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Like many young people today, Katie Concannon ’22 has dealt with her share of climate grief. She has searched for relief in the imagination of different visions of the future. One such experiment was her Tidal Shift Award-winning sculpture, “What We Left Behind,” based on her experiences with climate activism and the emotions surrounding it here in Vermont.
The most successful outdoor films tend to focus on the “firsts” of the outdoor world: first ascents, remarkable survivals, free solos. This genre is dominated by white men, reflecting how the individual experiences of traditionally marginalized groups in outdoor spaces are often overlooked. The accomplishments of these marginalized groups are often overshadowed by films with million-dollar budgets that focus on the names and places that audiences already know. In reality, the ability of ordinary people to thrive in outdoor spaces is just as remarkable. Public lands are one of the few places in our world that are, in theory, “free.” Yet for millions of Americans, the barriers to entry into the outdoors are still extremely high.
The Middlebury we know today is not the same as the one we surveyed during the first Zeitgeist student body survey in 2019. We may have expected the college to change over these four years, and it did — entire classes matriculated and graduated, presidents were elected and impeached, social trends rose and fell, boats got stuck and unstuck in canals — but few could have foreseen the transformation that our community and our world would experience in that time.
Nathaniel Brown ’13 majored in International Politics and Economics with an East Asian focus and is now a freelance filmmaker and photographer. He received a Fulbright Scholarship after college. He has since traveled around the world making documentaries with subcultural communities, including in the United States, Siberia, Indonesia and China. You can listen to the podcast here.
During the ’90s, Alex Lowe was considered the ultimate American hero. Idolized for his first ascents and enthusiasm for mountaineering, he pioneered a generation of celebrity climbers, like Alex Honnold, Tommy Caldwell and Lynn Hill. In 1999, Alex was killed in an avalanche on Mt. Shishapangma in Tibet, an accident survived only by his climbing partner and lifelong friend, Conrad Anker. His story is one of tragedy, adventure and even a Shakespearean love triangle — all the makings of a great Hollywood film. The 2021 documentary, “Torn,” rejects the potential for theatrics, instead embracing a personal approach to outdoor adventure cinema. Directed by Alex’s son, Max Lowe, the film is more than a summary of Alex’s life; it’s an ode to the impacts he had, not just on the climbing world, but on his family. It’s a family narrative of the five stages of grief, in the wake of an incomprehensible death. Most of all, “Torn” is the living diary of Max, one that reflects on decades of his story, and yet is still being written.
The month of April marks the end of a standard sugarmaking season in Vermont — the weeks when Vermont’s maple syrup producers tap their trees, collect sap and process it for syrup.
The true meaning of life is a question that many movies attempt to answer. Sometimes, the film can achieve a satisfactory answer to this immortal question, like in “Forrest Gump” or “The Matrix.” Out of them all, last week’s Hirschfield International Film Series selection “Everything Everywhere All at Once” stands as one of the best works of art to attempt an answer to this question. It is a film that demonstrates how life is absurd, ridiculous and often meaningless and gives an answer for how it can be lived anyway. On top of this, the movie is crafted to be entertaining and hilarious, putting most Marvel movie action sequences to shame with its masterful choreography and inspired creativity. The fighting sequences are exhilarating and the special effects seem real, but the brilliance of the movie is that it is fantastical in its premises and captivating in its execution. It is a comedy that rivals “Airplane” in its silliness, and an intellectual masterpiece that can enrapture even the snobbiest of viewers.
I am writing on behalf of Sunrise Middlebury, a chapter of the national Sunrise Movement youth climate activist group. We would like to express our support for Senate bill S.148, an act relating to environmental justice in Vermont. The bill will establish a framework that will guide and stimulate action on long-term work in the fight against climate change, initiating larger conversations about environmental justice. Marginalized communities in Vermont should not only be represented, but specifically addressed, within Vermont’s environmental policy. Senator Ram Hinsdale’s S.148 does exactly this by focusing on housing, food, transportation and other environmental inequalities experienced by economically and racially disadvantaged communities.
“Beautiful world, where are you?” is the title of Sally Rooney’s third novel and the question that the protagonists ask as they re-evaluate themselves and their place in an increasingly troubled society. “Beautiful World, Where Are You” follows Alice, a successful but unstable novelist who has recently moved to the Irish coast, and her college best friend Eileen, who works a low-paying job at a literary magazine in Dublin. Throughout the novel, we see Eileen reconnect with a childhood friend, Simon, and Alice begin dating Felix, who works at a nearby warehouse.
Tanya Tagaq is a songwriter, artist, activist and author born in Nunavut, Canada. Her vocal style draws heavily on Inuit throat singing, known as katajjaq, a game played by two women sitting face-to-face and a cultural practice she experienced while growing up. Tagaq developed her own solo throat singing technique out of necessity when she found herself without a singing partner during young adulthood. She uses this skill to create passionate, genre-defying music, as experienced on her 2016 album “Retribution.” The songs on “Retribution” flow seamlessly into one another, combining this ancient art form with avant-garde sonic experimentation. The album’s sound is also deeply rooted in collaboration, featuring contributions from many other Canadian and Indigenous performers. At its core is a call for awareness of Indigenous rights and an end to environmental destruction, interrelated causes that Tagaq has advocated for throughout her career.
Applause. Deafening, thunderous applause resonated through Robinson Hall, as the crowd called for an encore. On Thursday, Nov. 11, the Middlebury Center for the Arts was graced by the presence of the Schumann Quartet and famous chamber musician and Middlebury affiliate artist Diana Fanning. The Schumann Quartet features siblings Erik and Ken Schumann on the violin, their brother Mark on the cello, and Liisa Randalu on the viola. The group stepped proudly onto the stage to perform in what they view as a metaphorical “dropping of masks, a true display of vulnerability.”
Out of sight, out of mind. That’s what most of us think about our garbage. But what really happens when we throw something away? And who are the people that help reduce our impact on the environment?
As the days get shorter and colder, many of us have found ourselves cranking up our heaters and switching our lights on earlier in the evenings. These are actions we don’t think about; they are subconscious and hold no moral standing. After all, we attend an institution renowned for its sustainability efforts, which are encapsulated in the rollout of Energy2028. So we as students, in theory, shouldn't have to consider our energy consumption to have any moral implications.
Representatives from Middlebury College joined Green Mountain Power, state representatives, developer Encore Renewable Energy and the town of Middlebury at a groundbreaking event on Oct. 12 for the college’s new solar installation project on South Street Extension, which will supply 30% of its total electricity usage as part of the Energy2028 initiative for 100% renewable energy at the college by 2028.
Bill McKibben, Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury, renowned environmentalist and co-founder of 350.org — the first global climate campaign of its kind — was joined by his 350.org co-founders to kick off this year’s Clifford Symposium. The Clifford Symposium occurs each year at the beginning of the fall semester, bringing scholars, faculty and students together around a relevant theme. It is named for former Professor of History Emeritus Nicholas R. Clifford, who taught at the college from 1966 to 1993. This year’s symposium, titled “Radical Implications: Facing a Planetary Emergency,” featured talks from experts, faculty and students that confronted questions about how to navigate a world actively undergoing a climate crisis. The event featured several keynote speakers, including adrienne maree brown, whose works, such as “Pleasure Activism: the politics of feeling good” and “We Will Not Cancel Us,” ask questions about transformative justice, using emotional empowerment as an organizing principle and radical imagination about the future. Sarah Jacquette Ray, another keynote speaker, spoke about climate anxiety and other powerful emotions sparked by climate change — why people feel them, how to overcome them and what can be done to empower oneself. Other keynote speakers included Jane McAlevey, Mary Annaïse Heglar and Julian Brave NoiseCat. Faculty and students also presented on the impact of the climate crisis on the academic experience. Giving the first talk of the symposium, Bill McKibben and other 350.org founders, including May Boeve ’06, Jeremy Osborn ’06, Phil Aroneanu ’06, Kelly Blynn ’07, Jon Warnow ’06, Will Bates ’06 and Jamie Henn ’07, gave advice on how to balance activism and being a college student. They reminisced about the early days of the organization — before climate justice was a central focus at Middlebury or considered an issue deserving of international attention. The project originated from Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies Jon Isham’s J-Term course about the threat of the climate crisis. Today, climate activism is a robust part of the Middlebury community, with student organizations like the Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG) and a Sunrise chapter boasting large memberships, among numerous other student environmental groups. The panel suggested that a reassessment of priorities might be in order for Middlebury students to address the climate crisis. According to the founders, Middlebury provides students with incredible resources, but the potential for change lies in how the students choose to leverage those resources and the prestige of a Middlebury degree. “Stay in school –– lower your GPA,” Osborn said. Other student questions centered around making a life for oneself during an ongoing global crisis. McKibben and the other panelists described the fight for justice as unrelenting and the strength to persevere as collective rather than individual. For the 350.org founders, Middlebury is a place with unmatched opportunities for young people to build those necessary relationships. Employment in climate-related fields — spanning from scientific research to media to politics — are numerous and more available to Middlebury alumni today than when the 350.org founders graduated, creating greater opportunities for young people to make fighting climate change a part of their futures. “[Today,] the climate movement is a lot larger, it’s a lot more diverse, and it pays a lot better than it used to,” said Aroneanu. Bill McKibben and the 350.org founders expressed to the audience that there are no limits in what the community can accomplish as Middlebury students. They urged students to look to opportunities like J-Term to provide them with the necessary time and focus for getting involved in climate activism. McKibben also urged students to look outside of Middlebury. Most talks are available as recordings to view on the Clifford Symposium website.
Welcome to the first installment of Spin Doctor, a biweekly dose of music reviews and recommendations by Yardena Carmi ’23. Our current culture seems to be defined by an ever-increasing ability to hyperfixate and obsess. If there is an actor or athlete you like, their life story is immediately accessible through Wikipedia and social media. Your crush from class is probably also on Instagram, where you can analyze their public life — where they go, who they see, their favorite snacks — at your leisure. What does it mean when we start using the same platforms and tools to study our idols as we do to interact with our friends? In 1956, psychologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term “parasocial relationship” to describe one-sided friendships forming between everyday people and the daytime TV hosts they had begun to identify with from afar. Six decades later, we have fandoms and cultures that exist entirely online, through which one’s desire and capacity to invest themselves in a stranger becomes something close to a way of life. In “Back of My Hand,” the first track on the album “Doomin’ Sun” from new indie group “Bachelor,” a celebrity crush becomes real life as the narrator hangs uneasily in a space somewhere between girlfriend and fan, love and codependency, unsure if she wants to actually date her hero or just wishes she could be her. The speaker begins to negate herself — holding back emotions, questioning her own thoughts, skipping meals and compromising herself in an attempt to better suit her new partner. Obsessive love is a core theme for Bachelor, a collaboration between two already well-established indie rockers, Palehound and Jay Som. According to the duo, they drew inspiration for their name from the hit reality dating show franchise. But in “Doomin’ Sun,” love isn’t all flowers and chocolate. Instead, it becomes blood, spiders, melted ice cream and lost sleep as the album’s loose narrative explores a romance that doesn’t live up to the infatuation that preceded it. Palehound and Jay Som emerged around the same time in the indie scene but on opposite coasts. On their own, both artists have been making some of the most refreshing and earnest indie rock and pop released in the past five or so years. Now united as Bachelor, they marry their respective gifts into a unique, collaborative sound. The raw, grungy guitar riffs on songs such as “Sand Angel” and “Anything at All” are signature Palehound. The infectious vocal and synth melodies have Jay Som’s distinctive pop-y touch, buoying tracks — such as the aforementioned “Back of My Hand” — that are otherwise emotionally devastating. Other songs, such as the riotous “Stay in the Car,” are lighter and more fun. The real-life friendship between the two musicians is a tangible element of the album’s sound (and can be seen in the colorful and campy music videos Bachelor has released). They even include sound bites of themselves goofing around in the studio. Having lived, however, through the part of the 2010s where it seemed like everyone and their mom (ahem, SZA) was putting voicemails in their music, nothing snaps me out of the zone harder than random dialogue tacked on to the end of a song. I could have done without these production easter eggs, cute as they are, popping up in key spots like the album’s halfway point, right after the icily beautiful mental breakdown of “Spin Out.” Lyrics have always been a strength in the artists’ past work. Jay Som and Palehound both write with the directness of a journal entry. As Bachelor, the duo’s lyrics are mantra-like in their repetition and simplicity. Songs like “Went Out Without You” and “Aurora” have a meditative quality to their hushed refrains. At the same time, the writing on this album is an unflinching look at desire and power dynamics in a relationship between two women as it sours. Full disclosure, I fell in love with this project from the moment I heard Bachelor’s hard-hitting first single (and stand out track on the full album) “Anything at All,” which combines terrifying lyrics with a driving guitar line and cathartic vocals, but not every song on the album is as effective. The album closer and title track “Doomin Sun,” for example, doesn’t quite hit home with its abrupt thematic pivot to climate change (somehow, one of the most cheerful songs on this album). Overall, however, Bachelor’s first LP is cohesive, both introspective and playful, and musically-compelling enough for heavy listening. It holds up not just as music, but also as satisfying storytelling and an exciting development in the indie music world.
“How crazy would it be if a bee flew into your mouth while you were eating?” Charlie Reinkemeyer ’21.5 asked his friends over breakfast outside Proctor. When Reinkemeyer stood up with a yelp and announced that he’d just been stung, his friends thought he was joking. But the wasp that had alighted on the piece of fruit he was eating, dodging his gnashing jaws to jab the soft flesh on the inside of his cheek, was deadly serious. Reinkemeyer is one of the latest in a long line of the wasps’ victims. Each fall, returning students are greeted by swarms of the black and yellow bugs outside of the dining halls descending on anyone who dares to eat outside. The picnic tables buzz with students complaining about the insects’ presence, debating whether they are bees or wasps and speculating as to why the college isn’t doing more to deal with them. The Campus reached out to Middlebury’s bug experts for answers. The bugs that swarm the dining halls are primarily yellowjacket wasps, easily identifiable by their thin waist, which allows them to swing their abdomen forward and sting in front of their bodies as well as behind, an important defensive feature, according to Assistant Professor of Biology Greg Pask, who studies insect neurobiology. Yellowjackets can sting multiple times, unlike bees. However, each sting comes with a high energy cost, so wasps tend to reserve their venom for defensive purposes. Grabbing or swatting yellowjackets are good ways to get stung — as is being unlucky enough to trap one between your skin and clothes, or in your mouth. Yellowjackets are especially territorial when it comes to protecting their nests. They sense approaching threats both by vibrations and by smelling exhaled carbon dioxide. A careful person can approach a wasp nest and study it at close range without getting attacked, as long as they hold their breath. Only female wasps have stingers, which are actually primarily egg-laying tubes through which they can inject venom when needed. The venom includes a pain-inducing neurotransmitter called acetylcholine that “activates pain neurons in the skin,” Pask said in an email to The Campus. A variety of other proteins cause the severe inflammation that follows. Entomologist Justin Schmidt let himself be stung by more than 80 varieties of insects to rate them on a pain scale in his book “The Sting of the Wild.” He gave the yellowjacket sting a two out of four, the same as most bee varieties, and described it as producing an “instantaneous, hot, burning, complex pain” that “lasts unabated for about two minutes, after which it decreases gradually over the next couple of minutes, leaving us with a hot, red, enduring flare to remind us of the event in case our memory should fade.” While yellowjacket wasps may bug Middlebury students, they are popular with local farmers. They prey on bugs like biting flies, caterpillars and other pests that plague crops and gardens. Though not to the same degree as bees, they do occasionally drink nectar and pollinate plants as well. Worker wasps bring the protein back to their nests and feed it to the larvae. The larvae consume the insects’ flesh, digest it and secrete a sugary substance that the adult wasps then eat. This time of year, when the summer is ending and the wasps’ natural food sources are diminishing, sweet treats from the dining hall are extra appealing. Yellowjacket wasps have a keen sense of smell, and their antennae are covered with powerful scent receptors similar to nostril hairs. Yellowjackets are social insects and will communicate the location of food to their nest-mates by transferring the odor cue to their antenna. Then they will search out the source of the odor together, which often brings them to the dining halls on warm days when hundreds of students bring their meals outside. Pask said the wasp swarms on campus are likely to worsen for future generations of students. With climate change extending the summer season, the wasps will hang around longer and multiply even more fruitfully. If conditions are good, a queen can lay 50 eggs a day, and a mature nest can host anywhere between 2,000 to 4,000 wasps. Facilities staff try to remove wasps when they are a nuisance, like the yellowjackets that populate the area outside the dining halls, but there’s not much they can do if they can’t find their nests. Yellowjackets can forage as far as a mile from their nests. They are primarily ground nesters, and their colonies can often be found at the base of trees, under porches or even in cracks in the sidewalks. They also seek out spaces between walls, and college horticulturalist Tim Parsons said he removed one nest from between the two window panes of one unfortunate student’s dorm room. Depending on the year, the landscape team might remove anywhere between 10 and 30 bee and wasp nests a week, often by suctioning them out with a shop vacuum. This year, though, they are struggling. Over-enrollment is stretching their already-limited resources even thinner. The landscape team is severely understaffed. They’re missing one out of their standard roster of 14, and they were only able to hire one out of the normal five seasonal workers they bring on for the busy fall time. They are now examining options to contract out wasp removal to relieve the burden on the limited workers, according to Parsons. Wasp season should end in the next few weeks, before the time of the first frost. Before they die, the male wasps — “flying sperm packets” with little use beyond reproduction, according to Pask — will mate with future queens. The fertilized females will fatten up to “hibernate” over the winter before leaving the nest to form their own colonies next spring. In the meantime, Parsons said it's best to “leave them be, no pun intended,” and hope you don’t have Reinkemeyer’s extraordinary bad luck. Since his unfortunate experience, Reinkemeyer has taken to eating his meals indoors. If the weather is particularly nice, he might be tempted to brave the wasps and eat outside. But he’ll be carefully inspecting any food he puts in his mouth from now on. Correction: A previous version of this article contained the wrong credit for the drawing of the wasps. The artist is Pia Contreras.
After a two-year hiatus, Senator Bernie Sanders returned to the annual Labor Day Rally on Middlebury’s Town Green last Monday, Sept. 6. The event also included speeches from Congressman Peter Welch, Bill McKibben, Dr. Deborah Richter, Iris Hsiang, and Jubilee McGill. The speakers highlighted the current challenges that Vermont faces, from labor shortages to rising healthcare costs. Middlebury was the final stop on Monday for Sanders, who also held meetings in Springfield, Newport, St. Johnsbury, and Brattleboro earlier in the weekend. “I didn’t know there were this many people in Middlebury,” Sanders joked as he took the stage. Sanders spoke to a large crowd of community members, touching on climate change, Covid-19, housing issues, and childcare and education costs. The senator accordingly emphasized the current Democratic legislative agenda, as the party looks to pass a $3.5 trillion spending plan with razor-thin majorities in Congress. “We have issue after issue after issue,” Sanders said. “We must look these problems in the eyes, and not only can we solve them, [but] we can move this country and our world to a much better place.” Sanders spoke first on the American Rescue Plan, which was passed in March to address economic fallout from Covid-19. Sanders discussed the resulting decline in poverty and other points of progress, emphasizing the persistence of small businesses like those that line Middlebury’s downtown. Sanders also addressed current work in Congress, including moving forward with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF) and other initiatives supported by President Biden. Some of the other speakers at the rally addressed one of the issues closely tied to Sanders platform: climate change. Bill McKibben, a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College, then praised Sen. Sanders and credited his 2016 presidential bid for awakening a progressive reckoning in the country. Iris Hsiang, a youth member of Vermont’s climate council and high school student, delivered a speech that stressed the intersectionality within climate change issues and the need to combat those challenges individually in order to combat climate change as a whole.
The Faculty and Staff section focuses on increasing hiring equity, training new and existing faculty and staff in DEI practices, and building community among new hires to increase retention. Many view it as an important first step in an ongoing process that requires much deeper and continual institutional change. Of the 11 strategies included in the section, 10 have been completed or involve ongoing programs that are underway, although two programs have been temporarily put on hold because of the pandemic. Only one strategy, the term for which begins this year, is still in development. HIRING One of the major pillars of the section is hiring more BIPOC faculty and staff and those from other “historically underrepresented groups.” The college has historically struggled to hire a more diverse staff because most are recruited from the overwhelmingly white communities surrounding Middlebury, according to Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández. Almost 93% of Addison County residents are white. Resistance to diversifying the faculty body often comes from the perception of diversity and qualifications being opposing qualities, according to Associate Professor of Political Science Kemi Fuentes-George. “You tend to see a lot of language about [how] what we need are the most qualified people, and that usually gets taken to be an argument against seeking diversity,” he said. “There's this kind of equation of, if you're orienting around a diversity hire, by definition, you're not seeking qualified people.” Of the 329 current faculty members, 57, or 17%, identify as belonging to a minority ethnic or racial group, according to Dean of Faculty Sujata Moorti. While there is a formal hiring freeze for faculty and staff, the college is filling limited positions that were planned before the pandemic or are needed on an urgent basis. Faculty and staff search committees now receive DEI training (Strategy #3 and #4), and job candidates are asked to include their own experience with inclusive practices in their application as a measure to assess their “multicultural competence” (Strategy #5). New employee orientations now include workshops on diversity, equity and inclusion, though the college has not offered staff orientations — which normally happen periodically as opposed to the the once-a-year faculty orientation — during the hiring freeze (Strategy #6), according to Director of Education for Equity and Inclusion Renee Wells. The college has also approved a staff position to help with partner inclusion, and Moorti is currently working with the Educational Affairs Committee to see if an institution-wide policy is possible (Strategy #2). RETENTION A second large part of the section is an attempt to improve conditions for faculty and staff from historically marginalized communities. As part of Strategy #11, the college has developed exit interview questions “related to campus climate… to identify and address barriers to retention.” Moorti hopes that, over time, these interviews can inform the administration on how to improve the climate for remaining faculty. Faculty and staff say that some of the current barriers to retention are not feeling supported by the college and academia as a whole, the extra — often uncompensated — burden of advocating for students and not feeling a sense of belonging in the community. The plan addresses some of these areas, but critically does not include provisions for others. Measures to support incoming faculty hires have been put on pause because of the pandemic. The OEIDI has not been able to host social networking opportunities for faculty from historically underrepresented communities (Strategy #10) or DEI workshops in departments expecting new hires (Strategy #8) but are looking forward to bringing those back next year. The college has been able to expand mentoring opportunities for new and junior faculty from historically underrepresented groups. In addition to regular departmental mentoring, the college has purchased membership with the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (Strategy #9), which provides resources for development, training and mentorship. The college will also be expanding mentorship and development opportunities available through the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity this summer. Moorti hopes that junior faculty will be able to avail themselves of this resource for more support and networking opportunities. Measures like these have been crucial for retaining current BIPOC faculty despite the struggles they face. “One of the primary reasons that I stayed at Middlebury … was that I found my community,” Fuentes-George said. “I found people who were supportive and who mentored me, some of whom had tenure, some of whom didn't, some of whom were in my department, some of whom weren't, and it pretty clearly underlined to me how important those kinds of social networks can be.” Still, these measures are designed primarily to build support for incoming faculty and staff members and do little to address the underlying conditions current faculty members face. Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric James Chase Sanchez views academia as a whole as a white space within which people of color can struggle to feel welcomed or valued, and Middlebury is no exception. That fact became abundantly clear to Fuentes-George after hearing his colleagues defend the invitation of Charles Murray to campus in 2017. Fuentes-George recalls other faculty members insisting that Murray was not racist, despite his claims that Black people — like Fuentes-George — and Latinos are genetically less intelligent. In the wake of Murray’s visit, Fuentes-George strongly considered leaving Middlebury. Both Fuentes-George and Chase Sanchez credit their luck in finding their own small communities at Middlebury as one of the major reasons they have stayed here, something they say can be difficult for many faculty of color. They both discussed how easy it is to feel isolated on a predominantly white campus in a predominantly white area. Chase Sanchez recalled visiting a restaurant in Bristol with a Black colleague. At one point, he looked up from his plate and idly scanned the room. To his surprise, he realized he was making eye contact with nearly everyone around him. They had been staring at him, and he felt suddenly acutely aware of how much he stood out as a Latino in an overwhelmingly white space. “There’s a little bit more of that uncomfortable nature of being a minority living within the community that is very, very white,” Chase Sanchez said. “All these variables can just build up pressure.” Admissions Counselor Maria Del Sol Nava ’18 has also struggled to feel completely welcome in the local community. “Middlebury has become a home for me because I have now been here for seven years (four as a student and three as a staff member), [but] I am keenly aware that I am a brown woman in a very white town,” she said in an email to The Campus. “There are many times when I don’t feel safe.” The reaction of other faculty and academia as a whole to the scholarship of BIPOC faculty also make some feel unsupported or valued at Middlebury. BIPOC faculty who do race-based research often see their work devalued in academia, where it is viewed more as activism than empirical inquiry and seen as contributing less to their fields than the development of theory, according to Chase Sanchez. In the wake of the Jan. 6 capitol riots, Fuentes-George led a class discussion about the racial motivations behind them. He was taken aback when one of his colleagues accused him of engaging in advocacy rather than real scholarship. He views that interaction as emblematic of “a number of practices, discourses and comments about personal relations and about how departments and institutions function that make it difficult for people of color to feel supported.” While faculty and staff from historically marginalized communities often do not feel valued or supported by Middlebury as an institution, they contribute significantly to the college — well beyond the scope of their positions. Many shoulder the extra burden of pushing for institutional change and advocating for marginalized students who turn to them for support, labor that is often uncompensated or not rewarded in performance reviews. “[I feel] a social responsibility for the other first-gen and underrepresented students that I meet and worked with,” Del Sol Nava said in an email to the Campus. “[I take] on additional emotional labor that my white colleagues do not take on, or do not to the same extent.” Fuentes-George serves on the Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (CDEI) and is also a Posse mentor. He also frequently provides informal mentoring and support for BIPOC students who turn to him for advice in navigating through Middlebury and has worked to spearhead change within his department — labor that is uncompensated. “These are things that I do feel passionate about doing,” Fuentes-George said. “But the reality is that it takes a lot of time and energy, and it's also emotionally taxing.” Del Sol Nava hopes that the school works toward being a place where such sacrifices don’t need to be made. “I think we can imagine more for ourselves as an institution so that our BIPOC staff and faculty don’t feel burdened with being the ones who have to create change or be the only ones who support the students who want to make change,” she said. At the same time that the extra, uncompensated advocacy work drains faculty and staff of color, it’s also a major reason why some stay despite the institutional challenges they face. “There are a lot of students I didn’t want to leave alone,” said Fuentes-George “I didn’t want them to just be here with one less voice to advocate. There’s few enough for them already, so [I decided] to stay here and advocate for them.” Supporting BIPOC students also animates Chase Sanchez’s work, especially in light of his own experiences trying to navigate through a predominantly white college as a Latino student. When Chase Sanchez told his advisor — who was white — that he wanted to become a professor, Chase Sanchez recalls him replying, “Someone like you wanting to be a professor is what makes someone like me laugh.” Chase Sanchez turned his advisor’s doubt into motivation and worked triply hard to prove that he belonged in academia despite what his advisor thought. But he knows this kind of experience can set other students back or discourage them from pursuing their original goals altogether. This year’s Zeitgeist survey found that BIPOC students reported feeling imposter syndrome — “the experience of doubting one’s abilities and feeling like a fraud” — at a significantly higher rate than their white peers. “I remember what it feels like to have no one believe in you,” Chase Sanchez said. “I always want to help other people going through that, because it's a very tough space to navigate.” TRAINING While the advocacy of BIPOC faculty and staff and the promise to increase institutional diversity are crucial to students from underrepresented groups feeling supported, Del Sol Nava emphasized that the practices of the entire staff and faculty body must shift. “I think more students at Middlebury would feel more supported if they saw more people who looked like them, but that doesn’t mean that is the only step we take,” she said in an email to The Campus. “It also means teaching our current faculty and staff to learn and unlearn how to make students feel more comfortable.” Wells hopes that the Inclusive Practitioners Program (Strategy #7) will help usher in the culture change necessary to shift people’s practices and reform the institution in the long run. The program, launched in the fall of 2019, consists of a series of workshops within which faculty and staff “engage in critical conversations and skill building related to diversity equity and inclusion.” “It is about creating the kind of critical awareness that builds people’s skills and capacity to actually change their practices,” Wells said. “It's about developing your ability to actually change what you're doing and how you're doing it in ways that create more access, and opportunity, and equity and inclusion.” While many of the workshops have focused specifically on race in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Wells has begun reincorporating other workshops in the series with topics that range from “Designing Accessible Course Syllabi” to “Knowing and Respecting Who's in the Room: A Guide to Using Gender Pronouns.” “They were really valuable,” Food and Garden Educator Megan Brakeley, who has attended eight workshops, said. “I think that part of the power of doing this work is the power of it being done in community. There's so much that can happen when we are literally sitting in the same room.” Partly inspired by the lessons she’s learned in those workshops as well as through the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Brakeley has worked to make antiracism a cornerstone of her job at the Knoll, including reevaluating the organic farm’s mission statement, learning to identify and address harm as it happens and holding BIPOC affinity gardening hours. Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Mez Baker-Médard has attended 10 Inclusive Practitioners workshops and incorporated the lessons they have learned, including redesigning their course material to include more diverse voices and “bringing a lens of power onto the work” they are doing. “I think it's opened my eyes to a variety of ways in which I can really work on this in the classroom, and there are just so many ways that I can be thoughtful and more nuanced,” they said. “Engaging in that way, it's kind of an act of appreciation and respect for my students, and myself, as well as my own ignorances.” The workshops are optional to ensure that those who attend want to be there and are willing to put in the work. But it does mean that participants are self-selecting and the staff and faculty who might benefit the most from this education often never show up, according to Wells. While the Inclusive Practitioner Program aims to increase awareness and proper practices in and beyond the classroom, the DEI plan does not address the curriculum or broad pedagogical reform at an institution-wide level, steps Associate Professor of Education Studies and CDEI Chair Tara Affolter views as crucial for the next action plan. In the meantime, the initiatives in the plan are supplemented by the work of the Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (CDEI), a body for faculty governance on DEI issues formed this year. They created a grant program for academic programs and departments to “find structural ways to engage in anti-racist work” and awarded grants to three departments — Luso-Hispanic Studies, Educations Studies and Economics — this year, according to Affolter. MOVING FORWARD All those interviewed for this article emphasized that, while they were optimistic about the potential for the DEI strategies and other current initiatives, they are only the start in a long road towards reforming the college. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” Baker-Médard said. “The landscape of learning and teaching needs to shift as society shifts.” Despite the uphill and prolonged battle ahead of them, most expressed a feeling of hope for the future of Middlebury. “I’m definitely hopeful,” Fuentes-George said. “If I thought that there was no hope I probably would have left.”
“The rich will find their world to be more expensive, inconvenient, uncomfortable, disrupted and colorless; in general, more unpleasant and unpredictable, perhaps greatly so. The poor will die,” Kirk R. Smith, an environmental scientist, said of the coming impacts of climate change on the world. While some complain about quarantining, self-isolation and staying “one panther apart,” many of us are not as lucky to be able to have those privileges. Within our own community, we are all impacted, but in disproportionate ways. Who can say that the person who just passed by you in the hall isn’t facing food or housing insecurity, exacerbated by the pandemic? Or perhaps the person who sits beside you in class has recently had a family member pass away from Covid-19. Yet the injustices brought on by Covid-19 are disproportionate not only at the small scale (person-to-person), but also clearly on a global scale in the way that some countries have more access to vaccines and tests than other countries. If anything, Covid-19 reveals the structural violence operating in society — violence that also inflicts victims of climate injustices. Structural violence can be used to explain why some people suffer more than others through acknowledgement of the historical, political and economic contexts that shape global phenomena as pertinent as poverty or epidemiology. According to Paul Farmer, “structural violence is violence exerted systematically — that is, indirectly — by everyone who belongs to a certain social order.” Public health is one area where structural violence operates most intensely. This is the case today, when many countries are struggling to tackle Covid-19 because of the lack of infrastructure or political issues such as the hoarding of vaccines and patent rights. In the case of India, a new variant of the virus led to soaring death tolls and hospitals faced shortages of oxygen, medicine and space. Although many news outlets blame the government's lack of capacity to contain the spread of disease, the situation might in fact be caused by structural violence and the deep inequalities it imposes between and within countries. Within the country itself, vast inequalities exist between people, whether between the people in slums and the people living in lavish skyscrapers or between people of different castes. “A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught,” Abdul Husain, a teenager living in the Annawadi slum of Mumbai, said in the book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” Unable to “work from home” or quarantine within the confines of pristine walls, Abdul and others in the dense Annawadi slum must have been some of the people most direly impacted by Covid-19. India is a periphery in the global system, a country once colonized by Britain. The British used a system of divide and rule to conquer, leaving India with even greater social and economic inequalities following independence. After colonization ended, the Green Revolution brought by the United States wreaked havoc to India as it caused environmental damage, the loss of soil fertility and the loss of farmers’ livelihoods. This led many farmers, unable to repay debts, to commit suicide. Increasing market liberalization imposed by richer countries has caused increasing economic inequality, including the growth of the Mumbai slum population — those who, according to the government, have been “lifted out of poverty.” Surely, India’s response to the pandemic today cannot be understood without considering these historical, political and economic contexts of India’s past and present — without understanding structural violence. Similarly, understanding climate injustices requires an explanation that considers structural violence. Covid-19 itself was likely the result of climate change and its associated problems, particularly the expansion of human settlement and the consequences of our intrusion of wildlife. In terms of the response to climate change, the countries which were once colonizers are most equipped to respond to the effects of climate change. Yet this will happen at the expense of the lives of those in the periphery, as money spent on mitigating climate change issues is not spent on issues of poverty, disease, hunger and disasters of poor countries. Within our own community, perhaps the richest and luckiest among us will be able to move to the places in the country that are safe from environmental turmoil in the future, while others must weather through zones of uncertainty — perhaps even watch their own home sink. Is that fair? Where is the justice in being forced to leave your home? Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia and my birthplace, is predicted to sink in the future. By 2050, 95% of North Jakarta’s land mass will be underwater. This is because of the increasing strain on water sources, which has caused groundwater levels to diminish. The problem of overcrowding is overshadowed by rising sea levels from climate change. The overcrowding of the capital city is inevitable. After all, there is rampant inequality throughout the country in terms of facilities, services and resources offered — yet another form of structural violence. The effect, though, is that Jakarta is polluted, perpetually jammed with traffic, littered, water-stressed and, in the future, at risk of disappearing altogether. Again, I ask, what is the justice in being forced to leave your home? What will happen to the people who have barely anything to start anew? There are many other places like Jakarta in the world — island countries like Kiribati, Tuvalu and Maldives — that will no longer be. Where will their people go? If they become climate refugees, what of the affront to their personhood and dignity, since the land they call their country no longer exists? Even now, the issue of pollution from transnational companies seeking to minimize their profits and outsource costs hurt people in periphery countries most, where environmental regulations are lax and labor cheap. The consequence is the jeopardization of human health, as those living in polluted, toxic areas have higher risks for various illnesses like cancer. These types of problems are considered wicked problems, a term used to describe issues that lack clear solutions and cannot be solved through trial and error. Facing these wicked problems, the question that surely arises is what can we, as Middlebury students, do about it? Perhaps the answer is to build more empathy. Though these problems seem insurmountably difficult to solve, we have strength in our ability to feel. It is easy to forget that the injustices inflicted by Covid-19 or climate change are affecting real people with real lives and families. But there are students even within our community who can speak on the disparity between Middlebury and their home (read “The Storm of the COVID Crisis in Brazil” by Zaba Peixoto). How can we build empathy? Practically speaking, students from my environmental anthropology class have suggested several ideas: an annual forum on climate injustice, making climate literacy (or another globally relevant topic) a distribution requirement or even offering full-ride scholarships for climate refugees. It is not enough for the college to ask students to come up with solutions to deeply systemic issues. Such a method is neoliberal, making these issues seem like a game or another achievement that we as individuals need to choose to accomplish. Systemic issues entail systemic solutions; they also require utmost cooperation and a strong, empathetic community. Hamia Sophia Fatima is a member of the class of 2024.