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(04/15/15 3:49pm)
The men’s and women’s golf teams began the spring season last weekend in the greater New York metro area. The women finished fourth out of the 12 teams competing in the Vassar College Invitational and the men placed third out of the 13 teams competing in the Manhattanville/NYU Spring Invitational.
The women teed off on Saturday in Poughkeepsie at the Casperkill Golf Club in their first match since placing third at Wesleyan’s Ann S. Batchelder Invitational in October and finished the weekend in fourth with a score of 661. Ithaca College edged the Panthers for third with a score of 657, while NYU finished in second, 15 strokes behind Ithaca (632). Williams won with a score of 617.
The top finishers for the Panthers on the women’s side were Jordan Glatt ’15 and Monica Chow ’16, who both shot 161’s for the weekend. Glatt was the Panther with the best round for on day one with a 79, while Chow had the fifth-lowest score in the tournament on the second day of play, shooting a 78. The two finished the tournament tied for 12th place.
Though the Panthers finished 44 strokes off of the lead, they believe they are building momentum that will carry them into next weekend’s Jack Leaman Tounament hosted by Amherst.
The Panthers’ fourth-place finish offers a benchmark for the team to improve, and “it was great to begin competing again, as we haven’t had a tournament since the fall,” Glatt said.
“Even though we haven’t been able to utilize the golf course facilities much in the past couple weeks due to the weather, I was very proud of our team’s performance. The saturation and wind provided significant obstacles, but the team handled the conditions well. It has been a long winter, so we were excited to get outside,” Glatt said.
The men’s squad entered the Manhattanville/NYU Spring Invitational coming off of a first place finish at the Sunshine invitational in Port St. Lucie, Florida.
“The win in Florida provided our team with a great deal of confidence, but at the same time, we knew that the transition back to spring Northeast golf would pose some challenges,” Fitz Bowen ’17 said.
Eric Laorr ’15 was the top Panther last weekend, finishing second among the 74 individuals who competed. He carded a pair of 74’s to finish with a 148, only three strokes back of the top individual, Bayard Geeslin from the Hamilton squad.
Tying for 15th-place was Charlie Garcia ’15, who shot a 79 on day one and took three strokes off his day two score to finish with a 155. John Louie ’15 and Bowen shot 158’s. Louie came in with a 78 on day one and an 80 on day two.
Bowen, who had shot a 72 at the Sunshine Invitational, shot back-to-back rounds of 79. Rounding out the team’s scorers were Bennett Doherty ’18 (164), and Rodrigo Andrade ’17 who (166).
Reflecting on the team’s performance last weekend, Bowen said, “We were only able to hit outdoors on two occasions prior to NYU’s tournament; on days when the weather was not cooperative we resorted to hitting into nets in Nelson. Surely, this forced us all to feel unprepared for the tournament in some way, but we had to make the best of what we had.”
However, Bowen added that the team is “looking at last weekend as a stepping stone for the next few weeks. Each day, our goal is to get a little bit better. If we can do that, then our expectations will definitely be met.”
The Panther men will tee off again at the Ralph Myhre Golf Course next weekend for the NESCAC tournament.
(04/08/15 10:55pm)
Over spring break the Middlebury men’s lacrosse team traveled to Baltimore to play the second-ranked Rochester Institute of Technology at Homewood Field, the home of the Johns Hopkins Blue Jays. Though the trip was ultimately an unsuccessful one, resulting in a 21-11 defeat to end the Panthers’ six game winning streak, it marked only the second loss of the season. with the first coming at the hands of first-ranked Tufts.
The then 13th ranked Panthers were dominated in the game, as the Tigers won both the shot battle and the ground ball fight while successfully clearing at a phenomenal 80 percent rate. Though this marks the first win for RIT over Middlebury in three games in the all-time series between the two schools, it was no fluke, as it marked RIT’s 32nd consecutive victory.
The team, however, seemed to use the sting of defeat to forge a new level of motivation. In a quick three day turnaround the Panthers traveled to play Amherst on Saturday, March 28 where a NESCAC bout, against yet another nationally ranked top 10 team, proved to be the perfect scenario for a bounce back statement.
After sitting at a 4-4 tie with the 5th ranked team in the nation following the first quarter, the Panthers stepped on the gas pedal and never looked back. Led by Jon Broome ’16 and his astounding four goal, four assist effort, the team maintained the lead after Henry Riehl ’18 scored at the 13:34 mark of the second quarter. The Panthers would ultimately stomp their NESCAC rival by a 17-11 margin and in so doing hand Amherst its first loss of the year while taking over second place in the league.
Returning home to play Hamilton on Wednesday, April 1, the team did not resort to complacency and retained their coveted spot near the top of the NESCAC. After going down 6-2 at halftime, the Continentals, in rather typical hard-nosed NESCAC fashion, refused to go away easily and stormed back with three goals in the third quarter while shutting out the Panthers.
Hamilton continued to play very solid defense in the fourth quarter, requiring just as much grit and hustle, two aspects embodied by face-off specialist John Jackson ’18 who won 11 face-offs while scooping up five ground balls on the day. The Panthers also exhibited their skill in the offensive end, led by Riehl and Jack Cleary ’16, who had three and two goal games respectively. The Panthers ultimately came out on top by 11-8, retaining their number seven national ranking and second place in the league.
With a horde of fanatical parents packing the stands of Alumni Stadium on Saturday, April 4, seventh-seeded Middlebury took on the Colby Mules to try to improve upon its winning streak. Though Colby sits near the bottom of the NESCAC, no one considers the Mules a pushover.
Both teams got out to a hot start, pouring in five goals apiece in the opening quarter. The trend continued into the second quarter as Middlebury, led by Tim Giarrusso ’16 who earned his third point on the day after an assist to Joel Blockowicz ’15 at the 11:16 mark, dumped in three more to Colby’s lone goal to take an 8-7 lead heading into halftime. The Mules responded right away to open the second half with three straight goals, building its largest lead at 10-8 with 10:34 remaining.
The Panthers responded with three of their own: one notched by David Murray ’15 and another by Joey Zelkowitz ’17. Broome added his second of the day to round out the scoring and produce the seventh lead change of the game. Colby’s Kevin Seiler tied the contest up at 11-11 late in third, however, the Panthers took over yet again to end the quarter as Broome earned his hat trick at with under a minute remaining followed by Zelkowitz who netted his second goal of the game with a mere 18 seconds remaining. After a relatively slowly fourth quarter marked by a goal for each side, the Panthers won by a score of 14-11.
Following the victory Middlebury improved to 9-2 on the season and 6-1 in NESCAC play. The Panthers return to action at home on Wednesday, April 8th when they attempt to win their fourth in a row against the 4-6 Springfield College Pride in a non-conference matchup.
(04/08/15 3:55pm)
On Thursday, April 2, the Nile Project’s four-day residency at the College culminated in an engaging, energetic and participatory concert extravaganza that combined education and performance to increase interest in the issues facing the Nile River Basin.
Conceived in 2011 by Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis and Ethiopian-American singer Meklit Hadero, the Nile Project blends sounds from the 11 countries in the Nile Basin – Egypt, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo – to produce music showcasing the diverse range of instruments, languages and traditions in the region while educating an international network of university students about the unique challenges facing the Nile ecosystem.
Rwandan musician Sophie Nzayisenga began the show alone with the inganga, a traditional instrument carved from a single piece of wood featuring six to eight strings. From the moment she began playing, her confident stage presence, brilliant yellow dress and clear, powerful voice captivated the audience, creating a silent, buzzing energy that soon spilled onto the dance floor when the other musicians joined her on stage one by one, each wearing clothing or carrying an instrument representing his or her cultural background. As instruments, voices and cultures collided, the energy of the first song quickly escalated with the deft layering of percussion, vocals and encouragement of audience participation.
I will admit, before the show I had glanced at the cheerful “Come ready to dance!” printed on my ticket with a fair amount of skepticism and exhaustion from the week, thinking defiantly – and stubbornly – that I would not be moved from my seat no matter how exciting the events of the evening proved to be.
Almost immediately after all of the musicians gathered on stage during the first song, students began filling the section cordoned off for dancing, bodies quickly twirling and intertwining in the vibrant glow emanating from the bright colors and sounds on the Wilson Hall stage. As the steady migration from seats to the dance floor increased with each song, it was impossible not to view the growing mass of individuals from all walks of student and community life as an intended, remarkable component of the performance.
I do not know if it was the throbbing bass beat of the drums, the engaging musicianship and interactive performance of the individuals on stage or the carefree joy splashed across the faces of the dancers in the crowd, but something – especially in the aftermath of the traumatic news communicated in an all campus email only hours before – moved me to grab a friend, join the throng and participate in the exuberant celebration.
This continual engagement with the audience was executed with particular ease by Burundi’s leading bassist Steven Sogo, whose instrumental prowess, natural performance energy and invitations to sing and dance with him frequently propelled the buzz in the room to another level.
Sudanese singer Alsarah and Egyptian vocalist Dina El Wididi’s duet, which poked fun at the differences in Arabic pronunciation in Sudan and Egypt, perfectly encapsulated the energy of the night – cultures collided in a song providing both education and entertainment as two extremely talented vocalists crafted their gifts to communicate a larger message.
“We are looking for musicians who are traditionally rooted and play instruments that represent and are relevant to their respective cultures,” Nile Project co-founder Mina Girgis said. “We are also looking for the flexibility to listen and learn, and to adapt their instruments and their musical performance to the traditions that they’re in dialogue with. Equally important is finding artists that are interested in this conversation that we’re sparking – this idea of how music can facilitate a dialogue around water.”
The 437 million inhabitants along the basin of the 4,145-mile long Nile River are projected to double in population over the next forty years, increasing an already strained demand for water that is essential to food production, electricity and proper medical care. Today, seven of the 11 Nile countries suffer from undernourishment rates over 30 percent, and less than ten percent of basin residents have access to electricity, sparking a geopolitical conflict over allocation of the precious resource to countries with varying priorities and basic needs.
At its core, the Nile Project aims to empower and mobilize the Nile’s citizens to engage in cross-cultural dialogue and collaboration to address political, environmental, economic and social challenges faced by all 11 nations.
“It was primarily because of the water conflicts that we wanted to engage Nile citizens living in these countries in the watershed,” co-founder Mina Girgis said. “That’s really where the bulk of our work is. We act as a bridge across different countries in the Nile Basin.”
Following an inaugural Nile Gathering in Aswan, Egpyt, which encouraged participant experimentation to innovate constructive solutions to the vast array of challenges facing the area, 18 musicians from the Nile Basin translated this multifaceted dialogue into a body of songs representing the range of traditions and instruments in the region. The performance of these songs in their first-ever live concert in January 2013 was recorded and produced as their first album, Aswan.
Two more Nile Gatherings have followed, one in Kampala, Uganda in early 2014, and the other in Minya, Egypt in November 2014, and the songs from these collaborative sessions featured prominently in the collective’s 2014 Africa tour and in their current United States tour, which started in New York City in January and will end in May at Princeton University.
“This tour was a question of also engaging university students in the United States to contribute to the discussion about the Nile even though they don’t live in the Nile Basin,” Girgis said. “College students are the future. They are the ones that are going to live to see the fruit of current labors and they are also going to pay the price of the way we’re working with our environment right now. In a way they are and should be the most invested in the sustainability of the Nile Basin, whether that is environmental or cultural sustainability among the relationships of these different countries.”
Using music to raise awareness for the Nile’s sustainability challenges, the collective offered four days of residency activities in musical collaboration as well as in dialogue and education programs, including workshops, a keynote talk and class visits to offer context for the high-energy concert on Thursday night.
Dartmouth College first notified New England universities and colleges about the opportunity to collaborate to obtain a New England Foundation of the Arts grant to bring the Nile Project to the region, and it is through this grant that the College joined to help produce the month-long New England segment of the tour.
In a short break between songs at the beginning of the second half of the concert, co-founder of the Nile Project Meklit Hadero spoke to her realization that the water forming melting patches of snow on the College’s campus could very well have evaporated from the Nile and fallen as precipitation in the mountains of Vermont.
Indeed, the incredible power of the music and message to attract and unite those from a wide range of ages, cultural backgrounds and levels of knowledge about the struggles facing the millions depending on Nile River water for survival, speaks to this undeniable ecological and human interconnectivity between continents and cultures which may at first appear to have little in common.
The Nile Project recently launched a crowdfunding campaign for their second album, Jinja, which will be a culmination of the music composed and performed on their United States tour. After their current tour ends in May, the Nile Project looks forward to launching a fellowship program for students from five different universities in the Nile Basin to mobilize student leaders who, through non-profit chapters established on their campuses, will build a transnational network of youths focusing on the cultural, social and environmental challenges facing the Nile.
“This year into the next we will be launching our first Nile Prize in sustainability, and the following year we will hopefully be launching our Nile Tour, which is a traveling semester where both students from the Nile Basin and the U.S. will sail up the Nile and perform along the way and engage with local communities,” Girgis said.
Over the two and a half hours of high-energy performance and consummate musicianship showcasing the linguistic and stylistic diversity of the Nile Basin, the 13 musicians in the Nile Project provided an evening of entertainment and education that engaged members of every section of the student and larger campus community, proving the unique power of music to unite, inspire and spark inner reflection that can lead to innovation and creativity.
(03/19/15 3:02am)
The Middlebury men’s lacrosse team extended its winning streak to five games last Saturday, March 14 with a convincing 11-9 victory against Wesleyan and an upset win over Endicott on Tuesday, March 17.
Instead of surviving early blows and relying on half-time adjustments to come out with a victory, as had seemingly become the norm, Middlebury stepped on the gas pedal early and never looked back.
The Panthers came out flying as they got up to a quick 2-0 lead in the first quarter following goals from Joel Blockowicz ’15, a beautifully bounced shot off a Tim Giarrusso ’16 assist, and Jack Cleary ’16. Yet the Panther defense failed to completely stifle the potent Wesleyan offense, which scored 13 goals against fourth-ranked Union College just three days earlier, as Cardinal Lyle Mitchell pumped in a goal in the closing minutes from a Matt Prezioso assist.
In the second quarter Middlebury continued to dominate early and often. The quarter again opened with the Panther offense taking it to Wesleyan. Blockowicz and Giarrusso each doubled their point totals on the day with a goal apiece, both unassisted. Though Wesleyan managed to stop the bleeding with a Niall Devaney goal at 4:14, Midd would simply not be stopped. Less than a minute later at 3:20 Sean Carroll ’16 scored his second of the year off a David Murray ’15 assist to give the Middlebury squad a 5-2 half-time lead.
Though Murray continued his strong play with a couple of nice fakes ultimately culminating in a goal to start the third, Wesleyan refused to be blown out. First-year Cardinal attackman Harry Stanton responded with two goals little more than a minute apart to pull Wesleyan back to within two. To end the quarter, however, Middlebury broke many a Wesleyan heart as Kyle Soroka ’16 capitalized on a Henry Riehl ’18 pass to convert on the man-up opportunity with only eight seconds left in the quarter.
Though Wesleyan would go on to score five in the final quarter, the last two came in garbage time when the game was far from their reach thanks primarily to an unprecedented single quarter hat trick from attack man Jack Rautiola ’16, who received assists from three different Panther teammates. One of these teammate was first-year faceoff sensation John Jackson ’18, who pulled off a tremendous 19-24 day at the faceoff x. This 79 percent mark in faceoffs was a key factor in pushing the Panthers to a conference win.
On Tuesday, The Panthers beat eighth-ranked Endicott 11-10. The game started off very even with both sides scoring two in the first quarter, however, Endicott surged ahead. The Panthers, however, are by no means strangers to fighting back from behind as two of their five victories on the year have come in such fashion. As such, the squad answered right back with four straight goals from four different scorers tying the game up before the Gulls dumped one more in at 1:19 to end the half with a 7-6 lead.
The third quarter proved to be more of the same with an early Endicott charge and an on par Middlebury response led by Giarrusso, who had a hat-trick on the day. Rautiola notched the game-winner with 3:26 to play and despite the Gulls’ attempts, the Panthers were able to maintain the narrow lead.
The team returns to action this Saturday when they face Bowdoin at home.
(03/18/15 5:43pm)
Earlier last week, a series of anonymous graffiti paintings appeared across campus, sparking debate and concern. The graffiti pieces were found at BiHall, Forest Lounge, the Center for the Arts, Virtue Field House, Warner, Hillcrest, Ross and Munroe, according to Facilities Services and student sources.
At BiHall, one stencil spray-painting depicted a riot police officer holding a baton, with the words “TOO MANY COPS, TOO LITTLE JUSTICE.” The stencil appeared next to a large sprayed security camera and the words “NO CAMERAS.” At the entrance of Ross dining hall, a graffiti work read “BLACK POWER MATTERS”.
A stenciled rat in a suit appeared in multiple locations: Warner, the Field House and a trashcan at the entrance of CFA.
Another, on the exterior wall of the CFA entrance, read “THIEF,” which is stylistically different from the others. “It does not make any sense, unlike the stencil ones, which are better done. I think they are trying to say something but just not in the right way,” said Elyse Barnard ’15, who saw the isolated one at the CFA and a few at Ross.
The appearance of the graffiti coincides with a wave of campus events focusing on street art. Most notably, the exhibition held at the College Museum of Art, “Outside In: Art of the Street,” which launched on Feb. 13. Other events included the completion of a new Museum façade and a museum piece commenting on Andy Warhol both painted by British street artist Ben Eine over Winter Break and a documentary screening of “Style Wars” by the co-producer and photographer Henry Chalfant.
The College exhibition contrasts with the black and white graffiti that appeared outside the CFA and on College buildings. The juxtaposition reveals not only the different level of artistic expression, but also the divergent destinies of the works by famous graffiti artists and the ones that appeared on campus.
Many current social issues are at play in the messages inherent to the graffiti. Joanne Wu ’15 commented on the display outside of Ross Dining Hall, which read “BLACK POWER MATTERS.”
She said, “I think damaging public property in any form is irresponsible, in part because we are in this living space together. There are many non-destructive ways to get out your message that are equally, if not less, impactful. I do not agree with it. But I do agree that it has a high impact factor because it gets people’s notice.”
On the effectiveness of the message, Wu mentioned the installation in the Davis Family Library focusing on the issues of Mexican immigration and mistreatment of Mexican labor.
She points out the deficiency of context of the campus graffiti and compares it to the more academic way of putting an installation in the library, which goes through the bureaucracy. “I think they have a very provocative display in the library. That also attracts attention,” she said.
However, not everyone knew as much about the graffiti pieces that appeared. Professor of American Studies Timothy Spears saw the graffiti at the Athletic Complex and heard about others, but could not speculate about their purpose or origin. Many people, like Nika Fehmiu ’17, did not hear about it at all partly because the Facilities Services were called in promptly to remove the graffiti works.
Director of Facilities Services Michael Moser explained the cleaning process in an email response to the Campus. He said, “A solvent is used to remove graffiti on painted surfaces, then these surfaces will be repainted when weather allows. For stone surfaces we use a special paste to extract the graffiti. Both of these methods are effective, and are labor intensive.”
Moser and Spears confirmed that this is not the first time graffiti has appeared on campus. According to the College archives, numerous incidents of graffiti have occurred at the College, from basic desk inscriptions in 1966 to political messages on the cement canisters outside Weybridge in 1979. From 2006-2008, Lower Forest almost became a studio and gallery for student graffiti, murals and stenciling until the room was painted over in 2012. At the same time, homophobic graffiti appeared in Ross and prompted the then Ross Commons Heads Steve and Katy Smith Abbott and the administration to resolutely step in. These incidents and the most recent all point to a long history of active and passionate students with a desire to be heard.
(03/17/15 12:37am)
"We [the SGA] think that having an 'eliminate it' option—we don't think that will pass—but we think it will scare enough people into thinking about it and to vote... Honor codes can and do work in some places but they only work if students buy into the concepts. If a large number of Middlebury students come forward and say 'this is not what we want' then it isn't right for our school and we should move to a different system." — John Terhune '17, Student Honor Code Committee member.
If you've never voted in an SGA election, you're going to want to now.
SGA voted for a referendum that will put on the ballot the fate of the honor code. On the ballot, students will be given the option to 1) keep the honor code, 2) revise the honor code or 3) eliminate the honor code in its entirety. When these 3 options hit the SGA polls, majority vote wins—meaning if 50 people voted and 26 voted to eliminate it, Middlebury will remove its honor code. To bring it back, students would have to recreate the honor code, as if from scratch.
Guests: We are joined by Student Honor Committee member John Terhune '17. The Honor Code Committee drafted the proposal to put these 3 options up for student vote. And SGA Junior Class Senator Josh Berlowitz '16, who was the only SGA member to vote against the referendum.
Hosts: Jessica Cheung and Michelle Irei
Read more:
Middlebury's Honor Code in NYT "The Fading Honor Code" by Jessica Cheung: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/education/edlife/the-fading-honor-code.html?_r=0
The Latest on the Honor Code, "Honor, Identity and Administration: The Forgotten History of Middlebury's Honor Code" by Joe Flaherty
http://middleburycampus.com/article/honor-identity-and-administration-the-forgotten-history-of-middleburys-honor-code/
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(03/12/15 2:44am)
It was a harsh Vermont winter in December 1963 and, in the midst of the subzero temperatures, a landmark student life initiative had also frozen over. “The ‘question of honor’ at Middlebury College seems to have plenty of support as an ideal and not so much as a working system,” read a December 5 front-page Campus article. The article, which included student concerns about a code’s implications, foreshadowed the proposed Honor Code’s defeat in a student vote for the second time that May.
Over the past year, the Campus has investigated the untold story of the creation of the Honor Code. Although the story of the origins of the Honor Code at Middlebury is often that of a system fashioned by students and for students, the historical picture is much murkier.
A lengthy search in the College Archives and interviews with those who witnessed the process firsthand reveal that the Honor Code had a slightly turbulent history from the start.
It was a story that dominated the early 1960s at the College: a group of students and administrators who saw the Honor Code as an important opportunity for students to take ownership over their education. And yet, they received surprisingly strong pushback from students on the language and specifics of the proposed code.
The code’s proponents even dropped a compulsory peer-reporting clause, a hallmark of honor systems at Princeton University and elsewhere, from the Middlebury Honor Code in order to ensure its passage via a student vote. Moreover, after two failed student referenda on the Honor Code, evidence found in the Archives shows that at least one administrator recommended enacting the Honor Code without a student vote of support. However, in March 1965 the Code received sufficient support in a student vote to pass. Faculty opted for a streamlined approval process to avoid sending the Honor Code back with revisions to be subject to another student referendum, which they thought could be tantamount to its defeat.
The question of student votes on the Honor Code has renewed relevance of late. On Sunday, the Student Government Association (SGA) Senate voted in favor of amending the Honor System’s Constitution to put the code to a biennial student referendum with the options to maintain, revise, or eliminate the Honor Code. The amendment now must receive 2/3 of the vote in a referendum in which 2/3 the student body votes and must also be ratified by the faculty.
Change in the Air
Middlebury’s academic Honor Code, far from a lone initiative, was the product of social changes on campus that created profound shifts in student life during the 1960s. The College of the 1930s-50s was on its way out in several ways that precipitated the creation of an Honor Code.
Historians of the College have written much about the changes that took place in the 1960s. Among these reforms were major social changes to the institutional rules surrounding student freedoms. The influential Dean of Women Elizabeth ‘Ma’ Kelly oversaw a period in the ’60s when the ground shifted under students’ feet regarding their freedoms and rights as young men and women.
In the ’60s, parietal hours — the now seemingly antediluvian rules that governed when men and women could visit opposite-sex dorms —were gradually phased out. The College began to offer help to students with questions about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. Finally, the fraternities and sororities, long the bastions of the social life of yesteryear, became less and less of a mainstay of the campus party scene.
Historian of the College David Stameshkin said the ’60s were a period of remarkable change, bar none.
“Students wanted to be treated as adults. The administration wanted to treat the students as adults in certain ways but not others,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “It was incredible how things changed in the time [James] Armstrong was President.”
These changes, taken together, amounted to a climate of dramatically increased student responsibility in social life. Naturally, this trend simultaneously made its way into the academic realm.
As discussions were underway about a potential code, the Campus polled 254 students in October 1962 and found 80 percent approved of a code in theory. The newspaper also polled students and found that 35 percent of those surveyed had experience with an honor system at their high school. However, “a majority indicated they would not speak directly to a student if they found him cheating.”
The first instance of bringing the Honor Code to a vote occurred on November 19, 1962, when it failed. Harold Freeman ’62, the Student Association (SA) President, informed the Campus that the vote to inaugurate an Honor Code was defeated, 623-512, a combination of students voting “no” as well as “No-with-Qualification.” 235 voted no, 388 voted no with qualification and 512 voted yes. The students in favor did not reach the 85 percent threshold of “Yes” to send the measure to the faculty for a vote.
However, Freeman gave hints that the fight for a code was not over. “Freeman observed that by adding together the Yes and No-with-Qualification votes, almost four-fifths of the students were in favor of at least some form of Honor Code,” reported the Campus. Nonetheless, it would not be easy to convince the students who voted No-with-Qualification.
The SA, in a postmortem, theorized that a main cause for the defeat was the clause requiring students to report observed violations. This clause was considered a hallmark of longstanding honor codes at universities, including Stanford and Princeton.
Peer-Reporting Controversy
These qualms about the code reared their head repeatedly in the next two years. Surveys revealed approximately 80 percent of students supported an honor system as an ideal, but blanched at the proposal under consideration. “The main objection was to the obligation to report an offense committed by another person,” reported this newspaper.
Helen Gordon, president of the Panhellenic Council, “agreed that an honor code would be a benefit to Middlebury, but thought reworking of the ‘obligation’ clause necessary,” according to the Campus.
Gordon said, “It’s unrealistic to assume that human nature will [report others] but I don’t think they ought to leave out entirely this kind of an idea because it denies the opportunity to a person who’s really honest.”
The peer-reporting requirement would remain an issue through the end of the 1960s and beyond. As the clause became a sticking point in the debate, those in support of the Honor Code pushed back on the idea that peer-reporting meant “tattling” or being a “rat.”
In a December 1963 issue, Campus Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey J. Joseph opined that “whenever one brings up the subject of an Honor Code, the listener politely nods, makes a disparaging grimace, and quickly manages to say something like: ‘You going to the hockey game tomorrow night?’”
For all of the social life changes happening contemporaneously with the Honor Code debate, a large number of students felt comfortable enough with the status quo to stymie any efforts at instituting an honor system. Joseph explained that many students thought of the proposed Honor Code as either a way to end fraternities or to increase social code regulations and theorized that these factors led to its defeat.
“Let’s face it,” he wrote, “if someone wants to cheat, he cheats. If someone wants to ‘tell’ on him, he should be allowed to ‘tell.’ It is important to realize that a provision for ‘telling’ on someone is not included for the main purpose of making enemies out of friends. It is there to protect every honest student by presenting to the cheater a possibility that he will be caught. If you have any qualms about ‘telling’ on your buddy, keep your head down in your paper where it belongs.”
Despite the support of students like Joseph, the SA leadership began to contemplate foregoing the peer-reporting requirement. The Vice President of the SA was reportedly “willing to drop the stipulation that students report others, adding that ‘the maturity of Middlebury students ought to be able to make an honor code successful.’”
In December 1963, the chair of the student Honor Code Committee, Michael McCann ’65, cautioned against pushing the code too vigorously without almost unanimous student support. Two months later, the SA polled students on a potential honor code in what would be the run-up to a second push to pass it via a student body vote. A point of particular emphasis in the questionnaire was intended to gauge how students would feel about peer-reporting. The article stated that “McCann stresses the importance of questions dealing with student and faculty reports of offenders.”
The survey occurred concurrently with the 1964 election of a SA President, in which candidates weighed in on an honor code. Both John Walker ’65 and Peter Delfausse ’65 made an honor code a part of their platform.
Delfausse, who would win the election, said to a Campus reporter, “We on this campus are treated as adults in everything but the integrity of our academic work. Shouldn’t this be the first area in which we should be trusted? Nothing can force the student body into accepting something which isn’t wanted, but if an honor system is desired, we will find the right words with which to express it.”
Nevertheless, concurrent discussion about combating student apathy regarding the SA gives the impression that the Honor Code was an issue important to the members of its committee, but perhaps was less relevant to the wider student body. Richard Hawley ’67 was the Editor-in-Chief of the Campus, and said other issues captured the student body’s attention more than the Honor Code, particularly parietal hours — although he nonetheless appreciated the code when it was instated.
“I remember feeling a kind of relief,” Hawley said in an interview. “What a relief it was to take your exam to the library and do it there. I remember thinking, ‘This is wonderful.’ But I don’t remember student passion about it.”
Princeton on the Otter
Within the next few months, a figure who would be pivotal to Middlebury’s history weighed in on the code. College President James Armstrong, who had stepped into the position in 1963, approved of the proposed Honor Code in a meeting with McCann.
Armstrong said in a comment to the newspaper in April 1964, “Herding of students into the fieldhouse like animals, with proctors standing over them like jailkeeps, is not in keeping with the ideals of a liberal arts education.”
The influence of the college president and other key members of his administration may have been crucial to the Honor Code’s passage. Before arriving at Middlebury, Armstrong had spent his entire academic career at Princeton, an Ivy League school with one of the nation’s oldest academic honor codes — passed in 1893, with an obligatory peer-reporting clause. Armstrong earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton and then served as a faculty member and dean until he was appointed Middlebury’s 12th President.
“When Armstrong came as president from Princeton, he started bringing people from Princeton,” Stameshkin said in an interview. “In fact, the joke on campus was it was ‘Princeton on the Otter.’ That’s what they used to call Middlebury during the ’60s because Armstrong kept bringing people there.”
Another Princeton man, Dennis O’Brien was previously an assistant dean there before arriving at Middlebury in September 1965 to serve as the Dean of Men. His experience with the honor system at Princeton impacted his view of a potential Honor Code at Middlebury.
“Because myself and Jim came from Princeton, we had lived with it and we found it comfortable,” O’Brien told the Campus in a recent interview. “It seemed to establish a different relationship between faculty and students. Faculty were not always snooping over students’ shoulders to make sure they weren’t cheating; we were more like mentors. To suddenly switch over from being the person who is teaching someone to someone who is monitoring your honest behavior seemed not to be the image the faculty wanted to have.”
On top of a Princetonian as president, Middlebury’s stature as an institution was on the rise during the ’60s. O’Brien believes the Honor Code was part of the improvements.
“I think there was clearly a kind of an upgrade in terms of the quality of the students and the quality of the faculty that we were able to attract at that time,” he said, “and so it seemed like a much more senior, adult institution than one having proctored exams.”
The desire for an upgrade to Middlebury came from both above, with the administration, and also below, from students of the ’60s, particularly those who were tired of the fraternities’ hold on campus life.
“There was a genuine feeling that there should be more seriousness at the College intellectually,” Stameshkin said. “And the same thing was happening at Williams and other schools. This idea that there should be more intellectualism and more feeling of scholarship was also happening in the early to mid-60s.”
Nonetheless, the vocal support of Armstrong and O’Brien did not help the Honor Code at the ballot box at first. The proposed code failed in May 1964 to clear the 85 percent hurdle of students voting in favor, and the referendum did not receive even half of the student body’s participation. The result was devastating for those students who had worked tirelessly on behalf of a code.
“After two full years of preparation, an academic honor code was put before the student body Monday via a yes-or-no ballot – and failed to gain the needed support,” said a front-page article in the Campus. The measure received 69 percent “yes” votes from the 45 percent of the student body that voted. The rejected code included “that the test-taker pledge that he had neither given nor received aid” and that students report those they suspected of cheating within 48 hours.
The aforementioned Honor Code Committee displayed dogged, even stubborn, persistence to pass the measure. McCann told this newspaper, “This year’s balloting was far more encouraging than last year’s and there will be another honor committee next year trying to get this thing through.”
Victory, at a Cost
Despite McCann’s optimism, the outlook was grim: two votes and two defeats for an Honor Code within three years. But finally, in March 1965, the Honor Code was approved in a landslide. With 1,000 “yes” votes to 313 “no” votes, it was a marked improvement from the previous two tries in the fall of 1962 and the spring of 1964.
However, the code approved by students contained no compulsory peer-reporting clause such as that of Princeton, due to the fact that the committee viewed the clause as the reason for previous defeats. The Middlebury code stated that students with knowledge of an infraction should confront the student and if he or she does not report themselves to the honor board within 24 hours, the observer should. In O’Brien’s words, it was a passive reporting clause, with no teeth to punish a student who observes cheating and does not report it. The code that passed, unlike the previous versions, said students “should” report those they observed cheating, not “must” or “shall” of previous drafts.
The compulsory reporting clause had also been under fire in the opinions pages of this newspaper. In a Letter to the Editor on Feb. 25, 1965, William Michaels ’66 wrote: “Under the present system of exam proctoring, the College denies us the privilege of attempting to live up to the ideals of moral responsibility … this would also be the case if an honor code were passed which possessed a mandatory student reporting clause, since the student is not thus delegated the responsibility of looking after his own morality: it is merely shifted from the proctors to the other students.”
It was also a significant change that the threshold for victory was lowered to 75 percent from a lofty 85 percent, what it had been in 1962 and 1964. Some students grumbled about the idea of voting for an Honor Code for a third time, suggesting that other factors may have been at play in its success. A joke printed in the Campus poked fun at the code’s long-awaited victory. “Did you favor the Honor System at the recent election?” a student asks. His friend replies, “I sure did. I voted for it five times.”
President Armstrong was understandably pleased following the successful vote, as it was an initiative he had supported since the past spring, and he immediately set to work assigning administrators to it. In an October 1965 letter to the four members of the new subcommittee of the Faculty Administration Committee on the Honor Code, including Dean of Men O’Brien, Armstrong said, “Although I do not think you will be called upon for heavy duty quantitatively, I know you understand how important I believe the Honor Code is for the College and that a guiding hand from the faculty will be important and possibly crucial.”
Armstrong also probably worried that a lack of faculty support might end the last chance for the Honor Code to become a reality. He was present in a meeting of the Faculty Educational Policy Committee (EPC) in March 1965, after the code had been approved by the referendum.
“The honor code statement worked out by the students and brought to us with a large supporting student vote … was discussed,” states the meeting’s minutes. “It was felt best not to subject the statement to the scrupulous kind of inspection the EPC would normally employ in surveying a faculty document, but vote on it yea or nay as it stood; some felt that return of the document for a second student consideration and vote would defeat the proposal. Vote was a unanimous pro.”
It appears the EPC’s worries about the Honor Code failing in the student body led them to streamline its approval process, despite reservations that undoubtedly existed among the faculty.
The faculty also approved a key word choice in the code in April 1965. During the faculty meeting in which they approved the code, according to the article in the Campus, the faculty “did not demand a change to ‘must’” in the reporting clause.
Students Not Sold
There is a small piece of evidence that the College may have enacted an honor code regardless of the student vote. Dean of the College Thomas H. Reynolds wrote in his annual report dated July 1, 1964:
“There is an excellent chance that an almost unanimous student vote will be achieved next year. In the event that this kind of a program does not succeed next year, I recommend the College take some action towards bringing an academic honor system into effect.”
While Reynolds never ended up having to make that recommendation, O’Brien disagreed with his premise.
“I don’t think you should impose it without a successful student vote. I think that would have been a mistake to try to do that,” O’Brien told this reporter. “I think the whole idea of an honor code, to a certain extent, is to get away from the high school syndrome of, ‘You have to be proctored and not entirely trusted.’”
The following year, as new Dean of Men, Dennis O’Brien’s first annual report was pessimistic, illuminating the reasons why Reynolds or others might have pursued an Honor Code if the student body would not.
“By the time the student reaches the last half of his college career we have pretty much either got him involved intellectually or we have lost him for good … they may be active in fraternity life, extracurricular life, athletics, they may be valuable citizens in other ways, but academically they run along on minimal requirements seeking the gut courses and paying only lip service, if that, to the intellectual community,” wrote O’Brien in his annual report in June 1965.
He went on in that report to comment on the lackluster implementation of the Honor Code.
“The Honor Code was approved by students in early March,” O’Brien wrote. “I may have missed something, but I think no further initiative toward its implementation came from students until practically exam time, if then.”
O’Brien also observed how the administration was involved from the very beginning and that students were not yet invested in the code:
“Many students are far from ‘sold’ on the Honor Code. They feel that the Administration has been determined to have an Honor Code here no matter what and that the students finally let the Administration have its way. These students have a sort of uninvolved, ‘play it cool’ attitude. They intend to wait and see how ‘they’ will work it out. If students who felt that way could see the minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee on Honor Code for May 27, 1965 they would feel that their perception was largely confirmed. These minutes make it clear that the Honor Code Committee, chaired by the Dean of the College, consists of several professors and administrators and that to the meeting of this committee were ‘invited’ several specified undergraduates.”
O’Brien also cited a study from Columbia University that said for honor codes to be effective, the motivation should come from students and should appear to be coming from students. The difference between the honor codes at Princeton and Middlebury, he told this newspaper in October 1965, was not Princeton’s “obligatory clause for reporting, but a strong and firm belief in the system by faculty and students.”
Of the code, “it was held with a great deal of pride,” O’Brien said. “Most complaints of the new Middlebury system that I have heard have not been substantive, but procedural. And I think there are some false expectations about the system by a few students.”
A Reversal in Student Perception
Two years later in another report, O’Brien suggested that the honor code might have already backfired soon after its implementation.
“The Honor Code seems to be functioning well although there is still a certain amount of feeling against signing the pledge,” he wrote. “I personally feel that the distaste for the pledge grows out of a hypersensitivity on the part of students today that they are not trusted. As they are not trusted to close their dorm doors during parietal hours, so they feel they are not trusted in the matter of honor in examinations.”
This reversal in opinion was extraordinary. The push for the Honor Code, at least from students, was based on the idea that it would give the students more responsibility and was in the same spirit as a move away from parietal hours. Based on O’Brien’s report, the code had the opposite effect, making students feel like the administration trusted them less than before.
Whether the code was truly being followed is difficult to assess based on available records, but O’Brien writes that “a student was convicted of a violation of the Honor Code this year and suspended for a semester,” a low number of convictions by any standard.
Although during the 1960s the social rules at colleges and universities like Middlebury were being chipped away from all sides, it still took a great deal of effort on the part of members of the SA to pass an honor code via a student vote. Additionally, the faculty minutes and annual reports of the College show that at least one top member of the administration was ready to intervene to institute an honor code and held back probably because of concerns of its effectiveness if instated and operated by Old Chapel.
O’Brien’s 1967 assessment is revealing. There had been two unsuccessful votes from students amid vocal support from the administration and faculty; as a result, many students identified the Honor Code as an administrative device. A corollary explanation is that the social changes in the 1960s cut both ways on an honor system: while these sweeping changes helped make the code a possibility, they also changed the way a code was viewed in the years afterward. Increased freedom for students allowed them to pass the code; however, the perception of the code after 1965 was that it was an administrative measure — not a student-owned freedom.
“It’s very important that the students read the honor code as an administrative imposition as opposed to something that boiled up from the students,” Stameshkin said. “The students felt often as if the administration was kind of the enemy. They wanted to be adults and they felt the administration was treating them like children—you have to be in at this hour and all that — it wasn’t paranoia, but the students felt that way about a lot of things.”
The Campus reported in March 1968, three years after the code passed, that the student Honor Board was worried about the new system’s efficacy. The board had only heard six cases since 1965, and three of those were in the 1967-68 year. Two cases resulted in convictions, and only one of the six cases was because of a report submitted by another student. “This the board felt suggests either that only two students have cheated in the last three years, or that students have not accepted the responsibilities implicit in the system,” reported this newspaper.
The Honor Board, as a result, began to consider changing the constitution of the new Honor Code from passive acceptance of the code to hold responsible a student who did not report a violation.
A decade later, in January 1976, the student body approved by a landslide the revisions proposed by a committee on the honor system. There were dual changes: students now had a moral obligation to report cheating, moving away from the ambiguous language of the original code, and also proctors would be allowed in some cases with the specific authorization of the Judicial Review Board. Even under the best of circumstances, O’Brien said in a recent interview, getting students to report their peers may be asking too much.
“My guess is that [peer-reporting] never works terribly well, unless you’re in a highly codified organization like the military academy,” O’Brien said. “I’m not even so sure how well it worked at Princeton … it’s a nice thing to have: there’s a certain moral responsibility, and I love the idea of going up to somebody else and saying, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ But I suspect it doesn’t happen very often.”
It is difficult to assess whether the code cut down on cheating, as suggested by research that shows colleges with an honor code have less self-reported cheating by students. On that front, Emeritus Dean of Advising and Assistant Professor of American Studies Karl Lindholm ’67 said the Honor Code did not hurt and probably helped.
“I remember thinking it was a great idea. I don’t think there was any greater level of cheating than when the exams were tightly proctored,” Lindholm said. “It was almost a challenge to see if you could beat the system then,” with stories of notes written on hands and crib sheets hidden during an exam. “With unproctored exams, I don’t recall any greater level of cheating,” he said.
Approaching Another Vote
In a January survey by the SGA, 33 percent of the student body said they support the Honor Code in principle but that there need to be changes. 59 percent of the 1438 survey respondents said they support it in its current form and about 7 percent said they don’t support it.
Additionally, the Campus published (“Cheating: Hardly a Secret,” Oct. 30, 2013) the results of a survey by Craig Thompson ’14 for the course Economics of Sin where 35 percent of 377 students surveyed admitted to violating the Honor Code at least once in the 2012-13 academic year. 97 percent were not punished.
On Sunday, the discussion came to a head when the SGA Senate approved, in a nearly unanimous vote, the decision to move ahead with a bill that would subject the Honor Code to a biennial student referendum. Per the Honor System's Constitution, 2/3 of the student body must vote, and 2/3 vote in favor, for the change to take effect. The amendment would then need to be ratified by the faculty at large. If the amendment passes, a spring 2016 referendum would give students three options: to vote to maintain the honor code as it stands, to eliminate it or to revise it. A majority in favor of revision would cause the Honor Code committee to survey opinions during a two-week revision process. Students would then vote on the revised Honor Code to either approve it, to maintain the original code, or to eliminate the code.
Student Co-Chair of Community Council Ben Bogin ’15 was an impetus behind the SGA proposal and said fighting atrophy was a goal. “The idea behind our method is to encourage people to continue talking about the Honor Code after they sign it as a first-year,” Bogin wrote in an email. “The Honor Code only works if it’s a living, breathing document that people cherish and take seriously. We’re trying to breathe a little more life into it.”
SGA Director of Academic Affairs Cate Costley ’15 added that the idea is to reclaim the Honor Code as a document students care about and take ownership of.
“Through conversations and debates, we settled on a schoolwide vote to try to solicit the voices of our peers and to see what they think,” Costley said. “And having an edge to it with the possibility of eliminating the Honor Code is to say to people, ‘Let’s not take this document for granted.’”
Vice President for Student Affairs, Dean of the College and Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture Katy Smith Abbott said she believes discussion has also been sparked by the decision in the Economics Department to proctor exams in introductory classes starting last spring.
“It’s not that proctoring hasn’t been an option for faculty — it has been — but it’s required a certain kind of approval process that most people thought was not necessary or wasn’t in the spirit of the Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “And I think when that decision was made (thoughtfully, and at great length) by the Economics Department, it meant that a larger number of students were being exposed to the question of whether the Honor Code is working.”
Smith Abbott also said that the code could possibly fail in a referendum, based on what she has heard from students.
“I think some of my lack of a firm sense of how it would go is based on the variety of opinions out there right now about whether or not the Honor Code is working,” she said. “I think if we have entered into a period where more students, through their own experience or inherited wisdom, think the Honor Code isn’t working, we could see it fail.”
Several on Community Council, according to Smith Abbott, have raised doubts about the wisdom of a biennial survey in which the Honor Code could be eliminated.
“I think a lot of folks on Community Council — and I have mixed feelings about this — felt that those are insurmountable odds that, if two years later, you have two classes of students who have never lived with an Honor Code,” Smith Abbott said. “What’s their investment in bringing it back? Why are we putting that on them by saying, ‘[An honor code] worked for some people and didn’t work for others, but it’s on you to decide to overwhelmingly vote it back into existence?’”
Bogin, however, said that that he is not worried about failure and that the discussion of the code’s relevance is worth having through a referendum.
“I think that it’s incredibly unlikely that the Honor Code would fail in a vote. According to our most recent student survey, in which about 60 percent of the student body voted, 92 percent supported the continued existence of the Honor Code,” Bogin wrote. “I also think that it’s important to say that if something isn’t working, and everybody agrees, we should be able to get rid of it. It’s hard to say that the Honor Code is student owned if students don’t have the power to get rid of it.”
Hawley, who was at Middlebury during the Honor Code debate, said renewed attention to the code is not a bad thing.
“I think the cycle of concern is probably the best thing, whatever the outcome, because it’s heightening student awareness of how it’s my responsibility to do my own work. I don’t think there’s anything that would prove that a certain kind of honor code produces more honor,” Hawley said. “It’s sort of what Jefferson said about the American Constitution: it should be revisited; there should be at least a thread of revolution every 20 years to keep attention fresh on what the values are. I think raising the climate of concern about it is probably the most important thing with respect to honor, not necessarily what code you have written down.”
(03/12/15 12:12am)
“There’s something surreal about it. You feel like God,” Will Jacobs ’16.5 said.
Jacobs drives a Snowcat: a 20,000 lb. hulk of metal capable of grooming sub-par snow into quality skiing terrain. In Germany, where the machines are made, a Snowcat driver is called “Helder der nacht,” which translates to “hero of the night.”
But with this great title comes great responsibility. “When you go to a ski area and it’s a really bad ski day, sometimes that’s the weather conditions,” Jacobs said. “Most of the time, it’s the groomer who doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
His training began during his Feb-mester in New Zealand, where he did an unpaid apprenticeship at Whakapaka ski resort for three weeks. Since then, he’s worked at ski resorts in Chile and at Squaw Valley in California.
Jacobs described the thrill of driving a Snowcat as a power trip. “When you’re up there during a snowstorm in the night, you can’t see a thing and you’re pushing piles of snow so big that you can’t see out. You have enormous power.”
However, the job is not always glorious. “Sliding sideways off the mountain [in a Snowcat] is never fun,” he laughed, recalling a scary incident in New Zealand.
The hours are also unconventional. Jacob’s day usually began around 4 or 5 p.m. when trails close, to 11 p.m. or later. At Squaw Valley in California, he groomed during “the graveyard shift,” which ran from midnight to when the mountain opened the next morning at 8 a.m. “That’s just awful. I did that for a week. It’s not something I’d ever want to do in the long run,” he said.
Though Jacobs loves spending time on the mountain in a Snowcat, the Boston native never had dreams of becoming a ski bum when he got into grooming. “It’s not a ski bum job,” he said, citing the late-night hours, and required experience with heavy machinery that most people lack. “Skiing is kind of an upper-class sport, and being able to run a Snowcat is more of a middle class occupation. That was my situation.”
Currently, Jacobs is on the Snowbowl and the Rikert Nordic Center’s substitute list in case one of the regular groomers calls in sick, a rare occasion that happened once this year.
“I just do it for free. It’s a fun activity for me,” he said.
Even when he got paid working at Squaw Valley, he didn’t earn much, only around $12-13 an hour. Jacobs now considers his unique Snowcat skill set as a hobby. “I’ve wanted to do it since I was probably five years old,” he said. “When you’re five, you like any and every big machine. That love of big trucks, I never grew out of it.”
(03/11/15 11:46pm)
Researchers at the University of Vermont released a study investigating the use of antipsychotic medications on children in the March edition of Pediatrics. While the results concluded that the inappropriate use of the drugs is not a concern, about 50 percent of prescribers failed to meet best practice standards.
Amidst increasing nationwide use of such drugs by minors, lead author Dr. David Rettew and his team wished to gain understanding of what was causing the upward trend and if there is any reason for alarm. Rettew is the director of the Pediatric Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Vermont Medical Center and the Vermont Center for Children, Youth, and Families.
“Part of our concern is that these medicines may be getting pulled out too early in the treatment planning for things like oppositional behavior, ahead of things like behavioral therapy that could be tried first,” Rettew said in an official press release.
To collect information, the researchers examined Medicaid claims for July to October of 2012, extracting the names of Vermont physicians who had prescribed antipsychotic medications to children and sending them mandatory surveys.
In total, 147 doctors responded, accounting for prescriptions to 647 patients. Ultimately, the team decided that the drugs were issued under the proper circumstances in 92 percent of cases.
“It was pretty clear from our data that antipsychotic medicines were only being used once other things didn’t work, or other types of treatments or other types of medications failed,” Rettew said. “And I think that’s really good news because it reflects the idea that doctors are not prescribing these medicines casually or in a knee-jerk way.”
While Rettew seemed comforted by the lack of overuse, he insisted, “I don’t think we in the medical community can be too excited about a best practice rate of 50 percent … and we should be working on ways to improve that number.”
The standards for best practice guidelines were taken from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The recommendations include not only prescribing medications as a last resort but also stipulations such as appropriate testing before prescription as well as follow-up, not issuing such medications to children under 5 or using multiple antipsychotic drugs at one time. The greatest violations to best practice were due to a lack of adequate blood testing, both before and after commencement of drug use.
“The number one reason why a prescription did not follow best practice guidelines was not because it was being used inappropriately, it was because the doctors were not getting the recommended lab work that’s supposed to go along with these prescriptions,” Rettew said.
Such testing is important for keeping track of cholesterol and blood-glucose levels, elevations of which are common side effects when using these types of drugs. A leading reason for insufficient blood testing was reportedly children’s aversion to having the lab work done and undergoing the process of blood sampling. However, the researchers also feel that many physicians simply are not aware of the guidelines.
The report includes recommendations for doctors in order to mitigate poor performance on best practices. Namely, the authors tout the incorporation of electronic medical records that use software capable of alerting doctors when tests should be done. Additionally, the team is pushing for the better training of doctors that may work with children taking these drugs, even if the doctors are not the ones to prescribe them. The team is also looking for better access to therapy for children in Vermont and improved information sharing between centers to ensure consideration of patient history.
Interestingly, the rates of pediatric patients on antipsychotic medications in Vermont has fallen in recent years, by 45 percent for children ages 6 to 12 and 27 percent for ages 13-17. This contrasts with national statistics in previous years from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which report that usage increased by 62 percent for children on Medicaid between 2002 and 2007.
The aim of Rettew and his nine coauthors was not to undermine the validity of such drugs. “I’m not anti-antipsychotics; I just want to make sure they’re used very carefully,” Rettew said. “These findings could help us design a game plan for measures to improve best-practice prescribing.” He admited that while “there are risks associated with using these medicines … I think they’ve saved lives.”
(03/11/15 2:28pm)
This Saturday, two French/Catalan sisters, a Swede and a Scot cross the puddle to give the College one of the most vibrant and impassioned quartet performances of the millennia. The Elias String Quarter has risen like a meteor through the chamber music universe and into our own Performing Arts Series.
Too often students report the cost of arts events as barriers to their attendance. To that end, this concert will be completely free and open to the public. Be sure to come to the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts (MCA) Concert Hall slightly before 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 14, for great seating.
The Elias quartet is a relatively young ensemble, having debuted in 2012, but have been playing together for the past 17 years. This weekend they have chosen to perform Beethoven’s late quartets, three complex and incredible pieces.
The first piece that the Elias quartet will play tonight is the 11th quartet in F-minor. Beethoven started to write this piece in 1810, a particularly tumultuous time in Vienna, where he lived for most of his life. 1810 was the height of the Napoleonic campaigns across Europe, and Vienna, the capital of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, was under constant bombardment.
All of Beethoven’s composer-friends left the besieged city but him, although he complained endlessly about the constant noise of the bombardment. An eyewitness account from the time tells that the composer hid in his brother’s basement and covered his ears with pillows to protect the little hearing he had left at the time. Out of this chaos came the short but incredibly powerful 11th quartet, labeled Serioso by the publisher.
Beethoven never intended for this quartet to be played to the public, but rather planned for it to circulate in small settings amongst his composer and royal friends. When you hear Elias play it, you may understand why. The war brought out the character changes that transformed Beethoven’s heroic middle period into the genius late period.
This quartet, among other late pieces, does things that musicians at that time would not have dreamed of in their wildest dreams. Rapid outbursts, rapidly evolving motifs and an unprecedented use of silences characterize this wartime quartet. It is a piece that demands not only technical mastery, but also vibrancy and intensity. This piece matches the Elias quartet’s best traits.
Following the 11th, the Elias quartet will play the 16th quartet in F-major. This is the last significant work that Beethoven finished; he died in March of 1827, about five months after he completed the 16th quartet in October 1826. The most striking movement of this quartet is undoubtedly the finale, named by Beethoven Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß — “the difficult decision.” It starts with slow, dark chordal progression labeled muss es sein — “must it be?” and resolves into a nimble answer, labeled es muss sein! — “it must be!”
The 16th is a very flexible piece throughout. It moves from misty, bemused chordal cadences into complex, rapid counterpoint without fluttering an eyelid. It is another genius piece from Beethoven’s late period.
We step back a very small step in Beethoven’s biography to play the 14th quartet in C-sharp minor, completed in early 1826. Although any musicians reading this probably detest C-sharp minor (four sharps!), this is Beethoven’s favorite key. It is stoic, dramatic, complex and elusive, like the composer himself.
This quartet is almost twice as long as the 11th that Elias will begin the concert with, and many times it is more sophisticated. It captures leftover energy from Missa Solemnis, the grand choral mass written a few years earlier, that lends it a spiritual, puzzling tone. There is powerful melancholy present behind every note, written with a mastery that puzzled great composers for generations to come. After Franz Schubert heard this quartet, he said: “after this, what is left for us to write?” Robert Schumann remarked: grandeur [...] which no words can express. They seem to me to stand ... on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination.”
Come to the MCA Concert Hall at 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 14, for this entirely free performance by one of the best quartets in the nation. Associate Professor of Music Larry Hamberlin will offer a pre-concert lecture at 7:00 p.m. in Room 221 for all interested.
(03/11/15 2:17pm)
Child of Light is a platformer role-playing game that takes place in the fantastical world of Lemuria. You play as the young girl Aurora, an Austrian princess who wakes up to find herself in a strange world with even stranger creatures. Over the course of the game, you meet the different characters of Lemuria, from the mouse-like Populi to the circus-performing Aerostati, and befriend all of them. You learn that things are not quite right in this country and that the malevolent Queen of Night is keeping the people captive through the use of dark magic and evil minions. Aurora must fight her way through this strange world to save Lemuria and return to her ailing father. Along the way, Aurora learns that to be a good ruler, she must often put the needs of others above her own desires.
Ubisoft Montreal, a big name company in the gaming industry known mostly for the Assassin’s Creed series, released Child of Light in April 2014. However, Child of Light is a step in quite a different direction for the developer. The game showcases an absolutely stunning animated backdrop. All of the different environments were carefully hand drawn and scanned into the game. The player feels as though they are walking through a painting as they traverse the beautiful landscapes of Lemuria. The artists did a fantastic job making the game feel just like a child’s dream.
Over the course of the game Aurora must face many dark creatures and servants of the Queen of Night. Combat in Child of Light is time-based. At the bottom of the screen during an encounter there is a time bar which all of the characters move along depending on their speed statistic and the action they are about to take. This is not a common style among these types of games – most similar games use a simple turn-based mode. Compared to the combat style, the time-based system kept me more involved with each encounter. While I was waiting for Aurora and her party to move along the bar, I was busy trying to slow my opponents down and timing my hits to interrupt their attacks.
Another thing the developers did well with the combat was making characters compatible with each other. You are allowed to have two party members on the field at any given time during a fight. Over time, I found that certain characters worked especially well together. For example, my favorite team consisted of Aurora and her sister. Aurora’s sister Norah has abilities that slow down her enemies while speeding up her teammates. This allowed me to minimize the attacks of the enemy while allowing Aurora to bombard them with her spells and sword.
The best thing the game has going for it is the storyline and the way it is presented. The entire game is presented as a poem. All narration and dialogue within the game follows a rhyming scheme. This aspect of the game was not only beautiful, but also very entertaining at times. One of the characters has an inability to rhyme and is often corrected by the others with a word that fits the rhyming scheme. The main reason I enjoyed the poetic narrative is for its originality. I have never played another game that has used this style of storytelling and I they did an excellent job with it.
I only had two complaints with Child of Light. The first was that the levels could become a bit grindy. I found myself running from one battle to the next with the same enemies which could get a bit tiring at times. My second complaint was that the puzzles they presented you with were the same every time. You needed to open a door to the next area, used Igniculus the firefly to illuminate a few panels on the door and voilà – it opened. However, given that the game is only about 13 hours long, these were minor annoyances which didn’t add up to much in the end.
Overall, I give Child of Light a 9.5 out of 10. I immensely enjoyed this game for its engaging story, original narrative and engaging combat system. While the game could be a little bit of a grind at times, the feeling never lasted too long and new developments in the story followed soon after. If you are looking for a good, story-centric game to play in between exam weeks or to play through over the upcoming break, I highly recommend Child of Light and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
(03/11/15 1:43am)
The track teams were in action this past weekend in the final round of meets before the NCAA Championships. Several Panthers were making last-ditch efforts to qualify for the NCAA meet while others sat tight and hoped they were not bumped by other competitors around the country.
The top 15 men, top 17 women and top 12 relays in each gender that declare for the NCAA meet qualify. A group of runners was sent to the Tufts Final Qualifier on Friday, March 6 and another group elected to compete at ECAC Championships at the Armory in New York City on March 6 and 7.
After the dust settled, the men qualified one individual and the women qualified four individuals and one relay team for the NCAA meet.
As has been the case for the last few years, the Tufts Final Qualifier was a disappointment for the Middlebury competitors. Kevin Wood ’15 was third in the 5000m, running 14:57.17, which was not an improvement on his indexed best time of 14:46.42, a time leaving him ranked 23rd — ultimately not good enough to get into the Big Dance.
The men’s distance medley relay of Sam Cartwright ’16, Alex Nichols ’17, Luke Carpinello ’16 and Wilder Schaaf ’14.5 finished seventh by running 10:11.74; again, not an improvement on their indexed time of 10:06.09, ranking them 17th and leaving them on the outside looking in.
Down at the Armory, Hannah Blackburn ’17 broke her school record in the pentathlon by scoring 2931 points, good for seventh place in the ECAC.
“Every pentathlon is different, and this one started off poorly with high jump,” Blackburn said, “but then I actually learned how to run an 800, so that was good. Plus there were only a few of us at the meet, so it was also a great opportunity for bonding before the spring break trip.”
Kevin Serrao ’18 concluded his successful rookie campaign by running 1:55.79 in the 800m to finish 11th. Also in the 800m was Addis Fouche-Channer ’17, who ran 2:23.67 to finish 17th. Taylor Shortsleeve ’15 made his last indoor high jump as a Panther, clearing 1.92m (6’3.50”) for a 12th-place finish.
This year’s NCAA Championships will be held at the JDL Fast Track in Winston-Salem, NC, on March 13 and 14. Schaaf was the lone Middlebury male to qualify for the meet,and will be running the mile for the second year in a row. He is seeded eighth this year and looks to improve on his ninth place finish last year in Lincoln, NE.
For the women, Alison Maxwell ’15, Summer Spillane ’15 and Sarah Guth ’15 will all run the mile and are all seeded for All-American positions, entering the meet as the second, sixth and eighth seeds, respectively.
Adrian Walsh ’16 is seeded 13th in the 5000m, an event she finished ninth in last year while competing for the Hamilton Continentals. The distance medley relay squad of Maxwell, Alex Morris ’16, Paige Fernandez ’17 and Erzsie Nagy ’17 is seeded sixth. The Middlebury DMR finished seventh last year after a third place finish in 2013 and victories in 2011 and 2012.
(03/11/15 1:42am)
The Middlebury men’s lacrosse team earned its first NESCAC victory of the season with a 13-9 win at Connecticut College on Saturday, March 7.
After surviving a strong early push from the Camels, which involved a four-goal first quarter, the Panthers went on a tear in the second half that included a 6-0 run, eventually leading to the 13-9 win.
With the defeat Conn. College pick up their first conference loss of the season as their season record drops to 0-3. In so doing the Middlebury squad won their second consecutive game and improved to 2-1 on the season, and 1-1 in conference play.
Early in the game Conn. College’s Tucker Mscisz ’18 made a large impact, scoring the first two goals of the contest unassisted. Additionally, Ross Thompson ’17 recorded a goal and an assist in the game’s early stages to power the Camel offense. Leads, however, are not built exclusively on the offensive end.
In the first half, the Camels played a stifling zone defense which gave the Middlebury offense significant problems. Conn. also demonstrated stellar play between the pipes throughout the first half, which contributed to Middlebury’s struggle to find the back of the net. Middlebury had the last scoring chance of the half, but Conn. goaltender Bobby Bleistein ’16 made a terrific stick save in response to a Jon Broome ’16 shot from point blank range, allowing the Camels to enter the halftime break with a 6-4 advantage.
The second half, however, was an entirely different story as Panthers on both ends of the field steadily began to exert influence and take control of the game.
To start the third quarter Jack Rautiola ’16 continued his solid play with a goal assisted by senior Joel Blockowicz ’15, who would ultimately lead the Panther offense with six points on the day. In his first career start sophomore attackman Nate Smith-Ide ’17 notched two goals and two assists in the second half. Smith Ide’s contribution was certainly vital to the squad’s ability to play from a deficit and regain the advantage.
Just as Conn. College exhibited strong defensive play in the first half, the Panthers stepped up defensively in the second half to shift the narrative of the game.
After allowing six first-half goals, the defense tightened up to let in only three after the halftime break. When asked about this dramatic shift, defenseman Eric Rogers ’18 talked about an overall shift in the team’s mentality. According to Rogers the defense simply “started winning individual matchups” while the offense “maintained more possession due in large part to more faceoff wins.” The freshman defender also gave credit to Middlebury goaltender Will Ernst ’17, who solidified the Panther backline with 14 saves on the day.
The team extended their winning streak to three games on Tuesday, March 10 with a 13-11 victory over St. Lawrence University. Mid-week games are never easy, especially when a three and a half-hour bus ride is part of the equation, however, the Panthers were up to the task against a solid Saints squad who had won two of their last three matchups. In so doing, Middlebury avenged last year’s 14-7 loss with a 13-11 victory. Though not a NESCAC matchup, St. Lawrence competes in a high-quality conference, making the win crucial to the Panthers’ momentum as they continue their season.
In what is becoming a rather adverse trend, the Panthers went down in the first half but managed to pull out the victory through a second half comeback. Though they built an early 3-1 lead with goals from Joey Zelkowitz ’17, Jack Cleary ’16, and Jack Rautiola ’16, the Saints quickly stormed back with two goals apiece from Jeremy Vautour ’16 and Tommy Hovey ’15 as well as a first half hat-trick for Conor Healy ‘17. Had it not been for Tim Giarrusso ’16 with two early second quarter goals the game could have been out of reach at the half.
In a similar fashion to their last bout with Conn. College, Middlebury tightened up defensively in the second half to shut the Saints out in the third quarter and allow only three goals in the remainder of the game. On the other side of the ball, the squad dumped in four in the third quarter, as Cleary and Rautiola both scored their second goals of the day. First-year midfielder Henry Riehl ’18 added one goal as a part of the man-up unit, and Nick Peterson ’18 also got on the board, scoring his first career goal. With another solid day in net from goaltender Will Ernst ’17 and a quality day at the face-off X for John Jackson ’18, the Panthers ultimately pulled out another win to go to 3-1 on the year.
The Panthers return to action on Saturday, March 14 when last year’s regular season NESCAC runner-up Wesleyan travels to Middlebury.
(03/05/15 1:00am)
The Middlebury squash season officially ended last Saturday in Princeton, N.J., where Andrew Jung ’16, Charlotte Dewey ’15 and Saskia Pownall-Grey ’16 competed in the College Squash Association Individual Championships. Jung competed in the men’s “B” bracket for the Molloy Cup in which he advanced to the consolation finals. Dewey and Pownall-Grey competed in the women’s “B” bracket for the Holleran Cup.
The most success was enjoyed by Jung, but Dewey also had a good sending off as she played her last match in a Middlebury uniform Saturday afternoon. Jung posted three wins against two losses and advanced to the consolation final, while Dewey posted two wins against two losses and advanced to the second round consolation quarterfinals. Pownall-Grey lost both of her matches after receiving a bye. She lost in the round of 32 in four sets (11-9, 11-1, 12-14 and 11-3) and then in straight sets in the consolation bracket (13-111, 11-8 and 11-5).
Dewey dominated her first opponent, sandwiching an 11-0 victory in the second set with 11-1 wins. She proceeded to fall in a close, four-set second match (12-10, 11-4, 3-11 and 11-9), sending her to the second round consolation pool. In her first match on Saturday, Dewey made easy work of her opponent (11-5, 11-1 and 11-0), sending her to the quarterfinals. Although the quarterfinals would be the last match she would play in, she gave Dartmouth’s Lydie McKenzie a run for her money in a four-set thriller. They traded 11-9 sets to open the match and then McKenzie took the third set 11-5. The fourth and decisive set, however, saw an epic duel. Dewey fought tooth and nail but came up just short in a 15-13 loss.
Before entering last weekend, knowing it would be her last playing competitive squash, Dewey said, “I just want to have fun in my last real squash tournament.” She added, “I have nothing to lose at this point and everything to gain from playing my last weekend of competitive squash. I want to try and just play my best and keep in mind that why I’m out here in the first place is my love for this sport.”
Jung’s successful weekend started off on a sour note Friday morning when he lost in five sets to Darrius Campbell of Bates. Jung narrowly dropped a closely contested first set 12-10, before he rebounded to dominate the second set 11-4. He traded 11-3 victories with Campbell in the third and fourth sets before falling 11-5 in the final set.
Despite being sent to the consolation pool before Friday afternoon had rolled around, Jung furiously fought back in his next three matches without dropping a set. A quick turnaround could not even derail him as he won his match on Friday afternoon decisively, taking the first two sets 11-5 and then sealing the deal in the third set 11-2. Saturday Jung swept his way through the consolation quarterfinals (11-3, 11-5 and 11-4) and semifinals (a trio of 11-5 victories).
By the time he reached the finals on Sunday, Jung was out of gas.
“Unfortunately my body broke down pretty fast and I was just out of energy,” Jung said.
Although low on energy, Jung took William McBrian of Colby to five sets. The pair’s previous meeting on Jan. 10 went to McBrian in four sets. After trading 11-9 scores in the first two sets against McBrian, Jung won the third set 11-5 to gain an edge of two sets to one. The close fourth set loss 11-8 is where the fatigue of playing five matches in two days began to set in for Jung and he dropped the final set 11-5.
Exhausted and disappointed, Jung praised McBrian saying, “He’s a tough competitor.” But he added, “McBrian was someone I thought I should have beaten looking back on the regular season, so I was really looking forward to having an opportunity to play him. I think going into the fifth game I was trying to leave that larger perspective out of my head and just focus on what had worked for me in the games I won.”
(03/05/15 12:58am)
The track teams continued their postseasons on Feb. 27 and 28, competing in the Open New England Championships. “Opens,” as the meet is nicknamed, takes the top athletes across all NCAA divisions and brings them together to compete at Boston University’s Track and Tennis Center, home of one of the fastest banked 200m indoor tracks in the country. With fleet feet on their minds, the Panthers attacked the meet with vigor.
The meet began the afternoon of Feb. 27 with a selection of women’s events. Alex Morris ’16 set a season best in the 400m dash by running 58.56 seconds as the lone individual competitor for the women Friday afternoon. The distance medley relay team of Summer Spillane ’15, Morris, Paige Fernandez ’17, and Erzsie Nagy ’17 ran 11:48.44 for a third-place finish, but their time was marginally slower than the best Middlebury mark of the year set earlier in the month.
After the conclusion of the women’s events, the men took to the track Friday evening. Kevin Serrao ’18 set a new personal best in the 800m, running 1:54.13 to place 14th and was the top placing true freshman in the meet. Kevin Wood ’15 gathered All-New England honors in the 5000m run, finishing 25 laps of the track in 14:37.03, an all-time personal best for fifth place.
Like the women, the men also raced a distance medley relay team. Sam Cartwright ’16, Alex Nichols ’17, Luke Carpinello ’16 and Wilder Schaaf ’14.5 teamed up to run 9:57.95 to finish eigth. Their mark currently ranks them 13th in Division-III, a tough place to be in, as the top-12 declared marks qualify for NCAA Championships. In a later heat of the DMR, Amherst College set the all-time Division-III mark by running 9:48.61, breaking their 2011 team’s record of 9:49.11.
The teams returned to the track Saturday morning ready to impress with more fast times. As has been the theme for much of the season, the Middlebury milers again lit up the track. In the women’s race, Nagy, Spillane and Sarah Guth ’15 finished third, fourth and fifth by running 4:56.53, 4:57.11 and 4:57.48, respectively. Alison Maxwell ’15, who ran 4:53.63 the previous week, had an off day but still took ninth place by running 5:06.13. In the men’s mile, Cartwright shook off the previous night’s DMR to run 4:14.36 and Sam Klockenkemper ’17 set a new personal best by running 4:15.56.
In the 3000m run, Adrian Walsh ’16 ran 10:10.69 for 17th place. Walsh’s time was one-hundredth of a second off of tying Maxwell’s school record mark in the event. Brian Rich ’17 set a new personal best by running 8:37.98, also finishing 17th.
The Panthers will get one last chance at qualifying for NCAA Championships this weekend, competing either at the Tufts Final Qualifying Meet on March 6 or the ECAC Championships on March 6 and 7 at the Armory in New York City. The top-15 men and top-17 women in individual events qualify for NCAAs and the top-12 relays for each gender qualify. At the time of publication, the men currently would send Schaaf in the mile (ranked 12th) while the DMR is on the outside looking in at 13th. The women would send Maxwell, Nagy and Spillane in the mile (ranked second, 11th and 14th), Walsh in the 5000m (ranked 13th) and a DMR team (ranked fourth). Some of the milers, though, may opt to run the DMR fresh rather than doubling up events. The last weekend of the season always proves to be crazy with a wide swath of last chance meets contested across the country.
(03/05/15 12:49am)
Despite leading by two goals at the start of the second half, the Middlebury men’s Lacrosse team fell to first-ranked Tufts by a score of 17-10 after the defending national champions staged a 13-4 run to earn a victory in the season opener. The result on Saturday, Feb. 28 stands as an improvement on last year’s opening matchup with the Jumbos in which the Panthers lost by a greater margin of 24-6.
For the second consecutive year, Middlebury opened season play against Tufts, who now defend a NCAA title after posting a 21-2 record on their way to a national championship in the 2014 season. The Jumbos found success in the previous season as a result of their high-powered offense, which was led by John Uppgren ’16 and Cole Bailey ’15, who combined for ten points (7G, 3A) against Middlebury on Saturday. However, the Panthers relied on strong defense in the first half and were able to limit the powerful Tufts offense to only four goals in the first 30 minutes of play.
John Broome ’16 struck first for Middlebury, scoring unassisted twice in the first quarter while Tim Giarrusso ’16 added a single tally off a Joel Blockowicz ’15 feed. Tufts managed to find the back of the net for the first time with 1:13 remaining in the first, and converted again with 0:02 on the clock to end play with the scoreboard reading 3-2 in favor of the Panthers.
The second quarter saw Middlebury hold onto their lead, with Blockowicz, Broome and John Simms ’17 adding to the scoring effort. Penalties were held to a minimum for both sides during the first half, keeping both teams at even strength throughout much of the opening 30 minutes of play. The Jumbos added two more tallies in the second quarter, leaving the score at 6-4 as both teams left the field for halftime. As they headed to the locker room, the Middlebury squad looked like they might be poised for an upset victory to open their season.
The feeling would not last long after the break. The second half brought a significant change of momentum, with the Jumbos outscoring the visiting Panthers by a wide margin of 13-4. The home team opened the third quarter with three consecutive goals, including one by Connor Bilby while Tufts had a man advantage. Broome was able to add back-to-back goals for the Panthers in the third quarter, rounding out his scoring performance at five on the day. In similar fashion to the start of the quarter, Tufts added another three consecutive goals before the whistle sounded to end play and send the game into the fourth quarter.
For the first time in the game, Middlebury opened the final quarter with a one-goal deficit. Tufts then proceeded to score seven straight, with Middlebury adding its lone goal of the quarter off a Jack Rautiola ’16 shot with 3:10 remaining. The Tufts attack duo of Uppgren and Bailey added two apiece in the fourth, and Uppgren also recorded an assist. In addition, midfielder Garrett Clarke contributed three goals for the Jumbos in the victory, while Austin Carbone racked up three points on two goals and an assist.
Tufts asserted dominance at the faceoff-X, taking a 20-30 advantage throughout the course of the game. Tufts also exceeded Middlebury’s ground ball effort, scooping up 37 to the Panthers’ 22. Consistent with Tufts’ reputation as an offensively talented squad, the Jumbos released 64 shots on the day, almost doubling Middlebury’s shot total of 36.
Both teams displayed competent goaltending at the hands of Will Ernst ’17 for the Panthers and Alex Salazar for the Jumbos. The two goalies recorded almost identical save percentages, 43.3 percent and 44.4 percent, respectively. However, tasked with offsetting Tufts’ notoriously effective offense, Ernst faced 30 shots while Salazar saw only 18. Also on the defensive end of the field, Middlebury players Cal Williams ’15 and Jack DeFrino ’17 each caused three turnovers, while DeFrino recorded six of the ten faceoff wins for the Panthers.
The final score is deceiving, however, because Middlebury stuck with the Tufts team for the majority of the contest.
“Even though we didn’t win, we proved that we can compete with anyone,” said Broome. “We had great possessions and played solid defense in the first half, which is definitely something we can build on.”
The Jumbo’s prolific scoring ability in the fourth quarter allowed them to differentiate themselves and capture the win, yet they trailed Middlebury for much of the game.
“Tufts outworked us on ground balls in the second half and capitalized on our mistakes, like any good team would do,” Broome said. “[If we can] string together a full game of good lacrosse, we have the potential to be a top team in the NESCAC and in D3.”
Middlebury returns to action on the road on Saturday, March 7 against NESCAC rival Connecticut College. Tufts looks to improve upon its undefeated record as they face out-of-conference opponent Stevens Tech over the weekend.
(03/04/15 8:00pm)
For the 2014-2015 grant year, Middlebury was ranked sixth on the Fulbright U.S. Student Program Top Producing Institutions list for liberal arts colleges with 12 recipients, a College record. These numbers were likely higher than past years due to an increase in application volume, according to Associate Dean for Fellowships and Research Lisa Gates.
Yearly applications from Middlebury students have tripled, from 13 applicants in 2008 to almost 40 in 2014. This year, Middlebury had about 10 fewer applications.
On Middlebury’s success last year, Gates said, “It’s about increasing the pool; it’s about getting more students interested in applying and doing that work. That’s really the secret … We’re getting more students who are strongly motivated to do this and have good, relevant experience, whether it’s in the realm of teaching, tutoring, mentoring or research. We’re getting more students interested in applying, and that will, over time, increase the number of successful grantees we get.”
Gates went on to remark that because many Middlebury students choose to study abroad, their experiences prepare them well for the realities of a Fulbright.
“Students also spend time abroad through Middlebury programs where they are very much challenged to integrate into the host culture. It’s a highly immersive experience and I think our students take that very seriously.” She added that taking classes in a host university and doing research in a second language “are extremely important experiences in terms of preparing students to be successful in preparing for a Fulbright because they’ve done something similar at a smaller scale,” she said.
Hannah Postel ’13 looked at the Fulbright Program as an opportunity to further her studies and pursue an interest in international development. She traveled to Zambia after graduation to study the Chinese migration there.
“[The Fulbright] helped me to push beyond what I had learned into something I was very interested in but was too narrow to be taught at school… While I spent most of my time on my own research (interviews, compiling a dataset of visa records from the immigration department, archival work, etc.) I also interned part-time with the research NGO Innovations for Poverty Action to make the most of my time in-country and learn more about pure development work,” Postel wrote in an email.
Both Gates and Postel urged students to apply to the program if they have even the slightest interest. “[The Fulbright Program] is an incomparable opportunity. It doesn’t hurt to apply. While it’s definitely a competitive process, the application is actually not that long and involved, and most decisions are made on a country-by-country basis,” Postel said.
The Fulbright program was created by the U.S. Congress in 1946 “to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges” and is as prestigious as it is competitive – thousands of U.S. students and scholars compete for the roughly 2,800 grants designated for U.S. citizens.
(03/04/15 4:51pm)
Though the announcement did not come as a surprise to many, the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB) sent out an all-student email on Tuesday, Feb. 24 confirming that rapper and auto-tune extraordinaire T-Pain will headline this year’s spring concert on Saturday, April 18 in the Chip Kenyon ’85 Arena. Known for his mastery of auto-tune as a musical instrument, T-Pain has won two Grammy Awards for collaborations with Jamie Foxx and Kanye West in addition to enjoying multiple top-ten hits like “I’m in Love (With a Stripper),” Chris Brown’s “Kiss Kiss” and Flo Rida’s “Low,” which often competed for the top spot on the charts at the same time. Tickets for the event are on sale to students starting Monday, March 30 at 6 p.m. for $15 through the online box office.
MCAB’s 13-member Concert Committee, which is comprised of students from all grade levels under the leadership of co-chairs Matt Butler ’15 and Katherine Kucharczyk ’16, begins each large concert selection process with a brainstorm to generate about 30 possible artists - some clearly within reach and others less so - to bring to their concert agent, who returns with information about date and price availability for the requested performers and suggests names that fit the College’s specifications. It usually takes three to four meetings for the Committee to come to a consensus about venue, genre and artist.
“We generally try to include diversity in the type of genre to keep the concerts fresh, and we try to get some name recognition to appeal to as many students as possible, but our full mission is to bring high-quality musical acts,” Kucharczyk said.
Despite the Committee’s initial division between a short list of contenders, T-Pain quickly emerged as the best fit. The singer’s tracks, most popular in the late 2000’s, are filled with his now trademark use of auto-tune and references to the club, women and, most prominently, drinking. Though his first album was just released in 2007, the artist’s latest 2014 album is the aptly titled T-Pain Presents Happy Hour: The Greatest Hits, featuring hits like “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” and “Blame It (On the Alcohol).”
“Our selection committee is an extremely diverse group of students from all facets of campus who represent a variety of ages, religions, races and sexual orientations, so I feel like we have a good group who is picking the concerts,” Butler said.
T-Pain’s late 2014 appearance on NPR’s popular online feature “Tiny Desk Concerts” exposed an entirely different demographic to the artist, not only without his trademark sunglasses, top hat, or dreadlocks, but, perhaps most significantly, without the help of any vocal modulation device. He has always maintained that his use of auto-tune as an instrument – which, though often attributed to him, can be traced to earlier dance club remixes – stems more from a desire to sound different than from an effort to mask mediocre vocals. Indeed, the artist’s stripped performance in the carefully constructed, now recognizable corner of NPR’s offices proves that underneath many of the bass and auto-tune laden hits permeating middle school dances of a decade ago existed a competent, even soulful R&B voice.
“He was just one of those names that we threw into the list and when we learned that he was available and the pricing was appropriate, we looked at his videos and he’s really high energy,” Kucharczyk said. “He almost has a new sound where he isn’t using auto-tune as much and he’s actually a really talented singer, so we decided that he was the one we wanted.”
Though T-Pain’s recognizable look and musical style quickly garnered him popular success and influenced other rap artists like Snoop Dogg, Lil’ Wayne and Kanye West, in recent years, the self-proclaimed “Hard & B” singer has taken strides to evolve in a new direction. In 2013, he cut his iconic dreadlocks and began working on the yet to be released record Stoicville: The Phoenix, representing a rising from the ashes and new musical chapter. The first single, “Coming Home,” contains just enough auto-tune to identify the voice as that of T-Pain, but the track maintains the integrity of his natural vocals to a much higher degree than any previous release, producing a smoother, less rap-influenced sound still committed to the catchy hooks that propelled T-Pain to fame.
After the Concert Committee reaches a consensus, the chosen artist must garner a 2/3 approval rating from the MCAB Executive Board, which includes the president, vice president, treasurer and the co-chairs of each of the five committees.
The concert budget is allocated from the student activities fee, which is divided between each committee within MCAB at the start of the year. The majority of the Concert Committee’s budget is used for the large concerts, with the rest helping to fund the new Small Concert Initiative, a program granting students the resources necessary to bring small concerts of their choosing to campus.
In the past, MCAB has sent email surveys to the student body hoping to gain useful feedback for their concert selection process. This year, the Concert Committee considered crafting a different kind of survey that allowed students to directly vote for one of the artists on the shortlist instead of responding to more general questions about their favorite kinds of music and preferred venue. Ultimately, worries that students might be divided in their choice, making the Concert Committee’s job even harder, contributed to the decision not to send a survey.
“We decided against it for logistical reasons,” Kucharczyk said. “We try to book our spring artist before December break, and this year we booked T-Pain in very early December. In the time it takes to send a survey, collect data and analyze results, prices are going up with every week, so it’s beneficial to book as early as possible.”
Since MCAB opted for a nontraditional, two-day Start of School (S.O.S.) Festival during the first weekend of the fall semester, and last spring’s Matt & Kim concert took place outside, the T-Pain performance is the organization’s first large indoor concert since the Chance the Rapper debacle of fall 2013. The event raised major concerns about the limited capacity of the concert due to a poorly chosen venue, as well as questions about MCAB’s lack of marketing, which contributed to many students claiming after tickets had sold out that they had never known they were on sale.
In addition to backlash from students who wanted to attend the concert, the potentially offensive nature of some of Chance the Rapper’s homophobic and violent lyrics caused many to question the message sent by choosing such an artist to visit the College. The use of an all-student email to relay ticket information is just one indication that the fallout from the Chance concert proved a valuable learning experience for MCAB. Butler’s first major event as co-chair of the Concert Committee was the Chance concert.
“[Chance the Rapper] definitely changed the way we both announce and address issues surrounding events,” Butler said. “We’ve had a much stronger vetting process this time looking at individual lyrics and thinking about who we want to bring. To address the whole lack of marketing when tickets went on sale, it was as simple as adding when tickets are going on sale in the all school email, which is just an easy fix second time around.”
With his short hair, clear plastic glasses and heavier reliance on natural vocals, T-Pain is taking a bold leap by evolving away from the styles that landed him at the top of the charts. His most recent Instagram photos reveal T-Pain performing for troops on a Navy entertainment tour, and in early 2014 the artist spoke out against homophobia in the rap and R&B industries, citing his frustration that producers refuse to work with the openly gay R&B singer Frank Ocean.
“We are also trying to take a more proactive standpoint in anticipating controversy, so instead of being blindsided by any complaints in terms of content we try to anticipate what may arise, and if we believe it will be an issue we can set up a forum beforehand,” Kucharczyk said.
“WRMC did a great job of setting up a forum for Big Freedia when she came,” Butler said. “We are open to hearing all student opinions and will discuss if there is a sense that the campus community desires a forum before the event. I’ve definitely learned a lot since the Chance the Rapper concert. There’s a lot that went wrong but it was also a fantastic learning experience for me, and I think we are doing a much better job this year.”
T-Pain’s performance at the College should give students the opportunity to enjoy the high-energy, auto-tune rich hits synonymous with the artist’s name while also allowing a live glimpse into T-Pain’s musical and stylistic evolution.
T-Pain will perform in the Chip Kenyon ’85 Arena on Saturday, April 18. Doors will open at 9 p.m. Tickets go on sale for $15 at go/obo on March 30 at 6 p.m.
(02/25/15 11:46pm)
Middlebury College launched its first fully online class, “Years of Upheaval: Diplomacy, War & Social Change, 1919–1945,” on February 13. The class, which is taught by James Jermain Professor Emeritus of Political Economy and International Law Russ Leng, is the latest in a series of technology-based courses at Middlebury, Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), and the language schools.
The class is free of charge and is open to “alumni, parents, and friends of Middlebury.” Invitations to the course were sent out to alumni and parents via email, though anyone who these invites were forwarded to (the “friends of Middlebury”), including a number of current students, are also able to take the course. According to Leng, the decision to limit the class to these groups was done because of copyright issues.
“We use a lot of copyrighted material under the “fair use” provision that allows us to use it for educational purposes for limited audiences,” Leng said in an email. “If the course were simply open to the world, as with a MOOC [Massive Open Online Course], we could have run into legal copyright issues. The copyright holders feel that they completely lose control when their product is suddenly available to everyone in the world online.”
According to Provost Susan Baldridge, who directly oversees the class and who was largely responsible for its creation, the administration initially planned to only offer the class to alumni. The decision to expand the course to parents and friends of Middlebury was made after initial trials of the class met with positive reception. The decision to open up the class to a somewhat broader but still controlled audience was also influenced by a desire to test the college’s technology.
“Alumni were an obvious place to start for us,” Baldridge said. “The class is a sort of online version of the alumni college, an event for alumni at Bread Loaf where alumni can come and take short versions of Middlebury classes. Alums loved that experience, but it is not always easy for alumni to come up to Vermont.”
Because it is fully online, the class is largely lecture-based. However, unlike many MOOCs, the class has an integrated discussion section. In the discussion sections, Leng and alum Frank Sesno ’77 will hold “informal conversations” about the class material. They will also respond to questions from the students that are submitted in an online text-based discussion forum both before and during the discussion sections.
One aspect of the class that makes it unique from more traditional classes at Middlebury is the heavy and seamless integration of numerous types of media, ranging from news clips and battle footage to films and poetry. The diverse nature of course materials has led Leng to say that the class “has enabled me to be a true liberal arts professor.”
“You can begin to deliver content, in a really engaging way by using this kind of original, embedded footage,” Director of Assessment Adela Langrock, the project manager and quality evaluator for the class, said. “For example, when Professor Leng is talking about Churchill [and a speech he delivered], and then we can cut right into watching that speech in the House of Commons. And then Professor Leng comes back and explains how it was received and then we can cut to to news clips of talking to reporters outside the House.”
Another difference between this class and similar classes at the College is the lack of required reading. According to Langrock, this is done to accommodate the students, most of whom are professionals, graduate students, and parents who do not have time to do intensive reading. However, the class includes suggested readings.
“A lot of people, when they get older, start reading certain types of things, they pick up the mysteries and put away the scholarly work,” Langrock said. “The suggested readings may not be the most scholarly work, but they’re well written and good, and students are actually seeking out these resources and reading them.”
The course is an experiment for the College in providing online classes. As Baldridge put it, “part of this is to experiment with these [online learning] technologies and to see how well they will do in the future.” According to Baldridge, the course is one of the first steps in a broader “digital liberal arts initiative” so that any professor who wants to teach an online course or have Middlebury students collaborate with MIIS, Bread Loaf, or language school students will be able to do so.
The experimental nature of the class also contributed to the decision to limit the enrollment in the class. The class’ high current enrollment, over 1000 students, has already caused multiple crashes, according to Langrock and Baldridge.
The college is devoting considerable resources towards overcoming these issues and has made significant improvements since Fall 2014 (when his “Policy Analysis” course was offered), including purchasing equipment and dedicating bandwidth at the college to online classes, according to Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Orion Lewis. However, he notes that some of the technical problems are insurmountable not because of a lack of resources or commitment but because of the “the fragmented and siloed institutional structure that is the historical legacy of two separate institutions, Middlebury and MIIS.”
The initiative for Leng’s class and other partially online classes has largely come from the administration, not from professors. According to Baldridge, the class was proposed by the administration and Leng offered to teach it and developed the curriculum over the past year and through a 2015 J-term course on a similar topic. The initiative for Lewis’ “Policy Analysis” course came from the administration, and while he had more of a role in proposing the Insurgency and Security Policy course, he noted that the hybrid nature of the class stems from the fact that his contract of employment with Middlebury stipulates that he has to teach one hybrid class per year.
(02/25/15 7:11pm)
In the world of architecture, three alumni of the College see things differently.
“When most people think about virtual reality goggles, they imagine the technology from the ’90s. Back then if you put those on you’d be immobile, dizzy, and eventually start puking. IrisVR is ten thousand steps above that,” explains Amr Thameen ’14, a 3D artist/designer at IrisVR, a Burlington-based company that is revolutionizing architecture design.
Founded by Shane Scranton ’13 and Nate Beatty ’14.5 in 2014, IrisVR uses virtual reality goggles intended for video games to allow architects to see and explore models of their work.
Starting the operation involved making connections, bonding with mentors and raising money until a major donor gave them thousands of dollars to begin their project. About a year ago, Scranton and Beatty got their hands on the Oculus Rift, the technology that would be to their entire operation. Valued at around $350, this goggle-like gadget allows Scranton’s computer program skills and Beatty’s designs to come to life: the wearer is actually able to view things true-to-size and virtually experience walking through the building. The viewer is visually transported to another place.
Using lenses in the screen that warp the image as it is projected, Oculus Rift provides the viewer a constant stream of vision into another world. The immersive technology is now much safer, cheaper and technologically-advanced than the version from the 1990s that made users physically ill and cost over $40,000.
“The first virtual reality model that I made was a model of the house I grew up in, and [I] thought: ‘Let me make a little video game out of the Oculus Rift and out of this model,’” said Beatty while showcasing the black and white footage during a TED Talk at the College in November 2014. “It tracked my head movements as I walked through the space. It is the inside of my house. It’s untextured, the lighting is pretty bad, it’s pixilated, and everything’s essentially horrible about it, except for the fact that when I was in the goggles walking around the place, I really felt like I was standing in my house. I couldn’t believe it! I was holding these goggles up to my face and I felt like I was home.”
Although the virtual reality model of Beatty’s house was relatively rough, others who viewed the house spoke of the “snow” outside of the house. Beatty and Scranton had not perfected the program to include existing weather patterns, but the white plane of nothingness outside of the house resembled a bed of fallen snow: the alternate reality was that convincing.
As of April 2014, the most recent version of Oculus Rift is now owned by Facebook, after the popular social media company bought the rights for $2 billion. It has only been redesigned once fully, meaning that as the virtual reality technology grows and changes, so does IrisVR.
“The challenge is developing a software for a hardware that’s not finished yet, so being prepared to pivot, change, and build on new information is a harsh reality,” says Thameen.
The existing technology involves a lot of time-consuming importing and exporting of files, essentially creating a small video game out of each file. This process usually crashes a computer before it is even finished. Seeing huge opportunities in creating new software to fix a problem both gamers and architects could benefit from, Beatty and Scranton set out across the country to prove that they had what everyone needed. Huge architecture firms like Gensler and Perkins+Will met their enthusiasm with doubt, but that doubt turned into awe once the Oculus Rift goggles were put on. To match the demand for their virtual reality software from the most powerful architecture companies in the world, Beatty and Scranton created a team to give the people what they wanted: the ability to virtually inhabit a space.
Now that they have a good amount of their software created, IrisVR has left the developing stage and entered the pacing stage, described by Scranton as “wondering when this company is going to take off and become the company instead of a company.”
Scranton sees IrisVR being able to help in the film, education and theater industries, but as of now its impact on the world of architecture is more than enough. The alumni plan to use a perfectly sleek and easy-to-use iPhone headset to match their existing app, but their main goal is to improve the virtual reality technology. Beatty and Scranton’s understanding of space and design has allowed them to create an innovative way of building, and in a society that is becoming rapidly more technology-reliant and technology-efficient, this can only mean good news.
“This company is always changing and shifting, so the future is really uncertain,” Thameen said. “Will I even be here in four years? The industry is growing so fast!”
Thameen says that if he decides to leave IrisVR, he will certainly continue to pursue problem solving through design, and is still very much interested in the user experience. No other company in the world uses all three of those aspects in a more helpful or efficient way, so Thameen is likely to stay with the Burlington-based group unless another one comes along with something better. There is no way to predict IrisVR’s success or failure; however, this company that is re-envisioning reality seems to have a lot of excitement to look forward to.
