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(05/02/13 12:55am)
As homeowners in the area consider their energy bills, the questions of what fuel to use, whether or not it will be renewable and how much it will cost are constantly arising. Yet while some might save by switching fuel types, the strategy of using less energy overall by improving a home’s efficiency has become increasingly popular among environmentalists and cost-savers alike.
In January, Efficiency Vermont announced the Vermont Home Energy Challenge in the hopes that it would jumpstart the state’s push towards energy efficiency. In Vermont’s 2011 Comprehensive Energy Plan, the state outlined a specific goal of improving the efficiency of 80,000 homes by 25 percent before 2020. The contest promises a $10,000 prize for an energy improvement project to any town that manages to weatherize three percent of its homes by the end of the year.
“Seventy-seven towns have signed up from all corners of the state,” said Paul Markowitz, Efficiency Vermont’s community energy program manager. “We’ve had probably 250 or 300 volunteers who were trained to organize and reach out to their community.”
Four months into the challenge, however, the statistics are showing just how challenging the three percent target is for towns. While many town organizers have made great strides in encouraging their neighbors to make energy pledges — or written commitments to any number of energy-saving home alternatives — few towns have moved beyond five or 10 percent of their actual weatherization goal.
“In terms of the level of activity, it really varies,” said Markowitz. “We have some [towns] like Middlebury and Weybridge that have been really active in terms of engaging their residents and other communities that have been slower.”
Admittedly, places like Weybridge have the advantage of having small populations where three percent translates to only a handful of homes; a city like Burlington, on the other hand, needs to weatherize over 500 homes in order to win the cash prize.
Yet for many involved, this cash prize is secondary to the overall goal of addressing climate change by reducing energy-use at the consumer level.
“Personally, my commitment is to address climate change,” said Fran Putnam, the lead volunteer in Weybridge. “I really wanted to take another step and move out into the community.”
After the construction of a zero-net-energy home with her husband and working on offering different green energy workshops in Weybridge, Putnam decided to involve herself and her community of activists in the home energy challenge as a way to reach out to a broader range of community members.
“We signed up to enter the challenge in January,” said Putnam. “We have a very active energy committee in Weybridge [that] formed in October, 2011. We had already done some projects together and we were looking for a new challenge.”
The group had been successful in persuading workshop participants to make lifestyle and housing changes to benefit the climate in previous years, but attendance was consistently low.
“We were looking for a new way to get the word out and just at that time, Efficiency Vermont started the Vermont Home Energy Challenge and we said, ‘this is perfect for us,’” said Putnam.
As a result of these volunteer efforts, 38 Weybridge residents have made pledges to reduce their energy use in some way, and one resident has completed a full efficiency upgrade.
“This town is a great town to be working in because people are so receptive,” said Putnam.
The process involves a free initial audit from local volunteers, followed by a $100 professional audit, and then the project itself, which generally cost between $5,000 and $10,000 after state and federal incentives.
The main driver for most homeowners to pursue efficiency upgrades is the predicted savings on their heating bills. Most projects save around $1,000 to $2,000 a year on energy bills, depending on the preexisting level of energy efficiency.
While the return is certainly higher than what a savings account might offer, the amount of upfront capital required to move forward with a project has been prohibitive for some.
“Right now, we’re able to offer an incentive after a job is completed of up to $2,000, said Kelly Lucci, Efficiency Vermont’s manager of public affairs and communications, “but, unfortunately, it’s not going to [help] decrease the up-front costs for folks who are on the lower-income side of the scale, [yet] still make too much money to benefit from the weatherization program, which targets very low-income folks and provides those services for free.”
In addition to those who may not be able to raise the funds necessary for a project of this scope, there are many other kinds of Vermont residents who are not being reached through this home energy challenge. For instance, seasonal homes have been excluded from the competition, while renters and mobile home owners continue to prove a challenge for efficiency-minded folks in Montpelier and across the state.
In order for Vermont to see a quarter of its year-round homes weatherized by 2020, it seems likely that they will have to further address the high upfront cost of insulating and air sealing a home, yet in the meantime, Efficiency Vermont officials are hopeful that there are enough people out there who can raise the capital to get the ball rolling.
“There are a number of people who may be in a better position to make these investments than they think,” said Lucci, “and the idea is to mobilize these town energy committees and to work through VECAN [the Vermont Energy & Climate Action Network], knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, and explaining the resources that are currently available.”
“You do have to spend some money to do this,” admitted Putnam, “but we’re trying to motivate people to use less energy by helping them see that it makes sense financially.”
In Middlebury, Vt. volunteers like Laura Asermily have also put in a great deal of work to promote the town’s energy efficiency goals. In order to succeed in the competition, the town needs to weatherize 91 homes in contrast with Weybridge’s 10 homes.
Outreach efforts have included lawn signs, tabling, neighbor-to-neighbor dialogue and even a new show on Middlebury Community Television (MCTV) that shares testimonials from residents who have completed efficiency work and seen the savings it can create.
The outreach team has also looked to some larger businesses in town to join in with the project.
“We’ve approached Middlebury College and other large employers like Porter Hospital, but these things take time.”
Because the College operates huge number of residential buildings for faculty and students in town and because of its carbon neutrality pledge, it appears as though this would be a good match. Yet thus far, Asermily and her team of volunteers have not been able to bring the College on board.
“I approached the staff council and was able to present to the staff council what the home energy challenge was,” said Asermily. “I asked for their guidance about how I could get the word out to staff. They suggested that I come in to do a learning lunch, or to canvas faculty staff at the Grille; I tried to do that but I was declined.”
In spite of this small roadblock, Asermily hopes to continue to work with the College to address this need for efficiency upgrades. The College has set up a Green Revolving Fund of one million dollars to power energy saving initiatives as a result of Efficiency Vermont’s efforts in 2011, so it may be that this fund will someday provide capital for smaller home efficiency projects of this nature. The money will revolve as these capital-intensive energy project begin to pay for themselves in energy savings, allowing the College to put those savings toward a new initiative down the line.
“Vermont’s housing stock is among the oldest in the country, so there’s certainly a lot of potential to improve the efficiency of Vermont homes, and save a lot of money on heating bills,” concluded Lucci.
(05/01/13 11:26pm)
Jeannie Bartlett ’15
There were a number of things I wanted to add to my comments at the Student Divestment Panel that I didn’t get to, so I’ll add them here.
I’m surprised to feel the need for this first clarification: the shift off of reliance on fossil fuels is not just a nice goal to have, nor is it something society might forget about. I can see how here at Middlebury, where we feel fewer of the effects, it could be easy to feel that way. But climate change and fossil fuels extraction already impact the health, safety and prosperity of people around the world and their impacts will only increase with continued use. Seven years from now, when climate change has caused 75-250 million people in Africa alone to experience extreme water stress and halved yields for rain-fed agriculture, we’re not going to just forget about moving to renewable energy and reducing consumption. That water stress will make fossil fuels dramatically increase in price because of the intense water-needs of extraction and energy-generation. Climate change is going to become increasingly relevant, and renewable energy and efficiency are going to become increasingly logical and cost-effective.
Next, Ben Wiggins ’14 and Ryan Kim ’14 both expressed the need for undeniable proof that divestment will not hurt returns before they could support it. I agree that it would be unwise for the school to make rash investment decisions, but I don’t think that means we should wait for undeniable proof. If Germany had waited for undeniable proof of climate change, they wouldn’t have enacted climate legislation in 1995 and be generating 40 percent of their electricity from renewables today. No, they’d look more like we do in the U.S.: having refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, we continue to fail to pass climate legislation, we hand out $6.6 million per day in tax breaks to the five wealthiest fossil fuel companies and we generate two percent of our power from renewables. Sometimes waiting for undeniable proof means missing the boat.
Additionally, there is reasonable evidence that divestment will not carry a significant return penalty on the endowment. The Aperio study on the subject finds a 0.0101 percent increase in risk, with an associated 0.06 percent theoretical return penalty. But there’s also significant risk in staying invested in the fossil fuel industry. A study by HSBC shows that as much as 17 percent of the value of certain fossil fuel companies is at risk due to their valuation of reserves that will be “unburnable” when efficiency improvements and climate legislation are made. Studies by Mercer, the UN Environmental Program Financial Initiative and the Carbon Tracker Initiative among many others show a looming “carbon bubble.” I have seen no studies demonstrating that there would be a significant loss of returns associated with divestment, mostly just a sense of security in the status quo.
I went in and talked with Vice President for Finance and Treasurer Patrick Norton last week about what he would do if the College were to lose returns for any reason. As I expected, he was very clear about two things that would not be cut: financial aid and salaries and benefits for staff and faculty salaried less than $50,000 per year. Two places the College could cut back are in capital improvements, or in freezing salaries or reducing benefits very marginally for faculty and staff earning more than $50,000 a year. Obviously I hope and expect the school won’t need to make those cuts for any reason, divestment-related or otherwise. Nevertheless, those are cuts I find acceptable, and I take comfort in the dedicated protection of financial aid and lower-paid employees.
Finally, I want to highlight my hopes for the divestment movement. I hope Middlebury will announce its commitment to divestment, recognizing that the fulfillment of that commitment will take time, at the Board of Trustees meeting this May. I hope that schools and cities beyond the almost 18 already committed will be catalyzed by our decisiveness. The movement will spark conversations like the one Sunday night about our rights and responsibilities in this changing world. The media will continue to make that conversation national and global, reflecting mounting national pressure for climate change action. Individuals will become more aware of how their actions affect the global community. The media will stop citing the anti-clean energy, climate-denying messages of fossil fuel front groups, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation that received $1.6 and $2.5 million respectively from ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers over the last five years.
President Obama will reject the Keystone XL Pipeline. Congress will pass climate legislation because fossil fuels will no longer be allowed to spend more than $400,000 per day lobbying and they won’t be allowed to make large campaign contributions. Congress will redirect its subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable energies. Employment will expand as the growing renewables sector creates more jobs than the increasingly mechanized fossil fuels sector had been. Coal-fired power plants will close and asthma and cancer rates will stop climbing in their surrounding neighborhoods. We won’t raise the global temperature that second degree Celsius.
Obviously the divestment campaign is only one of many tactics in a many-sided approach to reaching those goals. Reducing personal consumption, educating yourself and others, protesting injustices, calling legislators, voting and so many other forms of engagement are crucial.
Of course climate change is only one of many critical issues. But it is a defining issue of our generation and our world, and I believe divestment is a novel and persuasive tactic that has the potential to catalyze a lot of the changes for good I want to see. Please be in touch to continue the conversation with me.
(05/01/13 2:46pm)
On Sunday, April 28, the discussion of the divestment of the College’s endowment from fossil fuel industries continued with a student-only panel, featuring three students in favor of the movement with four students whose opinions ranged from strong opposition to measured skepticism.
The panel took place in Dana Auditorium, which was about half-full of community members, a stark contrast with the almost 300 attendees who filled the McCullough Social Space for the College’s first panel on divestment. The first panel on January 22 featured professionals in investment, finances and the divestment movement with opinions ranging from support to opposition of divesting the current 3.6 percent of the College’s $950 million endowment invested in fossil fuel companies.
The student panel on Sunday featured former Governor of Vermont Jim Douglas ’72 as the moderator and students Jeannie Bartlett ’15, Ben Wiggins ’14, Janet Bering ’13, Ryan Kim ’14, Zach Drennen ’13.5, Michael Patterson ’13 and Teddy Smyth ’15 as the panel participants. The panel lasted for over two hours.
Vice President for Finance and Treasurer's Office Patrick Norton began the evening with opening remarks noting that the “management of the endowment has grown increasingly complex” and stating that his hope for the panel was to have a “meaningful discussion” that would “give us an opportunity to hear diverse perspectives and a broad range of opinions.”
Bartlett, co-president of the Socially Responsible Investment Club (SRI) and a member of the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investment, began the panel arguing for divestment, focusing mainly on the negative effects of climate change on the environment and how she believes divestment will help push a movement toward a healthier planet. She emphasized that as a college that preaches a green agenda, divestment falls in line with the College’s proposed eco-friendly practices.
“I think divesting from fossil fuels will align the school’s investments and practices with [its] mission,” said Bartlett.
“It’s imperative for our health and prosperity both now and in the future,” she concluded.
Smyth agreed with Bartlett’s arguments, saying that it is “morally wrong for us to profit from the destruction of our planet.”
Smyth cited strong student support for divestment, mentioning the results of this year’s Student Government Association (SGA) survey, which found that over 60 percent of the student body supports divestment and 24 percent are opposed to it.
“At this point, the question isn’t whether or not we’re going to divest, but when.” he said.
Bering, a self-described “environmental studies major who is skeptical of divestment as a tool for change” conceded that divestment “is the morally right thing to do,” but she questioned if divestment is addressing climate change in an effective way.
“It does not get people talking about and aware of the real issue,” she said. “They’re mostly talking about financial risk, not climate change. Divestment is a distraction.”
Bering, a Texas native, also argued that divestment is not a “national movement,” pointing out that one-third of the over-300 colleges that are currently a part of the movement are in California, New York or New England, and two-thirds would consider themselves on the west or east coast.
“We need a better movement,” added Bering, “and I think Middlebury is the perfect place to start doing that.”
Wiggins and Patterson also argued against divestment, but focused on the idea that the risk to the College’s endowment is too great to justify divesting from fossil fuels.
Wiggins expressed his belief that, while he agrees that “we need to pursue alternative forms of energy,” the endowment is too essential to the College’s running effectively to endanger its investment returns through divestment.
“I think the goals of the endowment are more important than divesting from fossil fuel,” Wiggins added, “and I think we need to wait until we can be assured that divesting will not have a significant impact on the size of the endowment.”
Echoing an earlier reference from Wiggins, Patterson also highlighted the importance of the endowment for funding financial aid, as he noted that for the 2012 - 2013 academic year, 42 percent of students are on financial aid with an average Middlebury grant of $36,277 per student.
In addition, Wiggins cited the complications that would come with having to divest. He stated that as the College is a part of a consortium under Investure — the firm that manages the College’s endowment — divesting from fossil fuels would require that the College either part ways with Investure or convince all of the other colleges and foundations in the consortium that they must divest as well.
Kim, a member of the Student Investment Committee, a student organization that invests about $355,000 of the endowment in stocks, also used economic reasoning based on his involvement and knowledge of the endowment’s investments to argue against divestment, which he feels is not currently a viable option.
“The energy sector has been doing exceedingly well,” said Kim, stating that his greatest concern for divestment is “risk and return.”
However, he did say that under certain circumstances, he would support divestment.
“If we can find mathematical proof that we wouldn’t incur undue costs in leaving Investure, then yes, I’m totally for [divestment].”
Drennen took a different angle in his support of divestment. While he said divestment was important for “the purpose of symbolism and the purpose of good investment practices,” he called for divestment from coal industries as an attainable first step.
“Not all fuels are created equal,” he said. “Coal has twice as much carbon per unit of energy as natural gas. I think it’s important to restrict the scope to something that I think can feasibly happen.”
After students on the panel gave their opening statements, they were allowed the opportunity to respond to and question each other. Then the audience was invited to ask questions of the panelists.
A number of audience members took this time to verbalize their own opinions on the divestment movement. In the majority of cases, these comments only weakly sought feedback from the panelists. All of the audience members who spoke seemed to be in support of divestment.
After the panel, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz expressed his approval of the proceedings of the panel.
“It was very good. I thought that it did provide a good representation of points of view and that was helpful.”
The panel was videotaped, a copy of which will be sent to members of the Board of Trustees, giving them the opportunity to watch the panel before their meetings from May 9 - 11, during which they will discuss divestment.
Liebowitz did not outline any specific outcome he thought would emerge from the meetings.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said. “It all hinges on the Investment Committee’s presentation first and then our discussion [of divestment] on Saturday [May 11].”
(04/24/13 5:05pm)
We are a coalition of Middlebury College staff, faculty and students who stand in opposition to the Addison County Natural Gas project. The project will transport fracked gas from Alberta and continue Vermont and Middlebury College’s dependency on fossil fuels for the next half-century. We demand that Middlebury College meets our goals of carbon reduction through creating biomethane infrastructure separate from the Addison County Natural Gas project and by continuing to invest in conservation efforts.
Many Vermonters in communities along the route have been voicing their concerns about the impact of the construction on their property, their water supplies, the local ecology and the climate. We are in solidarity with these communities, as well as those affected by the damaging and irreversible effects of fracking at the point of extraction. This fossil fuel pipeline will impose on farmland, wetland and residential properties, and provide few economic benefits to those directly affected.
We believe that Middlebury College can stand together with Vermonters, united by a vision of an equitable and sustainable energy future achieved through a just transition that focuses on creating skilled long-term jobs through energy efficiency services and weatherization in order to reduce energy consumption overall.
As such, together we demand that Middlebury College publicly retract its statement of support from the Vermont Gas System’s filing to the Public Service Board and use its status as an intervener in the process to advocate for the interests of faculty, staff, students and administrators impacted by the short and long-term consequences of this project.
This letter was launched this week as a change.org petition and as of Tuesday morning had gathered almost 900 signatures from members of the campus community and beyond. If you want to know more about the process of fracking, there will be a screening of the movie “Gasland” in MBH 220 at 7:00 on the night of Thursday, April 25.
Middlebury staff, students and faculty against the fracked gas pipeline
(04/24/13 4:38pm)
As the Campus’s editorial staff pointed out last week, on April 3 the National Association of Scholars released a report titled “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” Authored by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano, and funded by Tom Klingenstein (a Williams College alumnus), the report attempts to systematically examine and reveal the various factors it sees as responsible for a supposed “fall from grace” of the American liberal arts college. The report also claims that Bowdoin’s institutional emphasis on sustainability is a product of the same kind of aversion towards what the authors see as the fundamental tenants of Western Civilization.
Wood and Toscano assert that the foundational underpinnings of “the Common Good” and general education at Bowdoin — “virtue and piety” — have been replaced with radical new cosmopolitan ideas of “social justice, transnationalism and sustainability.” While the report singles out Bowdoin, its derision of the school’s sustainability efforts are more a “one-size-fits-all” critique of environmentalism on the larger scale — and we should be worried. Here at Middlebury, we have claims to the oldest environmental studies program in the country, a commitment to carbon neutrality with goals loftier than Bowdoin’s and a mission statement that commits our curriculum to teaching environmental stewardship. For Wood and Toscano, these features of our community are not only ideologically misguided, but an apparent disservice to you and me.
What the authors see as the “sustainability agendas” that pervade dialogue at our colleges has apparently provided a detrimental distraction to our education. Wood and Toscano argue that where a liberal education had historically taught the development of “open-minded seeking of human excellence” and “great-souled men,” it now teaches “environmental literacy” within a larger intellectual climate uninterested in debating the value of what is taught. For Wood and Toscano, an environmentally-minded education comes at the cost of critical thinking abilities, rationalism and the ability to appreciate opposing arguments. I’m not sure they’re quite right.
The fact that learning institutions in our day and age are able to recognize the gravity of the problems facing our species serves as a testament to the vitality of the liberal arts. If critical thinking is about analyzing and weighing perspectives, then Wood and Toscano fail to see that sustainability and environmentalism represent the practical application of a cost-benefit analysis embodying the multi-epochal consideration of how human reason affects the world around us. Wood and Toscano are certainly right to point out that problems of collective responsibility like climate change will not be solved when ears are closed to alternative opinions, but they don’t propose solutions that will get us any closer to solving the problem. What they do offer is an appeal to the conservative ideals that perpetuate our inability to consider environmental issues with the weight they deserve.
Wood and Toscano’s fundamental criticism of Bowdoin lies in what they see as a failure to develop character in its students. The report claims that students are ill-equipped to confront what life has ahead of them because, like Middlebury, Bowdoin lacks a core curriculum that requires students to associate themselves with the intellectual pillars of western culture. Though the authors seem committed to the idea that American liberal arts have come to idolize diversity for diversity’s sake, they fail to acknowledge how the presence of a diversity of perspectives — western and non-western — can allow for the rethinking of how we apply the lessons that the western canon teaches. The principles underlying environmental and sustainability efforts worldwide — justice and equality — are the same principles that western culture has held near and dear throughout its history. Efforts to ensure that humans and other animals have a livable environment constitute no blind pursuit of the undermining of the individual as Wood and Toscano would have it. Rather, the movements seek to preserve the conditions that allow us to care about individual well-being and character development.
“What Does Bowdoin Teach?” concludes that self-restraint, self-criticism, moderation, “how to distinguish importance from triviality” and wisdom are some of the things lacking from a liberal arts education in this day and age. While all of these things seem to fundamentally motivate environmental education and sustainability efforts in American higher education, the authors assert that they can only come from an education committed to parochialism and tradition. If a college education today places an increased emphasis on cosmopolitan thinking, it is only because the problems that face our generation are cosmopolitan in nature and scope. Bowdoin and Middlebury College earn their classification as “liberal” precisely because they offer the opportunity to freely and dynamically craft conceptions not only of the good life, but the good environment.
(04/24/13 4:36pm)
A natural gas pipeline runs through my neighborhood in western New York. The only reason I know that is because, curious about the orange markers sticking out of the ground at a golf course we sometimes play at, I decided to check them out. There’s no obtrusive pipe sticking out of the ground. The same will be true of the pipeline that Vermont Gas would like to build through the state; it will be buried three to five feet under the surface.
This is the type of project that is incredibly easy to oppose without having an actual stake in the matter. As students we stand to benefit from access to natural gas. But that does not mean we cannot understand the perspective of Vermont homeowners and business owners who see this pipeline as a way to both save money and use cleaner fuel.
As with energy issues, this pipeline is not as simple as benefit and cost in a vacuum. We also have to consider the alternatives currently available. It is not as though, denied access to this natural gas, people will instantly elect to put solar panels on their roofs. Those are still an expensive investment, they can only produce electricity when the sun shines and Vermont winters are cold and dark. Instead, the thousands of people who would be affected by this project currently heat their homes and businesses by burning dirty fuel oil or expensive propane, the former of which emits 25 percent more carbon dioxide than natural gas. Both of these have to be delivered by truck, increasing the risk of an accident that leads to a spill or leak and burning oil in the process of delivery.
Natural gas would produce significantly fewer emissions at a significantly lower cost, saving homeowners somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000 per year, a nontrivial amount in this era of economic stagnation. The savings would be even more for the types of businesses that Vermont critically needs to attract or maintain in order to keep the state’s population from melting away to warmer pastures. All told, the project is estimated to save Addison County residents and businesses $10 million annually.
I’m troubled by the lack of depth, balance or practicality that the dialogue about this pipeline on campus has shown. The Campus’s own article on the matter, two weeks ago, featured nine quotes by one student activist who opposes the pipeline — along with any other feature of a capitalist economy — and one quote from another student critic. Only a press release spoke for the other side. The repeated opposition to these types of projects has taken on the tenor of a particularly loud religion, the only type of religion truly accepted on this campus. But this is more than a symbol to latch on to. It is a real issue that will have real financial consequences for people. Every time environmentalists wrap our arms around an issue that makes us look indifferent to the concerns of people trying to get a job or pay their bills, we get further away from the type of national consensus that we need for concrete action to fight climate change.
We will never solve climate change by being against every type of energy development. Cleaner, cheaper energy is a good thing — the true difference between civilization and cave-dwelling. The way to motivate a shift to renewable energy technologies is to make them cheaper through continued innovation, economies of scale and, if necessary, government support. The activists who oppose this project in so-called solidarity with average people are ignoring the regressive short-term results if they prevail: higher heating and energy costs for working people.
Raising the price of energy is one of the surest ways to disproportionately tax poor and middle class families who are unable to invest in home upgrades or otherwise shift their consumption patterns during high price periods. Lowering the price of energy — by providing tax credits and feed in tariffs for renewables while, yes, making natural gas available — is one of the surest ways to stimulate the economy. If it has the side effect of reducing carbon emissions, as this project will, that’s even better. The benefits of this project far and away exceed the costs.
(04/10/13 4:44pm)
Four years ago, 35.5 percent of students reported cheating at least once. Ninety-seven percent of students who saw infractions did not report it. With few signs of improvement since 2009, it is clear that cheating, nonexistent peer proctoring and student apathy are still sickening the honor code, putting its long term health in danger.
The Honor Code Review Committee — two faculty members, two students and one member from Dean of the College’s office — is currently gauging the health of the code as they do every four years. The final report is due for release at the end of April.
Touted by tour guides to prospective students and signed by every incoming first-year, the academic honor code is designed to be the foundation behind the integrity of student work.
The most salient feature of the code is peer tutoring, in which both students who cheat and their peers who witness it are “morally obligated” to report the infractions, according to article three of the code.
But the strong data conducted during the last honor code review point to a fundamental problem undermining the code’s strength and effectiveness at the College: students are cheating, but neither faculty nor students themselves are willing to hold them to account. Numerous conversations with students, faculty and administrators have called into question whether the honor code can survive the status quo.
A STINGING REBUKE
This year’s review follows the committee’s contentious conclusions it arrived at the last time it was convened, four years ago. The headline recommendation was to remove language restricting faculty members from being present during exams, essentially killing the most visible feature of honor code.
Dean for Judicial Affairs Karen Guttentag described the privilege of taking un-proctored exams as a three-point agreement between faculty and students.
“The faculty agree not to proctor in exchange for students not cheating and proctoring each other,” said Guttentag, who served on the 2009 council and is heading this year’s review. “If one piece of that is missing, it doesn’t work.”
“We concluded [in 2009] that to a certain extent, neither of the student responsibilities were being help up. We could not in good faith continue this process.”
The recommendation was largely driven by a study conducted in the spring of 2008 by a student in the Economics of Sin, a 400-level class taught by Associate Professor of Economics Jessica Holmes.
Of the 484 students who responded, 35.5 percent admitted giving or receiving unauthorized aid on exams, papers, labs or homework some time during their four years at the College, according to data provided by Holmes.
Among the students who reported violating the honor code, 33 percent reported breaking it more than once a semester.
Student responses to questions on peer proctoring revealed that 63 percent of students witnessed violations more than once a semester. But only three percent of those who witnessed cheating actually reported the violation.
When asked why they did not report the violations, the most common responses were “not my problem/none of my business,” “do not want to be a rat or snitch,” and “so many students do it that it is unfair to single a few out or it would be hypocritical of me.”
“Of course I was dismayed but sadly, not surprised,” wrote Holmes — who served on the 2009 committee — via email. “I am in favor of having an honor code, but I don’t think the current honor code is effective (at least not for exams).”
Holmes expressed that if she served on this year’s committee, she would re-consider making “faculty presence” the default.
“Faculty can elect not to proctor exams if they so choose, but by changing the default, you remove the transaction cost associated with getting special permission to proctor,” she wrote. “This should increase proctoring which would better ensure the academic integrity of the exam environment.”
WHY NOBODY REPORTS CHEATING
Reporting honor code infractions can be a stressful process for both students and faculty. Students who report cheating must go in front of the Academic Judicial Board and face the person they have accused, which has become a challenging deterrent in a such a small community.
“There’s no carrot besides feeling good about your personal integrity, which is important, but hard to institutionalize,” said Bree Baccaglini ’15.5.
Professor of Mathematics Steve Abbott said he understands student trepidation with reporting their peers.
“It takes an emotional toll, there’s no way around that,” he said. “But if a student were to bring a case forward, their responsibility would only be to tell what they know. They don’t have to be a trial lawyer — it really is the system’s job.”
Abbott called the low peer reporting numbers “potentially scary,” and raised the possibility of changing the language in the code to make failing to report a peer cheating an actual violation in itself — similar to criminal complicity laws — instead of a moral infraction.
“If it became a violation for you not to say what you knew, it might be easier for people to report their peers,” he said.
Abbott said that the focus on enforcing the honor code across the faculty is “uneven.”
“There are instances of faculty members handling cases on their own and their reasoning is that their perceived impressions of the judicial process are unpleasant and inefficient and that the system doesn’t work,” he said. “But people who go through the process say it is fair, reasonable and difficult, but that it fundamentally works.”
Abbott chose to go through the Judicial Affairs Committee for all of the infractions he encountered and endorsed it wholeheartedly.
“In every case, things have gone in a positive way,” he said. “It has relieved me of having to be judge and jury.”
Holmes uses her experiences going through the Academic Judicial Board as a reminder to her students of the consequences of cheating.
“I also remind my classes that I have brought several students before the Judicial Academic Judicial Board for cheating and plagiarism over the years, and while it is not a pleasant experience for me, it is something I will do to uphold my responsibility. I warn them [cheating] is just not worth it.”
MAKING UP FOR PAST SGA BLUNDERS
The recommendation to strike the no proctoring clause was never implemented because of strong opposition from the Student Government Association (SGA), who asserted it would not pass the two-thirds student vote needed to make structural changes to the code. This led SGA, Faculty Council and Community Council members to hash out the current language of the code.
“I think both the faculty and the students came away from those meetings thinking they had won, which in essence is the perfect agreement,” said Guttentag.
A major aspect of the agreement was the establishment of a new cabinet post in the SGA dedicated to chairing the Academic Honesty Committee. Aseem Mulji ’11.5 was put in charge of the committee, according to faculty meeting minutes from May 13, 2009.
“He explained their goal to make the honor code more visible, and provide broader discussion of philosophical and practice issues,” read the notes. “Mr. Mulji stressed that students still care about the honor code and are committed to making it work.”
But the Academic Honesty Committee never materialized.
“It needs to be acknowledged that last time, promises were made that did not happen, but I’m hopeful that something really positive can come out of that,” said Guttentag, who praised this year’s SGA leadership. “There is no way that this can be entirely on the faculty and administration. Students need to take on shared responsibility.”
Current SGA President Charlie Arnowitz ’13 is trying to hold up the students’ end of the bargain. While he pointed out that the yearly turnover within the SGA results in promises easily falling through the cracks from one administration to another, he made no excuses for the 2009 SGA blunders.
“We’re going to do what wasn’t done in 2009, and do it better,” he said.
The result would be the Honor Code Student Committee, which Arnowitz is helping to create before he leaves office and will transition responsibilities to his successor.
Arnowitz said the goals of the committee would be to solicit student participation, conduct research on best practices at peer institutions with honor codes and find ways to involve the code into the broader student culture at the College.
“This is totally student driven,” he said. “We need to inculcate the honor code into everyday student life. One hard question we will have to answer is whether an honor code is worth it.”
Arnowitz said he had already received “a lot” of applications for the committee. But the SGA is fighting a pitched battle against what some see as student apathy about the future of the honor code.
On March 7, the SGA sent out an all-student email inviting students to attend a “community forum” surrounding the honor code with Collado, Guttentag and members of the SGA. But when the night came, only two students showed up — the Campus had three people covering the event.
While Arnowitz blamed the low turnout mainly on the remoteness of the Atwater location, he acknowledged the low turn out was “a little troubling.”
Failings on the part of the student body to uphold its end of the honor code — abysmal peer reporting, general student apathy and past SGA blunders — have led some faculty to question whether the honor code is nothing more than a first-year signature.
“I think students themselves have to decide if they want a strong honor code on campus — if so, then they should look for ways to create a student community that is not tolerant of cheating,” wrote Holmes in her email. “Perhaps students are content with current levels of cheating and enforcement?”
“I don’t think that’s the case, but maybe things have changed,” said Arnowitz, sighing. “It’s key to make sure students know what is at stake here.”
One of the main goals of the Honor Code Student Committee will be to show faculty and administrators that things have changed since 2009, according to Arnowitz.
Jackie Yordan ’13, who is serving on the Academic Judicial Board and the Honor Code Review Committee, said the key is to get students talking more about the code. She pointed to the It Happens Here campaign to promote awareness of sexual assault as a roadmap.
“We need to make the honor code as talked about as we have made the issue of sexual assault this year,” said Yordan. “We want the changes to come from students.”
The level of value placed on the honor code runs the gamut depending on the student.
“Having students take responsibility for their work is huge, because if you don’t take responsibility now in college, then why will you take responsibility for your work at any time subsequent?” said Ian Thomas ’13.5, who is on the Academic Judicial Board. “This is your last real opportunity to learn it.”
Baccaglini said that after First-Year Orientation, there isn’t enough follow up.
“I’ll run into tour guides in McCullough saying, ‘This is one of the hallmarks of Middlebury,’ and I’ll walk away saying, ‘Maybe it is, but I don’t know,’” she said. “Theoretically, students take it as an indication of trust from professors, but I’m hesitant to say students really care about it. Who here wakes up every day saying, ‘I’m so glad I go to a school with an honor code!’ Nobody.”
But Baccaglini said that both students and the College have a long-term interest in the code.
“I think Middlebury has an investment in keeping [the honor code] and that students, at least on an abstract level, do as well,” she said. “Every time I sign a test, I’m not bathed in the light of honor, but I think that students feel it’s a valuable part of our experience.”
POISONING THE WELL OF TRUST
Guttentag said that one of her primary goals this time around is to elucidate what she called “the real tangible costs of my cheating on you.” One tangible result is the loss of some faculty members’ trust in students.
“Many students assume that because of the honor code, professors have to inherently trust them,” said Guttentag. “But that’s not the way trust works.”
Abbott, the math professor who serves on the Honor Code Review Committee, was tapped to serve on the current committee because of what he described as “my unusually high number of encounters with [Guttentag] in the last two or three years.”
He estimated that he has had to bring five accusations of cheating to the judicial board over the past two or three years. While Abbott stressed that his experiences are not the norm among his colleagues, he acknowledged that the infractions have changed the way he grades.
“I do now approach grading in a mindset that’s more suspicious than I used to be,” he said. “And it doesn’t feel good.
“I have had experiences where I will see a solution by a student that surprised me in its elegance and ingenuity and the natural reaction to that as a professor is a sense of elation at the success of the student. Now that has to be filtered through a lens of, ‘Is this a real event based on this person arriving at a point of insight or did something improper happen to produce it?’”
Abbott is also attacking the notion some people at the College hold that cheaters are “only hurting themselves.”
“The freedom to think up the best possible assignment is dependent on the honor code working in some kind of robust way,” he said. “When you get out of that mode and start second-guessing whether or not the student’s approach to an assignment is an honest one, then you’ve given up something. Everybody loses.”
While Abbott is concerned about the vitality of the code, he repeatedly stressed his optimism in a bright future.
“Have I lost the rose-colored glasses? Yeah. But I don’t think we’re in a crisis. […] I haven’t gotten the feeling that we’re on some precipice.”
CHANGING PEDAGOGY
The affect cheating has had on faculty already depends greatly on whom you talk with. But even the most ardent faculty supporters of the honor code said they’ve changed their pedagogy in response to cheating.
“I’ve been a supporter of the honor code for decades,” said Charles A. Dana Professor of Mathematics John Emerson. “I’m happy to say that it’s been a very long time since I’ve had a plagiarizing issue with my students.”
Emerson’s perspectives come from a long involvement with the code, including stints as the chair of the Judicial Review Board and as the head of the Academic Judicial Board in the past. He said the effectiveness of the code can be enhanced by drawing attention to the importance of the Middlebury Honor System.
“It can be very constructive for any faculty member to take a few minutes at the beginning of a course to explain the relevance of the honor code as it applies to a particular course,” he said.
While Emerson always advises students that he will return to the classroom halfway through exams to respond to questions or provide clarification, he does not support making proctoring exams the default.
“Proctoring would change the psychology of the classroom,” he said. “My concern is that you don’t want to create a game where students try to cheat by outsmarting the teachers.”
Despite his unwavering support for the honor code, Emerson said that over the years he has adjusted his pedagogy by limiting the use of take-home exams.
“The reason I don’t offer take-home exams is because good people who care about honesty can still cheat if they are under enough pressure,” he said. “You get sick or you have a fight with your girlfriend and you still need to take that exam tomorrow and you are distracted and you panic.”
All of the faculty members interviewed recognized the immense pressure many of their students were under to perform at high levels and the importance of limiting situations where students might be tempted to cheat.
For example, Abbott refuses to give self-scheduled exams for multi-sectional calculus because of what he called math’s “ability to produce anxiety.”
But Guttentag said that even professors accounting for these situations is a cost of cheating.
“Instead of faculty saying, ‘What is the most engaging, creative way I can teach this material?’ they have to say, ‘How can I create a cheat-proof exam?’” she said. “You’re not getting the best pedagogy from your professors.”
IS PROCTORING THE ONLY ANSWER?
The answer — almost unequivocally — is no. For now.
“I don’t want to support a shift in the climate that surrounds an honor system,” said Emerson, who proctored students during his graduate years at Cornell University. “That was definitely a more negative climate than is the case here at Middlebury in my classroom when my students are taking tests. I treat students with respect and I think they know intuitively that I don’t assume that they want to cheat.”
Abbott said that while the code isn’t functioning at the highest level, restricting it would only make things worse.
“It really boils down to a sense that the honor code gets stronger when it’s put to use,” he said. “The best way to infuse it with meaning is to continue to invoke it by not proctoring. I think we’re better putting it to use than restricting it due to abuse.”
Administrators, faculty and students all agreed that dismantling the academic honor code would have negative consequences.
“Quite a bit would be lost without an academic honor code,” said Joseph Flaherty ’15. “You would lose the contract between students and faculty that says, ‘We’re going to treat our academic work with honesty and integrity.’”
“The culture would suffer for it,” said Guttentag. “I think the majority of students are behaving honorably and that the honor code is a point of pride for them.”
She said the administration is wary of creating a police state pitting students versus the administration.
“That’s not the kind of culture we want to have here and the relationships we hope to foster,” she said.
But at the end of the day, the health and fate of the honor code will rest with the students, something Arnowitz is acutely aware of.
“If the faculty and administration see students really making an honest effort in a way that is going to concretely continue next year, we will buy ourselves a couple years,” said Arnowitz. “But that by no means ensures that when I come back for a reunion in five years, the honor code will still be here.”
(04/10/13 4:26pm)
On April 5-7, five students attended the sixth annual Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) conference at Washington University in St. Louis. The students were selected from a pool of applicants from colleges and universities around the world to participate in the event. The trip was sponsored by the Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship (MCSE).
Founded in 2007, the CGI U conference was inspired by the structure of former President of the United States Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative, which brings together global leaders who are committed to facilitating change. CGI U draws the next generation’s leaders together each year to discuss and debate problems within five “focus areas:” Education, Environment and Climate Change, Peace and Human Rights, Poverty Alleviation, and Public Health. In order to participate in CGI U, educational institutions must commit to giving a minimum of $10,000 in funding to students for the implementation of CGI U-selected projects.
The five students who attended the conference, Rana Abdelhamid ’15, Rabeya Jawaid ’16, Betty Kobia ’16, Armel Nibasumba ’16 and Rachel Sider ’14, returned to campus feeling inspired by the weekend’s events, which included a plenary session titled “Getting off the Ground: Stories of Starting Up,” moderated by former President Bill Clinton and featuring remarks by Chelsea Clinton, as well as alumnus Shabana Basij-Rasikh ’11.
“It was super inspirational to be able to engage and build relationships with such incredibly passionate young people,” Abdelhamid said. “The entire experience just made me so much more optimistic about the future.”
To apply for a ticket to the conference, students had to submit a “Commitment to Action,” detailing a plan of implementation for a challenge of their choice that falls within one of the five focus areas. CGI U then selected 1,200 students to receive grants ranging to make their proposed commitments a reality. The five Middlebury students who participated in CGI U received funding in the form of two MCSE summer grants: a Davis Project for Peace grant and a MCSE fellowship.
Jawaid, who hails from Karachi, Pakistan, received $3,000 from MCSE to implement her Commitment to Action over the summer to provide deaf women in Pakistan with vocational training.
Jawaid worked with deaf Pakastani women two summers ago and wanted to continue her project, but lacked the necessary funding until now. Using her MCSE grant, Jawaid will purchase sewing machines to enable women to make and sell clothing.
“Before Middlebury, I knew I wanted to make a change,” Jawaid said. “But here there’s so much studying and it’s so busy, so [CGI U] is a great way for me to get back to what I believe in and get inspired again.”
Jawaid was impressed by the College’s commitment to CGI U, as the MCSE paid for her and the other students’ plane tickets and hotel fees.
“The school is really committed to helping students attend CGI U and carry out their projects,” she said.
MCSE Associate Director of Operations and Development Heather Neuwirth ’08 is excited that the students had the chance to participate in such a special conference.
“It’s a really important chance for our students to learn about projects of other like-minded undergraduate and graduate students,” she said.
The MCSE will be posting a recap of the CGI U conference for those who could not attend within the next couple of weeks.
(03/20/13 4:09pm)
Today the world faces a water crisis of unprecedented gravity. According to the U.N., 85 percent of the global population lives on the driest half of the earth and water is estimated to become scarcer with the projected increase in population. Yet as population expansion and development raise the demand for water, climate change rapidly diminishes its supply by melting the glaciers and snowcaps of the planet’s greatest freshwater reservoirs at record rates.
In light of this crisis, from March 14 to 16, the College’s Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs hosted its First Annual International Conference, titled “The Politics of Freshwater: Access and Identity in a Changing Environment.” The event brought together interdisciplinary scholars from national and international institutions to speak from varying perspectives regarding the processes that affect access to freshwater, such as climate change, land use, damming, privatization, commoditization and pricing. The symposium also focused on strategies to improve human interaction with vital freshwater around the world. The talks aimed to analyze these matters historically as well as with a view toward successfully addressing them in the present.
The symposium was co-sponsored by the Christian A. Johnson Economics Fund, C.V. Starr Middlebury Schools Abroad, the program in environmental studies, Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest, the departments of English and American literatures, classics, geography, political science and the Rohatyn Center.
Professor of Geography and Director of the Rohatyn Center Tamar Mayer, identified five reasons that the politics of freshwater was selected as the topic for the inaugural symposium. First, water is the source of life for all organisms on earth. Secondly, water serves as an important aspect of different cultural and national groups across the world. Third, the politics of water have sparked a great amount of conflict in recent years, and the possession of water has become an economic commodity as well. Fourth, the access to freshwater is an unmistakable source of conflict across boundaries and cultures as well as within local and regional situations. Finally, the UN has designated 2013 as the international year of water cooperation.
In her opening remarks, Professor Mayer elaborated on the purpose of these conferences.
“The idea is to have an annual conference on a global theme that can be discussed from multiple disciplinary perspectives and can both contribute to our International and Global Studies (IGS) curriculum and connect our campus to C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad,” she said. “To this end, we have invited scholars from the social sciences and the humanities as well as policy makers and engineers in the field of water management.”
The symposium welcomed scholars and academics from Dartmouth, Oberlin, Wellesley, Colgate and Universidad de La Rioja (La Rioja, Spain).
The water symposium ties into one of the IGS spring capstone seminars concerning water, as well as to a teleconference on the same subject that Arabic students on campus have had with Middlebury students studying abroad in Jordan.
“We want to bring the entire campus to the Rohatyn Center through these events,” said Mayer. “We want the arts, social sciences and humanities to come together to talk about these issues.”
In the four days preceding the three-day conference, Middlebury students and faculty participated in presentations pertaining to water, featuring representatives from non-profit organizations and Middlebury and Monterey Institute of International Studies students and faculty involved in water research. Robert Hoesterey, Director of Strategic Development of The Eden Projects, spoke on Wednesday about his work in Ethiopia and Madagascar decreasing povery through deforestation projects.
On Thursday, photographer Edward Burtynsky gave a lecture about his exhibit “Nature Transformed,” currently on display in the Middlebury College Museum.
On Friday, the Robert A. Jones House hosted three different panel discussions, titled “Water Divided,” “Changing Water and Land Use” and “Water Territories,” with a number of visiting professors.
Two more panel discussions were held on Saturday, “Sustaining Multiple Uses of Water” and “Access to Water and Resistance.” The conference came to a close on Saturday afternoon with a summary and concluding discussion.
The organizers of the symposium, Mayer and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Catherine Ashcraft, began planning for the event last July. They envision that the College will continue holding such annual interdisciplinary international conferences, and have chosen other global themes to discuss in subsequent years.
Professor Lina Abu-Ghunmi, from the University of Jordan, who gave a talk called “Grey Water Concept Toward Mitigating Water Shortage” and specializes in wastewater treatment, noted the significance of the symposium.
“We’re focusing on different scientific fields and bringing together economists, sociologists and engineers and looking at different situations all over the world,” she said.
Monterey Professor Pushpa Iyer spoke about “The Politics of Muddled Waters in Gujarat, India: Environmental, Economic, Social, and Cultural Influences.”
Iyer, whose expertise includes identity conflict and South Asia, said of the symposium, “This is wonderful. It’s the right size for meaningful interaction to happen. It gives us the opportunity to connect with scholars and really get to know their research.” With respect to the freshwater problems confronting the planet, she stated, “Sociocultural and political challenges dominate. Water is not just a resource that needs to be managed. It involves layers of complexity that make arriving at one solution hard, but these difficulties have to be analyzed to effectively deal with the issue.”
Marjeela Basij-Rasikh ’15 attended the symposium and believed that the conference was a crucial event to take place, especially in a liberal arts environment.
“It was very inclusive, encompassing even the social and spiritual aspects of water,” she said. “We care about the environment a lot on campus, so we need such insights from people who are experienced in the field. It allowed me to understand how individual participation matters and how I could take action. I encourage more students to take advantage of future conferences.”
(03/14/13 4:00am)
On Saturday, March 9, the 37th anniversary of International Women’s Day, around 50 female students and one male journalist filled the McCullough Social Space for ElectHer, a five-hour political leadership workshop designed to help women get elected into political office.
Each student at the event was nominated by a faculty member for their outstanding leadership skills. Over the course of the day female political leaders spoke to the students about the hurdles facing female political leaders and organized activities illustrating how to overcome them.
The idea for the event came from sophomore senator Rana Abdelhamid ’15. Abdelhamid was introduced to ElectHer after meeting Jessica Grounds at a young woman’s leadership camp two summers ago. Grounds, the executive director of Running Start, a nonprofit which inspires young women to run for political office, proposed ElectHer to get young women involved on their campuses.
“The program is based on the principle that women who run for office on campus are more likely to run for political office in the future,” said Grounds.
After Abdelhamid was elected SGA senator as a first-year, she began to notice a gender discrepancy across campus leadership positions.
“There was never another young woman running against me,” she said. “In fact, of the three women currently serving in the SGA, I am the only one who ran opposed. There hasn’t been a female SGA President in 10 years.”
Abdelhamid decided to work with Karin Hanta, director of the Chellis House, to try to bring ElectHer to campus.
“I was excited to come to Middlebury because I had met so many amazing women in D.C. who graduated from here,” said Grounds.
With the help of co-facilitators Alexandra Strott ’15 and Mandy Kwan ’15, Abdelhamid received a grant to host the event. She was able to bring to grounds and alexandra maclean, governor shumlin’s deputy chief of staff and secretary of civil and military affairs, to the College.
Maclean shared not only her some of her invaluable experiences with politics, but also an important strategy to help the women improve their political efficiency. “Imagine the type of speech you’d give if you were trying to convince someone you just met to vote for you in the timespan of an elevator ride. It’s got to be short, sweet and to the point,” Maclean said.
After breaking up into smaller groups to practice their “elevator speeches,” several of the students volunteered to perform them. Naina Qayyum ’15, a student from Karachi, Pakistan, spoke about her experience working with women’s health in Pakistan. She succinctly explained her reason for supporting her issue with the impromptu catechism, “the health of a woman is wealth of the nation!”
The last event of the day was a voting simulation, where the women had 10 minutes to run around campus and gather as many signatures as they could. The stakes were high — the winner received an invitation to a women’s leadership conference in D.C.
The reaction to this exercise was generally positive, though Rabeya Jawaid ’16, a first-year from Karachi, Pakistan, was frustrated by how little work she had to do to get a signature from the students. “How much work needs to be done if people don’t care about who they vote for?” Others echoed her concern.
But some students disagreed. An unnamed student mentioned that the activity helped push her outside of her comfort zone. “I’m usually shy, so I was really inspired by how receptive people were.”
All the women worked hard, but the prize went to first-year Laura Nubler ’16, who managed to recieve 75 signatures in 10 minutes. “I decided that I really wanted to win this, so I thought strategically, and realized that the library was the best place to get signatures.”
She found that she got votes most efficiently by giving a condensed elevator speech, explaining her passion for climate change. But ultimately, she admitted, “I was just running around begging everyone I saw for signatures.”
For Jawaid and Nubler, the event was an empowering experience. Jawaid, who ended up being the runner up in the simulation, said that she felt “super excited, because I want to run for office back in Pakistan. Although the political environments in America and Pakistan are very different, I know I can bring the strategies I learned here back to Pakistan.”
(03/13/13 5:10pm)
The banner brandished by the dozens of students marching down Storrs Walk last Monday read “Divestment is a tactic; justice is the goal.” There’s often a good deal of talk about the j-word in any number of settings — legal, environmental, social, economic, etc. — and I think more often than not, we take its meaning for granted. Specifically, taken for granted in the sense that we may actually have some concrete idea of what the word means. While this article won’t attempt to provide a complete account of the nature of justice, it will try to point the dialogue in the right direction.
The argument put forward by the divestment movement, as I see it, seems relatively straightforward: we shouldn’t contribute financially to the functioning of companies that engage in behaviors we consider ethically reprehensible. Alright, fair enough. But are “ethics” and “justice” the same thing? It’s a question that’s plagued the philosophical community in its entirety, and one that probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. One of the more popular conceptions of justice in the Anglophone world offers a contractual conception of justice: that is, relationships take on some quality of justice when two parties enter into an agreement or contract with one another, and each then obtains certain rights. People have come up with other conceptions of justice (see distributive justice, justice as fairness, justice as property, global justice; the list goes on), but this idea of contractual justice is simple and tidy enough such that I think it might take us where we want to go for now. Now if there’s something unjust about, say, investing in oil companies or arms manufacturers, we have just one of the tools necessary to pinpoint what that is.
Seeing as this is an environmental column, we’ll start with environmental justice, and how divestment could somehow right an unjust situation. Let’s say investing in fossil fuel industries is unjust because their entire business model rests upon the combustion of materials which results in the release of carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change, which will raise sea levels to the point of jeopardizing coastal livelihoods. We may then say that this is an unjust situation because the person whose shoreline property is now slightly more a part of the shore than they bargained for never entered an agreement which said they were alright with rising sea levels. Or maybe there’s injustice because of habitat loss that occurs — one could argue that because humans and animals both inhabit the same planet, each has an equal right to a safe habitat, or some variation on that theme. It’s the same basic premise which is supposed to justify our endangered species laws and other environmental regulations. There are countless other examples we could propose, but half of the challenge seems to be actually proposing them in the first place.
One of the problems that arises when dealing with problems with justice — something on which I was fortunate enough to have an extended discussion with recent guest lecturer David Abram — is that our ethical and moral frameworks are generally limited by our vocabulary and our conceptions of how things relate to one another. Humans have a hard time acting ethically or including non-human nature within our systems of justice because our way of speaking about such things is inherently isolating and anthropocentric. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — the whole “language” thing has helped our species along its way for thousands of years. However, it also seems like the same manner of speaking has also led to the kind of injustices we find within our own society. I was fortunate enough to be referred, by a friend, to recent JusTalks keynote speaker Tricia Rose’s TEDx talk regarding social justice from Brown University. Revealingly, she observes that one of the fundamental problems in trying to solve issues of justice is that it is generally pretty difficult to talk about structural problems within the contexts of the structures in which the problems arise.
I think all of this helps to show that many of the problems taken on by various groups — those working towards divestment, climate change, food, social and racial equality — can find a lot of common ground once we start working out what justice, conceptually, means. Greater dialogue between all of these groups might help iron out some of the wrinkles preventing us from ending up at the same ends, and increasing communication could enable us to speak more freely with one another about issues which, individually, we’re far less likely to solve. Aristotle conceived justice as a virtue naturally associated with friendship, and that the truest form of justice had a “friendly” quality. While it may seem simplistic, a bit of friendship and some more cooperation could be exactly what our community needs.
(03/13/13 4:38pm)
Throughout the spring semester, the Middlebury College Organic Farm (MCOF) will be making several changes to its current operations, including the introduction of chickens for eggs and meat, the allocation of plots of land to different student organizations and the incorporation of new seeds and farming techniques.
Perhaps the most notable addition to the farm is the chickens. Senior Co-Director of the Organic Farm Katie Michels ’15 said that this spring the farm plans to introduce 12 egg-laying birds as well as 40 chickens that will be raised for later consumption.
With the exception of honeybees in the past, MCOF does not keep any animals. The introduction of the chickens will mark the beginning of the farm’s animal product and by-product operations.
The farm received permission to bring the chickens to campus from the College’s Facilities and Services Office this spring, and three weeks ago they received an Environmental Council Grant to sponsor the project.
Michels said, “[The addition of the chickens] is mostly inspired by the idea that you can’t just produce vegetables. We need animals to eat vegetable waste and to fertilize the vegetables, so they’ll complete the cycle of the farm.”
In terms of other additions to the farm, the MCOF organizers have a project underway to introduce cultural gardens, new plots for student organizations on campus. The farm has been a frequent supplier to the College’s dining services over the years, selling bulk orders of products such as chard, basil and squash.
Michels expressed hopes that these changes will allow for the creation of a new educational space on campus for students interested in food and farm studies.
“We could just keep selling to Dining [Services],” said Michels, “But I think we have more potential as an educational space, and as a place to grow food for a school that’s really interested in food.”
In order to follow through with this mission, the farm plans to allocate plots of land — cultural gardens — to various student groups who show an interest. According to Michels, Hillel has already reserved a plot.
The farm’s staff would care for the gardens over the summer, and then in the fall, the farm will throw a cultural harvest festival where student organizations can cook from their garden “in hopes to create an outdoor community space to share food and conversation,” according to Food and Farm Educator Sophie Esser Calvi.
This project builds upon the farm’s outstanding partnership with Weybridge House, which has sourced its food from the farm since last summer. Farm organizers are also attempting to cement their relationship with Dolci, the College’s student-run restaurant.
Michels stressed the importance of the farm to Dining Service’s access to locally grown foods.
“We’re starting to grow nice lettuces, herbs and other specific things that Dolci uses frequently, so they can get it from us rather than from far away,” said Michels of the farm’s plans for the spring semester.
Not only is the farm expanding its presence on campus this spring, but the farm is also experimenting with new seed varieties and planting techniques. They have recently received a large seed donation from Renees Garden company, a seed distributor located in California.
“The farm is a place where we do what the students want to learn,” said Esser Calvi. “For instance, we will practice different growing methods. We are also growing different varieties of produce this year such as four different types of radish, beets etc. We’ll be doing trials and basically testing [the different] varieties.”
Farm volunteers will be working with many plants that are not typically grown in Vermont climates. According to Senior Co-Director Ari Lattanzi ’13, the farm organizers have hopes of finding a crop that can be grown in this climate with few losses. The directors of MCOF could then share these findings and advise other farmers in the area who do not have the ability to take risks with crop experimentation due to financial instability.
“We’re talking about trying several different techniques, maybe biodynamic farming, [which] is planting with the seasons and the cycles of the moon,” said Lattanzi of the new farming techniques. “[Another technique] is permaculture, a type of low-input farming that involves less interference in the lifecycles of the plants once they are established.”
“The farm will grow because there’s this new energy for a food and agriculture studies program, and there’s more land that we could expand into,” added Lattanzi. “We’re making sure the farm has something for everyone.”
(03/13/13 4:30pm)
Four students were arrested by police on Monday, March 11 at the northeast U.S. office of the TransCanada Corporation in Westborough, MA during a protest of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
The students — Anna Shireman-Grabowski ’15.5, Jay Saper ’12.5, Sam Koplinka-Loehr ’13 and Lucy Whipps ’14 — had handcuffed themselves together with 21 other young people, who refused to leave the office when asked by police. All 25 were arrested. The youth group acted as part of a broader protest that included some 75 others.
“We’re here in solidarity with front line communities who are facing the health effects of the past, present and future as a result of the extraction, transportation and refinement of tar sands oil,” said Koplinka-Loehr in a telephone interview on Monday evening.
“We stand in solidarity with them, but are also here recognizing that all of our futures are affected by the tar sands when it comes to climate change,” he added. “And climate change knows no borders.”
Shawn Howard, a spokesperson for TransCanada Corporation, pushed back by email.
“This really isn’t really about Keystone XL, diluted bitumen, emissions or a substance that is in a particular blend of oil,” wrote Howard. “It’s about a group that wants to end the use of fossil fuels entirely.
“This publicity stunt will not provide an American construction worker with a job to provide for their family and their needs. It will not reduce global emissions or the continued need for fossil fuels in the United States. It will not improve the safety of moving a critical product to market,” he continued.
Howard suggested that TransCanada “agrees” with the President that a move to a less carbon intense economy is necessary, but suggested that it will “take decades” for this transition to occur. He noted that TransCanada has invested billions in wind, solar, hydro and nuclear facilities.
“TransCanada knows what these technologies can do today (and what their current limitations are), because we have invested billions of dollars in emission-less energy production,” he said.
At Monday’s protest, Shireman-Grabowski, Saper, Koplinka-Loehr and Whipps were joined by students from Green Mountain College, Tufts University, Brandeis University and Brown University as well as members of the Massachusetts Methodist clergy and community members. According to Shireman-Grabowski, the protest represented a “sharp escalation” in the non-violent tactics of the protesters.
At approximately 11 a.m. on Monday morning, the 100-member group walked up to the third floor of the northeast U.S office of the TransCanada Corporation. They carried a fake coffin featuring the words “our future” — a symbolic representation of the impact of the proposed pipeline. The group sang a eulogy, carried flowers and walked in procession.
Approximately one hour later, the group of 25 youth, who had refused to leave the building, were arrested and transported to a local jail. They waited in a communal cell before being released on $0 bail at approximately 8 p.m.
At that time, the students were informed that they would be arraigned in court in Massachusetts on Wednesday, where they would face charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct.
Though student arrests are not commonplace, the four are not the first to receive attention for controversial environmental activism in recent memory. As a member of the Youth Climate Delegation at UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa in 2011, Abigail Borah ’13 interrupted the international proceedings to express her displeasure with “obstructionist congress” and the inaction of President Obama on climate change.
Borah received a significant amount of press for the demonstration, including an interview with the New York Times.
“Something I’ve learned through my time at Middlebury is that people have all sorts of ideas of what activism ‘should be’ and what produces ‘change,’” said Borah. “Whether we agree with one another or not, it’s hard to argue that the courage it takes to stand up for what you believe in isn’t admirable. As young people, it’s our job to push the envelope and rally for the urgency and ambition that is required to achieve social justice.”
The arrest of the four students in Massachusetts came on the same day as the New York Times published an editorial calling on President Barack Obama to “say no” to the Keystone XL pipeline — a commercial venture that would see 830,000 barrels a day of crude oil shipped along an 875-mile pipeline from Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
“A president who has repeatedly identified climate change as one of humanity’s most pressing dangers cannot in good conscience approve a project that — even by the State Department’s most cautious calculations — can only add to the problem,” the editorial read.
While the students expressed a similar motivation, they took a different tone.
“This is environmental racism,” said Koplinka-Loehr. “Poor people and people of color are disproportionately affected by fossil extraction and refinement, creating generational health problems and death.”
Focusing on the College community, Koplinka-Loehr elaborated, “We need to talk about environmental racism at Middlebury, and it needs to be driving the way in which we think about our endowment. [We need to think about] who is actually impacted by our stocks the most. Why is that not a part of the conversation?”
Saper was critical of the study of environmental justice by the College’s environmental studies department.
“We’ve talked more about environmental racism today — just today — than we have at a place where there is the longest standing environmental studies program in history in America,” said Saper.
On the national stage, the group’s action joins a much larger chorus of dissent against the Keystone XL Pipeline.
In February, approximately 50 members of the College community attended the “Forward on Climate” rally in Washington, D.C. where they were met by approximately 50,000 other protestors. The event was the largest climate rally in American history.
To date, over 50,000 have signed a petition to resist the Keystone XL pipeline and thousands more have joined the Tar Sands Blockade in East Texas. Protestors there include landowners, climate activists, members of frontline communities and Native American peoples.
According to the blog “Funeral For our Future,” which provided information about Monday’s protest, March 16 - 24 will serve as a “week of solidarity” with Tar Sands Blockade protestors, during which groups across the country will target the offices of TransCanada and its investors.
(03/06/13 11:15pm)
My last column talked about divestment — how I believe that it has powerful symbolic value but that it must not be used as a substitute for personal or community-level changes that would directly reduce the amount of carbon emissions for which we are responsible. Although I appreciate Hannah Bristol ’14.5’s response, I can’t help but feel as though she missed the point entirely. Tellingly, she does not offer a single solution to climate change beyond talking to “folks.” At this point, education is not enough.
I am fully and painfully aware that we cannot solve global climate change by turning off our lights. But we also must not forget that those choices do have value. When I drive from my apartment downtown to Proctor dining hall in the morning, or crank up the air conditioning on a hot day or fly halfway around the globe to Australia, I am contributing to the problem of climate change by releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and increasing the demand for fossil fuels. That round-trip flight alone sent more carbon aloft than the annual car use of entire American families. Such choices should hardly be dismissed as trivial; to do so feeds into the gloomy fallacy that we are helpless against global warming.
I worry about the push for divestment or the protests against the Keystone pipeline not because they don’t have value, but because in these causes I see an unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for climate change. It’s not enough to point at others and cry “stop tempting me with this sweet, sweet gasoline.” Oil and coal companies are not forcing us to buy product that we do not want. I am the cause of climate change. You are the cause of climate change. Al Gore and George W. Bush, Bill McKibben and Rex Tillerson are all the cause of climate change.
The only way to break that cycle is to accept that the problem begins in our backyards. The iron grip of fossil fuels on the business of powering, heating and moving the population will only be broken by making the alternatives cheap and available. Instead, I see a national movement of environmental activists obsessed with negative action. William F. Buckley once said that conservatism means standing athwart history yelling “stop.” That’s a strategy bound to lose without clear alternatives. It failed to stop the implementation of healthcare. It’s failing to prevent marriage equality from spreading across the country. But it seems to me as though modern environmentalism has fallen into this same doomed strategy of screaming “halt” at the world around it.
In the meantime, Vermont is currently debating a bill to ban the construction of wind farms in a state high on outrage but short on alternatives. The Green Mountain State produces less of its electricity from wind and solar than states from North Dakota to Texas, and we have heard barely a peep from those who profess to truly care about climate change.
I know how much easier it is to oppose things than to build up the other options; I spent most of the fall election cycle endlessly mocking Mitt Romney. Creation is much more difficult than moral outrage. It requires far more time, money and energy. But when a patient has heart disease, it’s not enough to tell him or her to simply stop eating, smoking and drinking. To survive, he or she will need to replace steak with salad and smoking with exercise. Without substitutes, stopping bad habits would still be fatal.
This is how to beat climate change: couple cries for divestment with a push for investment in small business solar companies or startups that aim to scrub carbon from the atmosphere. Oppose methods of fossil fuel extraction that cause excessive harm to the environment, but at the same time, encourage research in zero-emission vehicles so that there is no market for those fuels. We are the majority. It’s time to stop acting like the opposition.
It’s time to put solar panels on our roofs, wind turbines behind our homes and hydrogen powered cars in our garages. It’s time to plant more trees and consider seeding the oceans with iron, locking away carbon dioxide in algal blooms. That’s the type of movement we need: campuses and communities, cities and states, deciding to do things differently — not to complain, but to build and not only to divest but also to invest. The amount of money at this institution could do an incredible amount of good invested in companies like Solar Mosaic or First Wind. All of these projects will need to be in somebody’s backyard. You’re welcome to start with mine. Can we have yours, too?
(03/06/13 5:26pm)
The Campus' Leah Pickett '13 and Molly Talbert '13.5 will be liveblogging "Beyond Divestment: Money and Finance for Living Economy," a talk by president of the New Economics Institute Bob Massie and Scholar in Residence in Environmental Studies Bill McKibben. Beyond Divestment is a day-long summit aiming to explore economic alternatives in the areas of alternative currencies, time banking, impact investing, financial system regulation and reform, and "new economy" coalition building. The New Economics Institute is live streaming the events here.
1:33 (Leah) - The event has drawn to a close. Two representatives of Middlebury's Divestment For Our Future group closed out the program and invited participants to come to BiHall 219 at 3:30 today for the series' next event.
1:29 (Leah) - McKibben: The composition of the board of trustees is a major roadblock because these people are 1) very rich, 2) often connected to Wall Street, 3) not inclined to look the morality and utilitarianism of investments, and 4) mostly interested in the “bottom line.”
1:22 (Leah) - We’ve now entered the Q&A portion of the presentation. The first question is: What’s the same and what’s different in terms of divestment from South Africa and divestment from fossil fuels? The answer: in South Africa, people still thought the issue of apartheid was irrelevant; it was too big, too far away, and initially appeared to have too little to do with Americans’ own lives. It took a lot of time for people to draw parallels between what was going on in South Africa and our own experiences and history in the United States. This kind of awareness will grow. The “disgrace” of not talking about climate issues in politics extended to the “pathetic reporters” who refused to ask about it during the presidential campaign, but Hurricane Sandy brought the issues to people’s minds. Massie links Hurricane Sandy (McKibben later references Hurricane Irene as well) to major events in South Africa that raised people’s awareness of the issue and finally galvanized them to action. Significantly, Massie talks about the "political miscalculation" that those talking about divesting from South Africa weren't serious. They were in fact very serious, and only once people realized that this was a crisis that was not going to go away did policy really start to change. The implications for campaigns for divestment on college campuses are clear.
1:15 (Molly) - Massie says, "There is a mix of theory and practice unfolding around the country right now [regarding the new economy] and I don’t think anything is going to be the same … people are asking what is an economy, what is a business, what is the role of an investment?"
1:08 (Leah) - Massie says that not only are places and ideas changing, but places as well. Vermont is a prime example of one of these places; he says it is a “leadership community” in the country because, on the state and organizational level, it is experimenting with so many ideas for the new economic model at the same time.
1:06 (Leah) - Think about it: how neoliberal are your economics textbooks at Middlebury? (Probably very.) Massie cites a change in the ways we learn about economics in school as one of the ways we can experience a paradigm shift towards this “new economy.”
1:03 (Leah) - Massie: The idea of this “New Economy” is referred to by different names; sometimes the solidarity economy, sharing economy, resilient economy, sustaining economy, restorative economy, and collaborative economy. Though all these terms emphasize different aspects of the concept, they all posit that the economy should be an, “instrument to serve the needs of the people and the planet, rather than a machine that takes people in, crunches them up, and spits them out.”
12:58 (Molly) – Bob Massie refers to a YouTube video that has recently gone viral, illustrating wealth inequality in the U.S.
12:54 (Leah) - Massie: “You want people to see things in a way so that they can never ‘unsee’ them’… that’s a process of social transformation.” He delves into discussing the financial industry, saying that some of the major issues of our time are climate, growth, our broken economics and financial system, and the massive wealth inequalities in America. He asks what a "sane" democracy would do to solve these issues.
12:52 (Leah) - McKibben: divestment is “a wedge for making us understand how we can get off a system that quite literally is destroying the planet around us. Fifty years in the future, people aren’t going to care about… the fiscal cliff, the sequester; they’ll be asking ‘the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?’ And that’s really, at some level, the question we’re addressing with all this work.”
12:51 (Molly) – Bob Massie begins his talk. “For many of you, we’re going to be talking about this for the rest of our lives.”
12:49 (Molly) – Bill McKibben wrapping up his speech, saying, “The most important phrase that came out of the last five years with the financial crisis was probably, “too big to fail” … Really, when you think about it, anything that is “too big to fail” is too big.”
12:46 (Molly) – “The image to think about when we think about the new economy, … [is that] when we were growing up, when we got information we got three TV channels. Now, we live in a world with a multiplicity of information,” said Bill McKibben.
12:43 (Leah) - The Orchard is completely full. McKibben is in the midst of explaining why the most important “concrete reality” we have to deal with that will force our society to move in new directions is “the reality of what is happening ecologically on the planet.” A term he has brought up multiple times is "the new economy."
12:42 (Molly) – Bill McKibben speaking, saying, “We have to get off coal, oil, and gas and we have to do it fast.”
12:40 (Leah) - McKibben introduces Massie as a “hero in this really important work of trying to imagine what possible economic futures look like.”
(03/06/13 5:00am)
In the midst of a heavy snowfall on Monday, March 4, over 125 students marched from Proctor terrace to the College’s administrative center in Old Chapel, carrying signs, chanting and wearing orange squares, during what organizers called “a national day of action” for divestment.
The event was one of over 20 such demonstrations that took place on college campuses on the same day across the country according to student organizer Jenny Marks ’14. While national events differed in form, all student groups had a similar demand — the divestment of college and university endowment funds from fossil fuel manufacturing companies in the fight for climate justice.
At Middlebury, student organizers presented the same request as seven students voiced on Feb. 16 when they presented to the Board of Trustees. “By March 15,” organizer Laura Berry ’16 explained, “we want the Board of Trustees to make a public statement that by 2016 the College will divest fully from fossil fuel and arms manufacturing companies.”
Berry was just one of the many students responsible for generating enthusiasm for Monday’s event, a rally organized by a coalition of pro-divestment student groups, including Divest for Our Future and the Socially Responsible Investment Club.
During the march, the mass of students wound around snow-covered paths, chanting, “Money for students’ education, not for climate devastation. Money for homes and education, not for war and exploitation.”
Inside Old Chapel, Tim Spears, vice president for academic affairs, was one of the few senior-level administrators present at the time of the demonstration.
“I think it’s an admirable display of political spirit and commitment on a snowy March day,” he said from his office, as students marched around the front of the building.
Down below, students voiced a variety of perspectives on the event and on the divestment movement at large.
Steven Kasparek ’16, a student with no prior involvement with the divestment movement on campus, was visibly impressed.
“I’m really glad that I came,” he said. “I feel like this is a really powerful group that we have out here right now, and the fact that there are students who are passionate about this type of thing is something new to me, because normally students aren’t so concerned about the future and about preserving it for generations to come.”
Drew Vollmer ’13, a student who passed by the march but did not attend the demonstration, aired an alternative perspective.
“At Middlebury, environmental groups can mobilize lots of supporters and there are no opposition groups,” he said. “Student rallies like the divestment march are, to me, largely a product of one group’s passion about the issue and not necessarily a result of reasoned and well-considered arguments.”
Vollmer was critical of the movement, explaining that he believed divestment to be an “ineffective gesture” in the campaign against climate change. “Advocates seem to argue that oil money in politics is the sole factor stopping climate action and that divestment would remove oil’s legitimacy and pave the way for a carbon tax, but I think this is a horrible oversimplification. […] Climate action is necessary, but efforts are much more productive elsewhere.”
Yet student organizers disagreed, likely buoyed in part by the enthusiasm exhibited by other pro-divestment student groups on the national stage.
“Today’s events around the country were an incredible indicator of the potential for the American students’ movement of our generation,” said Marks. “The rhetoric is clear: divestment is a tactic, climate justice is the goal.”
In mid-February, Marks was joined by Molly Stuart ’15.5 and Teddy Smyth ’15, two other student organizers, at the Power Up! Divestment Convergence at Swarthmore College. The event, hosted by Swarthmore Mountain Justice, brought together student representatives from 75 colleges and universities to discuss divestment and other tactics associated with the climate justice movement.
At the convergence, students attended panels, participated in discussions and built upon the idea for the march fo(u)rth event, playing off of the syntactic momentum imbedded within the date.
During the week following the convergence, student organizers from schools across the nation collaborated over email and by conference call, coordinating photos and videos to be captured during the events, which organizers plan to use as they move forward.
Students from Harvard University, Mount Holyoke College and Locust Valley High School also created a Facebook page to promote the event, which by midnight on Monday night displayed photos of March Fo(u)rth demonstrations that had occurred at Smith College, Bowdoin College, Stanford University and Brown University, as well as at Middlebury College.
Following Monday’s demonstration, Marks described her motivation.
“These endowments belong to us and exist for us — colleges and universities must be educational institutions first and corporations second,” she wrote in an email.
“If the students demand divestment from destructive industries, it is ultimately our money, our school, our power that will ensure that this happens — it’s our future and the lives of folks around the world that we are fighting for.”
(02/28/13 5:00am)
Last Saturday night, Feb. 23, words flew in the McCullough Social Space as the American Sign Language (ASL) poetry troupe, the Flying Words Project, took the stage. The event was hosted by Middlebury’s ASL club and sponsored by a variety of campus organizations and departments.
Two poets performed at the event, Deaf Poet Peter Cook and his hearing coauthor Kenny Lerner. They create poems together in ASL and then add words to them so that their performances are accessible to both deaf and hearing communities. Susan Burch, director of CCSRE, taught at Gallaudet University and has strong ties to the deaf community; she described the Flying Words Project as “hands down the most important Deaf poetry artists in America.”
Middlebury’s ASL club first saw the Flying Words Project perform at Dartmouth College in 2010 and since then has been trying to get Cook and Lerner to perform here. Saturday’s event was free of charge and open to the greater community. While Middlebury students made up a majority of the audience, there were a number of town residents in attendance. A handful of members of the University of Vermont’s ASL club also made the journey from Burlington, and the performance was delayed briefly in order to give extra time to people making their way through the inclement weather.
As soon as the pair came on stage, Cook and Lerner captivated the audience, performing a series of poems that pulled from real life events ranging from the recent fire in a Bangladesh factory to their experiences performing in various countries. Many of the poems were quite funny and portrayed the versatility of the duo’s performance style. They also orchestrated a poem about climate change that the whole audience came together to perform.
ASL, as its own language entirely independent from English, does not translate directly into English but instead focuses on using visual signs and gestures to convey meaning. In Lerner’s words, it is “a picture language.” As a hearing person unfamiliar with ASL, seeing the Flying Words Project performance was an experience unlike any I’d had before. Words are very powerful, evocative and arguably taken for granted by most people. Then suddenly during the performance I found that the words Lerner was saying were not enough to truly capture what was happening before my eyes.
Instead, I had to take Lerner’s words and Cooks actions and create a new understanding of my own in order to appreciate the performance. While this was slightly disorienting at first, my brain soon adapted. Seeing Cook’s signs translated into words in real time slowed each poem down into a series of moments. “We play with language,” said Lerner of his work with Cook.
The performance was followed by a lengthy question and answer session in which the duo elaborated on their creative process and the intricacies of performing in other countries. Most nations in which the Flying Words Project has performed have their own official or unofficial sign language, and navigating the differences can be challenging, though Cook is able to pick up the new sign languages with relative ease. Cultural differences also often come into play; what entertains the audience of one nation will not necessarily entertain the audience of another. Cook and Lerner are constantly writing new poems and adjusting established ones.
“Their performance was very impressive,” Jiayi Zhu ’14 said. “It has made me more interested in ASL and Deaf culture. It’s something that should spread and can be shared with other cultures.”
Middlebury’s ASL club hopes to work with the college administration in the near future to create an ASL department that will offer a major and a minor and provide extended language tables.
“The success of the Flying Words Project event shows the obvious interest and need for the development of an American Sign Language academic department here at Middlebury,” said Ada Santiago ’13.5, president of the ASL club. “We [the ASL Club] hope that the administration and the Middlebury community at large will support us in this endeavor to help make Middlebury a more diverse and progressive institution.”
The club also hopes one day to have ASL offered at Middlebury’s Language Schools. So far a petition asking for this expansion of ASL has garnered over 200 signatures. With this growing support, events like Saturday’s are likely to become a more common occurrence on campus.
(02/28/13 1:30am)
On Tuesday, Feb. 26, Be Bright, the College’s energy literacy campaign, held a kick-off dinner event to launch its initiative. The dinner was held in Atwater Dining Hall and featured Professor of Environmental Studies and Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben. The dinner was the first of a series of planned events this spring hosted by the campaign.
Be Bright was started by the Sustainability Integration Office at the Environmental Center at Hillcrest in an effort to educate students about energy usage at the College. Communications and Outreach Coordinator Avery McNiff ’12 began planning the campaign this past fall.
“At the end of the summer, I got a lot of questions about energy at Middlebury and our sources,” McNiff explained. “Students wanted to know more about [the 2016 carbon neutrality goal] and where we are in our path to carbon neutrality. Generally, people wanted to be more energy literate.”
To introduce the initiative, Be Bright hosted an Atwater social dinner event, which attracted over 150 students. The menu featured local food, including Misty Knoll Farm chicken, local mashed potatoes, roasted local root vegetables, local tortellini Alfredo with local pasta, milk and cream, mixed greens and an apple crisp dessert.
McNiff opened the event with an introduction to the campaign and sustainability at the College, before introducing McKibben.
“Energy cannot be visible, so we have to make it tangible,” she said.
McKibben discussed the need for a balance between large and small efforts to do anything about the environmental problems the world faces today.
“These problems are big. They’re the biggest we’ve run into,” he said, citing how the atmosphere is now five percent wetter than it was 40 years ago, causing record rainfalls and damaging hurricanes.
“[It's] Just remarkably big change. And much bigger change is yet to come,” McKibben warned. “This phenomenon and many others happen when you change the temperature of the planet one degree Celsius. Scientists tell us confidently that if we don’t get hold of it fast, then that one degree will be four, five, six degrees before you reach my age.”
Educating the student body and greater community has been one of central goals of the Be Bright campaign from the beginning, according to Jack Byrne, director of sustainability integration, and co-organizer of the Be Bright campaign.
“Energy literacy means a couple of things,” he explained, in an interview prior to the event. “It means understanding basic energy sources — where our energy comes from, how it is generated, what the environmental, economic, and social costs and benefits of those sources are how we use energy on campus, and how it is that we can use it more efficiently in our daily lives.”
In the spirit of informing the College community, McNiff and Byrne explained that the biggest portion of the College’s carbon footprint is the fuel used to heat, cool and cook. Graphical analysis shows that a large portion of the footprint has been reduced with the use of the biomass plant.
“We’re anticipating that another big chunk will be taken care of if and when the bio-methane project [which will use biomethane fuel from local dairy farms] comes online,” Byrne said. “At that point then, the small portion of the footprint that is left will be the more challenging portion to deal with.”
According to the pair, the last portion of the reduction of carbon emission will be achieved through the more efficient use of energy by the college community, what McNiff calls “a behavioral change.”
McKibben said the title of the Be Bright campaign exactly reflects what is required of the school community to initiate change — to be smarter in our day-to-day lives. But he reminded that it is not enough to just turn off the lights and take shorter showers.
Byrne echoed his thoughts, explaining, “one of the [chief] obstacles, is that [climate change is] relatively invisible to us,” Byrne said. “We turn the light switch on and the light goes on but we don’t really see the big dams in northern Quebec that are generating the electricity that sustains the state of Vermont and we don’t see the huge expanses of land that have flooded in order to generate that power.”
Byrne also expressed concern that students lack awareness of the cost of wasteful energy usage.
“Students do not pay the actual electrical and fuel bills — the College does that — so they’re not as aware of the value of that energy,” he said.
Yet at the event, Mckibben was optimistic. “It’s really exciting that Middlebury is taking the lead on all these scales,” he said. “And the possibility of a beautiful world is there but only if we work hard, if we work quickly, and I guess only if we’re really bright.”
Throughout the night, students were invited to take a picture in a photo booth with their energy pledge written out on a Be Bright dry erase board. The pictures will be featured on Be Bright’s Tumblr site.
Students who attended voiced their own excitement about the dinner and the campaign.
“I really liked the idea of committing your pledge to a photo and the food was delicious,” said President of Campus Sustainability Coordinators Seton Talty ’15.5, who is involved in the initiative to start sustainability tours and bringing compost bins to residential areas. “It was also a lucky and unique opportunity to get Bill McKibben at such a small forum.”
Students also explained that the dinner event has further inspired their aspirations to become more aware of and involved in sustainability efforts of the College.
“I think I talk about being very environmentally conscious but hearing Bill McKibben talk makes it more concrete and more real to me,” said Meena Fernald ’16, who heard about the campaign through an all-student email. “[The Be Bright campaign] is a really cool thing that we’re doing and now I know how to get involved.”
Other events for the Be Bright campaign this spring will include “pledge rides” with a horse drawn trolley during lunch on March 6, a display in the McCullough Student Center called “Imprints of Energy” by Alison Andrews ’12.5, an exhibit at Davis Family Library on March 11 and a number of sponsored community dinners at language and social houses throughout the semester.
For more information on the Be Bright campaign, visit go/bebright.
(02/27/13 10:03pm)
While I agree with Zach Drennen ’13.5 in his column “Divestment: No Excuse for Inaction” that divestment does not go far enough, his argument undersells the fight that the environmental movement will face in attempting to achieve his outlined solutions.
Divestment is not the single solution to climate change. Middlebury divesting will not have an impact on ExxonMobil’s finances. But divestment offers steps that are ambitious. It is a risk that will drive home the scale of the problem. While divestment itself won’t end climate change, the media attention of hundreds of campuses and cities across the country divesting will bring attention to the energy and the power of this movement — to the power, in particular, of the youth in the climate movement who will inherit this climate-changed world.
This energy and this media needs to be harnessed and transferred into a national movement calling for change, the exact change Drennen outlines. We need to break our addiction to fossil fuels. But breaking this addiction is not as easy as turning off the lights when you leave your dorm room or walking to Shaw’s instead of driving there. Our individual behavioral changes will not make a dent in our climate problems without a broad national movement. Consumer patterns won’t change without an overwhelming push.
We are the group that is already concerned about climate change. Many of us are far more conscious of our carbon footprints than the majority of this country. A change on the scale necessary to combat climate change requires large-scale action and widespread behavioral changes. This change requires education. We need to leave the bubble where climate change is salient and talk to folks who are complacent or uninformed. We need to offer steps that match the scale of the problem. Telling someone to turn off the lights when they leave a room, as Drennen suggests, when we’re talking about droughts and superstorms and sea level rise seems almost trivial.
One of the many problems with the public perception of climate change is a feeling of helplessness. Once we push people past apathy and into concern, they realize how big the scale of this problem is and how many things need to change. Empowering this population and mobilizing them into action will require work. It will require organizing people to tell their representatives that climate change is the most important issue we face today — that it encompasses all other issues, from the economy to national security to health care. We need to push our leaders into action, because only national legislation will reach the people and corporations whose behaviors will never change without incentive and without serious cause on the timeframe we’re working with. This leadership from the United States will inspire other countries to take action.
The people who have contributed the least to climate change are the people who are suffering the most. The frontline communities are not the communities who can change their behavior to truly impact our trajectory, though it would be a lot easier to confront if this were the case. This is our responsibility. We need to move beyond individual action, target certain changeable behaviors and have collective action like we saw last weekend in the streets of D.C. As those 40,000 voices become millions of voices, the noise will grow so loud that you can’t avoid it. Then we will see change in our governments and in our corporations.
Divestment is a start. Closing our windows is a start. Solar panels on our houses are a start. But we are looking at a narrow window of opportunity to slow the rise of the oceans before the damage is done and the process is too far in motion. Only ambitious action, from our campus to our state to our country to the world, can save us.
Written by HANNAH BRISTOL '14.5 of Falls Church, Va.
(02/27/13 9:51pm)
If anything can be said of President Obama’s recent State of the Union address, it may be that it left environmentally-minded individuals with more questions than answers. The president wasted little time out of the gates bringing up energy issues (Politico has his first mention of renewable energy and “carbon pollution” on the third of the speech’s 10 pages), giving mention to the environment before other, less important fringe issues like the housing market, international policy and gun control. The ordering of the President’s speech was hardly the only nod that environmentalism received that night; in the very next paragraph (now on page four) the President explicitly stated that “we must do more to combat climate change.” Not “we should.” Not “we can.” “We must.” What the President presented us with was an imperative, just in case anyone managed to miss it, as in something absolutely necessary or required. So now that we have a verbal commitment to stopping climate from our commander-in-chief, how sure can we be that he’ll follow through?
A look at the past four years may provide a little insight for shaping predictions. While President Obama received no lack of criticism for a first term that, quite frankly, left environmental interests underwhelmed, to say that nothing happened for the movement during his presidency couldn’t be farther from the truth. The International reports that since 2007, U.S. carbon emissions have dropped by about 13 percent. Executive Order 13514, signed in 2009, told federal agencies that they had to make greenhouse gas reductions a priority, as well as provided targets for fleet reductions in petroleum use, improvements in water efficiency, waste stream reform. New fuel economy standards will mandate an average efficiency of 35.5 miles-per-gallon in cars and trucks by 2016, which along with proposals to cut $46 billion in fuel industry subsidies from the 2012 fiscal budget, will help wean our country off of its addiction to fossil fuels. The Obama administration has outlined plans for expansion of solar and wind energy development, and the president has made a number of Cabinet-level appointments (most notably the recent naming of REI President/CEO Sally Jewell as his pick for Secretary of the Interior) that put people with commitments to the environment in positions of real influence. The list of small victories goes on.
Yet there are still elephants — and elephant carcasses — lingering in the Oval Office. Any prospects for a national cap-and-trade may have died in 2009. Passage of that darn Keystone XL pipeline is still on the table. We’re still subsidizing fossil fuel companies with tax dollars, and 350.org had an absolute field day with the discovery that Obama was reportedly seen in Florida golfing with oil executives while thousands gathered in the streets of Washington to protest tar sands development. If anything, the sighting serves as a reminder of the President’s humanity; to play the role of idealist leader of the free world, one needs to be a politician. It’s unfortunate that all the under-the-radar accomplishments seem overshadowed by grandiose showings of ball-dropping on headline issues, but if the President is anything at all, it’s a pragmatist. While some may argue that pragmatism isn’t really what we need right now if we’re to solve the climate crisis, anyone who has read this column in the past can probably figure out that I’m not of that camp.
The rest of the President’s State of the Union address offered pragmatic, collaborative proposals for securing America’s energy future. It also provided a commitment to rebuilding our country’s crumbling infrastructure, including the energy sector, which echoed the calls for synergistic development of economy and sustainability raised by Nature Conservancy CEO Mark Tercek in his talk at the College last Thursday evening. I believe the speech’s real home run, however, came at its end, as Obama provided his own interpretation of the American condition: “We are citizens … [That word] captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations; that our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others.” If our president is right, and that our future is contingent not only on our cooperation but our inherent interconnectedness, then we have no choice but to work to reestablish our nation’s connection to its ultimate shared resource. You’ve got me Mr. Obama — that’s change I can believe in. It’s the change I want to believe in.
