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(05/07/14 3:55pm)
I am sure we are familiar with the resounding voice of Roger Daltrey screaming out the words “Who are you?” in the smash hit by The Who that bears the same name as the lyric. While I have listened to Daltrey sing this over Townshend’s guitar riffs for years, only recently have I actually taken the time to answer his question. Now just as Daltrey asked us I am asking you Middlebury, who are you?
I am sure when you toured the campus or went to an information session or got those incredibly annoying pamphlets in the mail, Middlebury claimed to know exactly what it was. Why it’s so simple! We are a small liberal arts college in northern Vermont. We are really good at languages and environmental science. Robert Frost hung out here for a little bit and we take credit for Alexander Twilight and the food is free. Oh, and Bihall is pretty nice.
This is my bias: I love Middlebury. It was not always the case, but I can say it with full certainty now. However, I cannot help feeling a little deceived by the message sold to me three years ago. I find myself often questioned on the merits of liberal arts and unable to provide an adequate response. In an age where technical and specific knowledge seems to be more employable, what use is a liberal arts education? Well I am not sure. I guess we take classes in some different areas to get a few requirements. That is enough to claim liberal arts status right?
Our identity as a liberal arts institution has changed. The liberal arts are not what they were. Leo Strauss defined liberal education as, “…the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.” I want to believe Leo Strauss and more and more I believe his perspective is one we should aspire to, yet often fail in our conversations on campus. Our identity as a place of liberal education needs an update for a changing world or at the very least a reaffirmation of some kind.
Yes, we have lost our way somewhat. We take the bare minimum outside our respective majors/minors and it seems few of us identify as students of the liberal arts rather than students of our given discipline. A liberal education has to be something more, something still relevant in a modern age. We do not have the technical facilities or faculties of many our peer institutions, so what do we offer in its place? What tangible skills do we gain from the liberal arts that make us identifiable as products of a liberal education?
We will never be experts in one very specific thing. That has never been the focus of a liberal education. However, we can perfect a broader more applicable skill that unites all disciplines. That skill is of course communication. If there is anything we should pride ourselves on, it should be our expertise in not only written argument, but verbal debate as well. The quintessential student of the liberal arts should not be recognizable by the degree on their wall, but by their skill as negotiators, mediators, diplomats and the very best debaters. So, when you are sitting at an awkward dinner party and someone whose had too many drinks questions the value of a liberal education, we can actively convince them that we do possess a certain tangible set of skills.
Persuasion and well reasoned argument has not been our forte lately, Middlebury. It seems of late not only has our academic ideology revolved around competition but also our debates outside the classroom. Our conversations have not been filled with well-reasoned debate. Instead we have opted to bash our opponents over the head with blunt ideology or simply ignore them. We have taken the easy road in the hopes of preserving a sense of elitism, a sense of infallibility that should be revolting to any student of the liberal arts. We should be better than that. We should take pride not in how stubbornly we hold to our given views but in the confidence that we have listened to argument and arrived at what we believe to be the best possible perspective.
Liberal education has never been for everyone. It takes a certain type of personality, a certain openness of character perhaps. We signed up for a liberal education whether we like it or not. We should count ourselves lucky, we get to define the liberal arts for the future. It will be us who decides how liberal education remains relevant in a rapidly changing world. So when The Who asks us, “Who are you?” we will have a good answer.
Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
(04/30/14 11:12pm)
From April 30-May 3, the Middlebury College Departments of Theatre and Dance are presenting Sarah Ruhl’s Tony Award-nominated play “In the Next Room” (or The Vibrator Play). Associate Professor of Theatre Claudio Medeiros ’90 will direct the work, which stars seven students and serves as the final campus production for theater majors Mari Vial-Golden ’14 and Matt Ball ’14.
True to its title, the play explores the use of electric vibrators in treating women for “hysteria” in 19th century Saratoga Springs, N. Y. It also sheds light on doctors’ long-standing, limited understanding of human sexuality and, in particular, the female orgasm. After all, the hysteria diagnosis — which is no longer recognized as medically sound — was regularly applied to women exhibiting symptoms ranging from nervousness to fatigue to irritability to general “troublemaking.”
It was these themes of female sexuality and desire that drove Vial-Golden to audition for the role of Catherine Billings, one of the leading characters in the play.
“It is a period piece that takes place in the late 1800s, but the themes are so timeless,” Vial-Golden said.
Indeed, the play points to just how far we have come but also how much we still don’t know about human sexuality.
“To me, it’s mind boggling that it’s so recent that we have actually come to understand the female orgasm,” Medeiros said.
Although “In the Next Room” presents serious topics, it does so with humor and lightheartedness. This rich balance appealed to Medeiros but has also challenged him and the cast.
“Tonally, it’s a tricky piece because it’s funny and serious often at the same time,” Medeiros said. “The challenge becomes how to navigate that. The director has to guide the actors to find a truthful connection with both the comedy and the drama. At the same time, one wants the audience to laugh at the situations but not the characters.”
Katie Weatherseed ’16, who plays Sabrina, a patient treated for hysteria, notes that the play draws some of its humor from characters’ genuine innocence, especially in contrast to that of a 21st century audience.
“The characters bring a charming naiveté that’s just really fun to play and also fun to watch,” she said. “I hope that the show can make the audience laugh while also giving them a little food for thought.”
In order to prepare for the show, the cast researched sex and intimacy in the Victorian Era, read the book that inspired the play, Rachel P. Maines’ 2001 text Technology of Orgasm, took a historical walking tour of Saratoga Springs and watched the 2011 movie Hysteria, which stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and explores similar topics to “In the Next Room.” In order to gain a better understanding of the “hysteria” diagnosis, Weatherseed also read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s popular short story, “The Yellow Wall Paper. “
“[It] was probably the piece I looked to most, as it guides the reader through the consciousness of a woman who is stifled by gender roles and encouraged to suppress her emotions,” she said.
Blocking scenes was particularly important to the rehearsal process because the play takes place in two adjacent rooms. Action moves between both and sometimes occurs in each simultaneously.
“It’s almost like in film — whoever is in the foreground is in focus, but then the focus can shift to the background,” Medeiros said. “Finding a way to do that in the theater has been a really interesting challenge.”
Because the play will be her last at Middlebury, Vial-Golden is particularly grateful that “In the Next Room” has presented challenges like this unconventional blocking.
“It’s nice to end on a challenge and to end with a friend — Matt Ball — who I’ve been working with since freshman year, as well as a phenomenal cast of mainly underclassmen,” Vial-Golden said.
Medeiros hopes that “In the Next Room” will push audience members just as it has the cast. Hopefully, viewers will leave the play with not only a deeper understanding of the evolution of medicine, sexuality and gender, but also a revised definition of intimacy.
“I think the play ultimately proposes a return to a kind of radical intimacy, one that is not just sexual but erotic in the larger sense of the word: a true physical, emotional and spiritual connection...I find that quite beautiful,” Medeiros said.
“In the Next Room” (or The Vibrator Play) opened at The Seeler Studio Theater on Wednesday, Apr. 30 and will run through Saturday, May 3 at 7:30 p.m. each night. Tickets are $6 for Middlebury College students and available at go/boxoffice.
(04/30/14 11:04pm)
Throughout the past semester, brightly colored posters calling for writers, illustrators, graphic designers and “any other interested parties or persons” have graced bulletin boards across campus on behalf of “The Storytold Project”, a student initiative born out of The Old Stone Mill. While many may be familiar with the posters, the details of Storytold itself are perhaps less known. The premise is simple — students submit an idea, however vague or detailed, and the Storytold artists deliver a customized story in one of a variety of mediums in regular installments.
The imaginative and ambitious endeavor began with Ben Mansky ’15, who had been exploring alternative methods of storytelling through avenues like the interactive services Inform and Storynexus, radio drama and fictional blogging.
“The idea for personalized storytelling as a service hit me last summer — I wanted a way to get out my creative impulses while doing something productive,” Mansky said in an email. “Writing to a prompt can be fantastic exercise, so I figured, why not get the prompts from other people, and then give them the results? That’s when I first made the Storytold web page.”
The website grew to a service on campus after Mansky applied to be a tenant at the Old Stone Mill, an off campus venue that provides students the space to create almost anything they can imagine. During his time as a tenant, Manksy formed valuable creative and entrepreneurial connections with other artists at the Mill and realized that his idea had artistic support and sizeable interest, prompting him to expand.
“I couldn’t handle every component of the project myself, so I asked around, starting with people I knew and gradually working outwards to posting in Facebook groups and asking professors to notify their classes,” Mansky said. “As people have joined the team, new possibilities have arisen. We don’t just have writers, we also have an amateur calligrapher, a graphic designer — all of these skills people bring to the team allow us to grow in new directions and tell richer, more fully-realized stories.”
So far, three stories are on Storytold’s website, ranging in format from fantasy fiction to journal entries to instant messaging transcripts. Students can request that their stories appear in anywhere between one and twenty installments and Storytold also offers the option for stories to remain confidential and anonymous.
The decision to publish the stories in chapters stemmed from a desire to adapt to the busy schedules of students, catering to an audience that is more likely to read smaller stories at one time. Writing a serial also allows the artists at Storytold more flexibility in composition and experimenting with different media while regularly including cliffhangers that entice readers to come back for more.
With so much reading material available in print and digital formats, it might be easy to question why a service like Storytold needs to exist. Manksy believes that the personalization of his initiative sets it apart.
“Everyone wants something that was made just for them. On top of that, everyone has ideas, some of them creative ideas that might never become more than a fleeting daydream. Students can search online, go to a bookstore or go to a library and find a huge number of books on a huge variety of topics. With Storytold, they can ask for the story they want to read, a story that might not exist on the shelves of bookstores — or at least, a story that they may never find.”
Though there has been a lot of curiosity around the project, a lack of writers and need for more pointed publicity caused a halt in the project in recent months. Mansky plans to restructure and revive Storytold next semester with improvements.
“Because we had a dearth of writers this semester, we put requests on hiatus, but now, as word is getting out, our base of writers has grown two-fold. We’re preparing a publicity campaign for the fall semester of next year.”
Mansky believes that Storytold offers its writers a unique creative fulfillment that may not be available in a classroom setting.
“Practically any writer will tell you that imposing some restrictions on where a story can go can be an extremely helpful exercise. Writers can decide what they’d most like to pursue, and the installment system gives them variety in their prompts. It also means that they don’t have to write the next Great American Novel every week — no Middlebury student has time for that. For our non-writers, it provides an opportunity to hone their skills for an appreciative audience while supporting a project that they find interesting.”
Ultimately, Mansky would like to expand the service beyond the College by accepting requests from anywhere around the country and world. As of now, he has his sights set on making Storytold a student organization by writing a constitution and finding a faculty advisor to give the service more recognition and legitimacy on campus.
Although Storytold is not currently accepting story requests, Mansky is actively searching for interested artists to join the team for next fall by applying at go/storytold or emailing him directly at bmansky@middlebury.edu.
Artwork by Tamir Williams
(04/30/14 6:37pm)
Here in idyllic rural Vermont, Middlebury College is a bastion of beauty, tradition, stewardship, and of course — safety. In order to foster elite learning, we have a multitude of mechanisms to protect us from any possible interference from danger outside our marble walls. But according to the Community Council, surveillance cameras may be an added necessity to campus security. As one member of the council said, “While we live in a tight-knit community, we are part of a larger scary world.” Apart from this, there has been no explanation about how surveillance cameras might keep us safer. Many of us are left questioning, are we a tight-knit community? What is implied by “larger scary world?” In the conversation around surveillance on campus, many “common sense’ ideologies and markers of race, class, gender and sexuality are being evoked. We want to both deconstruct this logic and name the assumptions used to justify new cameras.
The construction of an internal Middlebury community — with its highly selected members — as being safe, and those in the larger world being scary, creates a fallacy that violence is enacted by “strangers,” and we are not complicit in it. Moreover, fear of criminal strangers has notoriously been mobilized at a cultural level to increase control over certain people. In other words, at Middlebury and in the larger world, we are not all surveilled equally. Cameras aren’t neutral. Adding new ones will not keep us safer. Certain bodies are already marked as scary and criminal before they have been “caught” committing a crime: black and Latino bodies have historically been watched on this campus, mirroring how they are hyper-policed in the “outside” world. This is also true for gender non-conforming, trans and visibly queer people. The following are a few examples of the discriminatory results of surveillance and policing on this campus.
Recently, a non-white, non-gender conforming individual was confronted by public safety primarily for breaking the overnight guest rule. An anonymous author, writing for beyond the green, argued that her girlfriend was watched, confronted and treated more harshly because of her marginalized identity: she was viewed as having “something to hide,” while other violators of the guest rule are regularly treated with more leniency and given the benefit of the doubt. Surveillance reinforces normative identities by making deviance ever visible. Given that Middlebury has historically regulated and stigmatized non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality — permitting threats of violence against gay and lesbian identifying students to go unchallenged — widespread visibility is not associated with safety for marginalized identities.
Three years ago, a guest that an FYC brought to campus was forcibly removed by public safety. The details of this event are complicated; however, arguments were made then that still hold up now that factors such as the age, race and radical identity of this man likely had something to do with making the students feel “unsafe” and causing public safety to not just ask him to leave, but to (effectively) arrest him. Language of unsafe, stranger and scary is not neutral; rather, these terms are code words for certain bodies and certain practices; and in our society — as well as in the starkly white community of Middlebury — the black (male) body is marked as the most unwanted and unsafe stranger, continuously hyper-criminalized.
In questioning the politics of putting even more power into the hands of the administration, we should ask, why the panic? Middlebury already has multiple systems of surveillance and control: key cards track who has entered into buildings at what time, Public Safety reads our emails, and we have two surveillance cameras (one outside of Parton and one in the MCA). So far — again highlighting how surveillance is not neutral — these technologies have been used to punish acts of civil disobedience on this campus. Through surveillance, Middlebury’s administration arrogates power to itself by gaining exclusive access to the personal information of all who inhabit its campus, disciplining people by rendering deviance constantly visible, and normalizing punitive measures for handling conflict. For instance, just a year ago, one student — notably, a trans student with radical politics — was punished for her protest against anti-gay Red Cross policies. She was found out via key card technology and then suspended for a year. This instance represents a practice of discriminatory surveillance that seeks out acts of deviance and then reinforces punitive frameworks.
Looking beyond our campus we can also find examples of how surveillance has different effects on different people, depending on whether their communities have historically been deemed necessary to criminalize or to protect. Expanding on the notion about “which crimes will be punished,” and the idea that surveillance will only increase existing power structures, we turn to the case of Oscar Grant, a black man shot and killed by a police officer in 2009. The murder of Grant was caught on camera and the prosecutor attempted to use the footage to convict the white officer. However, the footage must have been disregarded as evidence, since the officer was not convicted of first degree murder and only served two years in jail before being released. Within a justice system in which carceral punishment is our only mechanism for dealing with this type of crime, this inconsistent sentencing, upheld by systemic racism, completely devalues the life of Oscar Grant. The use of video footage to solve crimes must be considered within the racism that still haunts our criminal justice system. Which “crimes” do cameras call attention to, or have the ability to see? The guise of neutrality, so clearly not in evidence, has contributed to a long history of devaluing certain identities. This type of evidence is used when it holds up current power systems, disregarded when it does not.
You might be asking, “I’m not doing anything wrong, so why should I care?” The NYPD’s stop and frisk policy shows us why this should matter to all of us. While it didn’t use surveillance cameras per se, it was a widespread surveillance program that had a devastating effect on thousands of people. Out of over 4 million stops in ten years, only one tenth of percent yielded illegal firearms — the purported reason for this policy. 90 percent of the stops yielded no evidence of criminal activity but the idea that people can be stopped for no reason has far-reaching consequences for all of us. Similarly, surveillance cameras assume guilt and require one to “prove” their innocence. Do you want to trade your rights for such low returns?
Surveillance has an acute effect on the way crime or rule breaking is dealt with on campus, favoring punitive over transformative justice. This can be illustrated in another interview with Director of Public Safety Lisa Bouchard, who states that the surveillance cameras’ purpose is “to keep people safe and solve crimes,” (The Middlebury Campus, 2008). The masculinist logic of objective technological evidence encourages punitive measures and works to obscure the social context underlying an incident on campus through its guise of objectivity. Although the watching claims to be neutral, it is not; the results of surveillance (who is caught, who is punished) are up to those doing the surveilling. We don’t view visual images neutrally, so when exclusive access to video footage is in the hands of administration, it can be employed as “neutral evidence” despite the continued functioning of power.
These technologies cannot be objective because they take on and reflect values from the context of their use, reproducing the unequal social orders in which they are grounded. They do not represent an opportunity for community-based transformation. That surveillance cameras can supposedly solve crimes makes assumptions about what kinds of crimes are committed and where. For instance, we could never hope to “solve” the crime of sexual assault, when the vast majority of this violence occurs behind dorm room doors.
This week a few renowned scholar-activists discussed these issues in light of the larger state-sponsored violence embedded in the prison industrial complex at a panel: Critical Queer Perspectives on the Carceral State. They argued that Middlebury’s surveillance cameras cannot be seen outside of the overall neoliberal state (the U.S.), which repeatedly criminalizes the survival strategies of marginalized people. Therefore, integrating the transformative critiques of these panelists, we must see how surveillance becomes complicit in oppression and find better methods of security. The panelists invited us to consider alternative ways of creating justice and building communities that truly transform our current social conditions; this may enable us to actually become “tight-knit.” One idea is to work on building community and mutual accountability, while developing restorative justice frameworks.
Just like the Prison Industrial Complex and systems of policing and criminalization, surveillance cameras do not make us safe. Rather, they centralize power, strengthen punitive frameworks, criminalize already marked, marginalized, “deviant” bodies and politics. They perpetuate myths of “neutrality” and “objective” technology, which actually stems from patriarchal logics and modes of being and acts unequally on a diverse social body. We should endeavour to be critical of the supposed beneficial effects of expanded surveillance, as it has primarily served to silence resistance, strengthen punishment and target those individuals already marginalized. For more information, visit beyond the green’s blog at go/btg.
MOLLY STUART ’15.5 is from Santa Cruz, Calif. LILY ANDREWS ’14 is from Minneapolis, Minn. ALLY YANSON ’14 is from Naples, Fla. KATIE WILLIS ’12 is from Birmingham, Ala. JACKIE PARK ’15 is from Los Angeles, Calif. ALEX STROTT ’14.5 is from Baltimore, Md. and ALEXANDER CHABALLIER ’16.5 is from Paris, France. Artwork by JENA RITCHEY.
(04/30/14 4:46pm)
As a kid, my favorite food and drink were spaghetti bolognese and Coca-Cola. Yet, after indulging myself in the richness of cakes, Cheese pizzas and meatball spaghettis for five months the dining halls, I’m starting to crave my mother’s meatbone soup.
To me, the taste of Chinese food tends to be three-dimensional: we are better at preserving flavor. For one, Chinese food enhances its taste with a strong aroma. One obvious difference you would find between American and Chinese stir fry is that the Chinese use woks (giant and slightly conical frying vessels) which give it a strong aroma. With the help of the chahn, high fire and dynamic stirring by the cook (to demonstrate the dynamisms of the motion - the verb chahn is sometimes combined with the use of Cantonese swear words), a strong savory aroma of the stir fry can be conjured. There is a method to our choice of ingredients as well. To soak up the juices of the stir fry we add turnips or mushrooms, which preserve the taste of each ingredient within the dish.
I think the reason that Chinese broths (we have very few chowders and heavy soups) are so multi-layered in flavor is because we boil our ingredients for such a long time, that their essences dissolve into the soup. This method of cooking is named the “old fire soup.” Although we use similar ingredients as some other cuisines, such as carrots, pork, vegetables and strong herbs such as cilantro and ginger, the flavor of the soup is much more full-bodied and savory.
While typical European food that I have tasted in America, such as meat dishes, pastas, and cream soups tend to be heavier, the Chinese developed lighter food with sharper flavors and scents. While America has the more versatile ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and salt, we augment our tastes with strong smelling shrimp pastes, fish sauce, a variety of chili oils, scallions, ginger and pungent fermented tofu. We also use more unusual ingredients, including a huge variety of mountain herbs and mushrooms, snakes, “the thousand year old egg,” durians (a large fruit with a strong odor and thorn-covered husk), fried larvae, scorpions and masked palm civet (an animal similar to a raccoon which lives in South-East Asia).
Like how canned food was invented for war or sausages for preservation through winter, cuisine is shaped by our environment and historical events. One explanation I have for Chinese use of such marginal ingredients and strong flavoring is that it is our way to adapt to hunger. How else could we have discovered how tasty fermented tofu is? The taste of strong condiments overwhelms hunger, and chili, traditionally used in the spicy cuisine of the Northwestern parts of China, is thought to help one warm up from the cold.
While Chinese food is flavorful, I associate European food here with a sense of comfort and orderliness. I love how rich and satisfying Mac and Cheese is, how bread is measured and orderly, divided into neat slices. I am fascinated by the sense of order associated with baking: how all ingredients are meticulously measured by specific utensils and measuring units and executed step by step carefully. The fact that you can indulge in the richness of spaghetti bolognese or a chocolate cake but not drown in the deluge of overwhelming scents can also be nice. Sometimes, these scents can be intrusive and distracting, should it come from someone else. I wonder whether this has to with the greater respect to privacy in the Western world, where every individual is divided with a separate serving on their dish in formal meals.
As I’ve grown older, I have learned to the savor the cold bitter melon and green tea of Chinese cuisine. There is a saying in China: “the days will be long if you are half-full or half-hungry.” Because of the fullness of flavor and having less smell and scent, Western food sometimes feel generic and too perfect. I long to taste food that is simple and spare. I guess my change of taste shows that I am starting to appreciate the subtler joys in life.
(04/30/14 4:45pm)
As April winds to a close, the College wraps up a month of events focused on raising awareness about sexual assault. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and new Health and Wellness Director Barbara McCall launched a series of events throughout the month in order to “recognize and support survivors in our community and create and maintain spaces for healing, allow program attendees to deepen their understanding of sexual violence at global, cultural, community and individual levels, and recognize sexual violence as a topic worthy of time, care and conversation in our community.”
The events included “Meditation for Survivors,” a workshop in which participants were guided through healing visualizations and breathing exercises to quiet the mind, “Sex, Relationships, and Consent: What You Need to Know,” a workshop by Keith E. Smith, the Men’s Outreach Coordinator at the University of Vermont, which discussed sex, relationships, communication, violence and what it really means to have consent, and “B.R.A.V.E. (Be Ready Aware Victorious Empowered),” a personal safety training workshop for both physical and mental empowerment. According to McCall, these events were well-attended and received positively. McCall emphasized the expansion of the sexual assault conversation as one of the goals for not only this month but for the entire year, too.
According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five women and one in 71 men will experience attempted or completed sexual assault at some time in their lives, a majority of those assaults happening during college. Though students consistently seek to increase awareness through certain events like “It Happens Here,” Wellness Committee member Casey Watters ’15 points out that the discussion may not always continue after such events.
“The lack of discussion afterwards takes away from some of the immense potential such a powerful event has on this campus,” Watters said.
In the media recently, apps such as “Kitestring” have received attention for their possible efficacy in preventing sexual assault. Kitestring is a “safecall” service (available for use by smartphone and non-smartphone users alike) that will automatically alert your emergency contacts if you do not check in with the app after an allotted amount of time. It can be used generally to get someone from Point A to Point B safely: you know you are going to be walking home alone, so you tell Kitestring to check on you in 15 minutes. Kitestring will then either text you or the app will send you an alert after 15 minutes have passed to make sure you have made it to your destination safely. If you do not answer the text or confirm with the app that you are safe, Kitestring will text one or more emergency contact numbers you gave it with a generalized message or a custom one you made: for example, “Hey, this is [insert your name here]. I’m walking back from this concert to my apartment by myself. If you’re getting this message, I may not have made it back safely. Give me a call?” You can text the app to extend the amount of time you have allotted if you are delayed, and you can add additional secret code words so someone else cannot check in with the app for you. Unlike other safecall apps, Kitestring relies on SMS instead of a data connection or just an app, so it is available to millions more users than other options. Some have suggested it could be used to prevent sexual assault.
But McCall pointed out that apps like Kitestring are far from a perfect solution. “Best practices in bystander intervention education do not rely on apps,” she said. “They are focused on communication between friends and community members to assess risk and act accordingly.”
Former Sexual Assault Oversight Committee Member Fritz Parker ’15 agreed, saying, “While apps like Kitestring certainly have their place, I think it is important that they not distract from the real issue: there are people who don’t feel safe doing something as simple as walking home. These emergency services don’t help us address that issue, only deal with their consequences more efficiently. That’s something, but it’s not a solution.”
GSFS Major, MiddSafe advocate and Feminist Action at Middlebury President Alexandra Strott ’15 highlighted one major issue with the app.
“I’m glad that [Kitestring] exists if it has the potential to help someone out of an uncomfortable or even dangerous situation, or even just to give someone peace of mind on their way from Point A to Point B, or while they’re out on a first date with someone they’ve never met before, for instance,” she said. “I’m a little wary of an app like Kitestring being branded as a solution to rape culture and sexual assault rather than as a precautionary measure. It doesn’t really address sexual assault that occurs between intimate partners or acquaintance rape.”
Watters believes that Kitestring may be effective in more urban areas and thinks there are better ways to address sexual assault on campus, like the workshops and discussions that took place this month.
“At Middlebury, I see our solution more through empowerment and discussion teaching students their rights and resources: to remove blame from the victims in realizing that it is always okay to say no halfway through or change your mind, to stand by a belief that you want your partner to use a condom, even if it may not feel as good and to stress to all students that a maybe is not a yes, and a no is not a maybe,” she said.
Sexual assault is not the only way that sex can introduce complications in the lives of young adults, and the app world has realized as much. Fears of STIs and pregnancy can often add to the stress of college life and app-creators are tapping into this with a variety of apps, primarily targeted toward females, to improve reproductive health and awareness and help optimize (or minimize) risk of pregnancy.
One such app is “Glow.” Originally targeted toward women who were having trouble conceiving, Glow analyzes data on a woman’s menstrual cycle, basal body temperature and medication history to predict when a woman is most likely to be pregnant. Though at the start it operated as an encouragement to try to conceive on certain days, the app now has many different interfaces depending on whether the user is trying to conceive or trying not to conceive, and whether the user is sexually active. For those who are not sexually active, the app focuses on reproductive health tips and provides alerts for the user as to when to expect her next period; for those who are sexually active and trying not to conceive, the app alerts the user at “high-risk” times of the month. All of Glow’s alerts and tips are based on the data provided by the user; the more information the user provides, the more accurate the app’s information will be.
This app is not a substitute for gynecological visits or pelvic exams, nor does it mean that one no longer needs to practice safe sex.
As Strott points out, “Apps like these can be really useful for students who are concerned about becoming pregnant, if it gives them peace of mind, but I think it’s important for them not to use these apps as a substitute for practicing safe sex (whatever that looks like for them) and getting exams and tests regularly.”
Though both of these apps do not provide fail-safe solutions to sexual assault or unwanted pregnancy, they can be helpful tools to use in conjunction with healthy practices, good communication and increasing awareness and education.
(04/24/14 3:39am)
The Middlebury track and field teams finished up their last weekend of non-championship competition at the University of Albany Spring Classic on Saturday, April 19, competing in a field of mostly Division-I schools in a non-scoring meet that also featured elite international competitors.
On the women’s side, Alison Maxwell ’15 continued her season’s success with a second place showing in the 800 meters, crossing the line in time of 2:16.09.
“I was really surprised and excited with my 800, which is the first one I have run all year,” Maxwell said. “My time is one I’ve been hoping to run for a while, and it felt really good to finally make it happen. Mostly, though, it felt great to get some speed in my legs, which should benefit me in the coming weeks.”
Other Panther women with high finishes on the day included Paige Fernandez ’17 in the 400 meter hurdles, where she took sixth place in a time of 1:06.87. Emily Singer ’14 also posted a sixth-place finish with a time of 18:45.69 in the 5,000 meters, while teammate Katie Rominger ’14 took fourth in the 1,500 in 4:49.00. In the field, Hannah Blackburn ’17 posted a mark of 16’11.5” in the long jump, good for fifth place in the event. Carly Andersen ’16 took third in the javelin with a toss of 121’11”.
“The whole team is really excited for NESCACs of course,” Maxwell said. “After getting second last year, the girl’s team is hungry for the win, and we have a definite chance of getting it. I can’t wait to see how it plays out.”
On the men’s side, the Panther squad managed to post a number of top finishes. Bryan Holtzman ’14 edged up the Panther’s all-time list with his 10.79 performance in the 100 meters, the third fastest time in school history. Jake Wood ’15 continued his collection of high finishes in the 400-meter hurdles when he took fifth in the event with a time of 56.57. Sam Cartwright ’16 and Sam Craft ’14 also took fifth place in their respective events, with Cartwright posting a time of 4:02.20 in the 1,500 and Craft crossing the line in 1:58.47 in the 800. In the 110-meter hurdles, Kevin Chu ’14 took second place in a time of 14.75, while teammate Taylor Shortsleeve ’15 finished behind him in third with a time of 15.40.
“The 110 hurdle race went well,” Chu said. “It was the first time all year that I have felt a good rhythm in the hurdles, just in time for the NESCAC championship. My time ranks me eleventh right now in Division-III. The goal is to stay in the top twenty to earn a trip to the NCAA championships next month. I made it there last year qualifying seventeenth overall, and I’d like to improve on that. The race over the weekend is nothing more than a step in the right direction, and there is still a lot of work left.”
“[Albany] as a whole went well for the team,” Chu said of the meet. “Many of our athletes did not compete in their primary event. We used the meet as a tune-up for the conference championship. The most important thing is we came through the meet healthy. NESCACs is the big meet for us every year because the focus is on overall team performance rather than individual accolades. Check back with us next week and there will be plenty of stories of my teammates rising to the occasion and performing well beyond expectations. It happens every year. This is the strongest team I have been a part in my four years here. I’m confident that my teammates will back up my words.”
Head Coach Martin Beatty was encouraged by the weekend’s results as the team heads into the NESCAC Championships on Saturday.
“I am excited not just from this weekend, but overall,” Beatty said. “It was nice that we had sunny weather to work with, but it was another windy day so that took away from most people’s performances. But having that wind makes us tougher, and it’s good to get through it. NESCACs is our big build-up for the season, and I’m rearing and ready to get to Colby and compete.”
While the rest of the team was in Albany, two Panther individuals traveled to Princeton to run in the Larry Ellis Invitational on April 18th and 19th. Sam Klockenkemper ’17 took 67th in the 1,500 meters with a time of 4:00.52, while Kevin Wood ’15 took 34th in the 5,000 in a competitive 14:37.15.
“The race at Princeton is a unique opportunity to run at a very competitive level and put up a fast time before championship season,” Wood said. “Few races have such a deep, talented pool of runners, which can make a huge difference in distance running. The race was pretty fun. It was a crowded heat with 30 entries, but everyone was fast, so traffic wasn’t bad. I got to the rail early on and chilled in the back of the pack drafting. My plan was just to hang on as long as I could to a pack going 69 or 70 [seconds] per lap. It worked out pretty well.”
The Panthers will return to action at the NESCAC Championships on Saturday, April 26 at Colby.
(04/24/14 3:07am)
Although we pushed ourselves to adopt the “early-riser” mentality that other active students all share, our attempt to cut the ties to our beds in the mornings failed. We may not have made the cut for this exclusive group of kids who wake with the sun, but we have decided to make our own clique: the night runners. If we can’t get up early, then let’s stay up late.
Due to the fact that Izzy is nocturnal, she has been anxiously awaiting to start her routine of night running since the day spring was supposed to start. Monday’s optimal weather provided us with the first chance to run after sunset.
What are the advantages of night running? From being able to embrace your ostrich run without the fear of fellow students seeing you, to saving yourself the humiliation of having your professors outrun you, the pros are endless. When midnight struck, Maddie and Izzy let their inner ostriches run free. After passing a romantic couple on the swings outside of Twilight, we were enveloped in our own solidarity. Everything was going smoothly; Maddie had actually remembered to use her inhaler and was able to breath without sounding like a 60-year-old nicotine addict, and Izzy had just watched the newest episode of “Online Dating Rituals of the American Male” and was therefore running on a trash-TV high. All was well … until the townies started appearing. To all of you female runners out there, we are sure you have experienced a car full of townie teenage boys rolling down their windows and shouting inaudible, yet clearly inappropriate, words at your sweaty selves on a run. Well, when the sporadic streetlights are the only sources of illumination, and you seem to be the only people for miles, these audible shouts become more alarming than flattering. Especially when there are multiple cars doing this. Together. In a caravan formation.
Long story short, we quickened our pace, ran to Izzy’s house in search of shelter, and begged her mother to drive us back to campus. Safely back in Battell, Izzy started browsing the internet for headlamps while Maddie looked into obtaining a concealed carry license.
Thanks to Mother Nature, our next day’s training was derailed. But not to fear: we elicited help from everyone’s second favorite personal trainer (behind Goran “Bob Harper” Simic), Shaun T. For those of you who haven’t experienced this workout god, Shaun T. is a six-foot-tall and roughly 200 pound nugget of muscle that stars in the Insanity workout videos. Playing eenie meenie miney mo to settle on the “Pure Cardio: Day 7” video, we pressed play, locked the Battell common room door, and exchanged nervous glances. What followed was a combination of wheezing, grunting, whining, fist-pumping, jump-jacking, push-uping, butt kicking, squatting and hopping. All of this while Shaun T. yelled any combination of the following phrases: “Dig deeper!” and “Soft knees, soft knees!”, “Shaun T. is starting to sweat everybody!” And, our personal favorite, “I’m so tired I don’t know the names of my moves!” Regardless, the yelling worked, and although some of our push-ups looked more like the Vine sensation “Grind On Me” dance move, we completed all forty minutes of the video without stopping. One of the first fully successful workouts we have had in a long time (longer than we have been waiting for Spring).
Last week’s training brought us to an interesting conclusion: we are far more successful runners when we have creepers harassing us or Shaun T. yelling at us. In other words, when we have people to motivate us we accomplish more than we thought we could. This proves difficult for us when we are completely isolated on the unpaved Sheep Farm Road and about to start up a big hill. Too many more times than we’d like to admit, we have stopped for a walking break instead of pushing ourselves to go farther. Frankly, we’ve tried a lot of tactics to improve our mental endurance: self pep-talks, counting games, meditation, visualization, folk music, no music and pop music. Some of these methods provided more success than others, but we know that the race-day adrenaline and the presence of other runners will help motivate us to keep going.
(04/24/14 12:40am)
Bakery at Crossroads Cafe
The school bake sales as you knew them pale in comparison to the kind of creative baked goods the student-run Crossroads Café are selling. From lemon-frosted blueberry cake to banana peanut butter finger cake, from white chocolate sweet potato cake to pumpkin bread, the range of pastries conceptualized and made by the baking team at Crossroads never stops expanding. Head chef of Crossroads Sandra Markowitz ’15.5 said, “Once we had an overabundance of coconut flour and so we wondered, ‘what are we going to do with all this?’ and so then we found a coconut banana bread chocolate chip recipe,” a melting pastry that now sells over the counter.
Creativity cooks here even without a kitchen. “The main difficulty is that the kitchen we have access to is the Grille’s—which isn’t a baking kitchen,” Markowitz said. “They’ve been really helpful in supplying us with the things we need. They have a good oven, they have whisks, and I’m hoping next to ask for bundt cake pans!”
Pastries sell by the slice here, but they can also be bought whole. Because it takes four hours to bake a cake, chefs would optimize and take to baking three cakes on Sunday—two of them decorated for Crossroads and the third replica would be sold whole. Markowitz says that the difference between buying here and buying pastries at Carol’s is that “you don’t know the person baking them. It’s a chance to support someone and their passion here, and I think that’s a really great thing.” Food, and all the creativity that goes into it, doesn’t get any more local than this.
Prices: $1.25-$3.25
Contact: smarkowoitz@middlbury.edu
Team Members: Sandra Markowitz ’15.5 (Head Chef), Mariah Levin ’16.5, Georgia Wei ’16, Birgitta Cheng ’17, Connor Bentivoglio ’15.5
Wash & Carry
Since 1987, Middlebury men’s hockey team has been running Wash and Carry, a laundry washing and delivery service. Serving about 200-230 people per year, Wash and Carry picks up your laundry once a week in a special bag outside student’s doors, transports it to Mountain Fresh Cleaners where the laundry is washed, dried and folded, and returns the laundry in the evening. This one-day service takes about nine players doing ten shifts to get the job done. Wash and Carry is not exclusively a hockey team job but the company was founded by a men’s hockey player and since the ‘80s has been passed down through the team because, in the words of current head Thomas Freyre ’14, “it’s easier to trust someone to do their job when they’re a teammate and close friend.” Freyre, who will be passing his leadership on to David Loughborough ’16 next year, says, “Sometimes things take longer than you’d like but mistakes are part of learning how to run a business. I like to think at the end of the day people feel like we tried for them and they had a positive experience.”
Prices: $425 for laundry service once a week for the year; $290 for every other week for the year
Contact: dloughborough@middlebury.edu or visit middleburywashandcarry.com
Team Members: Middlebury Men’s Hockey & friends
Summer Spillane Haircuts
Summer Spillane ’15 has been cutting hair since her first year on campus. A self-taught cosmetologist, Spillane started learning the trade of haircutting through YouTube tutorial videos before she decided to pick up a buzzer and cut clean the hair of her male friends. But since then, she’s gotten more practice. “I started out with close friends who trusted me with their hair but have expanded my client base as word spread. I have more experience with short styles but I really like working with long hair.”
She has dealt with a client range of personalities from laid-back to people very particular about their hair. “I’ve invested my name,” she said. “My name is going to be attached to the style, so as much I love talking and getting to know people I’ve never met, I focus. I always want them to like it.” Students who don’t want to trek out to town go to Spillane for a cheap cut. Since she is not a licensed professional, she accepts tips. For a small tip, you’ll get “the full treatment, blow-out and finished product.” Want the view from a barber’s chair and the full experience of the wearing a plastic styling cape? She’s got that too.
Prices: $5-$10 (plus tip)
recommended
Contact: sspillane@middlebury.edu
Team Members: Summer Spillane ’15
Otter Delivery
“I hatched the idea while assembling a TV stand early in the school year,” said Teddy Gold ’16 of the nascence of Otter Delivery, a new student-run delivery service launched this semester. “I realized that the stand needed a screwdriver and I, along with the entirety of Gifford, did not have an adequate screwdriver.”
Though in this incident, Gold fell prey to the ease of Amazon delivery, the situation sparked an idea and has grown ever since.
Otter Delivery’s business model took its full shape in Gold’s J-term class, Midd Entrepreneurs, with the help of visiting Professors Andrew Stickney and Dave Bradbury, as a simple call and response system. Customers email or call in orders—Gold cites “diapers, a birthday cake, brownie mix, shampoo, local cheese from Scholten family farmstand or pizza at an hour when Ramuntos doesn’t deliver”—and items are delivered by around 5 p.m., with a $5 surcharge per business visited.
Otter Delivery receives ten to fifteen orders a week, which are handled by Gold and Brandon Gell ’16, the company’s marketing director. At this point, the business is manageable with two “otters,” or deliverers, but Gold hopes to expand in the near future.
The next step is developing a website and app through which customers can place orders, and which can then allow the franchise to expand to other NESCAC schools, where friends of Gold are interested in drumming up business.
Gold and Gell believe the model is sustainable and beneficial to small town college life.
“Amazon is easy, convenient, and omnipresent,” Gold said. “But nowhere in the Amazon equation does anyone account for the brick and mortar, mom and pop shops that drive local economies. At the very heart of Otter Delivery is convenience for customers and support for local economies.”
Prices: $5 per store visited (plus cost of item)
Contact: Teddy@Otterdelivery.com
Team Members: Teddy Gold ’16, Brandon Gell ’16
Middorm
Extra long twin size beds seem to be an unavoidable aspect of residential life on campus, until you meet the minds behind of Middorm, Jack Steele ’16, Dylan McGarthwaite ’17 and Eliot Neal ’17. Inspired by a friend’s similar endeavor at Dartmouth College, Steele co-founded the bed buying business at the beginning of his first year. The company rents full size beds and futons for semester or full year terms.
“Crazy comfort” is the company’s goal, according to Steele, and its one that has found great success across campus, as rentals almost doubled this year. Middorm’s model is simple: an all student email over the summer informs Midd kids of rental options, and the team delivers the order at the beginning of the term.
With business growing steadily, the company is committed to consistent comfort across campus.
Prices: full size beds at $250 for one semester or $399 for the year; futons at $150 for one semester or $250 for the year.
Contact: middorm.com
Team Members: Jack Steele ’16, Dylan McGarthwaite ’17 and Eliot Neal ’17
Morning Glory
Ever find that dining hall brunch simply won’t cut it? Morning Glory seeks make breakfast a gourmet experience. A Gamut Room gig started by Olivia French ’16 and Caroline Decamp ’14, Morning Glory sells breakfast sandwiches from 11 am to 1 pm on Saturday mornings for only a dollar! Morning Glory was born last spring out of French’s sampling of regional cuisines abroad and the desire on behalf the former roommates to spend time together in a new way. Now, the pair serves up savory breakfast sandwiches such as the Cleopatra (a breakfast sandwich with roasted red pepper and eggplant, garlic yogurt sauce, fried egg, feta, and cilantro) and Pillow Talk (bacon, caramelized onion, arugula, maple vinaigrette, fried egg, and cheddar), debuting new recipes each week inspired by food blogs, travel and their favorite restaurants.
“It is important to us that each recipe is original,” emphasizes French, however, who wrote a local foods inspired cookbook for her senior thesis. “We have a lot of fun deciding what veggies, cheeses, herbs, and meats to use on our sandwiches each week, and make sure to change it up--for both our customer’s enjoyment and our own.”
The pair, which describe breakfast sandwiches as “a wonderful canvas to experiment with new flavor combinations,” concoct about 50 handmade creations each Saturday to sell. French and Decamp have no plans as yet to continue Morning Glory after their graduation this spring. Students interested in keeping up with Morning Glory’s gourmet recipes, however, can check out the blog French is starting this summer called the Foodie and the Farmer, featuring photojournalism profiles of food workers like farmers and chefs and original recipes based on their stories. In the meantime, hit this delicious deal while it lasts!
Prices: $1 per sandwich
Contact: ofrench@middlebury.edu or edecamp@middlebury.edu
Team Members: Olivia French ’14, Caroline DeCamp ’14
(04/23/14 3:10pm)
As Museum curator Emmie Donadio began her introduction to the talk given by Frida Kahlo in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts last Thursday, she amended the cursory warning to turn off cell phones with the consolation, “There’s a good chance you won’t be able to hear them anyway.” While her remark was received with amusement in the audience, it also seemed to make sense. After all, we had spent the time after filing into the dance theater jamming to throwback pop songs and looking at a collage of women in ferocious gorilla masks. Frida Kahlo is one of the founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous collective that took the art world by storm in the ‘80s with its brash, statistics- and sarcasm-laden posters demanding an end to sexism and discrimination.
It was something of a surprise, then, when Frida Kahlo took the stage. Dressed all in black, from low boots to ever-present gorilla mask, Kahlo was soft-spoken, almost quiet. This mildness, of course, did not translate to content of her lecture. Beginning with a series of sexist quotes from luminaries such as Pythagoras, Martin Luther, and Renoir and ending with the advice to “Use the f-word – feminism,” Kahlo’s talk was delivered in the same pithy, humor-laded style as the Guerrilla Girls’ posters. Particularly amusing was her discussion of the Guerrilla Girls’ upcoming book The Hysterical Herstory of Hysteria and How It Was Cured; the book explores the historical pathologizing of female sexuality.
The bulk of Kahlo’s presentation was dedicated to a survey of the Guerrilla Girls’ history, explaining the way in which their tactics and message have shifted as the group gained first an audience and then acceptance in the broader art community. Over time, their posters have moved from being wheat pasted to the streets around museums to being framed within them. While admitting that it’s a “thrill to criticize an institution on its own walls,” Kahlo nonetheless acknowledged that maintaining resistance while working within a system can be a challenge. “What do you do,” she asked, “when the system you’ve spent your entire life attacking suddenly embraces you?”
This is a particularly salient question to have asked at the College. There is something seemingly incongruous about seeing the Guerrilla Girls’ inflammatory posters tidily framed and hanging on the quiet gray-green walls of the college museum. Nonetheless, Guerrilla Girls: Art In Action is consonant with other ongoing efforts by the museum to call into question both what kinds of art are suitable for Middlebury audiences as well as how art is defined more generally.
“Knowing that an exhibition of performance art was coming to the museum this spring and that the Performance exhibition would be concurrent to some extent with the Guerrilla Girls’ show – and also that next spring we would be presenting an exhibition of work by graffiti or street artists,” Assistant Director and Chief Curator Emmie Donadio said. “I wanted … to explore the broader parameters of 20th century and contemporary art practice.”
This question was explored in great detail by the course “Art, Performance and Activism,” taught last J-term by Donadio. The twelve members of the class worked over the month to whittle down the 82 pieces in the Guerrilla Girls’ Compleat Portfolio: 1985-2008 to the 13 posters and ephemera pieces that appear in the exhibition. While revolving around the Guerrilla Girls, the course also worked to thoroughly contextualize their work.
“[The course] was designed to some extent to survey the topic of object-less art,” Donadio said. “That means art as a form of activity rather than a means of producing objects.”
In pursuit of this goal, students researched and presented on topics ranging from Dada to the Judson Memorial Church to the NEA 4. The course and exhibit were also strongly influenced by an exploration of the 1970s feminist movement, particularly within the art world.
“Linda Hershman Leeson’s video !WAR (Women-Art-Revolution), which we watched in class, turned out to be one of the best ‘finds’ for an introduction to the Guerrilla Girls in the context of feminist art action of the last half-century,” Donadio said.
A theme that emerged strongly from both of these sources – object art and feminism – was the importance of collaboration. While the intrusion of the spring semester made on-going collective work on the exhibit difficult, the class nonetheless strove to make sure that each member’s voice would be present in it’s final form.
“Each student did research on one of the selected posters and wrote a wall text to accompany it,” Donadio said. “The idea was to present each work in its particular historical context.” Each student also created a visual response to their piece; these were then compiled, along with background information on the Guerrilla Girls, into a zine that accompanies the exhibit. The importance of collaboration was also recognized as extending beyond the efforts of the class.
“We had a lot of ideas for interactive features for the exhibition,” Donadio said. “All of the students seemed eager to engage the public and invite them to comment.” Hopefully Kahlo’s talk last Thursday has helped to kick-start this conversation. Those involved with the exhibit emphasized that the issues of sexism and discrimination addressed in the Guerrilla Girls’ work are very much ongoing.
“It’s exhausting to look at art prices for male artists and female artists today,” Maisie Ogata ’14 said. “Shouldn’t we help demonstrate to the viewer that we have not reached full equality between male and female artists?” As Kahlo emphasized near the end of her talk, the Guerrilla Girls are not the only voices capable of criticizing the status quo. “People who want to do work like this don’t need us,” she remarked, putting the ball squarely in our court.
(04/23/14 2:54pm)
I am a student in Professor Dry’s Race, Sex and the Constitution course and for my presentation at the Spring Student Symposium reading a paper I wrote for the class, I’ve been called a racist. First, in beyond the green’s preview of the presentation, Lily Andrews wrote, “To watch out for (MAY be offensive): ‘Race and American Political Regime’ discusses colorblindness. Murray Dry has a BAD reputation around racism….” This provocative piece of advertisement brought a lot of students to our presentation, inevitably including those who would misunderstand our words. Then came an anonymous essay on MiddBeat, called, “A Counter Narrative to ‘Race, Sex, and the U.S. Constitution’ Symposium Presentation.” This piece claimed that the presenters vastly misunderstood race and racism and that it is a great crime to do anything but automatically support programs like affirmative action. In response, I would like to express my overall concern with the potential effects of shutting out opposing voices as well as address a few misunderstandings in Anonymous’ piece.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard is: “Read books written by those you disagree with.” With similar sentiment, I would first like to ask potential critics to avoid pre-judging, especially with judgments that are poorly founded and revolve around something so fickle as a reputation.
To address Anonymous’ post, the papers we read presented a wide range of views and were put together by a group of students that have dedicated a whole semester to educating themselves about race and sex in America. We have read the liberal books and the conservative ones. We have read their critics. We have had discussions and written essays and striven to get to the heart of these important issues. We came to the presentation with thoughtful insights gleaned from a lot of reading and hard thinking. Yet, we were told we misunderstood racism. Further, we never had a chance at understanding it because we are not ourselves the minorities of which we spoke. I would posit, to return to my previous point about shutting out discussion, that to truly understand things, you must fully educate yourself. One should not simply read Michelle Alexander, but also read her critics and her challengers. They may not say what you want to hear, but they will expand your thinking and round your opinions.
The particular statement, “All ideas do not need to be entertained,” concerns me. Rather than censor ourselves so quickly, we should instead foster all productive types of student discourse.
I feel morally and intellectually compelled to address the assertion that “Racism is colorblindness.” The sole dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson (the now-overturned case that upheld segregation in the south), Justice Harlan, wrote, “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Harlan was the only Justice to object the blatant and real racism behind Jim Crow — so why does Anonymous reject his view? If racism is colorblindness, can we never defeat racism, defined this way, except by guaranteeing permanent entitlements based on skin color? That’s antithetical to the conventional, sensible understanding of racism. Today, colorblindness seems to be the goal of the Supreme Court, which accepts affirmative action today, but looks to a future in which it will be unnecessary. Justice O’Connor, writing an opinion supporting affirmative action, but with a twenty-five year sunset, said “[A]ll governmental use of race must have a logical end point.” The Court has not accepted colorblindness categorically, as many Justices do view affirmative action as problematic. Given the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the use of race is what must be defended, not the absence of racial preferences. If one is to reject both the voices that stood up against Jim Crow in 1896 and our honorable justices of today, it must be done with credible proof and well-thought out arguments.
I would also like to ask the Middlebury student body: Why has it become impossible to have a full discourse about race without being labeled a racist? I cannot but think the only remaining recourse to respond to those you disagree with after you forgo the informed, educated response is to call people names. I suppose it is easier to write us off as racists rather than sitting down and thinking together. And, when you fling names on the Internet, you can convince others we are racists, too, all while keeping your identity secret. Sounds like a pretty good set-up. But I ask you to not take the easiest, loudest route. Do not simply paint us as misinformed monsters. Read with us. Talk with us. Do not rush to be offended or prove us wrong. Be open to the possibility that your thoughts may evolve, as will ours.
(04/17/14 12:08am)
The faculty rejected internships for credit by a 53-48 vote on Monday, April 7. A more general “Summer Study Proposal” was passed at the same meeting, however. The internships for credit segment of the bill was not approved by faculty due to the passing of an amendment that sought to counter internship-related policies within the bill.
When the bill was first brought to the faculty on March 3, Math Professor Priscilla Bremser introduced a resolution seeking to prevent the Educational Affairs Committee (EAC) from introducing anything regarding internships for credit. Bremser’s resolution then became an amendment to “remove the option of academic credit for summer internships.” In keeping with faculty meeting bylaws, during the crucial April 7 meeting, the amendment was voted on before the larger proposal.
Once Bremser’s amendment was passed, the amended version of the EAC bill was voted on and passed by the faculty, with the wording “while an internship can be a valuable experience, in no case does it warrant notation on a student’s transcript from Middlebury College.”
The EAC proposal divided internships into three distinct classifications, two of which would provide credit. Transcript notations, which are currently available to students, are not credit-bearing but take the form of a note on a student’s academic transcript that he or she completed an internship.
Credit-bearing clustered internships would involve a group of students with similar internships working with a faculty mentor and completing a series of readings or assignments. The faculty mentor would receive a summer stipend for mentoring 15 or more students, or a fraction of the larger, fixed stipend if he or she worked with fewer students.
Course-connected internships would also earn students academic credit, requiring either a prerequisite course or a predetermined course to be taken after the completion of the internship that relates to the student’s major. For example, a Political Science major who spent time working on a political campaign would have to enroll in U.S. National Elections the following fall in order to receive credit for his or her summer internship. Faculty advisors would receive a stipend for offering supplemental assignments to those completing course-connected internships.
In order to receive credit for a summer internship, the internship would have to be directly linked with a specific academic department in which the student has taken a number of courses.
Dean of Faculty Andi Lloyd noted that among faculty, “there didn’t seem to be a question of whether they [internships] could be valuable [for many did acknowledge the importance of internships], it was whether or not they should be awarded academic credit.”
“The question of how all of you navigate from your education to a career is front and center,” Lloyd said. “The faculty vote was about how internships fit into your overall academic experience. I don’t think it should be seen as in any way an end to that broader conversation about the pathway from education to career.”
The faculty vote stirred a range of reactions from across campus.
“In my opinion, this vote symbolizes our inability to acknowledge the real value and promise of a 21st century liberal arts education,” said Dean of the College Shirley Collado. “Our students are asking us to recognize how multi-faceted and rich their learning experiences can be … It is unfortunate that the vote did not support these kinds of teaching and learning opportunities for both our faculty and students.”
But Political Science Professor Murray Dry, a longtime vocal critic of internships for credit, applauded Bremser’s amendment.
“Internships are not liberal education. They’re something that may be practical and useful, but they are not governed by what I think the standards should be for what should be studied here,” Dry said. “We’re not a vocational school.”
“It’s not just a matter of work, it’s a matter of what it is that we’re about and that we the faculty are responsible for determining the content of a liberal education,” Dry continued. “We don’t all agree [on what should be in the curriculum], that’s true, but that doesn’t just mean that we should allow others, the people who run internships, to decide what should count for credit.”
SGA President Rachel Liddell said she was frustrated by the vote.
“From my perspective, the legislation presented by EAC provided a huge amount of flexibility and gave authority to professors,” she wrote in an email. “Professors had the option to offer for-credit internships, they were not required to do so. Nor would students be required to participate in a for-credit internship. The legislation simply created options for professors and students who wanted to offer these opportunities for their students. Ultimately, the vote reflects a distrust amongst faculty members. Those who voted to prevent for-credit internships communicated that they do not believe in that their colleagues’ teaching methods.”
Several faculty pointed out that many of the arguments made in support of the amendment, especially the arguments about how promoting internships for credit goes against the core principles of a liberal arts education, also apply to the existing policy of allowing students to do internships in the winter term for credit.
“The first thing that I thought of when the proposal came up is that aren’t we being hypocritical, by providing credit in the winter term but not in the summer, and so I think that we shouldn’t provide credit for J-term either,” said Assistant Professor of Economics Racha Moussa.
However, Moussa stressed that students will still be able to take internships for credit in J-term.
“I didn’t get the sense that the faculty wanted to end the J-term program,” Moussa said. “The voting was so close, so that’s not something I predict that will happen in future. But I think that definitely the conversation led into thinking about J-term a little bit more.“
One of the major criticisms of the vote was the lack of faculty attendance. The meeting barely roused the 94 votes needed for quorum.
“To those professors who did not attend the vote but held an opinion on the issue, I hope they regret their decisions,” wrote Liddell. “I also hope that students learn from their mistakes and remember to vote in SGA, local, state, and national elections.”
But Lloyd said that low faculty attendance at meetings and votes is nothing new.
“We’ve been grappling with an issue of relatively low attendance for a couple of years now,” Lloyd said, noting that the April 7 attendance of 101 voting faculty was about normal.
When asked why she thought internships for credit was amended out of the proposal, Lloyd pointed to the role that student experiences played in shaping her own support of internships for credit.
“I had the opportunity this past fall to hear the students in the Foodworks program talk about their experience. it was extraordinary for me to hear from students how much their academic work had been enriched by the experience. It changed my attitude towards internships,” she said. “I think it would be valuable for us to think about how to create more opportunities for faculty and students to come together to talk about your perspectives on internships — and the broader discussion of how your education prepares you for what comes next.”
It is hard to predict when the idea of internships for credit may come up for another vote, but Math Professor and longtime faculty member Mike Olinick said that once issues have been voted on, “faculty committees accept the verdict and move onto other questions as least for a few years.”
While dead now, the future of internships for credit at the College may not be over.
“Students did internships before this vote, and I assume you will continue to do them after the vote. I don’t think the conversation between students and faculty about what you learn from internships, or how you can best integrate your learning from internships with your classroom pursuits, is over.”
Additional Reporting by EMILY SINGER, ELLIE REINHARDT and KYLE FINCK
(04/16/14 8:37pm)
A group of 11 students have been combining the rigorous time commitments of staging a theatrical production with the unique challenges of acquiring a new language in the Spring term course FREN 306: Study and Production of a Play, and the culmination of their work will be presented Apr. 18 and 19 at 7:30 p.m. in the basement of Le Chateau when they perform Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) by seventeenth-century French comedic playwright Molière.
The diverse cast hails from Burundi, Morocco, Senegal, Japan, France and the United States, and these 11 students taking the course for credit are joined by nine students tackling technical and behind the scene roles in lighting, costumes, make-up, set design and administrative work, as well as advising from this year’s French assistant, Charlotte Prieu.
Molière, the stage name for Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, polished his comedic abilities as an actor before he began writing plays, and he was popular with French aristocrats and Parisians for both his acting and his clever way with words. He is known as one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western Literature, and penned classic works such as Le Bourgeois Gentillhome (The Bourgeois Gentleman) and the final work before his death, Le Malade Imaginaire.
Produced in 1673, Le Malade Imaginaire is a three act play originally performed with dance sequences and musical interludes that follows hypochondriac Argan and the romantic affairs of his daughter, Angelique, while heavily satirizing the dependence on doctors who, at the time, depended on methods such as enemas and bleeding to purge the body of impurities.
“In selecting a French play to perform before an audience of primarily non-native speakers, I give preference to works that allow us to take full advantage of non-verbal means to complement textual meaning, including the use of gesture, intonation and other visual and acoustic cues,” Professor of French and Director Charles Nunley said. “Molière’s theater, and Le Malade Imaginaire in particular, is geared toward such adaptation. Molière’s farcical approach to theater, moreover, is an invitation to experiment. He invites us to step outside the ‘sameness’ of everyday life and immerse ourselves in the richness of human experience. Such exploration is enhanced by the fact that the language Molière uses is that of seventeenth-century France which often comes across as delightfully strange to the modern ear.”
Aissatou Gaye ’16 is from Senegal and will be studying abroad in France next semester. The course perfectly filled her 300 level French language requirement.
“I came across this course and I didn’t think twice about it,” she said. “Theater always captured my attention and I couldn’t resist the possibility of diving into it for a full semester.”
In Le Malade Imaginaire, Gaye plays Toinette, a compassionate, intelligent and sassy servant of Argan and his family, acting as a central figure connecting father, daughter, doctor and stepmother. Playing the role has challenged Gaye to completely step outside of herself.
“Although I can identify with a number of similar traits in the sense that she really wants to help out, I find her energy and motivation hard to embody,” she said. “She adds a certain dynamism to every scene in which she appears and given my somewhat calm and shy nature, this is quite challenging.”
Though some students from outside the class were recruited to assist in specific technical aspects of production, all of the enrolled students are involved in virtually every aspect of the presentation.
“I would say that each participant brings specific competencies to the production,” Nunley said. “For example, one student with experience in vocal performance has created a wonderful duet to be sung a cappella in the second act by the play’s two young lovers, Angélique and Cléante. The hats worn by the doctors in the closing burlesque scene were created by a group of students with, to say the least, a vivid imagination. I continue to be amazed by the energy and resourcefulness students bring to the play. I find it difficult to keep up with them!”
The necessity for lightning-quick, radically different costume changes has proven difficult, and at least four quick-moving stage hands are needed to assist equally fast actors in smoothly making the physical transitions.
In addition to evening rehearsals, screenings and improvisational exercises, students enrolled in the course have studied the application of Molière’s comedy from many perspectives, including examination of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1900 essay on laughter and Eugène Ionesco’s exploration of fear of death in his 1962 absurdist play, The King is Down.
Ultimately, Nunley believes that the College’s invaluable opportunity for students to study French through theater is an extremely useful way for learners to critically engage with their new language skills.
“There can often seem such a difference, at least in perception, between the acquisition of language proficiency per se and the acquisition of tools for thoughtful engagement with literary texts,” he said. “I believe the collective undertaking of a theatrical production in French can be effective in dispelling such perceptions.”
Students like Gaye agree that the theater possesses a magical quality of teamwork and critical thinking.
“Acting is fulfilling and energizing and it gives you the platform to connect with your partners on a level that you wouldn’t otherwise,” Gaye said. “My classmates and professor have made this experience rewarding for me.”
Seating is limited, so theatergoers are encouraged to arrive early.
(04/16/14 5:29pm)
This past Friday evening, the Swing Dance Club took the stage for their first official performance in McCullough Social Space, lighting up the room with energy and dance moves. The show, featuring nearly 50 dancers with a wide range of experience, attracted a full house of students and community members. The club brought levity and laughter to the crowd, leaving the audience with impressed smiles and the repetition of, “I wanna swing dance!”
The pre-performance process began in December when the three co-directors shared a MiddRides shift. As Melanie Dennis ’14 drove the van, Eleni Polychroniadou ’14 and Tim Fraser ’16 alternated as driver’s assistants, using the time to brainstorm the show, which would take place a few months later. Through collaboration and hours upon hours of choreography, rehearsal and logistics, they pieced together The Swing Express.
When Polychroniadou and Dennis first joined the Swing Club their freshman fall, neither of them thought that they would be sitting in these seats, having just completed such a successful production.
“I never anticipated being a swing dancer,” Polychroniadou said. She decided to join the Swing Club her first semester after discovering swing dance in Greece just prior. Polychroniadou said she “fell in love with the movement,” but felt that the dance community she had found in Greece was lacking on campus.
The club was small in 2010, with a core group of around ten people and not a strong sense of camaraderie. As she took over the club her freshman year, Polychroniadou worked to change the system to one that fostered stronger relationships. With the implementation of biweekly meetings, club dinners and a continual effort to reach out to the wider Middlebury community, the club began to progress. Although Dennis has stepped down as president of the club this year, it is now run by Fraser, Dennis and Lindsey Hunt ’14, and flourishes as a community, welcoming one and all to come join the fun.
Last weekend’s show started to develop this January during the J-term Swing Workshop. The workshop advertised both the club and the performance and gathered a group of dancers that spanned across all departments and campus activities. Fraser explained that the show and club have provided a space for students from all sectors of campus to collaborate.
“That’s the best part about swing,” Polychroniadou added. “It brings anybody and everybody, people who think they can’t dance, people who think they can and people who would not have any other overlap.”
Through word of mouth and a fruitful workshop, the club collected nearly 50 students for their large-scale production.
Consisting of 14 routines, the swing show proved adaptable to various tunes and forms of footwork. From the ‘20s Charleston, to Jazz to Fusion dance, the three co-directors evenly split the choreography, with the exception of a few performers choreographing their own pieces. Part of the choreography included a handful of elementary school girls from Bridport. Dennis and Fraser, the pioneers of the elementary routine, visited the school in Bridport once a week for six weeks to teach the dance. Dennis said that they learned faster than they had expected, and even picked up difficult moves visually without having to be taught. The young girls’ routine proved to be one of the highlights of the evening, and one of Dennis’s favorite parts about putting on the show.
The Swing Club’s value on involvement with the wider Middlebury community was demonstrated by the donation of all of Friday night’s proceeds to the Charter House, Middlebury’s local homeless shelter. The tie came from Polychroniadou’s decision to fuse dance with The Charter House’s need for a fundraiser. With a nearly sold out show, Polychroniadou proudly stated an estimation of $1,500 in donations. Fraser explained that looking forward, they hope to continue community engagement through frequent visits to local nursing homes, participation in Puppets for Education, (a Burlington based non-profit) and further investment in local schools.
So, what’s in the near future for Swing Club? For starters, come one and all to McCullough on Monday and Wednesday nights at 7:30; Mondays for lessons, Wednesdays for free dance. Then, make sure you don’t miss the first ever “Swing Fest,” May 2-4. If you like to dance, and even if you don’t, this is another Swing Club event you simply cannot miss.
(04/16/14 5:21pm)
What’s in a name? As Romeo said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet, in this day and age, names, and more specifically definitions, definitely matter. While many modern day college students enjoy the benefits of sexual freedom and the influx of information on sex, relationships have received much of the backlash from all of these changes.
A few decades ago, the boundaries of relationships were very clearly defined. People would be “seeing each other,” and after a while, if the feelings were mutual they would end up “going steady”. While the vocabulary might have changed, even up until more recent times, people traditionally would find a boyfriend or girlfriend first, and then the rest would follow.
But now, many relationships start with sex. You meet someone on a drunken Friday or Saturday night, and after some dancing or DFMOs, you both go back to a room, do the nasty and wake up in the morning for an awkward good bye, or if you are lucky, a relatively pleasant breakfast and quick hug goodbye. And then, you see the person one weekend, the next and the next. But generally both people are afraid of DTR, defining the relationship. But what do you call the guy or girl you sleep with every Friday and Saturday night but are definitely not dating and are barely even friends with? Is it exclusive? Is it going anywhere? Most of the time people don’t even really know, they just go along for the ride until it fizzles out or blows up.
Relationships, therefore, have kind of gone by the wayside. Instead, people have “things”, as they are often dubbed (can there be a more ambiguous word?), that pretty much just allow for miscommunications and insecurities. But what is it that has really changed? I believe that people have become more sexually expressive, but the requirements for dating have not adapted with people’s sexual activity. While having sex no longer has the same stigma, for some reason having sex with someone before you are dating precludes them from a datable option. Perhaps it’s because the idea of dating is still relatively conservative: the innocent expectations of a boy giving you a ring and going steady with him à la Grease are still going strong.
Who knows if this change is a good or bad thing? All I know is that there shouldn’t be a stigma to sex. As sex becomes more open, people’s preconceived notions need to adapt. And also, more importantly, dating should not go away! People shouldn’t use simple sexual relationships as replacements for actual emotional relationships; they aren’t the same. And while a consistent drunk hook up on weekends, (or even a sober hookup on weekdays), may be great, the lack of clarity doesn’t help anyone.
(04/16/14 5:11pm)
As we walked into the dining hall for our seasoned potato cubes on Saturday morning, the student body was shockingly hyper, reminiscent of Charlie Sheen on tiger’s blood (#winning). Still in our pajamas, we meandered to our anti-social corner in the side cove of Ross and overheard conversations from students on the following subjects: the dedicated Brooker inhabitants waking up at sunrise to trek up Snake Mountain, the dedicated biddies waking up at sunrise to trek up Snake Mountain for an Instagram that might just make the popular page, our fellow half-marathon trainers showing more dedication and fitness than we ever will on a weekend morning and Sci-fi nerds discussing their morning LARP — live action role playing — session.
When we found ourselves sitting with a group of girls who had awoken at 7 a.m. to go on a 8-mile run (questionable if this is humanly possible), we felt a surge of motivation. Although our exhausting night of watching Zoolander in bed had taken a lot out of us, we were infected with Spring Fever and decided to embark on our own Saturday long-run. Before we exited Battell, Maddie had a surprise up her sleeve. She smugly whipped out two packets of Gu from under her pillow and presented one to Izzy. For those of you unfamiliar with this beautiful invention (Izzy was right there with you), Gu is an energy-packed gel that runners consume during particularly long runs to refuel. With a glimmer in her eyes, Maddie said to Izzy “Today is the day.” With the gel packets in our sports bras and our Katy Perry playing in sync we headed outside. We must admit that the sensation of the warm air grazing our bare limbs left our appallingly long leg hair standing on end (sorry for the image). After mile five, Maddie enthusiastically pointed towards her bra and Izzy mistakenly gave her a thumbs up thinking she was questioning how her boobs looked. She then realized Maddie was referencing the Gu packets. We paused our run to very dramatically rip open the packets and squeeze the suspiciously viscous material into our mouths. When we use the word dramatically we want you to know Maddie unplugged her headphones and played the theme from Rocky. We continued our run with sticky mouths and a very strong craving for water. After approximately one more mile, Maddie reached her breaking point and started dry heaving on the side of the road. How ironic that the girl who slept with these packets under her pillow for good luck could not handle the “Chocolate Outrage” flavored Gu and had to walk the rest of the way home with teary eyes (caused by the lurching of her stomach NOT because she is a crybaby). Izzy parted ways with her companion, and finished the run for the both of them. Although not without being surprise-attacked by two horses that had escaped from Morgan Horse Farm. True fact.
As our only long-run of the week, we were not able to train all of the five days that our schedule called for. This is because this past week illustrated one of the most difficult aspects of this campus: achieving balance. When the most utilized emojis of the week included every face with either arched eyebrows or uncontrollable tears, it was no surprise Atwater ran out of to-go boxes at lunch and dinner dates were rainchecked for meals of coffee and more coffee at the library. For those of you who did not relate to these feelings, clearly you are taking Earthquakes and Volcanoes (Izzy sure is) or The Creative Process (don’t take her spot during Fall registration). Although we wanted nothing more than to run our stress away down Weybridge street, there was simply no time. Weeks like this will happen to us all (probably too often), but figuring out how to survive until Friday is an incredibly useful skill. If anything this week has given us a greater respect for all the student athletes on campus, who deserve a shoutout for somehow making it through the weeks with an athletic schedule that is significantly less sporadic and more strenuous than ours.
(04/16/14 5:06pm)
Bill McKibben
Schumann Distinguished Scholar
It's never been a huge problem for me. I grew up writing for newspapers, and that tends to cure you of perfectionism: you know that half the job is to get it done on time. I think sometimes you have to say: I'm going to write as well as I can right now, and when I wake up I'm going to go over it again to make sure it's good. Making sure the first time through can be a little daunting.
Marion Wells
Associate Professor of English and American Literatures
When I hit a roadblock in writing I have a few techniques:
1. Make a cup of tea. This can take a while, done properly and gives the mind a chance to mull things over.
2. Just start writing – even if the structure and organization of the piece as a whole are still elusive, writing a "core" piece of it can be very helpful
3. Leave the writing alone and think about teaching instead! Using a different part of the brain can help unlock the issues causing the block.
Christopher Klyza
Stafford Professor of Public Policy, Political Science and Environmental Studies
My writing in the years since I've been at Middlebury (I arrived in 1990) has primarily been aimed at an academic audience. I've written and edited several books as well as articles, book reviews and book chapters. In general, I don't get writer's block. But I do sometimes have a hard time getting started on a new project. When that is the case I make myself start writing — it could be something from the middle of the paper (such as a case study) or a description of the theoretical framework I will use rather than the introduction. I also don't worry so much about the quality of the writing, knowing that I will go back and revise it. At the end of the day, having 4-5 pages of text often primes the writing pump for future productivity. I also tend to think about the overall project better when I have done some writing.
Kathryn Kramer
Visiting Assistant Professor of English and American Literatures
Have a baby. There’s nothing like knowing you have only two hours of child care to focus the attention. (A descriptive, not a prescriptive, remedy.)
There are many devices and prompts, like imagining that the world is coming to an end in twenty minutes and what you write will be the sole remaining record, or writing without ever using the letter e, for example. But as it’s generally construed, writer’s block (which Gilbert Sorrentino calls inspiration’s “idiot brother”) has probably most to do with not wanting to write what you think you want to write, like a term paper or a letter of recommendation. There’s some dishonesty, either of intent or execution. So it’s interesting to figure out what that’s about.
Michael Sheridan
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College
I think that the key to overcoming writer's block is to start writing and let yourself write junk. Now that you've gotten started, you can keep going and later go back and either fix or delete the junk. The other trick I often use is that I make myself explain whatever it is that I'm supposed to be writing about in ordinary non-specialist language, as if I was giving an overview of what I'm trying to write about to a patient, sympathetic and wholly ignorant friend. That sketch becomes the first paragraph (which may be junk, and that's OK). The second strategy for curing writer's block is to make your writing something that you need to do for other people, not just for yourself or the text itself. For example, I often propose a paper for an academic conference on a topic that I haven't written about yet, and then the conference becomes both a deadline and group of people depending on me to deliver. Finally, chocolate never fails to motivate me. One page done means I can have one piece, no exceptions.
Julia Alvarez
Writer-in-Residence
When the writer William Stafford was asked the same question, he replied that he never suffered from writer's block, all he had to do was lower his standards. I don't think he really meant that he would settle for schlock, just that part of the block is that the writer is getting in the way of the writing by worrying too much about performance, and measuring up. At that point, just forget about achievement and write to limber up, write as finger exercises, write in a journal, write a letter. (Whoever does that anymore? I do!) The point is to keep up the agility, the flexibility, the practice of the craft. Writing, all creativity, I think, should have an element of play, self-forgetfulness, fun.
On the other hand, times when I'm forcing it, I realize that the balance is off. I need to get out, get involved in the things I care deeply about, issues in my community and beyond. We are writers in a context, storytellers in a tribe. To quote another great, Charlie Parker, the jazz musician, said, "If you don't live it, it ain't going to come out of your horn."
So there are a few prescriptions for writer's block, courtesy of Dr. Alvarez, via Drs Stafford and Parker: Keep Doing the Writing but forget about the performance/measurement, and when all else fails: go out there and get involved in life itself – fall in love, plant a garden, save a forest, work in a soup kitchen, teach kids to make balloon animals and then take them over to the local assisted living facility.
Christopher Shaw
Visiting Lecturer, English and American Literatures; Associate Director, Program in Environmental Journalism
“Work every day without fear or expectation.” (Somebody said that.) Always show up at the desk or notebook, or, god help us, computer screen. In fact, if you are stuck I suggest returning to the basic and essential physical act of making words on paper with a pen – or maybe a piece of burned charcoal from a fire. Don't judge, at least for a while. Keep going. Put it aside. Then go back and see what you have, if a structure or a point seem to be emerging that you can begin building on. Some days it works and some days it doesn't. Don't judge. Go back and work again.
It's different for school work and creative work, of course. Deadlines are useful even without an assignment. Desperation often breaks the log jam.
Stop fighting, stop judging, stop comparing yourself to the great. The writing NEVER turns out the way it gleams and beckons in your mind. In the draft stage you need to accept being terrible. As an editor, I have worked with some of the best full-time deadline writers and I can tell you their first stabs are gobbledygook. But you need to start. Don't wait.
Timothy Billings
Professor of English and American Literatures
I asked that question of William Stafford once when he came to give a reading at Pomona College many years ago when I was an undergraduate there, and his immediate answer was: ‘Lower your standards and keep writing.’ What I love about that advice is that it recognizes that “writer’s block” is nothing but your internal editor harrying you, saying that what you are about to write is not good enough – and that what you most need to do is to trust yourself. The downside is that Stafford’s many wonderful books contain not a few mediocre poems written no doubt when he would otherwise have had writer’s block. And yet without those poems – which many people have enjoyed, I’m sure, even if they didn’t do much for me – he might never have written the truly extraordinary poems that knock my socks off. Stafford certainly wrote more books than I ever will. For a certain kind of person, I think that’s still probably the best advice there is, but I’m just not that kind of person. What works best for me is to stand up and start talking. Whenever I find myself paralyzed because my sentences are becoming tangled and intractable, I stand up and start talking to myself. I pace back and forth and gesture with my hands (probably looking a bit loony, to be honest) exactly as though I were explaining the issues to an interested group of fellow scholars or students. Somehow the language comes to me that way because if I imagine an audience sitting in front of me I can’t just stand there – I’ve got to say something – and the exercise gives me focus. I then lean over my desk and type in what I have just said, sentence by sentence, and keep pacing. (It helps to be a good talker, but one becomes that by writing.) So my alternative advice is: when the words on the page feel intractable, return to your voice; when the ideas in your head feel tangled, remember your audience.
Vendela Vida
Keynote Speaker (April) and Class of '93
If a scene’s not working or giving you trouble, it can help to think about how you’d approach it if you were telling the story in a different medium. That is, if you can’t figure out how a scene works in prose from, how would you write the scene if it was a film, or a play? I find this technique can help me a lot when I’m stuck.
Another remedy: try writing first thing when you get up in the morning. Before e-mail, before anything. If you write right away, before your doubts or second thoughts awaken, you can keep them at bay.
(04/16/14 4:04pm)
Joanna Rothkopf ’12 wrote a dank column near the end of her time here, which I guess you could call a “feminist column” (squirm) called That Thing Down There. (I squirm not because I feel uncomfortable to call myself a feminist, but because of how many people abandon ship when they hear a bright-eyed white-skinned Middlebury girl say that. It’s like sliding up in your Birkenstocks, whispering “sustainability” and popping your liberal arts insured booty on the hood of your daddy’s Range. If your rants start to smell like pop feminism, if you’re tagged as an activism fetishist, if you cannot skillfully walk the line between stone cold revolutionary c-word and really active listener to all voices, your take-me-seriously card is revoked. Side note: I recently have taken ownership of the c-word and I have a lot of feelings about it. Email me if you want to discuss.) That Thing Down There used to be a great, steady feminist voice on our campus, and I wanted to do a mini-homage in my vague-cloud-column this week with a haphazard brush with the discussion of modern conceptions of modesty and immodesty.
So let’s talk about that hair down there. Ooooh, touchy subject? Bush seems to make people around here more uncomfortable than talking about masturbation (but maybe still more acceptable than discussing anal play?). For the record, to all you ladies tagging Insta’s of your flowing Garnier Fructis locks with “long hair don’t care,” that phrase isn’t about topside mane. That phrase refers to pubes and armpit hair. Just ask Lil’ Wayne. The ability to hold shame and shamelessness in tension is one of the most fun feminist pickles to put on the side of a slice of hot meat at the Girldom Deli. We evaluate our goods and decide what we are ok or not ok with presenting to the world, instructed by other ‘doms, especially Sexdom and Media-dom. Personally, when I get home at the end of the day, I’ll take off all of my clothes. Visitors, friends, strangers; I cannot count how many people have seen my Ts. I’m not about to join a nudist colony, but I am pretty cool with being naked. And since high school, I’ve eschewed hair and felt a part of the norm.
Even being cool with being naked makes things a lot more complicated and body-centric than it seems it should. How many thinkpieces about Lena Dunham and her show Girls could go for 800 words without mentioning how much she featured her naked body on screen. None of them, as many secondary thinkpieces pointed out (including the one you’re reading right now, sigh). Censorship of da ladie$ in public spaces and forums has become most evident to me in artistic venues. At Maisie Ogata ’14’s performance art piece during the Symposium last Friday outside of the Johnson Memorial Building, I learned that you aren’t allowed to be nude in public spaces on campus. A couple days later, while helping Lily Miao ’14 install some art in the foyer by McCullough Social Space, she was not allowed to post a painting with full frontal nudity.
Who is ok with what and why are we ok with that? In Istanbul I enjoyed keeping it hairless down there. Often for religious reasons, many women (and men) in Turkey wax off a lot of their body hair. Elif, my Turkish bikini waxer, once answered the phone mid-wax. It was her mother. I find it worth sorting through the juxtaposition of how near someone is allowed to my nether regions and for what reasons to figure out just what the deal is. In traditional Istanbul, sex resulted in a kind of invisible or internal blemish, a stigma, but to get a full Brazilian was part of a ritual maintenance of cleanliness.
Our constant body evaluation is coupled with a shifting relationship with how much of this we can see on a daily basis as well as its connotations to others. The fake math of body economics is relentless. If I take my top off on Battell Beach, I am technically at risk of getting a citation. If I grow my hair out, I wonder how many boys here at Middlebury would pump the brakes at the feel of OG-sin, Eve-style pubic zones mid-romantic-entanglement. If my name is now Google-associated with the word “bush,” how many job offers have I lost?
Pubic hair seems to have a recent comeback in trendiness, even mainstream-ness, judging by recent articles in New York Times Magazine and The New York Times itself by Amanda Hess (a dope sex columnist, read up on her) and Marisa Meltzer respectively, about a month apart in publication. But even if the Times is glacial in its recognition of alt trends (Surfer chick 70s bush is suuuuuuch a thing you guys, it was not just hippies. Our moms were woooorking it.), it does suggest some sort of mainstream interest. As Hess notes in her December article and Meltzer in her January piece, several celebrities have expressed their tendency to keep it natch, and American Apparel, in their window display in Lower Manhattan, manikins posed with full bush under their sheer negligé. When I was in Los Angeles, capital city of hair removal down to the follicles, a group of post-grad friends confirmed their preference for bush. Turns out that hair is erotic to plenty of people out there. Recent mid-act with a signif. other actually left me worried about how bare I was down there.
So now I’m growing my own hair out, maybe because I’m a trend-chaser. Or maybe, I don’t mind getting less action in my final months here because I’m outgrowing Middlebury and its teenagers who are still learning that bodies are cooler and more fun if they don’t look like blowup dolls. Or maybe because my body, specifically my c-word, is the only space over which I feel I have political power at this point in my life. No matter what I choose to do with my pubic hair or how many people have seen my areolas, I’d like to think I still have purity of heart. Haha just kidding, I’m a deviant who’s going to hell on a River Styx Wet n’ Wild water slide.
Artwork by TAMIR WILLIAMS
(04/16/14 3:56pm)
As editors of the Campus, we strive to make this newspaper accessible to and representative of the student body. We strive to encompass all voices on campus and give voices to those who might otherwise feel marginalized. This has been our goal from the start — just the opposite from what beyond the green wrote about the Campus in last week’s issue, saying “we are motivated to create beyond the green because we feel marginalized and silenced by the mainstream platforms available, including the student newspaper, the Campus.”
Yet, we publish every oped that is submitted as long as it is not libelous, hearsay or vulgar. We respond to all emails when students have questions or submit news tips. We constantly push ourselves to include more perspectives and make this a representative voice of student body.
We see beyond the green as filling a niche by giving a voice and a gathering space for the perspectives that are often marginalized and are glad they are writing a column in our pages to highlight these perspectives. However, we question the way they framed this need in their oped, “A Collective of Middlebury Voices.”
Yes, the Opinions section is not representative of the spectrum of opinions that exist on this campus, but we have made a conscious effort to reach out to a large swath of people all year, sitting down to lunch and chatting about how we think their voices are important and need to be reflected in these pages. Even when people do not want to submit regular columns, we have worked with them to draft opeds and let their voices be heard. While these efforts have not always panned out, we have been constantly engaging with all who want to engage with us. We also acknowledge the fact that the editorial board is not currently representative of the diversity of backgrounds and experiences here at the College. It is a problem that is on every one of our editors’ minds. In fact, we just sent out our all school email encouraging anyone to apply for editor positions for the coming year. This is an open opportunity and we hope that people who believe that the Campus is not representing their views to apply and help broaden perspectives on the board.
Given the effort we are putting in to create a much more nuanced and representative Editorial Board and Opinions section, this is a two-way street, and while we have tried to reach out, we have not seen the same engagement back. We are being accused of ignoring a spectrum of politics, yet one of the first attempts at expressing these politics in the Campus was in this oped. What we want in our paper and what beyond the green wants for this campus is not that different. We want people to feel comfortable expressing themselves. We want open and inclusive dialogue. We want to be a catalyst for change.
beyond the green also wrote that our “politics are not transformative,” but all year, we have strived to write progressive and transformative editorials. From looking for ways to bring down the comprehensive fee and make the College more accessible to decrying the normalization of proctoring and giving recommendations to strengthen the honor code to asking It Happens Here to rethink its advertising because their strategy was triggering for some rape victims, we have fought to change this campus to be more accessible and safer for everyone here.
As a student newspaper, we are community journalism in its purest sense. We can only be as strong as people chose to engage with us. We only learn about events through word of mouth and can only publish the opinions that are submitted. We want to provide a safe space for discussion on issues plaguing this campus. As facilitators, we do not suppress any of the opinions we receive. If all is done right, the Campus should be a mirror reflecting what is happening on campus. If you do not like this image, you have no one to blame but yourself. Being proactive and not reactive requires taking the reins, not only by creating your own forum but also by engaging in existing ones. At the end of the day, we are one of the most widely read and distributed publications on campus and are able to touch a diverse group of people, from students and alumni to faculty and staff. We want your opinions, but we are not mind readers. We cannot reflect what you want to see unless you participate.
Artwork by JENA RITCHEY
(04/09/14 11:13pm)
Digital scholarship and research has become crucial to a liberal arts education and the College has started to take significant steps to implement it more fully. The College recently received an $800,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a project entitled “Galvanizing Digital Liberal Arts at Middlebury”.
The grant was proposed by a group of faculty and staff including Professor Tim Spears, vice president for academic affairs, along with Professor of Film and Media Culture and American Studies Jason Mittell, Professor of Geography Anne Knowles, Dean for Faculty Development and Research and Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research (CTLR) Jim Ralph, Dean of Library and Information services and Chief Information Officer Michael Roy, and Director of Collections, Archives, and Digital Scholarship Rebekah Irwin.
“We want to think about how technology is being used on our campus,” Spears said. “We’re paying particular attention to the Davis Family Library and we want to make a space that is literally more visible [as a place for technological innovation and usage].”
Davis Family Library will be the center of the project’s work in hopes that the project will reach many different people on campus. In addition, various departments will benefit greatly from the grant.
“[The Film and Media Culture department] is fully invested in the use of digital technologies in their teaching and research,” Spears said.
Mittell also believes the Film and Media Culture department, as well as others, will take their status as leaders among liberal arts colleges and improve even more with the help of the grant.
“The Geography department is a leader amongst liberal arts colleges for using GIS … What’s unique about our program here is that [it] is really interdisciplinary [because] we have people who are social scientists and people who are humanists,” Mittell said.
Geography is another department that will be able to use the grant to expand its already extensive digital simulations and mapping systems.
In addition to bolstering the Davis Family Library and various departments, the grant will allow for other important projects to take shape. One such project will implement a Digital Faculty Fellows program and a Digital Research Assistants program for students.
These programs will encourage faculty to do research in different areas as well as provide collaborative opportunities for students with their professors. There will also be four “innovation hubs” created as part of the project. These include geospatial visualization, video and audio production, digitization of special collections, and multimedia art.
The group who proposed the project was passionate about incorporating digital humanities because they are such a rapidly growing field in the world of liberal arts education.
“Everyone had a piece in the development of the ideas for the grant and the writing of it but [the office of Corporate and Foundation Relations] pulled the proposal together and sent it off to the Mellon Foundation… with the president’s signature. Really, a great team effort, all the way around,” Spears said.
“What can we learn about history that digital maps can teach us that we can’t otherwise know just by using more traditional research methods? How can we communicate to people using tools like video and audio on a website that’s different from the written word? What types of analysis of culture can emerge by using computational methods?”
Professor Mittell posed these questions as a way of thinking about the possibilities of digital humanities. He and the other professors involved in proposing the grant have successfully made this field of study an important presence at the College.
