier that day. I was taught to treat the Israeli flag with respect, as Israel is a holy place for many world religions.
The hardest part of the performance was sitting with my discomfort and noticing that the majority of the audience members were not uncomfortable. Why were they not questioning this narrative? Did they know that four men were murdered while in prayer that very morning? I asked Una in the Q&A how she came to her perspective and we spoke afterwards as well. We disagreed, hugged and kept going.
The recent display in Davis Library, sponsored by Justice for Palestine, highlights the inequities of access to resources and rights among Israelis and Palestinians. This is not inherently bad. However, there were many problematic elements of the display. The “Want to Go to the Beach?” infographic depicts a stick figure of a bearded man with payot – curls Orthodox Jewish men wear – and a gun strapped across his chest. This is offensive. The infographics also cite data from Wikipedia, which is not a reputable source.
I have noticed that the lectures and events that seek to criticize Israel or with controversial speakers have been heavily attended by students. Other lectures, like Jay Michaelson’s lecture “Why is Israel-Palestine Discourse so Polarized on Campus?”, which gave strategies for starting productive conversation, had 10 students present. The Rohatyn Center’s Fall 2014 lecture series on Israel had less than five students present at each one. Why are these spaces, which seek to bring nuance and dialogue to this region and this conflict, so void of students? Is it because we are apolitical or is it because we are afraid?
It is wrong to depict Israel as a country, government or army that can do no wrong. It is equally wrong to portray Israel as a country, government or army that can do only wrong. It is sad to me that whether you support or denigrate Israel becomes a barometer of whether or not you stand for social justice. If you support Israel, you must be conservative. If you support boycott of Israel and throw out words like “massacre,” “apartheid,” “genocide” and “Holocaust” freely, you can stay in the liberal camp. I believe you can love Israel and believe in – and work toward – social justice. Indeed, we can and should be using a social justice framework to think, act, learn and teach about this issue with more consciousness.
As “smart, globally minded” students committed to learning and seeking knowledge, we must not let nuance fall when we speak about this conflict. We must not just jump at controversy. We must try harder to educate ourselves and learn from one another in a nuanced way. If you are trying to learn more about the conflict, I encourage you to admit what perspective you are coming from, acknowledge what you don’t know, take your time to form opinions and learn from a variety of news sources – not just The Electronic Intifada. Also, ask people! Especially those who may have views different from your own.
Similar to how we approach so many other topics and conflicts locally and globally, Middlebury has the potential to have productive dialogue, programming and activism that highlights the nuance and comp complexities that exist in Israel and Palestine
(05/06/15 9:24pm)
Twenty-nine years ago, the Middlebury College Board of Trustees stood on the right side of history when they voted to divest from the South African Apartheid. The College was one of over 150 campuses across the country to divest from companies doing business in South Africa – the leading ethical issue of the time. Now, Middlebury College is at a crossroads and has the chance to once again stand on the right side of history by divesting from fossil fuel companies. Climate change is the defining ethical issue of our generation. The College has the opportunity to make history once again, or to be vilified by it.
Middlebury College prides itself on its practices of environmental stewardship and its innovations in institutional sustainability. The College started the first environmental studies program fifty years ago this fall, helping to kickstart an era of environmental policy and legislation the likes of which our nation had never seen. The College was an incubator for programs of recycling and composting far before these issues reached national prominence and gave rise to 350.org, one of the fastest-growing environmental justice organizations in the world. The College also plans to go carbon-neutral by the end of 2016 and is well on its way to achieving this admirable goal.
However, the College’s investment in fossil fuel companies jeopardizes its reputation as a champion of climate justice by profiting from the exploitation of the environment and marginalized communities. Professor Emeritus of Religion Steven Rockefeller –yes, a member of the Rockefeller family that made their fortune on oil – wrote during his time here that the College should “avoid investments in businesses and products that are inherently unhealthy for human beings or that threaten serious environmental harm.” Rockefeller wrote these words twenty years ago, yet they still remain true today. As long as the College’s endowment is invested in fossil fuel companies like Exxon and BP, it is actively contributing to a system that threatens the future of our planet.
From UC Berkeley to Harvard, students on campuses around the country are asking their administrators whose side they are on: the side of the fossil fuel companies who feed on the Earth and its people like parasites to maximize economic success, or that of the new generation calling for a just transition to a greener future. Arrests of students at Yale University and University of Mary Washington show administrators that this fight is about something much bigger than the institutions we attend. And people are noticing. Just in the past month, Syracuse University, the Guardian Media Group and Prince Charles have committed to move to fossil free investments.
With the quest for carbon neutrality nearing its completion, we have to ask – are we truly carbon neutral if we are invested in fossil fuels? It is time for Middlebury to rise up and once again do what is right over what is easy. It is time to change the system that perpetuates social and economic inequalities. The environmental movement is always evolving and can no longer be an elitist movement that only wealthy white folks can access and engage in. It has shown its ability to bridge gaps of race, gender, generation and wealth as it has spread across the world. Climate justice is a global issue, one that affects all people.
It is our responsibility as Middlebury students to be at the forefront of this battle. Students have organized here to usher in peaceful change in the past, and I know that this will happen again. Through education, thoughtfulness, organization, passion and hard work, we are fighting to create a movement that will be larger and longer than the four years we spend in Addison County. So the question remains: whose side are YOU on?
Vignesh Ramachandran '18 is from Fremont, Calif.
(05/06/15 9:14pm)
Stuart Warren, dark-horse candidate for SGA President, was runner-up in the elections with 38 percent of the votes in the third round of tabulations. The reason we voted for Stuart comes down to a single sentence written on many of his campaign posters: “You can vote for snack-time, or you can vote to combat oppression.”
While other candidates talked about improving McCullough or increasing late-night snacking options, Stuart aimed to dissect the values at the core of this institution. He stressed the importance of listening to marginalized voices and funding activist student groups. He talked extensively about changing our practices to better reflect the needs of a diverse student body. He questioned the way we use words like “diversity” and “privilege.” Most importantly, Stuart saw an opportunity for an SGA President who tackles greater structural problems. Real change to campus culture cannot be accomplished in the one-year term of an SGA president, but these deeper conversations about the kind of community we want to be are the most important issues for us to address.
It can be difficult to grapple with structural issues like diversity, sexism or colonialism. Stuart’s campaign, however, brought these issues into our daily vernacular and grounded them in the experiences of our fellow students. The more we talk about these issues, the better we will understand the various experiences of our fellow students, and the better we can enact real change.
So, Stuart, keep advocating for marginalized voices. Don’t let the conversation die down. Write a column for this section next semester. Keep us on our toes.
To our new SGA president: congratulations. We love your plans for peer counseling, cultural competency for faculty and staff and more transparency and higher standards around sexual assault. Keep Stuart’s platform in mind and examine which of his ideas are most feasible. Students are more vocal and involved than ever before. Use this energy to create meaningful reforms, and use your leadership position to champion greater societal change on campus – change that may not see immediate results in a single year, but over time will improve student life immeasurably.
Improving the character of our community will be a long, hard and messy process. But it is the most worthwhile pursuit that any of us can undertake on this campus.
(05/06/15 8:42pm)
As the latest addition to the wave of graffiti found across campus, more spray-painted words, stenciled images, and stickers were found on the Ross complex, Atwater Dining Hall, Bicentennial Hall, McCullough Student Center and Axinn early last week. The probing messages behind the graffiti work and the ways in which they have been expressed have received various reactions from students and faculty alike.
According to Facilities Management Supervisor Wayne Hall, instances of graffiti or vandalism have occurred every weekend this term. This latest work of graffiti embodied two recurrent themes from previous graffiti work found on campus.
“We’ve noticed two issues taken up with the spray-painting,” said Hall. “Some of the graffiti has been in support of the Black Lives Matter movement involving the police in the whole country. The other issue is more central to Middlebury regarding security cameras.”
Early in the morning of Monday April 27, students found the words “No Cameras” spray-painted on the ground in bold letters in front of Atwater Dining Hall. “Who Watches the Watchmen?” and “Cut the Cord!” were spray-painted on the walls, accompanied by a stenciled rat and free-hand drawings of security cameras.
BiHall sported similar messages regarding the surveillance of students. Hall also noted that on the morning of Tuesday April 28, stickers were applied to the clock in front of McCullough, saying, “F*** Cameras.” Touching on another recurrent message, a “Black Lives Matter” quote was reported on the walls of Axinn. These images and phrases are direct replicas from previous instances of graffiti, but applied to different buildings.
Hall said that the news of most recent round of graffiti writing reached his office by 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning, and facilities staff was out working by 10 a.m. The process to clean the walls of buildings of spray-paint is extensive, requiring multiple solvents and other tools to first remove the graffiti and then re-paint when necessary.
“Two facility guys were working all of [Monday] until four o’clock,” said Hall on Tuesday. “They have also been working on it this morning, and I’m not even sure if they’re done with it yet.”
Reactions to the graffiti have been diverse, as students have expressed both positive and negative responses, sparking many discussions and criticisms. However, social media boasted an overwhelming denunciation of what has been called a “defacing of college property” and “blatant vandalism” as a direct attack against college community.
One anonymous post on the popular social media mobile app Yik-Yak commented, “There are opportunities to express your opinions without defacing the campus and making facilities’ lives harder.”
Another one offered, “The facilities staff who clean the graffiti have to use incredibly nasty, toxic cleansers. You put the health of others in danger to make a statement that you could’ve made in the student forum.”
Hall noted that many students witnessing the cleanup process offered support or their apologies. “Students have come up to us and have said, ‘Sorry this is a waste of time,’ or, ‘Sorry you have to be doing this,’” he said.
However, Jackie Park ’15 noted that this emphasis on the importance of community appears and dissipates seemingly when convenient for the student body.
“Where was the support when students were holding meetings with faculty and the administration, signing petitions, creating support groups, bringing in speakers and performers to ‘effectively’ tackle these issues [of surveillance, oppression and injustice],” said Park. “It is quite scary to hear and see over and over again that people are more angry over a wall than over people’s lives.”
Other students have also shown support and have agreed that the matters presented by the graffiti represent very real issues and offer opportunities for valuable discussion.
One of the themes perpetuated by the graffiti work was the topic surrounding the potential use of security cameras on campus, an issue that has been taken up by Community Council. Student Co-Chair of Community Council Ben Bogin ’15 said although the original reasoning behind implementing security cameras was based on recent instances of theft, conservations broadened out to include graffiti and other vandalism.
“More broadly, I think this all came from the place of, ‘How can we make sure that students feel safe here?’” said Bogin. “Some feel safer with surveillance cameras, others feel threatened.”
One post on Yik Yak spoke in favor of cameras, “Before I didn’t care, but because someone has been repeatedly vandalizing buildings, now I really want [Middlebury] to put cameras up.”
At the Community Council forum to continue this discussion, many cited the pragmatic use of cameras to deter vandalism of this kind from repeating itself. Ultimately, however, the Community Council vote ended with six votes in favor of cameras, nine votes against, and two votes abstaining.
Hall noted that students have other options on campus to express themselves and vocalize their opinions in artistic form other than continuously spraying graffiti throughout the campus. He cited the chalkboards in McCullough or the slateboards in BiHall as alternative means.
“I think freedom of expression is great, but to do it properly is one thing, and to do it improperly in a way that hurts other people is another thing,” said Hall. “We would rather be spending our time on making the campus look nice than cleaning up senseless damage.”
As of now, the person or persons behind these different acts of graffiti are still anonymous, and there have been no publicized measures of preventative action to block any future graffiti.
(05/06/15 8:38pm)
The Middlebury Campus previously sat down with College President Ronald D. Liebowitz in the fall to discuss his time at the College. This is the second and final installment of the conversation, which took place prior to and after the announcement of Laurie L. Patton as the College’s 17th President. In this edition, Liebowitz discusses what it takes to be a successful College President, the nature of a presidential transition, and what is next for him after July 1. You can read Part One of The Exit Interview here. Middlebury Campus (MC): Does a college president associate with other college presidents, such as at a NESCAC conference? Do you talk to them and ask about what’s working, what’s not working?Ronald D. Liebowitz (RL): Well, yes. And no. The yes is that NESCAC, which stands for the New England Small College Athletic Conference, is what is called a “presidents’” conference, meaning presidents are the ultimate deciders on the place of varsity athletics among the 11 conference institutions. Athletics, then, brings us together three or four times a year to discuss athletics policy. I love athletics and understand the benefits that come with a good athletics program. At the same time, it would be nice if the presidents got together to discuss other issues more frequently. Generally, college presidents hold things close to themselves; we don’t share much with colleagues even though we know each other pretty well—I suspect nobody likes to project any kind of weakness in his or her institution. The only time I recall in my 10-plus years as president where my fellow presidents were a lot more open to discussing things was during the financial crisis. I remember especially the 2009-10 meetings as ones where, during our breaks and lunch, we did discuss what we were doing and how well each campus was responding to the challenges. But in general, college presidents tend not to share because I think it might project institutional weakness and we all are so competitive. Not that it’s right or productive, but…MC: Did you have any input on the presidential search process or was it completely within the committee? Would they have been open to you saying, ‘I know a great provost or a great administrator at another college, why don’t you look at them?’RL: No, the tradition is that sitting presidents are kept at arm’s length from presidential searches for a whole host of reasons, all good. It is interesting that in most professions the outgoing CEO, at least the ones that are in good standing, has a lot of input into who will be his or her successor. It’s not that way in the academy.The extent of my involvement was helping to get the search committee together with faculty representation. I didn’t choose the faculty members, but worked with faculty council and the faculty at large to get those four people and it was a great group—a great mix of backgrounds, perspectives, and disciplinary expertise. I then worked with Sunder Ramaswamy at Monterey to select the staff person, Bob Cole, and the faculty member Laura Burian (both are great, too) to provide a Monterey perspective to the search. The only other thing I did in the search was to meet with the committee early on and give an overview of what I saw from my vantage point as President of where the institution is now, what issues and challenges are ahead, and what the committee ought to know as they started engaging in the process of finding the 17th president of the College.MC: Time for a little advice for your successor — if the next President of the College asked you, ‘How do I keep my finger on the pulse of what students are thinking about?’ what would you say?RL: Try to be as active in the community as possible. Pop into Proctor, Atwater, and Ross. I have found students to be very welcoming. When I find an open seat and sit down with students, always uninvited, I’ve found them to be very receptive to conversation—I’ve never been told to leave(!). We’ve been fortunate to have some great SGA leaders, at least in my time as President, and I think keeping an open communication with the head of SGA is very valuable and is something worthwhile.I would just try to stay as involved as feels natural and manage to your personality and to your strengths. Don’t try to be something you’re not.MC: How to work effectively with faculty?RL: Well, there’s a natural tendency for faculty and administrators to have some tension, and healthy tension is good. But as I mentioned earlier, the perspectives of an administrator or a president and a faculty member don’t always align. A president has a certain set of time horizons and considerations that differ from those of faculty. It can therefore look like a president is sacrificing the present for the future by holding the longer-term perspective, and so the challenge is articulating your position when it differs from the sense of the faculty and hope your colleagues understand your position.It’s hard for me as an individual to say what the next person should do. As I said, for good or bad, I’ve had a relationship with our faculty for more than three decades. A new person won’t have that history. The new president is going to have a completely clean slate, which I think can be a real benefit.Anyone coming into this job is going to have great experience in administration already and so I think they will have a good sense of how to work with faculty. However, a challenge for all new presidents is how to understand the culture of one’s new institution. That’s where I think the four faculty on the search committee come into play. Those faculty are going to have a stake in the new president’s success and they will do the institution well by helping the new president understand and navigate through some of the idiosyncrasies of our campus.MC: How to maintain a good relationship with the town of Middlebury?RL: That takes a lot of work and it depends on your partner—in our case, the chair of the town’s select board. Many college towns are fraught with contradictions, especially in rural America. In small, rural places the perceptions about a billion-dollar-endowed institution can be unfair and the institution misunderstood. Consequently, there’s a great natural tension between what appears to be a privileged, entitled student body and college on the one hand, and the town on the other. It took me a while as president to learn that that old adage, “you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t” applies quite well to the College’s involvement in town affairs. If you sit on the sidelines people think you’re aloof, you don’t care about the town, that you have all this wealth and yet you are doing nothing to help your community. And then if you do get involved, you’re accused of throwing your weight around. So, at times it seems you can’t win, at least not with everyone.I came to the conclusion early on in my presidency that it’s better to be damned for doing than for not doing. I’d much rather get involved because I believe strongly that what’s good for the College is good for the town, and vice versa. The College benefits by the town being vibrant and healthy and the town benefits from an engaged College._____________________________________________________________________________MC: The student reaction to Dr. Laurie L. Patton’s announcement as the next College President was overwhelmingly positive. Did you hear a similar reaction from alumni and other members of the Middlebury community?RL: Yes. In every case. Last week, Jessica and I hosted a large reception in San Francisco and had smaller dinner events and in all cases our alumni were very excited about Laurie’s appointment. Similarly, Laurie and I were in New York two days ago, where I introduced her to a number of foundations and donors who have supported the College in the past. The meetings were excellent with substantive discussions about Middlebury—past, present, and future.MC: What is the transition like between College Presidents? Is there a structure to the way administrative best practices for leading the College are communicated?RL: Transitions are sometimes tricky and require both attention and a lot of thought on the part of the Board of Trustees, the incoming president, and the outgoing president. Many past presidents have written on the subject, usually urging boards of trustees to take an active role in establishing clear protocols for how the incoming president engages the many constituencies of a college so as to not confuse administrators and others as to who is the decision maker! We have been so fortunate with our transition as Marna Whittington and our board have followed a well-developed plan, and Laurie and our point person on campus, Tim Spears, have followed the plan to the letter. Laurie and I have been in communication regularly, too, which helps with continuity and increases the chances of a smooth transition come July 1.MC: Did the previous College President, John McCardell, give advice to you upon your announcement as the 16th College President? RL: Well, the situation was different in that I was already on the faculty here for 20 years, and was vice president and provost for the last seven of those years. I’ve come to recognize, through my own experience, that the best preparation for the presidency is on-the-job-training.MC: What are the biggest challenges facing the College as President-elect Laurie L. Patton assumes this role?RL: The issues that all college presidents now face: the increasing cost of higher education and what that means for access; keeping a liberal arts education relevant for the students Middlebury wishes to matriculate; and managing expectations. New presidents are expected to, or hoped to be able to, come in and fix all that is perceived to be wrong at an institution. One must remember, however, there are nine major constituencies that have a stake in any one decision a college takes, and it is rare that positions on a major issue aligns with all nine. Or that all see the issues that need fixing to be the same ones. That means it takes a lot of time to pick the right issue(s) to address, and then to work with all the constituencies to arrive at a position, knowing it will be rare for all to agree on the solution.MC: Is it overstating it to say that this a momentous transition in the College, with both the Dean of the College and College President departing within six months of each other?RL: It is not an overstatement in that we have a new leader and the first woman president. That is momentous. However, that these two positions are changing within six months of each other is not likely to be all that earth-shattering. This is an incredibly resilient and strong institution. We have an engaged and talented board, which has just gone through significant governance reform, a very experienced and skilled senior administration, and a remarkable group of commons deans whose work with students and faculty often goes unheralded. And so while welcoming Laurie to Middlebury will be a momentous occasion, a change in two administrative positions should not be viewed as anything more than that: two positions changing within six months of each other.MC: Although you have probably been asked this a lot, what is next for you when you depart the College in the summer?RL: We have a long-awaited sabbatical next year and we will be in Boston. Jessica and I will be working on a project on graduate education we have been contemplating and discussing for a number of years. It will focus on Ph.D. programs today, asking two major questions: (1) how we can better bridge the apparent widening gap between the public and the academy through how our graduate students are educated; and (2) how can we better address the very different speed of demographic changes in the student body compared to those of the professoriate. That is, while the diversity of the student body has increased significantly over the past twenty years, partly as a result of demographic changes in the country and partly the result of a conscious effort on the part of institutions to create richer educational environments through a more diverse student body, the diversity of most faculties have not changed nearly as much. The result has created some previously unseen tensions or at least misunderstandings and challenges in the classroom. Part of the increased tension is due to the pedagogies that our students entering college today have experienced during their K-12 years (hybrid learning with far more technology, interactive learning, collaborative learning), which they often do not see in most liberal arts classrooms, and part is due to the cultural divide between the more rapidly changing demographics of the student body relative to their faculties.
(05/06/15 7:04pm)
Wide-eyed and tight-lipped, students sit facing the podium in the Warner Hemicycle. The class will continue its discussion of Plato’s Republic today. As Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry begins to write his outline, the whispers begin.
“Is that a d?”
“No, no – that’s definitely an ‘s’ and a ‘t’?”
“Positive?”
“No.
Mr. Daniel Dignan ’17 — Dry always addresses his students using honorifics — suggests the class set up a fund for handwriting lessons. There’s a murmur of agreement.
Dry turns around, his face beaming. He begins his lecture with a three-minute-long question addressed to Ms. Ella Marks ’17. She is clueless; it’s not her fault. Dry restates the question.
If you have done the reading thoroughly, the lecture and ensuing discussion is a delight. There is passion in his voice that draws students in — a passion fueled by his desire to convey the zenith of his chosen author’s philosophical heights, even if he has to go overtime. This is his 47th year teaching political science, and few if any students remember him ever finishing class on time.
If you haven’t done the reading thoroughly, however, “your shame will be very public and your justice swiftly dealt,” wrote Mr. Caleb Cunningham ’14 in a Campus article two years ago.
Sometimes, Professor Dry will ask a particularly difficult question and his face will contort with anxiety as one by one, his students fail to come up with the answer.
Mr. Alex Brockelman ’18 remembers one such day. The class was discussing the Republic with a particular ferocity. Dry had just asked the class whether or not the philosophical life was possible.
Dry knew it was a tough question; the purpose of Socrates’ teaching was at stake. He wanted his students to stimulate their intellects and utilize their reasoning capacity to their fullest. If that involved buckling knees under the intense gaze of Dry’s eyes, so be it.
Nine people attempted to answer the question. All were wrong. Brockelman raised his hand and said that the philosophical life is possible as Socrates himself embodied it.
“AND THE DUCK COMES DOWN!” Dry shouted.
He started pacing around the room in ecstasy, his face red as a tomato and his hands held high in the air. The students – some excited, others still as a statue – heaved a sigh of relief and began to laugh.
Dry was referring to the duck that dropped whenever an audience member said the secret word on You Bet Your Life, a 1950s comedy quiz show.
This is trademark Dry: exacting and exuberant. He will laugh uproariously at Socrates’ hints at the impossibility of the communalism of men and women in Plato’s Republic.
For Dry, there are two prerequisites for good teaching: interest in the subject matter and in talking about it. He fell in love with political philosophy as a senior at the University of Chicago. As a Ph.D. candidate, he decided that being on one side of the lecture wasn’t very different from being on the other. When a friend recommended applying for a teaching position at Middlebury in 1967, he did not hesitate.
“Why have I stayed? My wife asks me that too. She said she thought we’d get married, I’d do well and we’d go elsewhere!” he exclaims, laughing.
From the very first day, he felt that Middlebury was the right place for him. He has occasionally taught at some other institutions. For him, the differences between teaching at a small liberal arts college and a major university are stark. One just cannot find time “to be the complete teacher of your students,” he says.
And then there’s the freedom.
“Nobody says, ‘What on earth are you doing teaching a course called Love and Friendship?’” he says. “They even say it’s pretty good.”
Dry met his wife, Cecelia, at the College. She started as a student the same year he began to teach, and was among the first group of students housed in mixed-gender dorms. She took two of his courses.
“I don’t think she wanted to do constitutional law,” he says with a chuckle.
When they got serious, she decided she was not going to take any more of his classes. He believes her friends and fellow students accepted their relationship, even though it was unusual.
“It is a little more difficult to do now,” he adds with a smile.
Dry has two daughters: Rachel, who attended Harvard University, and Judith, who graduated from the College. Judith found a world here in complete contrast to her father’s. She was a theater major and did not take a single political science course. He would have liked if she had, but concludes that the experience turned out perfectly for her.
“There are many Middleburys in Middlebury,” he concludes.
For Dry, teaching always complemented his familial responsibilities. However long his office hours might have been, he was always five minutes away from home. Though Cecelia had the major parental role, he was the parent who “did the trips to the school,” he says. He was a timer for his daughters’ swim team and served on the board for Middlebury Union High School.
Mr. Dignan says if he were to create a statue of Dry, it would depict him leaning back on his podium with arms outstretched, book in one hand, chalk in the other; a timeless visage of intellectual might and fortitude.
Professor Dry is known for his absolute intolerance of hats in class, his struggle with memorizing names, his hatred of e-books, and his habit of calling on students instead of waiting for volunteers.
Most of all, however, he is known and respected for his ability to inspire his students care about learning from the great philosophers. The fear of being called on is part of the reason, but mostly it is his enthusiasm, his vigor, and his love for the material he is teaching. He is in love with Plato, and will not rest until he makes you fall in love with him too. Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke are mountains of knowledge, but the best way to reach their summits at the College is to go through the Murray Dry experience.
A version of this article appeared in the Jan. 2015 issue of “The Snow Globe,” a publication of the J-term course, Reporting and Writing.
(05/06/15 3:51pm)
The final weekend of “Gaypril,” a month devoted to creating more visibility for LGBTQ groups on campus, was celebrated by the timely premiere of Millennium Approaches, Part I of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Written by Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play explores the struggles of gay men living in New York City during the 1980s, when intolerance, shameful denial or an impending sense of doom hovered over many people’s heads. The student-produced show ran in the Hepburn Zoo from April 31 to May 2, bringing to light questions of religion, race, gender and sexual orientation that once sparked ethical scandals and continue to bear relevance in the modern era.
The burdens of everyday life become magnified and exacerbated in this dramatic tale as three groups of people grapple with different but interlinking sets of problems. Mormon chief clerk Joe, played by Max Lieblich ’18, and his agoraphobic, emotionally unstable and sex-starved wife Harper, played by Katie Mayopoulos ’18, fight to establish a sense of trust, communication and constancy in their relationship as Joe contemplates accepting a job offer in Washington and Harper wrestles with her suspicion that Joe is gay. Successful lawyer and deeply closeted homosexual Roy, portrayed by Phil Brand ’18.5, refuses to come to terms with his recent AIDS diagnosis, proclaiming that “AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer.” Meanwhile, clerical worker and gay Jewish man Louis, played by Lee Michael Garcia Jimenez ’18, is struck by the devastating news that his boyfriend, Prior, portrayed by Christian Lange ’17.5, has contracted AIDS. Throughout the play, these heavy plot points manifest themselves in intensely emotional confrontations behind closed doors, with Harper shouting impassionedly at Joe as he arrives home late, Louis and Prior discussing Prior’s prognosis whilst embracing intimately in bed and Roy confronting his medical fate within the confidential confines of his doctor’s office. Over the course of the play, the lives of these troubled characters slowly and unexpectedly begin to intersect.
Life in New York City moves at an unforgivingly breakneck speed, but amidst paperwork piles, hospital appointments and burnt dinners, the days drag on. The actors portray this existential slog with a careful mixture of exhaustion, misery, frustration and apathy, their words casting a heavy silence over the audience at some points and provoking laughter at others.
“The audience might find it strange the way the play switches between funny and deadly serious and back again very quickly,” Lange said. “It’s a weird play, and if you don’t walk into it with an open mind it has the potential to be very difficult to process.”
Within one dream sequence, Prior commiserates to his makeup-adorned face in the mirror, “I look like a corpse. A … corpsette! Oh my queen; you know you’ve hit rock-bottom when even drag is a drag.” As Prior’s condition declines, his chest marred by dark purple scars and his face increasingly pale and gaunt, Lange’s delivery of these candid moments hovered between humor and heartbreak, poetry and pain. With each broken scream and moment of bloody, writhing agony, a sense of empathy tore through the audience, bringing to light the utter torment of the times.
The AIDS crisis of the 1980s brought with it intolerance, ignorance and fear toward the gay movement, as the virus became stigmatized as “gay cancer” and “gay-related immune disorder.” Angels in America provides a cross-sampling of voices within this messy, confusing and tragic era. Roy is symbolic of all the closeted gays who refused to admit who they were for fear of being associated with the queer image, which was generally viewed as weak and insignificant. Joe, trapped in his church-sanctioned Mormon marriage, will never gain acceptance for an identity deemed wrong for religious reasons. Belize, Prior’s voodoo cream-using, magic-loving nurse and black drag queen, portrayed artfully by Rubby Paulino ’18, embodies a particular subculture of the gay image. Louis’s poor coping mechanisms in light of Prior’s tragedy are a call to those unable to face the harshness of reality – whereas Prior, in his quiet resilience, represents those who can.
In this sense, Angels in America serves as a window into the past, a stark reminder of all that society has seen and overcome.
“It connects us to a generation of gay people that lived through a part of gay history that I didn’t. I was raised with education around sex being that HIV and AIDs were an ‘everyone’ thing,” Garcia Jimenez said. “A lot of old people still see it as a ‘gay person’ thing. I didn’t grow up seeing my gay friends die of a disease that no one really understood.”
Sadly, Prior’s suffering is further compounded when the emotional strife of the situation causes Louis, his lover of four years, to abandon him. Similarly, the deterioration of Harper and Joe’s marriage pushes Harper to a state of panicked pill-popping and frequent hallucinations. Traveling on parallel paths toward destruction, the anguish within both relationships reaches a point of full, explosive expression in a joint break-up scene near the end of the play. At last, Louis confronts the limits of his own love, while Joe recognizes his homosexuality.
“Characterized by Harper’s short phrases, Louis’s apathy, Prior’s hurt and Joe’s overflowing realizations, this scene beats out a rhythm that is difficult for actors to keep up with, and splices together two stories in a challenging way for the audience,” Mayopoulos stated. “Nevertheless, watching two very different couples break apart at the same moment because of the same basic reasons – trying to save oneself and one’s identity – is emotionally overwhelming and extremely powerful.”
Ultimately, in leaving their respective relationships, Louis and Joe stumble into each other. In a moment of bittersweet clarity, their feelings culminate in an intimate, lingering kiss that left the audience in an awed sort of silence. Within this scene, Garcia Jimenez portrayed the multiple facets of Louis’s complicated, even paradoxical, personality – apathy, selfishness and above all, self-loathing – with delicate emotional precision.
“If you touch me, your hand might fall off or something,” Louis tells Joe in a sad, matter-of-fact tone. “Worse things have happened to people who have touched me.”
Some critics of the play argue that it delves far too much into a story rather than a political thesis about the approaching millennium and its implications on the gay movement. But perhaps it works better as art rather than as a political campaign speech. Angels in America is more than merely a tragic tale: beyond the harsh realism of the play lies a distinct sense of mysticism, which eventually gives way to hope. A mysterious, almost harassing voice beckons periodically to the ailing Prior, telling him to “look up” and “prepare the way.” The stunningly illuminated angel that embodies these haunting messages in the final scene, as portrayed by Nadine Nasr ’17.5, is a sign from the universe that society is on the brink of change. “Greetings, Prophet,” she announces. “The Great Work begins. The Messenger has arrived.”
“The mysticism makes it an undeniable, divine fact of fate. There’s a certain point in society where something is obviously going to happen, so we need to let it happen,” Garcia Jimenez explained. Pointing to modern times, he said, “It’s not about whether gay marriage is going to be passed; it’s about which state is going to be the last to pass it.”
This weekend’s performance of Angels in America, a work deemed by the New York Times as “the most influential American play of the last two decades,” was a momentous labor of love for the 12-member team. There were no stage hands, leaving the full responsibility of physical labor and onstage logistics to the cast and crew. Additionally, within the entirely student-run production, some actors multitasked as producer, director and assistant director. Mayopoulos, who acted brilliantly as Harper, was inspired to produce the play after performing a scene alongside Lieblich for her Acting I final.
“I went to a socially conservative high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, where doing a piece of theatre as daring, liberal and free as Angels in America would never have happened – there would literally be protests,” Mayopoulos said. “For me, this play exemplifies the tragedies that occur when a society is not accepting and the extent of the strain it puts on all members of that community, which I witnessed firsthand in my hometown.”
A tale of many faces, Angels in America touches on everything from drag queens to disillusioned wives, from fatality to potential pregnancies and from divine forces to awkward sex between strangers in the park. Through tears, laughter and moments of poignant discomfort, the actors within this production carved to life a story of momentous proportions, evoking an era marred by hatred and neglect. Handled with care, the characters’ devastating narratives became a reflection of a powerful, collective hope that perhaps the world is not coming to an end after all. As millennium approaches, a better future is surely underway.
(05/06/15 3:39pm)
Dance-making has deep roots, in the experiences of choreographer and dancer alike. For the four senior dance majors whose choreographic work composed “Threshold” this past weekend, their research in various fields deeply informed their pieces. For all of the works, the choreographers engaged in dance as a mode of research – Stevie Durocher ’15.5 in connection with English literature, Doug LeCours ’15 with creative writing, Afi Yellow-Duke ’15 with sociology and Sarae Snyder ’15 with physicality and anatomical study.
Pervasive through the evening was a constant questioning of what it means to be a body, a person, in relation to societal expectations. Perhaps the most narrative work of the evening was Stevie Durocher’s “Reasons,” performed by Krystal Egbuchalam ’18, Olivia Raggio ’15.5, Julia Rossen ’16, Esme Valette ’16 and Durocher herself. Durocher’s solo and duet work with Egbuchalam followed the opening of the piece, in which the audience saw only shadows of dancers on the illuminated surface of the white scrim at the back of the dance theater – effectively creating images of smooth, ballet-esque movement like shadows on the stage of Durocher’s memory as she performed an intensely reflective and inwardly-focused solo. She hesitantly put on a pair of pointe shoes and moved between uninhibited leaps and stillness on pointe, embodying the intersection between a classical ballet background and modern dance forms.
LeCours’ work, “MY SAD GIRL DEAD BOY PROM NIGHT PITY PARTY,” shed light on the American narratives of sad girls and mourning rituals alongside the dialogue of LeCours’ queer male body. The piece invited a space of “radical mourning” that challenged audience members to laugh, to cry and to grieve the traumas, large or small, that we have all experienced. His five dancers, Juliette Gobin ’16, Emily Luan ’15, Annie Powers ’15, Sarae Snyder ’15 and Meredith White ’15, formed a group of wraith-like women clad in white nightgowns. Their distant, sorrowful gazes lent their movement an almost involuntary or sleepwalk-like feel, interrupted only by moments in which Gobin, and later White, broke apart from the other women for solo moments, collapsing out of the automatic motion into a more pained expressiveness. White’s tangible agony accompanied the sound of her whimpers and sobs as she struggled between the distant, reflex motion and her emotional collapse, and heel-toed offstage.
Sarae Snyder’s duet work, “Vowels,” was brought to life by Miguel Castillo ’17.5 and Meredith White ’15, in an exploration of how physicality and interaction develop meaning throughout the creation and performance process.
“I am interested in how content emerges from otherwise ‘meaningless’ physicality,” Snyder wrote in the Program Notes.
While watching dance, it is often tempting to try to uncover a narrative behind the piece, but Snyder’s work defies this attempt by presenting varied and innovative movement forms that make the viewer’s experience very much their own. What we take with us after witnessing such a performance are glimpses of what the dance has provoked in us. This narrative was enhanced by portions of the audio: Compiled by Snyder, recordings of Castillo and White’s voices speaking words and non-words created sounds that defied meaning in the same way as their movements.
The ending phrase of “Vowels” invited this interpretation: For a moment, the pair held hands and leaned their upper bodies away from each other whilst placing their feet close together, united in gaze and breath. Before long, they gradually twisted and fell away to run to separate spotlights on either side of the stage, hands on their chests. This moment read as an expression of both a mutual need for connection and an acknowledgement of our need to stand on our own – simultaneously together and alone.
Choreographed by Afi Yellow-Duke ’15, “Post American Mess” engaged in a deep questioning of fear, the unknown and our confrontation of it – or rather, our lack thereof. The piece flickered into view with a stark light on dancers Rachel Getz ’15.5, Andrew Pester ’17 and Julia Rossen ’16 as they paced onstage, periodically raising their trembling hands beside their heads. Audio from various public safety announcement-like texts contributed to an atmosphere of worry and impending danger, amplified by evocations of run-duck-and-cover movements of bomb drills and jarringly contrasted by mocking, circus-like and patriotic music. Perhaps the piece’s most evocative movement was the morphing of an anxious hand twitch into a saluting hand – addressing the notion of how America, as a concept, a place and a society, can stand at the root of our anxieties.
The evening’s last work was a second duet, created and performed by Sarae Snyder and Maggie Ammons, a student of dance and neurobiology at Bennington College. The work’s title “(Co)incidents” is layered in its significance, as it reflects the collaborative process of creation, whilst also sounding very much like ‘coincidence’ – a possible reference to the manner in which meaning and content emerged.
Snyder and Ammons exemplified a level of synchronicity in their unison phrases that deeply satisfied the aesthetic instinct – a particularly impressive feat in moments of silent movement. A note of humor arose as deep, club-like rhythms accompanied Ammons’ and Snyder’s empty-gazed, slack-limbed movement. At one point, they disregard each other to the point of bumping into and dancing over each other’s bodies – an allusion to practices of embodiment within dark, loud and bass-pumping music environments. But this physicality is dance as well. Within this piece, as in the works of the other senior choreographers, artists engaged in an exploration of the threshold of physicality and human experience in relation to culture, art and meaning.
(05/06/15 3:25pm)
In a general way, I think that the saddest stories are the ones that depict injustice against decent people. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan does more than this, processing an archetypal Russian film protagonist named Kolya through an almost-comically horrible downfall at the hands of political evil. Kolya has built a home with his hands, perched on pretty land overlooking the sea which the town’s mayor wants to seize for a business venture; Kolya suspects the mayor wants to build his own palace. With help from a lawyer named Dmitri, Kolya tries to rebel. But his story has an unavoidable end: it is contained within a system which overwhelms all levels of morality, and even if people are unconscious to their role in the system, they can’t escape it. Dmitri, in an early line, perhaps encapsulates the film, saying, “Everything is everyone’s fault.”
Kolya has a temper and smokes and drinks, but not more than everyone else, and he is generally well-liked amongst those in the small town. There are tensions between his wife and teenage son from a previous marriage, but initially, he is able to manage these tensions. We sense the beginning of something much worse as Dmitri and Kolya attend the court hearing on Kolya’s land. A judge pronounces the verdict – supported by “indisputable facts,” legal jargon named with long case numbers and statues – in a monotone so fast that the ruling against Kolya is almost inaudible.
These proceedings are very formal and impersonal, which does not satisfy the mayor, who staggers drunk to Kolya’s house to remind Kolya that he “never had rights” to begin with. Dmitri files a claim against the mayor for trespassing, worded in the court system’s legal jargon. He takes it to the police station with Kolya, who impatiently asks why it’s taking so long for the officer to process his claim. The officers immediately arrest Kolya, who in theory might have rights, but certainly not the right to question authority with impatience.
Different characters ask Dmitri if he believes in God, to which he always supplies the same response: “I’m a lawyer. I believe in facts.” If it’s true that all of us must believe in something, then Dmitri might want to dismiss facts altogether, as facts seem useless against a system that creates its own truth. Alternatively, the mayor does believe in God, but mostly because God believes in him. The local priest assures him that yes, God does want you to take Kolya’s land.
Leviathan’s drama plays out on a closely personal scale, focused on Kolya’s legal battle and quickly dissolving family, and only ever filmed in Kolya’s small north-Russian town. Then again, we look later in the film to find Kolya and his friends taking target practice at portraits of Lenin and Gorbachev. Things could be more subtle, but at least they have a sense of humor. Someone asks about Yeltsin’s absence from the shooting-party, but is told that Yeltsin is “too small time,” and also that the current leaders should “ripen on the wall” a bit before use. We see Putin’s face only one time in the film, his portrait hanging on the wall of the mayor’s office: he ripens on the wall, but is not exactly the target, either. Everything about the system is evil, and for the most part, people, maybe all people in the film, are just pawns eaten by its power.
Our sympathies are straightforward in Leviathan – the good people have relationships, families, ambitions and the bad people don’t have redeeming qualities, totally consumed by greed and systems of bureaucratic evil. It is true that the bad people, mostly the mayor, are more stand-ins for corruption than real characters. Usually we’re meant to chastise black-and-white moralities of this nature, asking instead for more honest shades of grey, but Leviathan’s exact narrative goal is to paint a world in moral black and white. The church says that that there is only God’s Truth, which somehow corresponds to the truth of the politicians, and together the two are so bloated with their own truth that ambiguity becomes impossible. To call Leviathan resolute in its ideas seems like meager praise – it runs for two and a half hours, but is structured perfectly, with no wasted shots or time. Even if Leviathan’s conclusion becomes unavoidable, watching evil work is somehow always surprising.
(04/29/15 11:40pm)
Last Thursday, David Huddle – who is currently a Fellow of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a distinguished poet and novelist with eight published poetry collections and 11 works of fiction to his name – drew quite a different portrait of form in poetry through his lecture “Formal choice as the Path to Fresh Possibility” at a packed audience at the Vermont Book Shop.
The lecture – the second in a series titled “Poets and their Craft” – was organized by the Sun Dog Poetry Center. For each lecture in the series, each poet is in charge of choosing their own topic.
Based in Jeffersonville village in north-central Vermont, the Sundog Poetry Center works to promote poetry and create audiences for the poets based in Vermont. The center, whose name originates from one of Tamra’s poems titled “Parhelion,” is focused on ways to share poetry throughout the Vermont community.
Tamra Higgins, who is co-president of the center along with Mary Jane Dickerson, explains that this lecture series grew out of a desire to have a dialogue with poets about the many aspects of poetry that is typically excluded from the opportunity to discuss in a public forum.
For Professor Huddle – who has been teaching at the University of Vermont for over 40 years– making a formal choice does not necessarily mean imposing a standard form on your stream of thoughts. He explains how he has been making formal choices in the context of free verse poetry throughout his writing career.
“They include decisions like where one breaks a line or adds a three line stanza,” he explained. “They are little things that you do not pay attention to.”
As Huddle sees it, formal choices are not only for the writer. As an example, he had an audience member read out a poem of his chronicling the days of his father’s last illness. The second to last line of the poem ended with an enjambment that forced the reader’s eyes to continue without pause. This format created a sense of breathlessness, and forced the reader to make conscious decisions about the poem should be read.
Huddle also explained that formal choices do not have to be conventional either. He referenced with delight a number of poems of his in which he tried to make all the lines come out exactly the same length in typewriter space. He had varying success.
Emphasizing how poetic form should have a purpose, Huddle describes how form should move the reader, rather than merely showing off the writer’s skill. As an example he mentioned shape poems, in which the physical arrangement of the words in the poem play an important role in conveying the intended meaning of the poem. In Huddle’s view, shape tends to become much more the point than the content itself.
To further depict how he views form, Huddle compares poetic form to the way a jazz musician interacts with accompanying musicians; where the accompaniment is a steady rhythm with some chord changes, the jazz musician who is improvising weaves the melodic story into the background music.
As Huddle describes, the process is “something steady and solid under a line that can meander all over the place.”
Shedding light on his creative process, Huddle explains how form and content overlap in his mind simultaneously. He describes how while writing the poem he can “almost step back and let the two [form and line] talk.”
Huddle then explains how he draws inspiration from that that specific moment of overlap.
“When I am writing and suddenly I put down a word or two, a line or a sentence that I had no idea I would write.”
Alongside expansive events like this lecture series, the Poetry Center also organizes periodic retreats to Fielder Farm at the base of Camel’s Hump in Huntington. Higgins and Dickerson are currently preparing for a ‘Poetry and Healing Retreat’ on April 17-19 for people interested in exploring poetry as a means of dealing with loss or difficult events.
Although Dickerson recognizes that the SPC still has a lot to do for the encouragement of young poets in Vermont going forward, the Center at large has received a positive response from the Vermont community. The organization has grown significantly since its inception.
Higgins mentioned the tremendous encouragement they have received from local bookstores throughout Vermont, many of which have taken up the center’s cause and cooperated extensively for the organization of the long-running lecture series.
This current lecture series will run until October 8. For more details and full event listings, visit sundogpoetry.org.
(04/29/15 9:28pm)
The second faculty show of the semester, Spring Awakening, will usher in a 19th-century tale of sexuality that proved to be far ahead of its times. Written by German dramatist Frank Wedekind in 1891, the play offers a harrowing perspective of suicide, rape, child abuse, abortion and other difficult themes, which frequently led to the banning or censorship of the play during the author’s lifetime and beyond. (Indeed, the first uncensored production in English took place in 1974.) This weekend’s rendition will grapple directly with these complex issues, under the direction of Associate Professor of Theatre Claudio Medeiros ’90. The content is for mature audiences only.
Spring Awakening follows a group of adolescents in a small town in late-19th-century Germany. Within their sexually repressive culture, they experience an awakening into sexuality. But in a world where people still believe that storks bring babies, this pubescent transformation holds scandalous implications. As such, Medeiros described the premise of the play as “living the tension between those emotions and desires and the ideology of the time.”
To understand the context for their performances, cast members conducted research specific to their roles and spoke with Professor of German Bettina Matthias. With 21 student actors, one faculty actor and a five-student production team, the making of this show has proven to be no small feat. In contrast to the small cast of his last faculty show, Medeiros chose Spring Awakening for its wide breadth of roles.
“Directors have lists of plays in their heads that they would like to do in the future,” he stated. “Each time you direct, you have to take into consideration the students who are available and the roles that you can offer for those students.”
While casting last semester, Medeiros was extremely upfront regarding the sensitive and potentially triggering content of the play. During the reading process, he chose particularly difficult scenes for students to run through so he could read their level of comfort as they confronted the full extent of the show’s material.
Later on in the production process, following the devastating loss of one of the College’s students, Medeiros felt it was necessary to discuss the mature subject matter of Spring Awakening with the administration, and to question whether or not to proceed with the production.
“In light of recent events, some on campus were concerned about what impact the play might have on the community and, in particular, on vulnerable members of the community who might be struggling with their own reaction to recent events,” Andrea Lloyd, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, explained.
“You start questioning what you are doing,” Medeiros stated. “But we always felt that the demonstration was taking great care to look at the issue and think about it very, very carefully.”
The cast and crew discussed the issue heavily. A small group of faculty, including Medeiros, engaged in an open dialogue with the senior administration about the complexities of the show. Ultimately, it was decided that the play should go on, with a clear warning to all audiences about the mature content.
“I hope that members of the community make informed choices about whether attending is the right thing for them,” Lloyd said. “And I applaud the cast members for the work they have done grappling with very difficult subject matter.”
Indeed, the controversial nature of Spring Awakening ought not to overshadow the meticulously passionate work of the cast and crew in bringing this piece to life. Medeiros chose British playwright Edward Bond’s translation of Spring Awakening, as he preferred the economy of the text over the overwritten quality of other versions. Last semester, students in his first-year seminar, Power and Sexuality Onstage, proved integral in helping him unravel certain scenes of the play. Meanwhile, in rehearsals, the cast has demonstrated an unprecedented chemistry in piecing together this thought-provoking work.
“This company has been a total joy to work with. Usually you try to do a lot of ensemble-building. But they created an ensemble practically on their own,” Medeiros said. “The only thing I did was create an environment that was playful and comfortable. I was really fortunate.”
In particular, he lauded the initiative of Adam Milano ’15 and Chelsea Melone ’15, who play the challenging roles of Melchior and Wendla, respectively.
“I would come in and shape the material,” Medeiros said. “But the first draft they would come up with on their own.”
Of course, crafting this difficult piece has not come without its challenges. Students initially struggled to grasp the sense of sexual ignorance that embodied the era. Additionally, the poetic nature of the text has posed both theoretical and technical demands for the cast. The challenge lies in making the meaning of the dialogue understood and articulating the words so that they are clearly heard, since the spacious Wright Theater creates a tricky situation for acoustics.
“The moment an audience member moves forward to listen better, some of the effects are already drained,” Medeiros explained. In terms of the nature of the text, he stated, “It’s more expressionist than realist. Instead of representing life as it would happen outside the theater, the playwright is trying to represent the essence of experiences, not all the contours in detail. So the language is somewhat poetic, elevated. It’s not people sitting at a table having coffee and chatting. There’s a clear sense that this is poetry, or art.”
The task of the actor, then, is to ensure that the dialogue is understood not only for its surface meaning, but also for what is underneath it.
Structured as a poem, the play is composed of scenes that juxtapose each other but are unlinked by cause and effect. The visual concept is minimalist, with an abstract material space that clearly suggests a real place. Lighting shines down upon the same set to evoke scenes within a house, a forest or any number of different settings. As Medeiros put it, the space is “more of a surface that suggests something, but that resonates differently in different scenes.” Throughout the show, the visual focus falls mostly on bodies in space, lights and costumes.
In contrast to previous renditions of Spring Awakening, Medeiros chose to incorporate a dancer in this show. Through fluidly choreographed movements, Artist-in-Residence in Dance Scotty Hardwig will portray a mysterious figure known as the masked man, opening up a physical language onstage.
In breaking open difficult ideas and transcending modern times to an era of oppression and scandal, the cast and crew of this production have worked diligently to do justice to the original text.
“For us, it has been pleasurable work,” Medeiros said. “It is an artful play.”
The long-anticipated Spring Awakening debuts tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Wright Memorial Theater. Two subsequent showings on May 1-2 will also take place at 7:30 p.m. Running time is approximately two-and-a-half hours with intermission. Tickets are available through go/boxoffice.
