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(10/22/20 9:59am)
It’s March 10, 2020. At around 1:30 p.m., Middlebury students received word to pack their suitcases in preparation for an early spring break. It was around 7:30 p.m. in Stockholm, Sweden. As texts rolled in from frantic friends back on campus, I stood among a roaring crowd of over 5,000 Swedish hockey fans.
“Are you coming home? We just got the official email,” a friend texted. “Nah I’m still here, we’re still going strong,” I sent back. “The Swedish government is pretty chill right now, luckily.” Luckily. I thought I had nothing to worry about. 48 hours later, I was on a plane home.
In the wake of Sweden’s controversial approach to battling Covid-19 through “herd immunity,” I’ve reflected on my Covid-19-shortened semester abroad in Sweden’s capital city of Stockholm. I hope that my perspective of Sweden’s response from right before the pandemic can shed a light on Sweden’s widely covered response over the last seven months.
Especially when — after being completely asymptomatic — I would later test positive for Covid-19 antibodies.
A product of your own environment
When I arrived in Stockholm in January, Covid-19 was making its way through China and beginning its slow but steady global spread. It wasn’t until the Milanese outbreak in Italy in mid-February that most of the West began to wake up to the potential threat of a worldwide pandemic.
Even as President Trump downplayed the threat of the virus in the United States, Americans were nevertheless starting to learn the basics of social distancing and other measures that we’ve grown to know all too well. This was not happening for Swedes; it was from my parents over FaceTime that I first heard about the idea of social distancing. Life in Sweden faced no interruption, and thus neither did my daily routine. Classes, public transit and every business in the city were still running as normal. I was a product of my own environment.
The Italian outbreak was my first wakeup call. In Italy, Middlebury shut down its schools abroad, sending home friends from Middlebury and others in the program in late February. My roommate in Stockholm, Jacob, was traveling in Milan during that outbreak. When he returned, we convinced our program that he should quarantine. “We are not expecting to see new cases of Covid-19,” said Dr. Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s Dr. Fauci, after Sweden’s second confirmed case on Feb. 27. “It is important to remember that there is a difference between individual cases and the spread of infection in society. That is not taking place in Sweden.” That assertion would not hold for long.
Testing
Let’s first use testing as an early case study of Sweden’s response. Sweden’s cases per capita has remained on par with much of Europe despite its more open approach. One reason for Sweden’s apparent success at first glance might be a skew in the numbers. Here in the US, testing for Covid-19 is increasingly available, albeit with a significant delay, to those with or without symptoms. In Sweden, it remains difficult today to get a test without either being hospitalized or showing recognizable symptoms.
When Jacob, my roommate who traveled to Milan, returned to Sweden in early March, my other roommate and I vacated the room so he could quarantine for two weeks. Yet, it took a week and a half of constant contact with public health authorities to authorize his test. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who expressed she likely had contracted the virus during her travels around the continent during the late winter, was unable to get a test herself in the spring due to similar reasons and standards. Even today, the Public Health Agency’s guidance on voluntary quarantine states, “If for some reason you have been tested despite not having symptoms, the seven days start from the day you had the test.” I think we can agree that “if for some reason” countries are not testing asymptomatic people potentially exposed to Covid-19, they’re not doing enough testing.
Sweden vs. the United States
To understand Sweden’s lax response to Covid-19, it is also crucial to understand how it is one based on qualities so ingrained Swedish culture. These qualities make the Swedish model difficult to directly compare with a chaotic “herd immunity” method of the US, but we can still compare their basic differences.
Sweden is built on an intense trust in their welfare state, as is crucial in any social democracy, which is palpable in Swedish society. Swedes entrust the state to provide them with free healthcare, education, generous unemployment and many other benefits in exchange for high rates of taxes.
This trust has defined Sweden’s response to Covid-19. With its lack of any sort of national lockdown, Sweden stands almost alone with its approach to confronting the Covid-19 pandemic.
So how has Sweden attempted to confront the virus? The short answer: lagom. A term in Swedish meaning “not too much, not too little,” lagom is a balancing concept found in nearly every part of Swedish daily norms from work hours to alcohol consumption. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Sweden has tried, and failed to find a point of lagom.
In the spring, they closed universities, banned social gatherings larger than 50 people and encouraged the elderly and the at-risk to isolate themselves. However, restaurants and other shops remained open and few steps were taken to discourage people from public interaction. Swedish primary and secondary schools remained open and compulsory to attend — it is still illegal to homeschool your children or keep them home from school for family or personal reasons. Social distancing is encouraged, but few masks are worn.
Many conservatives in the United States, including the President, have pointed to Sweden as an effective example of Covid-19 mitigation largely free of state-wide lockdowns and masks. Here in the United States, lockdowns, masks and many public health guidelines have been unnecessarily and dangerously politicized. We’ve learned all too well that one’s feelings about each of these safety measures are the product of one’s environment, culture and political leanings.
In the U.S., small government libertarians pointed to Sweden as a reason to lift these lockdowns and the far right spent months protesting social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders. This is an errant comparison for two reasons. First, they fail to recognize that the very example they reference relies instead on more government trust and influence, and, second, occurs in a far smaller country with a population largely centered in only three major cities.
The depoliticized Public Health Agency in Sweden trusts the population to adhere to basic guidelines and have Swedes trust one another to do the right thing. The approach of “herd immunity,” which has not been specifically endorsed by name by the agency, hopes the virus spreads at lagom: slow enough to not overwhelm the healthcare system.
However, Swedish deaths per capita nearly match the tragic levels seen in the United States. Sweden’s nursing homes were decimated in the early stages of the virus, the main source of its nearly 6.000 deaths, a substantial number in a country of only 10 million. In Sweden, around 90% of its deaths are from those 70 or older; 95% are of those 60 or older. In the US, on the other hand, around 57% of deaths are 75 or older and 79% are 65 or older. Sweden’s overall health has spared more younger people from death than in the US, but the results are nevertheless tragic for its elderly population.
Additionally, despite keeping much of the economy open, Sweden’s economy was hit even harder than its Nordic neighbors that locked down. Sweden’s GDP fell 8.3% in the second quarter, compared with 6.8% in Denmark and 5.1% in Norway. Even if a restaurant or store is open, people’s behavior still changes in a pandemic.
Where do we go from here?
In June, my dad and I both tested positive for Covid-19 antibodies. After seeing how remarkably similar Sweden’s approach looked to my experience in March, I decided to get tested along with my father, who was still commuting through the middle of Times Square only weeks before the New York outbreak began to emerge. Even after my antibody test, I continued (and still continue) to follow precautions amidst the risk of a false positive test or even of reinfection. My father and I also can’t account for the unknown long term health effects that two healthy men may suffer going forward.
Sweden has sacrificed several thousand lives in exchange for a more open approach to tackling the disease. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven admitted in April that “[Sweden] will count the dead in thousands.” To their credit, Swedes are largely following health guidelines and keeping politics out of it. Cultural differences matter — this is a very Swedish strategy and is not something even remotely possible in the United States. The buy-in from Swedes is there, but the results are not. Sweden is far away from being anywhere close to “herd immunity,” and with no end in sight, the tradeoff is simply not worth the extra loss of life.
I did not expect to be part of the herd. When and if this pandemic reaches an end after months if not years of interruption, death and economic collapse, Sweden will not be standing above the fray. It will be right there in the middle of it.
Porter Bowman ’21.5 is an Opinion Editor for The Middlebury Campus.
(10/22/20 9:57am)
When I was born in 1971, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were 324 ppm — roughly consistent with where they had been for the last 100,000 years; roughly consistent with the environmental conditions that allowed our species to transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to stable civilizations that could domesticate livestock and crops; build cities; and create art, culture and science.
When I graduated from Middlebury in 1993, we were at 353 ppm.
Today, at the age of 49, we are over 410 ppm.
That’s a nearly 33% increase in my lifetime.
When I graduated from college, a Republican administration had just committed the country to an international agreement to set a price on chlorofluorocarbons through a system of tradable emissions permits in the Montreal Protocol. It was our expectation that the incoming Clinton administration would do the same for greenhouse gases in the Kyoto protocol. And yet it didn’t. Why?
Because politicians decided to punt the problem down the road and leave the generation of tomorrow to deal with the issues of today.
That’s not leadership, but it is politically understandable; after all, future generations don’t vote in the current election. And now that future is upon us.
In 2020, college-aged Americans are projected to make up 10% of the voting-age population. But, if historical voting trends continue, just 30–40% of them will vote. Conversely, more than 70% of voters over the age of 65 will vote.
If you ever wonder why politicians talk so much more about Social Security and Medicare than they do about climate change, that’s why.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]It is in your power to turn that around. But only if you vote.[/pullquote]
We are less than two weeks away from one of the most important elections of our lives. As we move closer and closer to the 2020 election, you must ask yourself:
Should we finally address climate change at a level that is scientifically necessary, or should we simply settle for that which we judge to be politically possible?
Should we address the economic inequities that have been borne so heavily by younger and minority communities, or should we prioritize tax cuts for the old and already wealthy?
Should we recognize the tolerance of your generation, who sees gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose as yesterday’s battles, or should we prioritize the values of those who still want to relitigate 1990s culture wars?
I know how I answer those questions, but too many of my colleagues will instead prioritize the interests of older, voting Americans over your generation.
There are nearly 20 million college students in the United States. You have an enormous amount of power. You have the ability to sway elections up and down the ballot. The 2018 midterm elections saw record turnout levels, and yet, a handful of congressional races were won or lost by less than 2% margins. This presidential election year, young people have the power to decide critical seats for the U.S. House and Senate.
Democracy is an amazing tool. But only if you use it.
Vote by November 3.
Sean Casten ’93 serves as the U.S. Representative for Illinois's 6th congressional district.
(10/08/20 10:00am)
Three months ago, we editorialized on the importance of working and thinking beyond the Instagram stories and Twitter trends revolving around performative anti-racist advocacy in the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and many more. “As protests and racial justice begin to leave the national discourse — our actions from this point onward are key in implementing concrete changes and forwarding genuine change,” the Editorial Board wrote in July.
Implementing these concrete changes at Middlebury — that dismantle structures of institutional racism and engender cultural shifts that decenter whiteness and white comfort — are more imperative and urgent than ever before. On Friday, Sept. 25, just hours after more than 500 hundred students marched on College Park protesting the Breonna Taylor verdict, Rodney Adams ’21 and Jameel Uddin ’22 were accosted by two white students who referred to them using a racial slur. Then, on Thursday, the Political Science department in conjuction with the widely contentious Alexander Hamilton Forum sponsored a debate titled “1619 or 1776: Was America Founded on Slavery?”
It has been made painstakingly clear that Middlebury must come to reckon with our complicity in the occurrence of overt hate speech — but also grapple with how institutional recognition of certain events leads BIPOC students to question their place on this campus. We must also recognize for whom the consequences of such events have just been made clear, and who has always known such stark injustices to be apparent and normalized.
While many white students expressed shock and dismay in response to these incidents, entrenched racism on campus has always been a demoralizing reality for BIPOC students. For them, the use of explicit racial slurs, an academic climate that treats the lived experiences of BIPOC students as topical academic theories and the morally deficient outcomes of police brutality verdicts aren’t just unsurprising — they’re expected.
Students, in their own right, have a vital obligation to reach far beyond their aesthetic Instagram infographics to bridge this disconnect. And while holding our peers accountable day in and day out is critical, we cannot let the administration off the hook for the role they play in abetting racism on campus.
This summer, our inboxes were peppered with promises we have yet to see reach fruition, from the half-a-million dollars to support nebulous “anti-racist programming” to obscure plans for a new task force, a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) action plan and supposed initiatives at the board and trustee level. Students remain in the dark about these initiatives, and we urge the administration to double down on a much-needed sense of urgency that has appeared absent thus far.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]We cannot wait for an amorphous five-year plan to tackle racism on campus. We must see material steps being taken as soon as possible — not just ambiguous lip service directed towards students who require both answers and healing. [/pullquote]
These steps in question are not a mystery. The letter to President Patton published last week in The Campus by Adams and Kaila Thomas ’21, the organizer of the Breonna Taylor protest, outlined a myriad of definitive demands ranging from Black faculty and staff recruitment efforts and a comprehensive Black Studies program to a compensated body of Black students responsible for creating distinct anti-racist initiatives alongside the Senior Leadership Group.
It is becoming increasingly evident that Middlebury does not have a concrete framework for addressing the racism that is embedded in the fabric of our institution. The administration has not only lacked adequate clarity and urgency — they are also unprepared.
This dilemma draws a parallel with another serious aspect of Middlebury life that we have been considerably prepared for. When it comes to Covid-19, we have extensive infrastructure in place to tackle the general campus culture surrounding everyday actions. Conversations regarding Covid-19 safety and responsibility aren’t just encouraged, they’re unavoidable. From classrooms to residence halls to required trainings, Middlebury has ensured that this discourse has become a natural part of our daily lives.
But why is it can we not have the same all-encompassing focus on campus toward anti-racist work? Why have dialogues surrounding race and race-based advocacy been confined to a specific few while many — predominantly white — members of our community get to skate by? Why is it that some professors can choose to go the entire semester without once having to confront inequities in their own classrooms?
It is long past time that we as a community stop placing these conversations and actions on the back burner. We students have a lot of work to do, but we expect that the powers that be will meet us halfway. We can no longer afford to be surprised by manifestations of both structural and interpersonal racism at Middlebury, and we can no longer be complicit in enabling the circumstances that allow such manifestations to be perpetuated.
This editorial represents the opinions of the Middlebury Campus’s editorial board.
(10/08/20 10:00am)
Inspired by the role that sports have played in her life, Jamie Mittelman ’10 created a podcast celebrating female athletes who play at the highest level of competition: Olympians and Paralympians. The podcast, called “Flame Bearers,” is part of the Women in Power Conference, a student-run conference at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to “spark difficult conversations on how together, through leadership and policy, we can work to remove systemic barriers and elevate people of all genders to places of power.”
“Growing up, many of the hardest and most rewarding times of my life were on the [soccer] field, [the ski racing] mountain and on the track. Sport has been the wheelhouse in which I’ve had some of my greatest joys but also the home for embarrassing and cringe-worthy self-realizations,” Mittelman said.
Mittelman is on track to receive a Master’s of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, the public policy school at Harvard University. She first became involved with the Women in Power Conference last year as a conference co-chair, a position she still holds. She began “Flame Bearers” to celebrate the triumphs and struggles of female-identifying Olympians by providing them with the opportunity to share the lessons they learned while becoming elite athletes.
On the podcast’s website, Mittelman discusses the struggles she experienced during her own athletic career on the Middlebury Women’s Soccer Team. “Before losing my dad to brain cancer, the single most challenging period of my life was when my obsessive-compulsive disorder paralyzed me during my college soccer experience, transforming the game from one of joy to one of constant anxiety and fear,” Mittelman said.
The hardships that accompany the intense commitment and training of a competitive athlete are often not discussed, Mittleman said. Playing at the highest level of competition is gratifying and rewarding, but the process to get there can be taxing and stressful. Being a top female athlete comes with its own host of decisions and stresses as women contend with issues such as social pressures on body image and the prospect of having children, among others.
Recognizing the highs and lows of sport is central to the goals of “Flame Bearers.” Mittelman hopes to create a space that celebrates both sides of being an athlete by normalizing discussions of the adversities that athletes — and women in particular — face.
In August, Mittelman interviewed two fellow Middlebury alumni, sisters Lea and Sabra Davison (’05 and ’07, respectively). Lea Davison is a two-time mountain biking Olympian and 2016 World Championship silver medalist. During the episode, she discusses her experiences as an openly gay cyclist as well as her work with Little Bellas, a mountain biking and mentorship nonprofit for girls that she cofounded with her sister. She spoke about showing up to under-18 races in her youth and seeing as many as 50 boys race each other, in contrast to only five girls competing. The Davison sisters decided this gap in participation had to change.
“We use mountain bikes as a kind of vehicle for empowering women and creating a welcoming space and community for our female mentors as well as our Little Bellas,” Lea Davison said. “Another factor motivating us to create Little Bellas was the fact that we didn’t see a lot of positive female role models out there, and so we wanted to give girls a selection of positive female role models to choose from.”
Athletics have continued to play a huge role in Mittelman’s life after leaving Middlebury; she completed the New York City marathon and received her yoga instructor certification. Despite her active involvement in athletics, Mittelman expresses that she still feels “athletically unqualified” to host the podcast. She makes a clear distinction between her athletic experience and the intense, life-long training of an Olympian.
“Sport has been one of my greatest teachers, and given the many more hours these athletes have dedicated to perfecting crafts than I had, I know that the lessons they’ve gleaned will be that much more powerful,” Mittelman said.
With the cancellation of the 2020 Summer Olympics, “Flame Bearers” is even more important, as it provides a platform for these athletes who have dedicated their lives to their sports. Mittelman expressed the importance her podcast holds in the current climate of the world as well.
“Our world is locked in a state of constant change and chaos, and people from all corners of the world are alone and in need of hope,” Mittelman said. “I want to create space for hope. These athletes carry their own Olympic torches, and I want to help illuminate their lights.”
(10/01/20 9:57am)
When campus closed for students last spring, Professor of Economics Caitlin Myers and Professor of Political Science Sarah Stroup — both on sabbatical at the time — began looking for ways to keep people academically connected. From their collaboration, the Faculty at Home Series emerged.
The Faculty at Home Series, a webinar-style lecture series open to the public, premiered on April 22 and has continued into the fall. Each session features a lecture by a Middlebury faculty member, followed by a brief Q&A moderated by Stroup or Myers. Since April, the series has featured twenty lecturers presenting on topics ranging from food systems’ transformation to Frankenstein. Attendees register online and then receive a Zoom link to join the live talk.
Stroup and Myers envisioned the series as a way to create a virtual public sphere where academic conversations could resume after the closure of the campus. The program received funding from the Engaged Listening Project, a “faculty training program with a focus on techniques to better engage students with controversial topics” led by Stroup, which had independent grant money at its disposal, specifically to support work in the digital space.
In partnership with the Office of Advancement, the series emphasizes connection with the broader Middlebury community, including alumni, parents and other friends of the college. The series also acts as an adaptation of the Faculty on the Road series, wherein similar programming is offered in cities across the country, according to Associate Vice President for Alumni and Parent Programs Meg Storey Groves ’85. Myers says that the Faculty at Home series is more accessible by nature. Since its start, the series has had 2,500 unique attendees from 49 states and 43 countries.
Spring and summer lectures have included as broad-ranging topics as “The perils of being black in public: A conversation with Carolyn Finney,” “Diagnosing Dissent: Soldiers and Psychiatry in Germany from WWI to the Nazi Era” and “Assessing coral reef resilience to thermal stress in the face of climate change.”
“It was a dream come true. For us to have this way of engaging in a really robust way was incredible,” Groves said.
Groves has received a number of messages from participants expressing their gratitude for and excitement about the series. In addition to being of value to the community as a whole, she sees the series as being mutually beneficial and rewarding for attendees and lecturers alike.
Professor of Political Science Bert Johnson says that the series offers attendees a distinct scholarly perspective of phenomena that they may not get from the daily news cycle, while simultaneously providing a platform for the scholars themselves.
“It’s important for scholars to be able to communicate with the broader interested public, and to be able to explain why we think what we think, why what we are observing is sometimes different than what you might see in the media or in other popular conversations,” Johnson said. “We offer a different perspective than what you get in the day to day.”
The talks also give current students a glimpse into the Middlebury community out in the world, which can be hard to conceptualize while attending the Vermont campus, according to Johnson. The next talk will be on October 16, featuring Assistant Professor of Film & Media Culture Natasha Ngaiza. It is entitled “‘Black Lives Matter’ and Abortion at the Movies.” Recordings of all previous lectures can be found at go/facultyathome.
(10/01/20 9:56am)
Student MiddView orientation leaders, prepared to introduce first years to Middlebury and help them bond, were surprised to find that they were expected to facilitate conversations about race and prejudice this semester. After widespread criticism from BIPOC student leaders, staff organizers apologized and said that the plans were never finalized, retracting the proposed programming.
Student leaders pointed out that they had received no training on the subject except for a mandatory microaggressions workshop led by Director of Education for Equity and Inclusion Renee Wells, which some criticized as being centered around white students. Wells later apologized for the shortcomings of the presentations.
This summer, the team of three Student Activities Office (SAO) staff members who organize the MiddView orientation program each year prepared a new format in anticipation of an orientation week heavily altered by Covid-19 restrictions. Orientation leaders are typically tasked with leading three-day trips and facilitating bonding between their groups of first years; this year, they met twice-daily in groups of 10 to 12, with some interacting in person and others convening virtually.
MiddView leaders felt unsure of the specifics of orientation prior to their arrival for training on campus, according to Suria Vanrajah ’22, who led a MiddView group this fall.
“In one of the first few days we got a list of daily agendas of things to do with the first years,” she said. “Some of the days it was talking about the honor code; it was talking about drinking, drugs, and there was one day where they wanted us to talk about race, primarily in the context of Black Lives Matter.”
Brittney Azubuike ’22, a first-time MiddView leader who organized affinity group lunches during orientation, said the conversation was planned for one of the first few days of orientation. She noted that this worried some leaders who had expected their role in orientation to be more like previous years, during which they had primarily been responsible for ensuring the safety of their group on trips and encouraging first years to connect with one another.
Though the college initially included the conversation about race — with the idea that it would be facilitated by student orientation leaders — it was eventually removed from the schedule after student leaders expressed concerns about lack of training, the burden it placed on leaders of color and the discomfort BIPOC first years might feel if the conversation were facilitated by a white MiddView leader.
“Even if you are a person of color, you're still not equipped to talk about [issues of race] in an institutional context, especially to first years, and, certainly, white leaders are not equipped to do that,” Vanrajah said.
The Student Activities Office (SAO) team had drafted guidelines for holding such conversations that were criticized by some MiddView student leaders. The original document was eventually deleted from the shared Google Drive to which all leaders had access.
“It was like, ‘Talk about racism because it's a very important topic right now.’ That wording was also problematic for a lot of people because it made it seem as if we're only bringing it up because it's on trend,” Azubuike said, describing the guidelines.
Azubuike said her herd leaders, the students who had served as MiddView leaders in the past and headed groups of leaders this fall, created a copy of the document with the guidelines in which they noted the features they saw as problematic.
Amanda Reinhardt, director of the SAO and one of the three staff members who organized MiddView, said that the group was still working to finalize many of the agendas and that the version that listed the conversation about race was still a work in progress.
“This summer, with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others, the national climate and just the injustice of all of that, it felt pertinent to hold space for that — not only pertinent but ethical, the right thing to do,” Reinhardt said.
She acknowledged that an all-white MiddView team — which included the three SAO staff members and two MiddView student interns — organized orientation, leading to oversights. She said they are working to change this in the future. Reinhardt also explained that the team had not spent enough time reviewing the phrasing and content of the daily agendas and guidelines that were available to leaders through the shared Google Drive.
“We weren't ready, as a team, to have our leaders check all those out,” she said.
Reinhardt and the other members of the MiddView team apologized to leaders during a morning check-in meeting, sent out a written apology and organized an 8 p.m. meeting to discuss what had happened.
The three SAO staff members laid out some of their long-term goals in the written apology, including creating a MiddView Advisory Board with paid positions for students of color. The team also plans to evaluate leader recruitment, hiring and training, as well as work with the Anderson Freeman Resource Center and Miguel Fernández, chief diversity officer, to consider the orientation program’s role in dismantling racism at the college.
Even though the leader-facilitated conversations about race were removed from the orientation schedule, many still sought ways to address the topic within their groups. Rasika Iyer ’22, a herd leader, said she and her co-leader, Jessica Buxbaum ’23, compiled a list of resources for their first years, invited them to ask questions and spoke about the college’s history with Charles Murray, who was scheduled to visit campus again last spring until students were sent home due to the pandemic.
MiddView leaders received no mandatory training related to race apart from a microaggressions workshop led by Renee Wells, director of education for equity and inclusion. The workshop was divided into two parts, the first of which focused on defining microaggressions. The second explained how to acknowledge and apologize for committing a microaggression.
MiddView leaders criticized the training, saying it did not represent a broad variety of microaggressions, instead focusing solely on racial microaggressions. Some shared that they felt the second portion of the training was centered on white learning and overlooked leaders of color. A few students brought these concerns to Wells’ attention during the training, including Melynda Payne ’21.
“I think that what I had an issue with with the microaggression training — and I vocalized this during the training — was that it was very centered on the white leaders and leaders who hadn't really had any type of trainings or any type of experience with anything having to do with race,” Payne said. “I think it was more aimed at them and their perspectives.”
Wells sent out an email with the subject line “An apology to MiddView leaders of color,” in which she acknowledged the specific ways she had caused harm and offered to meet with students to discuss the workshop and other concerns.
Wells said in an interview with The Campus that she had worked with faculty and staff over the summer, running workshops on anti-racism and racial microaggressions. She explained that the student microaggression training she conducted for MiddView leaders was focused on racial microaggressions because of what she had been working on over the summer.
“I think my brain was so wrapped up in doing all the antiracism stuff this summer that I didn't really change the presentation from what I had been doing,” Wells said.
In the past, she has run workshops with examples of microaggressions rooted in racism, sexism, ableism, heteronormativity and other forms of prejudice.
“It wasn't until the students were naming the fact that ‘this is centering white student learning’ that I was like, ‘Yeah, I did not change the presentation,’” Wells said.
First years also received training on microaggressions, which took the form of a three-hour pre-recorded webinar. Wells said she changed the workshop following the MiddView leader training, so the groups that followed — including first years and residential life staff — had a slightly different workshop. Wells said she did not receive the same criticism during those later training sessions.
Reinhardt sent out an email on Sept. 7 to students who had reached out to express their concerns as well as those who planned and led affinity group lunches during orientation. The email thanked these students for their additional time and energy and offered each of them a $50 Visa gift card as compensation.
Several students expressed discomfort, feeling that their emotional labor had been quantified. Vanrajah said she plans to donate the money and has heard that several other leaders plan to do the same.
Many leaders who were critical of the way the MiddView team handled the issues that arose also acknowledged the burden that had been placed on the three SAO staff members. Student leaders noted that three staff members were responsible for designing what essentially became a completely new orientation program as the college made decisions about the format of the fall semester.
Alex Burns ’21.5, a herd leader, said she did not think any individual or group was at fault and felt that there had been a lot of oversight but that the SAO staff had been receptive to student ideas and concerns once they had initiated those conversations. Burns noted that she believed many people quickly realized the kinds of changes that needed to be made in the future.
“While this year it especially felt really necessary for us to be centering these conversations or at least acknowledging them and acknowledging how they impact our life on campus and at Middlebury, I think that that's something that needed to happen before this year,” she said.
(09/17/20 9:59am)
As Phase One neared its highly anticipated end, the college concluded its campus quarantine programming last Friday with a remote lecture and Q&A by Scholar-in-Residence Bill McKibben. During the talk, titled “This Crisis and the Next One: What the Pandemic Suggests About the Century to Come,” McKibben spoke about the relationship between environmental injustice and Covid-19 and the reasons he believes Vermont has been so successful in its battle against the pandemic.
Jim Ralph, professor of American history and culture, introduced McKibben. Following his talk, three underclassman student panelists — Tim Hua ’23.5, Alicia Pane ’23.5 and Daisy Liljegren ’24 — opened the Q&A session with prepared questions.
Before diving into the future implications of the pandemic, McKibben began by speaking about its ramifications in the present moment. He emphasized the disproportionate severity of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on minority communities, even in predominantly white Vermont: one of the state’s few bad outbreaks occurred in Winooski, a city with a large immigrant population.
“If there was a single powerful quote from the last six months, it came, tragically, from George Floyd,” McKibben said. “And, as you all know, what he said was, ‘I can't breathe.’”
He described the many ways in which the compounding crises of the past six months have restricted the ability of people, particularly Black Americans, to breathe: police brutality; poor air quality from coal fired power plants, usually seen in POC communities; the wildfires filling the air with smoke; and the sheer heat of this past summer.
“We have this huge mix of crises on top of each other,” he said.
During his talk, McKibben highlighted three key aspects of the relationship between the pandemic and the climate crisis.
1: Reality is Real
“I've spent the last 30 years trying to remind people that chemistry and physics won't negotiate or compromise,” McKibben said. “And the pandemic was a good reminder that the same is true for biology. It’s fine for the president to get up and say it’s all a hoax and whatever, but the microbe could care less. If it says stand six feet apart, then stand six feet apart.”
2: Reaction Speed Matters
“We've learned a lot about flattening curves this year,” he said. “The U.S. and South Korea had their first cases of Covid-19 on the same day in January. South Korea went, admirably, to work. And it’s not over there, but it's definitely in the rearview mirror, and with a tiny fraction of the suffering and the loss of life that we've experienced here. That's because we wasted a couple of months, as Bob Woodward has demonstrated over the last couple of days, despite the fact that the White House knew very well what was going on. That slow reaction is the equivalent to the way that we've done nothing about climate change over 30 years that the scientists have given us a warning. And so now, of course, we need to move with extraordinary speed.”
3: Social Solidarity is Really Important
“I grew up in the political shadow of Ronald Reagan,” McKibben said. “He was the dominant figure in my early life, elected while I was in college. Unlike most presidents, he really did realign the country around a new ideological idea, and that idea basically was that markets were going to solve all problems — that government was, as he put it, the problem, not the solution. Indeed, the most famous laugh line in Reagan's speeches, always, was, ‘The nine scariest words in the English language are, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’ Well, it turns out that the scariest words in the English language are, ‘We've run out of ventilators,’ or ‘The hillside behind your house is on fire and you have to leave now, without any of your possessions.’ Those are not things that are solved by markets. Those are things solved by social solidarity of one kind or another, governments learning to work competently, but people joining together with some trust in those governments — and with each other.”
According to McKibben, about 78% of Vermonters mostly or completely trust their neighbors, compared with 38% of Americans. And 69% of Vermonters say they know most of their neighbors, as opposed to just 26% of Americans. He credits the state’s high level of social trust for the early, effective intervention that limited the spread of Covid-19.
Earlier this year, as armed protesters gathered in many states in opposition to wearing masks and other pandemic-related mandates, “in Vermont, there was a demonstration called for Montpelier outside the state capitol,” McKibben said. “And when the day came, there were seven protesters on the ramp for that demonstration.”
He doesn’t attribute Vermonters’ willingness to wear masks and maintain social distance to particularly liberal politics: though Vermont is home to democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, the state’s governor, Phil Scott, is a Republican. Rather, McKibben ascribes it to the state’s unusual geographical and political structure. Unlike other remote states, which tend to be centered around a small number of major cities, Vermont’s population is spread more evenly across the state, and individual towns manage their own affairs through annual town meetings.
“It is a state of villages, and what that means is that people tend to know each other better,” McKibben said. “More to the point, what it means is it’s enabled this long Vermont tradition of very close, democratic self-governance.”
He believes that local self-governance disincentivizes polarization, “simply because you have to get the business of the town done and everyone knows it.”
Many of the questions from panelists and audience members alike addressed the concept of social trust. Hua, one of the panelists, asked whether anti-mask protests could have decreased social trust elsewhere in the country; attendees raised questions about encouraging trust on a larger scale and the potential for people with more diverse backgrounds, in more densely populated communities, to develop similar levels of social trust.
McKibben emphasized that it is unclear how significantly Vermont’s demographics — being a particularly homogenous state with a predominantly white population — impact social trust throughout the state, and that it is difficult to gauge how well the concept of local self-governance might translate to other parts of the country. He denounced the increasing political polarization perpetuated by the current federal government and spoke highly of efforts like “citizens’ assemblies,” designed to help communities become informed about, and collaborate on ways to deal with, local issues.
Pane, another panelist, asked how McKibben sees Vermont’s motto, “Freedom and Unity,” playing out during the pandemic.
“We have chosen, I think, unity above other freedoms here in Vermont during the course of the pandemic,” McKibben said.
(09/10/20 9:57am)
Back in Los Angeles, my Latino working-class background didn’t turn heads at weekly meetings with Extinction Rebellion, a grassroots organization that uses nonviolent civil disobedience tactics to draw attention to government inaction in addressing climate change. It was the norm to find a diverse group of folks meeting to plan the next freeway blockade or die-in or other art-centered action — folks from different racial, socioeconomic and religious backgrounds actively engaged with all comrades. It was a space where I felt incredibly comfortable and ready to advocate for climate justice that truly included all people, because I knew all people were included in the process.
So when I arrived at this institution, I was shocked. I quickly came to see that there was a sort of problematic, yet normalized, expectation for environmentalists at Middlebury College. They are assumed to be straight, white and male, hailing from wealth and a suburb, able-bodied and with tremendous experience in the outdoors. They are vegan and deplore your inability to be vegan, paying no attention to the barriers to and gentrification of such a diet. They walk around in fancy clothing from outdoor brands and incessantly talk about their extravagant NOLS trips in a developing country. They focus on solar power but don’t ask if the lithium mined for those panels was acquired ethically. They weep at the sight of a precious animal poisoned by polluted water but do not fight for the communities of color downstream.
There is nothing wrong if you see yourself in parts of this description; identifying as or advocating for one or all of these things isn’t inherently wrong. However, advocating and affirming this singular conception of environmentalism, and creating space for nothing else, is dangerously exclusive.
Why is Middlebury’s environmentalist culture exclusive? For starters, not all environmentalists are white, straight, male, wealthy or able-bodied. By creating campus culture and spaces that cater to this ideal, we exclude so many crucial individuals who care for the environment and humankind’s future. By excluding BIPOC, poor, disabled, queer, female-identifying and city folks, we not only lose essential comrades to fight for the movement but also fail our community in advocating for real climate justice. I believe this exclusion is a mode of environmentalism inherited from problematic environmentalists in the past, from John Muir to Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt, three foundational influences on America’s conservation movement and the advancement of America’s eugenics movement and racist ideologies. We can no longer ignore the significant influence these histories have had on our environmentalism at Middlebury.
It’s time Middlebury’s idea of environmentalism changes. Environmentalists on this campus should take a bold stance in denouncing their organizations’ hurtful words and actions and mobilize to fight for real climate justice. We need to center Indigenous, Black and POC voices and make an effort to include them in our actions, events and processes. It isn’t enough to “stand in solidarity” with #BlackLivesMatter, or any other movement, solely when it is trending.
Real climate justice has to fight for racial justice, migrant justice, disability justice and class justice. So it is imperative that Middlebury environmentalists create inclusive spaces that prioritize the voices and needs of BIPOC and marginalized neighbors. As artist and activist Johanna Toruño says, “If your environmental advocacy doesn’t include folks of color, you refuse to acknowledge the impact of environmental racism on communities of color.” We cannot turn a blind eye to this ever-growing reality that low-income communities of color are subject to the disastrous (and disproportionate) effects of climate change.
So I ask my predominantly white, wealthy, able-bodied and male environmentalists and outdoor organization members reading this right now: What are you doing to make sure your membership doesn’t look just like you? What are you and your organizations doing to serve as allies to BIPOC communities regarding racial and climate justice?
As for my fellow BIPOC environmentalists who have yet to find a safe space: I invite you to “BIPOC Sunrise” on Thursday, September 24 @ 7 pm EDT. The Justice, Equity, and Anti-Oppression working group at Sunrise Middlebury will be starting these monthly meetings to create a safe space for BIPOC persons with love for the outdoors, the environment, a healthy future for all and a desire to fight for racial and climate justice. A Zoom link and collaborative agenda can be found on Sunrise’s Instagram in the coming week.
May this brief critique of Middlebury’s environmentalist culture not bring anger or disdain but instead inspire folks to start prioritizing this movement for our marginalized communities.
Andrés Oyaga is a member of the class of 2023.
(07/01/20 6:12pm)
Marissel Hernández-Romero, departing visiting assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese, sent an email to the Middlebury community on Sunday evening describing in detail a series of alleged incidents of racism she experienced in her department and at the institution during her three years as a faculty member.
Hernández-Romero, who is Black and Puerto-Rican, presented a weighty critique of systematic marginalization at the college punctuated with descriptions of allegations involving nine faculty members, all referenced by name.
“I came to Middlebury College in 2017 with a positive attitude, and within a month here, my opinion shifted to survival mode. A sense of powerlessness and marginalization took over my perspective of my place here,” read the email’s opening. “I am an outsider. I was hired, but never accepted, nor welcomed.”
The email was sent to all students, faculty, retired professors and alumni, as well as many administrators, student organizations and other individuals.
Hernández-Romero’s email went on to criticize the institution’s treatment of people of color. She states that the institution ignores and oppresses people of color — expecting them to assimilate into a hostile culture of whiteness and exclusivity without professional or personal support.
Her email frames the college as hypocritical — an institution that claims to advocate for faculty of color while protecting tenured faculty who defend “the continued and uninterrogated comfort of privilege under the guise of ‘free speech.’”
The email opened with a claim that Professor of Political Science Murray Dry made a threatening statement in 2017 directed at non-White faculty and administrators, which she interpreted as meaning that “challenging white privilege will bring worse consequences.” Dry denied this accusation in an email to the Campus, also noting that the meeting in question — centered on racial discrimination — was closed and confidential, therefore limiting his ability to discuss it.
“I would also observe that the statement attributed to me by Professor Hernández-Romero does not reflect my views on this important subject,” Dry wrote in the email . “I am more committed than ever to doing the work necessary to help make Middlebury [a supportive] environment for everyone.”
The remainder of the accused professors teach in Hernández-Romero’s own department. Those allegations vary in severity — from an interpreted racial microaggression from Professor Laura Lesta García to an alleged comment from Professor Patricia Saldrriaga suggesting that Hernández-Romero was an affirmative action hire. Both García and Saldarriaga directed the Campus to the Dean of Faculty when reached for comment.
Another assertion in the email alleges that Associate Professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies Marcos Rohena-Madrazo addressed Hernández-Romero with an offensive term.
“Professor Marcos Rohena called me ‘pendeja’ in front of a candidate, and two other male professors white passing, Enrique García and David Miranda, found it funny and inoffensive,” Hernández-Romero wrote. “When I confronted [Professor] Rohena, and asked if he would call other white female professors in the department such as he firmly said: ‘no, never.’” (“Pendeja” is a Spanish slang term that loosely translates to “dumbass” in English. The letter “a” at the end of the word denotes a female recipient, therefore making this a distinctly gendered term.)
Professors Rohena-Madrazo and García did not respond to a request for comment. Professor Miranda Hardy declined to comment.
Roughly two hours after Hernández-Romero sent the email, the college deleted it from Middlebury servers, removing the message from the inboxes of those who had received it. This retraction was met with outcry from students on social media, who criticized the removal as an action of censorship that violated free speech doctrines.
On Monday afternoon, seventeen hours after the contentious deletion, Chief Officer of Diversity Miguel Fernández sent a “Message of Accountability,” co-signed by Dean of Faculty Sujata Moorti and President Laurie Patton, to the campus community.
“[Hernández-Romero’s] email demonstrates the ways that individual incidents of racism and our inability to respond to such incidents in a way that addressed the underlying climate both reflect and reinforce racism at the systemic level,” Fernández wrote in his email to the community Monday. “We must be accountable for responding to incidents as they arise and for addressing the culture that enables such incidents to occur.”
Notably, Fernández is one of the named faculty members accused in Hernández-Romero’s email. She claims that he was dismissive when she inquired about race-related policy, an allegation he did not comment on in his message to the community. Fernández did not respond to The Campus’ inquiry.
In an email sent to the Campus, Hernández-Romero also alleged that Fernández ignored emails she sent about allegations of harassment regarding Department Chair Mario Higa. When reached for comment about this allegation, Fernández wrote in an email to the Campus that “I have never failed to take any claim of harassment seriously and to follow through appropriately and empathetically. I am fully aware of my obligations and responsibilities.” Higa did not respond to requests for comment.
According to Fernández’s statement to the community, Hernández-Romero’s email was deleted from the college server “in order to prevent an influx of reply-all messages from the thousands of recipients and the additional harm that might have been caused if anyone responded in ways that did attempt to dismiss or make light of her experiences.”
For many students, the acknowledgement came too late. By Monday morning, Dr. Hernández-Romero’s email had been widely circulated on Twitter and Facebook, and was posted on Instagram by accounts such as @dearmidd, @dearpwi, and @blackatmidd. Many individuals took it upon themselves to disseminate it, such as former sophomore SGA senator Paul Flores-Clavel ’22, who forwarded the email to all students. Student organizations such as SNEG, WRMC and JUNTOS followed suit in distributing the email to their registered domain lists.
Joel Machado ’22 composed an email template for students to send to administrators, which demanded both student oversight for the Anti-Racism fund and that the SLG investigate the faculty accused in Dr. Hernández-Romero’s email. “Rest assured knowing that the student body will continue to hold you accountable to the promises that have been made by President Patton,” Machado wrote in reference to Patton’s recent communications on racism within the Middlebury Community.
Monday night’s town hall on the college’s plans for re-opening in September led to conversation about the allegations that had been disclosed the night before. SGA Vice Presidents Roni Lezama ’22 and Sophia Lundberg ’21.5 along with SGA President John Schurer ’21 gave introductory remarks that called for all students to read the email. President Patton later alluded to Dr. Hernández-Romero’s allegations.
“We need to focus on accountability particularly as it relates to systemic racism and in the ways at Middlebury we must be accountable in addressing that racism,” Patton said. “Our policies of due process and confidentiality require that we cannot address this.” She then doubled down on her commitment to intensive fundraising in these areas.
In an email to The Campus sent on Wednesday — two days later — Patton stated that “[t]he deletion of the email in no way reduces our need to confront systemic racism, to diminish the deep pain that racism inflicts on individuals at Middlebury, and to hold public discussions as we work toward changing our institutional culture.”
Middlebury’s general counsel Hannah Ross affirmed that she cannot speak on the allegations, as proceedings under the code of Faculty Misconduct are completely confidential. The faculty misconduct code in question states in Section 3 that, "The principle of presumed innocence applies: until the process of review is complete, the faculty member is presumed innocent." It is unclear if any such review is taking place at this point, as Dean of Faculty Sujata Moorti did not respond when asked for comment.
The only faculty member named in Hernández-Romero’s email who was not the subject of an accusation was History Professor Darién Davis. Hernández-Romero alleged that the administration attempted to impose a harassment claim against Davis — who is Black — from her against her will. “I never had any problem with Darién,” she wrote in an email to the Campus.
She did, however, describe receiving a message from Davis she deemed as inappropriate, but that she did not feel uncomfortable or harassed. She did not further describe the contents of that message. In her communications with the Campus, she repeated that it was Higa, not Davis, against whom she had allegedly attempted to file a harassment claim.
Hernández-Romero is not departing Middlebury earlier than planned, as her visiting professor contract was three years long. She has accepted a tenure track position at an institution in New York that she declined to name. She also declined to provide evidence verifying her claims, although she stated that she has indicatory notes, emails, and witness accounts in her possession.
Hernández-Romero says that in the days since she sent the email, students and some professors from other departments have reached out to show their support. At the time of publication, the administration has yet to contact her.
“A lot of Black, Hispanic, and Latinx students have contacted me to show support and to share with me their experience[s] here at Midd, which are heartbreaking,” Hernández-Romero wrote in her email to The Campus. She noted the uproar that students are making on social media, which has become home to a myriad of calls to action on her behalf.
Hernández-Romero’s own statement to students was circulated on Instagram by Lily Colón ‘21.5, a student in her Socio-Culture of Salsa Music class this semester.
“I urge you all to continue denouncing racism until our institutions and people that run them change,” Hernández-Romero wrote. “I imagine for many of you, your experience may mirror mine, and for that I am sorry.” She then went on to reinforce the messaging in her email, calling upon students to listen and act fearlessly as they continue to move through a world seeped with systemic and institutional racism.
Colón, who has maintained a close relationship with her now-departed professor, fortified the feelings of isolation and hurt that afflicted Hernández-Romero at Middlebury.
“The constant teaching they have to do only to be continually undermined and pushed aside by administration and other students didn’t sit well with her,” Colón said in an email to the Campus, in reference to Black faculty and other professors of color. “Her email shows the ways the school failed her to the point where her hope turned into rage and frustration.”
Colón, who was working on a symposium project with Hernández-Romero and one other student, noted that the three of them met often. “I would like to say the email does not begin to cover the frequency or severity of the abuse she received here,” Colón said.
Hernández-Romero described this rage and frustration as beleaguering throughout her time at Middlebury. She stated that she had already been planning to denounce the racism she experienced when the Luso-Hispanic department released their Black Lives Matter statement last week, which she saw as hypocritical.
Dr. Hernández-Romero concluded her email by imploring all members of the Middlebury community to enact change and hold the institution accountable.
“Create a record of all these events, that are not rumors, but real traumatic experience[s],” Dr. Hernández-Romero wrote. “Make noise. Enough of hiding these events, enough of being off the record.”
(06/25/20 8:36pm)
The race for Vermont governorship continued for the Democrats last week in a debate between the three candidates, Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, former Vermont Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe and attorney Patrick Winburn. The three gubernatorial hopefuls discussed issues including re-opening the state, police reform and climate change in a forum hosted on Facebook on June 15.
The debate was hosted by the Addison County Democrats and Dave Silberman, who is running for High Bailiff of Addison County. John Flowers of the Addison Independent and Hattie LeFavour of The Campus moderated the debate.
Holcombe remained focused on larger, systemic issues throughout the debate, opening with a call for sustainable solutions to crises of democracy, the economy, racial justice and the environment. She voiced strong support for police reform, climate change initiatives and expanding early childhood education, linking each to broader issues such as raising minimum wage, finding affordable housing, reinvesting money in Vermont and creating jobs by committing to renewable energy sources.
“If we are going to be an equitable state, we need to work at every level and every sector to do that,” Holcombe said when asked about police reform. “We have been systematically dis-investing in opportunities and in social services for over thirty years.” Holcombe emphasized the need to collect accurate data on policing, as well as examining disproportionate discipline in schools based on race and class.
Holcombe differed from Winburn and Zuckerman on dairy farm bailouts, which Winburn strongly supported. “Dairy farmers have been the lifeblood of Vermont since the beginning of Vermont,” said Winburn. Throughout the debate, Winburn also took opportunities to affirm his commitment to healthcare for all, as well as regulating and taxing cannabis and redistributing part of the funds towards drug and alcohol education.
Zuckerman took more chances to focus on the need to defeat Governor Scott throughout the debate. When asked about Governor Scott’s reopening plan, he explained Scott’s failure to include business owners in discussions about reopening. Zuckerman also expressed that Scott should have been more proactive in unemployment compensation after the system experienced backlogs.
While all candidates supported climate change initiatives such as renewable energy, Zuckerman also advocated for joining the Transportation and Climate Initiative and investing in affordable, weatherized homes in Vermont towns to allow Vermonters to live where they work. Zuckerman is endorsed by Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org and a professor at Middlebury College, while Holcombe was recently endorsed by Sunrise Middlebury.
A recording of the debate can be found on Facebook here.
Editor’s Note: Hattie LeFavour ’21 is one of the Managing Editors of The Campus. LeFavour played no role in the reporting. Any questions may be directed at campus@middlebury.edu.
(06/19/20 3:20pm)
The following statement was previously sent to President Laurie Patton and other members of the Senior Leadership Group on June 17, 2020. The piece has been lightly edited in accordance with The Campus’ style guidelines.
We the undersigned faculty and staff members wish to offer our perspectives on plans for the Fall 2020 semester and the possibility of bringing students back to campus. We know and appreciate that the administration has worked tirelessly to assess various situations and balance many factors, both known and unknown. However, we believe that bringing back a significant number of students to campus risks a devastating health crisis, and thus there is only one path forward that prioritizes the health of our community as well as the long-term financial status of the college.
We see four basic scenarios for how the fall might play out:
In-person fall: We reopen campus for the majority of students and, having exercised widespread diligence and made broad investments in health and safety precautions, we are lucky enough to get to Thanksgiving without a significant outbreak.
Mid-semester shutdown: We reopen campus for the majority of students, but despite our best efforts, there is an outbreak that causes us to shut down campus early, sending most students home, disrupting the semester and potentially infecting many students, employees and community members.
Last minute abort: On June 22, we announce plans to reopen campus for the majority of students, but by the time that students would be due to arrive, conditions have changed locally, and/or outbreaks have emerged on other campuses that repopulated earlier than we do, resulting in our cancelling plans to bring students back at the last minute.
Planned remote: We proactively plan to teach remotely, allowing only a small number of students on campus who would not otherwise be able to safely and effectively participate in remote learning if they were off campus.
We think scenario 4 of a remote semester is what we should plan for now. Obviously, everyone would love for scenario 1 of a non-disrupted in-person fall to work out. We cannot emphasize enough that this would be our preference in an ideal world. But in the world we are actually living in, we believe that a mid-semester shutdown or last minute abort scenario is likely if we plan to repopulate campus. The cost to the institution in money, pedagogy, reputation and (most importantly) health with either of these outcomes would be even more dire than those associated with a planned remote fall. We understand that substantial financial losses would occur as a result of a remote fall, but we believe these losses could be minimized. We have suggestions in that regard, based on the AAUP budget statements that have been overwhelmingly endorsed by the faculty at the June 12 faculty meeting.
By aiming for an in-person fall, we believe the college would risk far more costly and dangerous situations. A mid-semester shutdown due to an outbreak would obviously be the worst, and seems quite likely, given how outbreaks have flared up over the past month throughout the U.S. Based on our understanding of the psychology of young adults and their attitudes toward risk, having 2,000 students, or even half that number, cohabitating and interacting with a large number of employees and community members is likely to produce an outbreak that could overwhelm a small-town hospital, resulting in severe illnesses and fatalities. This would result in damage to the College’s reputation and a backlash from the community, and it would waste the significant funds we would have to spend on preventative measures on campus. Most importantly, it would put the health of thousands of people at risk. A last-minute move to shift to remote would avoid the worst of this, but would waste a great deal of time and money, damaging the College financially and reputationally, and undermining the quality of teaching due to a last minute scramble.
Even if we were fortunate enough for an in-person fall to occur without incident, the experience for students would be far from what they had signed up for, leading to a semester of widespread tension and anxiety, creating rifts between members of our community with different attitudes toward risk, and forcing students, faculty and staff to work in challenging teaching and living environments of questionable safety. What might it mean to try to teach and learn in an environment where everyone begins to regard their friends, students, teachers and colleagues with mutual suspicion? It would certainly be a subpar semester lacking in many of the educational and co-curricular activities that typically make Middlebury a vibrant place. We are convinced by the case made by the Biology Department at Macalester College, which assesses both the health risks and inequitable challenges to community and mental health that a trauma-suffused in-person experience would create.
On the other hand, given the higher-than-anticipated enrollments for the online Language Schools — roughly two-thirds of conventional enrollment — we think it likely that more students than anticipated would sign up for a remote semester that maximized safety and leveraged our pedagogical expertise in DLINQ to create a robust and vibrant, equitable remote experience. We believe that as it becomes clear that Covid-19 is not going away this summer, more and more campuses will follow the early lead of California State University and McGill (and most Canadian universities) for a non-residential experience, or Harvard and Stanford in committing to remote teaching, embracing online learning and avoiding unsafe campus conditions. By saving time and money on trying to make campus a Covid-19-safe teaching environment, we can focus on ensuring that a remote Fall 2020 is well-planned and designed to continue regardless of local health circumstances. We can also use the talents of our Communications Office to represent how valuable and effective this online semester will be. We believe that the College is fortunate to have a large enough endowment and can withstand the losses from room and board fees without triggering significant cuts to employee compensation.
None of us want to be teaching online, nor see our students far flung across the globe. But the virus doesn’t care what we want. Just as Middlebury has been a leader in adhering to the inconvenient truths of climate change, we must acknowledge the science behind the spread of Covid-19 if unchecked. We believe a planned remote semester is vital to the health of our students, employees and broader community. On December 1, we would rather look back at a successful remote semester in a healthy Middlebury and wonder if we could have brought students back, than regret a failed attempt to bring students back that caused avoidable damage to our community.
We recognize that based on the faculty vote on June 16, we are not in the majority among our colleagues. Assuming that the College does bring students back to campus, we will continue to collaborate in advocating for the strongest possible health and safety protocols, full transparency in communicating these plans to the community, and a clear emphasis on protecting the employees and community members who will suffer the most from a health crisis.
Sincerely,
AAUP Working Conditions Subcommittee:
Jeanne Albert, Center for Teaching, Learning & Research
James Berg, English & American Literature
Lorraine Besser, Philosophy
Diane Burnham, American Studies
Laurie Essig, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies
Jamie McCallum, Sociology
David Miranda Hardy, Film & Media Culture
Jason Mittell, Film & Media Culture
William Poulin-Deltour, French & Francophone Studies
The signatories are members of the Working Conditions Subcommittee of the Middlebury branch of the AAUP.
Editor’s Note: Jason Mittell is The Campus’ faculty adviser.
(05/23/20 12:44am)
John Barstow
29-year resident of Middlebury, currently contracted by President Laurie Patton’s office as a college-town liaison on climate emergency
Location: Middlebury, Vermont
Submitted May 1, 2020
I remain healthy, as does my family, so low impact. Staying home and staying safe is the main impact. I now work remotely from home, I go out much less often, and in myriad ways with which we're all familiar, life has changed — for worse and for better.
I feel very privileged (bordering on guilty) to be able to live in a comfortable home large enough to easily accommodate my wife Kate and me, now both working from home. We have each other, we have a degree of security — so far, we have Vermont, once again a place apart, for which we are grateful.
What has been your greatest worry or day-to-day concern as coronavirus has spread?
My older son Charles living in northern Italy. He remains healthy, but his pre-existing condition makes him immunocompromised and therefore especially vulnerable should he contract Covid-19.
What has made you happy over the past few weeks?
Spring in Vermont: long hikes, distancing with friends and family, on the TAM and on trails near and around Silver Lake. The blossoming wildflowers are more wondrous than ever — the natural world, as always, putting this human life into perspective.
(05/22/20 10:19pm)
Timothy Castner ’93.5
Location: Massachusetts
Submitted April 2, 2020
I am a high school teacher who was on medical leave for six weeks, prior to the pandemic closing schools and colleges throughout the country. As an introvert and former Mountain Club guide I already had gone through "basic training" in social isolation. The biggest stressor was rescuing my daughter from her elite liberal arts college in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, and adjusting to everyone unexpectedly being at home.
I am currently still out from work and getting exercise in an (exurban) area by doing trail maintenance in nearby conservation land and working in my lawn. I am trying to be a support for family and friends while avoiding getting sick myself in order to flatten the curve. I also am trying to spend my "surplus" to support small local businesses and those most impacted by the crisis.
What has been your greatest worry or day-to-day concern as coronavirus has spread?
That people won't listen to experts or officials and make things worse.
What has made you happy over the past few weeks?
The many examples of people showing love and concern for those suffering.
Anything else you'd like us to know?
Geography, history and the relentless pursuit of honest dialogue are crucial for understanding our present predicament and charting a path towards a better future.
The disease is tracking the European settlement and conquest of the New World. The first cases were among “globe trotting” leaders and business people. They were biotech executives in Boston and frequent flyers from Seattle, New York City and San Francisco. People who look a lot like Middlebury students and graduates and faculty.
The greatest damage has been among the urban and rural poor and elderly. Maps around Boston show that the “support staff” for global elites are being harmed disproportionately. Hotel workers have been laid off. Taxi, Uber and Lyft drivers are now competing to deliver groceries. The custodians at hospitals and the food inspectors do not have the luxury of retreating to rural hideaways. They are threatened with being fired or are the first to be laid off. The pattern of "outsourcing suffering" has been repeated throughout our shared history.
My experience as a social studies teacher and a Middlebury graduate keeps bringing me back to the “settlement” of Massachusetts. Even before “Plimoth was planted” 400 years ago, virgin soil epidemics ravaged coastal New England.
Scholars such as Emerson “Tad” Baker of Salem State University have argued that no human intervention could have prevented the population collapses that Wampanoag, Nipmuc and Abanaki populations suffered in the 17th century and beyond. Even in the midst of the pandemic, federal officials are scheming to deprive the Mashpee Wampanoag of their ancestral lands and sovereignty on Cape Cod.
My education at Middlebury and beyond has allowed me to connect the dots between the virgin soil epidemics in the 1610s with the smallpox epidemic during the Revolutionary War and the Spanish Flu outbreak in the midst of World War I. The failure of many leaders to connect these dots represents a failure to teach and submit ourselves to the grim lessons of history. Many high school history textbooks spout talking points to corporate leaders instead of environmentalists and ecologists. As a result most leaders mystified by the “unprecedented” events of the present and have to be reminded that students in the 1970s were also sent home due to campus unrest in the wake of the Kent State shootings.
But even in the midst of great suffering, leaders have always emerged to battle injustice and speak for a more inclusive world. None of them are perfect. Most are heavily critiqued or even pilloried by contemporaries. But learning about their lives and lessons can bring us new comfort and resolve as we move forward. I would recommend reading biographies and memoirs from such diverse voices as Roger Williams and Abigail Adams, who experienced and wrote about pandemics and wars. George Washington and Frederick Douglass fought for the rights of their people and then sacrificed their own interests for the good of the whole. Henry David Thoreau and Elizabeth Cady Stanton accepted internal isolation and rejection from their peers to prophetically imagine a better world. Sojourner Truth fought for the rights of women and enslaved Africans. Abraham Lincoln chose mercy over judgment during the nation’s greatest crisis.
Mother Jones became a tireless advocate and grandmother to embattled coal miners. John Steinbeck should be required reading again for his elegant nature writing, and chronicling of the dispossessed from an early depression and environmental crisis. Reinhold Niebuhr, Dr. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Harvey Milk, Robert F. Kennedy, Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, Bill McKibben, Ellen Degeneres, Oprah, Barack Obama and even the current occupant of the White House have all tried to speak out on behalf of people who have felt “left behind” by rapid change. A new generation of scholars such as Lisa Brooks at Amherst College are helping us to reconnect with the "toxic legacies" of stories that we would prefer to forget. Such activists and authors who live at the bleeding edge of change often pay the greatest price, as Rachel Carson, climate change activists and "The Squad” can attest.
The list is never ending but it shows that prophetic and loving critique matters and that "honest patriots" lose many battles. Their sacrifices, however, inspire the next generation to keep fighting for "The Healing of the Earth."
We need the technocrats and the experts, but we also need the “synthesizers” who can make connections across diverse fields of inquiry to solve pressing challenges. Making “liberal arts” education available for everyone, especially for those excluded by the stressors of poverty and oppression, is more important now than ever before.
Those of us who have the advantages of secure jobs, retirement funds, access to health care and housing should be doing what we can to ease the suffering of those in our neighborhoods, communities, nation and planet. Only when our circle of care includes the whole ecosystem can we begin to recover from the Covid-19 crisis. An economy that values profits over health will not get us there. We need to combine the insights of both ecology and economics to imagine a better future.
(05/07/20 10:02am)
Fifty years ago today, students, faculty, staff and administrators crowded together in the pre-dawn light to watch a fire consume Recitation Hall, a temporary building behind what is now Carr Hall. Earlier, at 4:15 a.m. on Thursday, May 7, 1970, a student doused rags in gasoline, placed them against the base of the building and set them alight. The flames engulfed the wood-frame structure at the height of the 1970 student strike over the Kent State shootings and Vietnam War.
While it later emerged that the arsonist was not politically motivated, the fear and tension ignited by the event epitomized the emotion and turmoil on campus and across the nation.
The Campus spoke with former student leaders and activists, faculty, and administrators from the 1970 strike about the triumphs, pitfalls and lasting legacy of the strike and the surrounding years of anti-war organizing.
The Strike
Just three days before, on May 4, protests against the Vietnam War and the bombing of neutral Cambodia engulfed Kent State University. The Ohio National Guard was called to intervene, and in the ensuing chaos, used live rounds on the students, killing four and injuring nine others.
The deaths of affluent, white college students engrossed the nation, bringing home the horrors of war to many in a way the far-off deaths of working class Americans and Vietnamese civilians had not. Calls for a national student strike spread like wildfire across college campuses. Five hundred miles away, the spark of radical anti-war activism finally reached the sleepy town of Middlebury.
“For six years, now, the flood waters of frustration and alienation and hopelessness have been rising behind the dam,” reads an article from the 1970 Middlebury summer newsletter. “The shooting down of the Kent State demonstrators finally cracked the facade, and all of this accumulated despair poured forth.”
For Howard Burchman ’73 and his band of fellow student activists, May 4 was a night of frenzied activity and organizing. In the WRMC-FM college radio office, Burchman manned the teletype, a machine that sends and receives typed messages, to follow the news coming out of Kent State and traded phone calls with student organizers across the country to coordinate political action at Middlebury. Students covered campus sidewalks with graphics calling for a strike and superglued padlocks on classroom doors so no one could attend class the next morning. At 7:00 a.m., Burchman called Dean of Students Dennis O'Brien to inform him that the students were striking.
By midday, the College Council and faculty had voted and approved a resolution to suspend classes for the rest of the week, both to grieve and memorialize those killed at Kent State and to protest the war in South Asia, joining over 800 colleges and four million students nationwide in the largest student strike in U.S. history.
That evening, students packed into Mead Chapel for a memorial service honoring the four dead students and for the first rally of the strike, which began immediately afterwards. Burchman recalls the space overflowing with bodies as 1,000 students crowded into the aisles of the chapel, designed to hold only 700. The choir sang “Absalom,” a haunting hymn whose lyrics poignantly encapsulated the grief, shock and anger of the student body (“When David heard that Absalom was slain, he went up to his chamber and wept, and thus he said, ‘O my son, Absalom my son, would God that I had died for thee!’”).
Students demanded that the college end its complicity with the U.S. military by removing the Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC) from campus; called for the federal release of political prisoners, including jailed Black Panthers; and urged for an immediate withdrawal of American troops from South Asia.
Throughout the week, students spent their days attending teach-ins, workshops and rallies to learn about the war, the draft and Black Panthers. Students marched through Middlebury Union High School to “liberate” the high schoolers and inspire political action. Activists canvassed throughout the town, engaging residents in conversations and aiming to educate the conservative-leaning community about the anti-war cause, according to Steve Early ’71. After the burning of Recitation Hall on May 7, many spent their nights patrolling the campus to prevent further destruction and to avoid the widespread violence witnessed on college campuses nationwide.
The town residents feared similar violence, and the fire seemed to only reaffirm those fears, causing tension to emerge between the campus and community. In an effort to improve public relations, Obie Benz ’71 organized a group of students to stay in Middlebury over the summer. The students engaged in community service work to try and mend the town-gown relationship and reassure locals that Middlebury students were not like the violent anti-war radicals frequently featured on their TVs.
Results
Classes resumed on May 11 with academic exceptions made for students who took the rest of the semester off to protest the war. The College Council, faculty, and student body voted to broadly affirm the national strike goals, substituting the demands of national leaders for more moderate language.
The Middlebury administration worked hard to maintain Middlebury’s reputation and reassure parents, alumni and community members that the college-wide activism was moderate in tone. Middlebury President James Armstrong never referred to the events as a “strike,” describing it instead as “suspending normal activities,” being “in extraordinary session” and deciding whether or not to “resume classes,” according to Baehr. In the summer newsletter to parents, the college framed the strike as “a united searching — by students, faculty, and administrators — for the most useful set of responses to the national situation.” The newsletter failed to mention Black students’ efforts to raise issues of race, or calls for solidarity with the Black Panthers. That year set the then annual fundraising record high of $272,000.
Still, the strike was a catalyst for widespread student anti-war action at Middlebury in the years that followed. Radical Education and Action Project (REAP), founded by student activists Early and Burchman the following fall, brought speakers to campus and hosted rallies, with the goals of inspiring political action and thought through education.
Burchman recalled groups of students routinely burning draft cards outside of Proctor Hall in shows of public defiance against the war. Burchman himself faced disciplinary action when he protested Navy representatives publically advertising beside the cafeteria line. He set up shop next to them and projected images of napalm-ravaged villages and mutilated Vietnamese children until the Navy representatives left.
“It's not like the student strike happened once and there was no more unrest,” Burchman said. “The great mass of Middlebury returned into its slumber, but there was an activated core of hundreds of students who remained very very committed.”
While immediate responses to the strike and student anti-war organizing at Middlebury may have been tepid, students’ efforts did make a long term difference. O'Brien cited the strike as a major reason for the college’s ultimate decision to remove the Military Studies Department as a credit-bearing program and relegate ROTC to an off-campus extracurricular in 1976.
“The collective activity, unexpected and unprecedented in scale, put pressure on lots of other people [like Armstrong], drew them in, and made them part of the process of seeking solutions to the situation,” Early said. “Students became a conscience for people in positions of authority, including elected leaders and heads of institutions.”
On a national level, many consider the widespread student activism on college campuses instrumental in pressuring the U.S. government to withdraw from Vietnam in 1973.
Issues of Inclusion
Anti-war efforts at Middlebury struggled to include more diverse voices.
While the killing of four white students at Kent State galvanized the campus into widespread action, the shooting of Black students by the National Guard, resulting in two dead and 12 injured, at Jackson State University in Mississippi just 11 days later hardly registered a response at Middlebury. Efforts by Black Students for Mutual Understanding (BSMU) to organize around the shooting and raise consciousness around the Black Power movement went largely ignored by the student body.
“The death of the four Kent State students was a very tragic event for Kent State and the parents of those students,” read the BSMU position paper published May 6. “However it would be hypocritical of this organization and its members to pretend that these deaths have rendered us emotionally bankrupt; for many of us, and the vast majority of Black people, death and suffering has become a very real part of life.”
“We barely paid even lip service to the urgent issues Arnold [McKinney ’70, the leader of the BSMU,] and others were trying to have us see during the strike,” wrote Kaarla Baehr ’70 in an email to The Campus. “Not surprising given the time and place, but painful.”
Just as Black activists were excluded from the mainstream conversation, women were sidelined as men took center stage in the anti-war movement at Middlebury and beyond. Baehr, the Student Senate president at the time, was the only prominent female voice during the strike.
When she came to the stage to speak to the assembled crowd at Mead Chapel on May 5, the entire rally had to pause for several minutes as she attempted to lower the microphone positioned well above her head. That struggle was indicative of an entire movement structured around an assumption of male leaders, Baehr said.
The summer newsletter to parents made that divide even more apparent.
“Striking blonde reads a letter to her teachers explaining why she was quitting for the rest of the year,” read an article detailing the chronology of the strike.
Class also divided student protesters. Calls to shut down the campus for the rest of the semester failed to inspire many low-income and first-generation college students, who did not want to jeopardize their hard-won and expensive education, according to Baehr. While some students took the summer off to protest the war, Early, a dedicated activist and major organizer of the strike himself, had to start work flipping burgers at McDonalds immediately after finishing his finals in order to afford his next year at Middlebury.
Learning to Lead
The gaps in representation during the 1970 strike gave rise to opportunity. Torie Osborn ’72 transferred to Middlebury in the fall of 1970 after being inspired by the anti-war activity of the previous fall. She became one of the most visible figureheads of the modern women's movement at Middlebury, helping eliminate curfews for female students, advocating for access to birth control and organizing an abortion underground to Montreal where it was legal in the days before Roe v. Wade.
She learned how to organize and lead as an activist through her anti-war activism at Middlebury. Those skills helped shape her decades-long career as a queer feminsit activist, which has included serving as the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and a term as senior advisor to the mayor of Los Angeles, focusing on reducing homelessness and poverty.
“I was used to being one of thousands of followers. When I got to Middlebury, I learned how to be a leader. I learned how to organize,” Osborn said. “The skills that I learned and the passion that was reinforced at Middlebury for social justice activism has shaped my whole life.”
Many of the organizers of the 1970 strike and subsequent anti-war activity went on to lead lives as prominent activists, like Early, who is known as an organizer, union representative labor activist, lawyer, and author. He said his time at Middlebury taught him how to successfully organize action and the importance of patience in long-term social justice efforts.
Burchman was a freshman in 1970. Leading anti-war activism over the next three years, he learned how to take advantage of the power of crises to galvanize the masses and create longstanding positive change. He later used those lessons to fight the ’80s HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City, advocate for community health and residential care and work to develop solutions for homelessness across the country. He is now working remotely to advocate for the homeless in Nebraska in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
“[The strike and anti-war activism at Middlebury] gave me a direction in life. The war gave me an understanding of the basic question: Who benefits?” Burchman said. “I’ve been able to have a wonderful professional career orientated towards issues of social justice... that I’m so grateful for. It gave me a great life.”
Beyond the individual lives of Middlebury graduates, the 1970 strike and anti-war activism of the late 60s and early 70s has left an indelible impact on the landscape of education nationwide.
In a Jacobin article, Early cited student walkouts over the Iraq invasion, Parkland shooting and climate change as echoes of the 1970 strike continuing to influence national politics.
“The memory of [the student strike] hangs on and hangs on,” said O'Brien. “The effect of that one moment, that one week, has impacted into the student DNA [at Middlebury and beyond].”
(05/07/20 9:54am)
“What do you define as the most pressing issue of our day?”
Each year, we have asked respondents one open-ended question that defines the theme of the Zeitgeist survey that year. This year — right before the turn of the decade — we asked students what they believed to be the most pressing issue of our day. The responses leaned heavily toward the climate crisis. While this answer took myriad forms – “Climate change”; “Climate change, f*cking duh”; “ummmm climate change have u heard of it??” and “The Earth is about to be one-a-spicy meatball,” among many others – “climate” was the most common term among the 535 responses. The “environment” was also written 43 times, “environmental” 39 times and “energy” seven times, suggesting similar concerns.
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Gun control came in second, with “gun” used 47 times. Healthcaret was also frequently referenced, with “health” used 18 times and “healthcare” used 16.
Some answers were combinations of a few issues, such as the response, “In my personal life, healthcare. In the public sphere, […] gun control.” Other issues raised were systemic racism, political polarization, economic inequality, the faults of the capitalist system, criminal justice, indigenous people’s rights and reproductive rights.
Some were specific to Middlebury at the time of the survey, including “Napkins at the dining hall” and “the new scan-in system.” Other responses were broad-spanning, including “unkindness,” “I just feel like our generation is f*cked,” “Learning how to connect as a society” and, for the indecisive anti-establishment, “They are all connected. Capitalism?”
At this point, it’s important to point out that this survey was issued months before the novel coronavirus came onto anyone’s radar. But the issues students outlined above have been exacerbated as the global health crisis exacerbates systemic inequality and access to public services, such as healthcare.
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As the U.S. rapidly approaches it’s next election year, political issues are at the forefront of many college voters’ minds. When asked to list the importance of 10 political topics from Politico’s list of 2020 issues as “very important,” “moderately important,” “neutral” or “not important,” respondents identified the most vital issue as “energy, environment and climate change.” 77% of respondents ranked the issue “very important,” while 95% ranked it important to some degree, backing Middlebury’s reputation as an environmentally-conscious school. The issue is also considered prominent nation-wide among youth and college-aged voters, validated at Middlebury by its strong turnout.
The other issues that exceeded a 90% response rate of moderate to very important were healthcare, gun control, immigration and abortion. However, these data were collected before the Covid-19 pandemic, which has served as a development that has reshaped U.S. healthcare policy. While healthcare fell slightly behind abortion and gun control in rankings of “very important” at the time, it is possible that more recent data would reflect an increased level of emphasis placed on healthcare.
The issue ranked least important by Middlebury students was, “support for the military,” with only 32% of students deeming it important. The penultimate concern was “marijuana and cannabis legalization,” with just over 50% of students signaling it as important.
(04/30/20 10:02am)
Increased financial stress has put the future of three public Vermont colleges in question as the Covid-19 crisis continues to unfold. On April 17, Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges System Jeb Spaulding announced plans to close both the campuses of Northern Vermont University (NVU) and the Randolph campus of Vermont Technical College (VTC). Deemed financially necessary, with projections of high deficits and particularly low enrollment, the plan was to be effective in fall 2020. Spaulding withdrew the plan for immediate closure days later amid public backlash, and announced his resignation on Tuesday.
Under Spaulding’s original plan, liberal arts programs at Northern Vermont University would be moved to Castleton University. Technical programs at Vermont Tech would continue, albeit in different locations, while its main Randolph Center campus would close. The colleges’ administrations would also be restructured. The consolidations would result in over 500 employee reductions altogether. In the wake of Spaulding’s resignation, the fate of the colleges remains unclear.
Financial struggles
The April 17 press release from the Vermont State Colleges System explained that the Covid-19 crisis will exacerbate a long history of financial struggle within the system, and that these challenges demand a major reorganization. Projections estimate an operating deficit falling between $7–10 million this fiscal year; $5.6 million of that deficit will come from refunds issued to students following the shift to remote learning. For the 2021 fiscal year, Spaulding forecasts a deficit of nearly $12 million even with “substantial” budget cuts. Furthermore, residential campuses of VSC are expecting expected to see a 15–20% decline in enrollment if they remain open.
Significant financial issues were a major concern even before the Covid-19 crisis introduced further complications. A white paper released by the chancellor’s office in August 2019 outlined challenges such as the level of state funding and demographic shifts. The report cites data that Vermont ranks 49th in the country in state funding for full-time students. State appropriations have also declined significantly as a revenue source since 1980, according to data provided in the report. In fall 2018, VSC requested $25 million in additional funds on top of annual appropriation. The state legislature ended up providing an additional $2.5 million.
The report also focuses on shifting demographics as a major challenge to small New England colleges. The number of Vermont high school graduates has decreased by 25% in the past 10 years. Births in Vermont have been in steady decline, and 2015 saw the lowest birth rate since the start of the Civil War. The report indicates that demographic trends are unlikely to change soon.
These demographic trends translate into declining enrollment, a key contributor to the colleges’ financial struggles. In the past five years, enrollments have declined at every VSC college except Castleton. There were 540 empty beds in the VSC system for the 2018–2019 academic year, which represents a 20% vacancy rate. In addition to demographics, the report cites competition from online education providers like Southern New Hampshire University, exacerbating declining enrollment.
Public backlash
The chancellor’s plan was met with a surge of mobilization and public backlash in the days following the announcement. Protests are taking place online across New England due to Covid-19 restrictions, though some protesters are also demonstrating offline.
A Facebook group protesting the closure, started by Ben Luce, a professor of Physics at NVU-Lyndon, has since grown to more than 10,000 members. “Most of the effort is focused on contacting legislators and the Governor, and raising public awareness as well,” Luce explained in an email.
Since the state has already downsized its programs, state funding is the obvious solution for Luce. At the least, Luce would look for the legislature to appropriate an increase of $25 million in funding. “Such an investment would pay itself back many times over,” he wrote. Luce believes that the legislature is not meeting state law which requires public colleges to be funded “in whole or substantial part” by the state. Currently, only about 17% of VSC’s revenue comes from the state.
Patrick Wickstrom, a student at NVU-Lyndon, formed an online petition protesting his school’s closure, which has garnered nearly 50,000 signatures. A member of the men’s tennis team and residential life at NVU, Wickstrom explained that closure would be “simply devastating'' to faculty, staff and students. “A lot of people are connected to this school and the institution, and were very disheartened to see this even remotely be a proposal,” he commented.
Wickstrom was concerned about the uncertainty of the chancellor’s proposal. Wickstrom, who is double-majoring in Climate Change Science and Atmospheric Science, does not know whether his program could continue at Castleton. “I know a lot of students personally in my program who would have transferred schools or put a hold on college,” Wickstrom said.
A perfect storm
State Senator Ruth Hardy (D-Addison), a resident of East Middlebury who has worked in education and serves on the Education Committee, agreed that state funding for higher education is a major issue. Since taking office in 2019, Hardy has pushed for scholarship funding to increase enrollment at Vermont’s public colleges.
Hardy notes that Vermont has a particularly strong K-12 education system, but is not doing enough when it comes to its colleges. “We have one of the highest high school graduation rates in the country, but we do not do a very good job of getting those high school graduates to go to college,” she said.
Covid-19, she explained, has put the chancellor in a difficult position. “For institutions like the state's colleges, which were already vulnerable and already sort of deterring, the Covid crisis is just absolutely devastating.” Hardy concludes that demographic challenges, insufficient appropriations and the Covid-19 situation amounted to a “perfect storm.”
However, Hardy feels that higher education issues in the state have been prevalent for many years, noting the closure of four private Vermont colleges in 2019 and 2020. “I feel like we need to have a broader conversation about higher education in Vermont in general,” said Hardy. She hopes to help public and private institutions towards a more sustainable future.
Hardy and others stress the value of the state colleges in rural and economically challenged regions of Vermont. Caledonia County, where NVU’s Lyndon campus is located, sits at 12 out of Vermont’s 14 counties for per capita income.
“The colleges provide a higher education opportunity for those who wouldn't otherwise have it, and they are also economic drivers for the region,” said Hardy. According to her, Vermont State Colleges educate many lower-income and first-generation students.
Luce agreed that keeping the State College System intact would boost Vermont’s economy after the Covid-19 outbreak subsides.
“The truth is that our state colleges are actually fantastically efficient institutions that provide enormous and direct economic benefit to our state,” he said. “Energizing [state colleges] going forward would be an enormously effective way to both keep young people in our state and help with the recovery from this terrible pandemic.”
Luce explained that the colleges both produce a multitude of jobs and foster students who will later work in the community. Wickstrom said that Burke Mountain relies upon Lyndon students for its winter operations.
“I don't know what better investment that the state has,” Wickstrom said of the state college system. Wickstrom cites a statistic that the two NVU campuses bring $113 million per year in economic outlook, a high “return on investment” from state appropriations.
Looking ahead
Although the original closure plan has been shelved, an aggressive response continues. Wickstrom is planning to work with a larger group to present before the VSC Board of Trustees. Luce plans to continue to advocate for NVU and the other colleges, but acknowledges that damage has already been done. “The proposal has already severely damaged our prospects for enrollment next year,” he said. Many colleges, including financially stable institutions, are already predicting lower enrollments because of Covid-19.
The VSC Board of Trustees originally planned to meet in a special meeting on April 27. This meeting was canceled, and the Board will meet at a later date to discuss the decisions ahead.
Editor’s note: Ruth Hardy is married to Middlebury College Professor of Film and Media Culture Jason Mittell, who is the Campus’s academic advisor. All questions may be directed to campus@middlebury.edu.
(04/22/20 3:31pm)
Hope Allison '19.5 never thought of herself as a romantic. After graduating from Middlebury last February, Allison took on photography as a fulltime career. Operating out of Allston, Massachusetts, Allison launched her website and began picking up freelance work. However, her outlook on photography changed when she realized her passion for capturing moments that were emblematic of love and romance: weddings. Since then, she has been specializing in small wedding coverage, shooting receptions and ceremonies across New England and beyond.
“I kind of had an epiphany a couple of summers ago, trying to think about what I wanted to do with my life,” Allison told The Campus. “I realized that I wanted to do photography ... I just kept coming back to that.”
Before graduating, Allison garnered experience in the field, trying out one style after another. While abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland, she worked for a travel website, writing and contributing her photography. She took photos for a local boutique and an architecture firm while managing her own projects on the side. As she dabbled in different styles, she reaffirmed her passion for photography.
Allison initially wanted to focus on sparking global change with her work. “I was thinking, ‘You could be a war photographer, you could photograph the impacts of climate change,’” she said. “I think I had this idea of wedding photography as being kind of superficial. I wanted to do good with my work.”
Then, she looked at the photos her family had digitized of her grandfather's life. “I saw photographs of my grandmother and grandpa’s wedding, and it kind of clicked for me,” she said.
After her first few shoots, all doubt was gone. “I actually ended up really loving it,” Allison said. “I realized that naturally I’m a hopeless romantic ... I kind of surprised myself. I never thought I’d get into it ... But now I’m like ‘just kidding, I love it.’”
As Allison would realize, this new playing field came with a new set of rules.
“Architecture photography is about photographing things that are staged. And I’m a perfectionist, so it’s great to photograph beautiful, perfect things. But wedding photography is about anticipation and knowing to capture the unexpected — always being one step ahead.”
Despite these new sets of challenges, wedding photography also offers its own set of rewards. “It’s always satisfying when you can anticipate the moment and capture it the way that it felt. It feels like a gift to give that to a couple,” she said. Allison explained that she lets events happen as they unfold, capturing big wedding days as they actually were. “If a bride is hugging her grandmother,” she said, “I’m not going to stop it because I don’t have the best lighting.”
As a photographer, Allison pulls back the curtain on one of her clients’ most cherished days.
“The wedding photographer is one of the few people who is with the couple for basically every moment of the day. So when the bride is getting her dress on, it’s her, her mom, her maid of honor, and me.”
The balance between making the imperfect appear immaculate and crafting staged moments that look candid has been its own art form for Allison to master.
“When you’re taking the staged photos of the bride, the groom and their families, it’s kind of hard,” Allison said. “You can’t just say ‘Say cheese!’ You have to work with the crowd and read the room. I’m always saying things like, ‘In your sexiest voice say what you had for breakfast’ to get a natural laugh.”
Having traveled the East Coast for a summer capturing weddings, compiling newlywed blog entries and schmoozing with couples, matrimony has become something of a fixation for Allison.
“I’ve never been the kind of person who dreams of a big wedding. But you go to [12 weddings] in a summer and you can’t help but think about them all the time.”
With a dozen wedding shoots under her belt from the previous summer, Allison is lined up to do 16 more in the coming months. While the outbreak of Covid-19 in New England has shaken the foundation of the wedding photography business, Allison continues to keep the wheels of her work turning. “Right now I’m doing a lot of back-end work — creating pamphlets for the couples and working on [brand] logos.”
Many of her clients that originally scheduled their weddings for this coming summer have decided to shift to smaller alternatives for the time being. However, Allison expects that most will follow through on a complete ceremony once the opportunity arises. For many couples, the event itself is an irresistible part of the experience.
“The whole thing about a wedding day is hope. That’s the thing that’s so energizing about photographing them — it’s so joyful. Why wouldn’t I surround myself with people like this?”
Once the time comes, Hope Allison will be there to capture every moment.
(04/16/20 9:59am)
70 users participated in a webinar for Vermont's branch of the "Solve Climate by 2030" project, which aims to set 3 ambitious but attainable actions that communities can take against climate change.
(04/16/20 9:59am)
Middlebury hosted Vermont’s branch of the “Solve Climate by 2030” project, drawing more than 70 Zoom users to its virtual panel while universities in nearly all 50 states hosted simultaneous webinars last Tuesday. Dr. Eban Goodstein, director of the Center for Environmental Policy and the MBA in Sustainability at Bard College, launched the project last year with the aim of convening a panel of experts in every state who would determine three ambitious but attainable actions that communities could take against climate change.
“What you do locally will change the future,” Goodstein said in his pre-recorded introduction to the panel, which was streamed to attendees at the beginning of the Zoom conference. He reminded viewers of the 2030 deadline to prevent catastrophic climate change, set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018, and emphasized the need for immediate, local action that will facilitate an equitable transition to clean energy sources and green jobs.
Transportation, heating and efficiency became the three areas of focus in the Vermont group’s discussion, which centered around constructing a Vermont that would work for all. The four panelists — Jared Duval, executive director of Vermont’s Energy Action Network; Carolyn Finney, scholar-in-residence in environmental affairs; Fran Putnam, a community organizer from Weybridge, Vermont; and Jack Byrne, dean of sustainability and environmental affairs — spoke at length about issues of justice and inclusion in future energy and transportation policy. Jon Isham, professor of economics and environmental studies, moderated the talk from the lounge inside Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest, with the familiar backdrop of Adirondack House and Forest Hall visible behind him.
Due to concern about “Zoombombing,” attendees remained muted for the duration of the panel, with their posts in the chat function visible only to the panelists. The biggest challenge seemed to be keeping panelists within time constraints; the introduction portion of the panel took up most of the webinar’s scheduled 90 minutes.
Duval, the first panelist to speak, addressed Vermont’s particular energy challenges: 70% of the state’s climate pollution is the result of transportation and heating, which also make up most of Vermonters’ energy costs. While the state has developed successful policy in its electricity generation sector, Duval said it has not seen the same success in the transportation and heating sectors.
“It’s important to focus on the fuel,” he said, “but the fuel is not enough. It's also about the equipment — the vehicles and the heating systems — and intervening at that point of purchase when you can avoid locking in a decade of fossil fuel use with vehicles, or two or three decades with the average life of a heating system.”
Duval noted that any policy addressing transportation and heating would need to focus on equity to ensure that low-income Vermonters are not left out of the transition to electric vehicles and heating systems.
Finney built on Duval’s point about justice in her introduction, discussing how the power dynamics and relationships present in Vermont decide who gets to participate in climate conversations. The issue of justice brings greater complexity to the conversation, she said, and this complexity must be addressed when developing solutions.
“It's as though we're asking ourselves to cut through to the solution,” Finney said of the panel’s aim. “And I think that makes a lot of people nervous — it makes me nervous — because I want to get there too, but I don't want to get there the same way we've always gotten there. Because a lot of people are going to lose.”
Like Goodstein, Finney drew comparisons between Covid-19 and climate change. “Climate change does not honor borders,” she said. “And we know that just like we've seen with Covid-19, that it can impact everywhere, but it doesn't impact everyone in the same way.” Throughout her introduction, she reiterated the importance of considering the diverse impacts that climate change will have in Vermont.
Putnam, who gave a talk last month about her self-designed study trip in the Nordic countries and is best known on campus for her work with the Sunday Night Environmental Group, spoke about her experience as a local environmental leader. As a retiree motivated to do something about climate change, she spearheaded programs for weatherization, waste management and transportation in Weybridge, Vermont and began volunteering with statewide environmental organizations and state legislators.
“If somebody like me with no academic credentials in this field, or expertise, can do something like this, anybody can do this,” Putnam said.
In Putnam’s experience, people in Vermont already want cleaner heating options and more efficient cars. The issue is affordability. “That's where the state of Vermont has to come in,” she said. “That's where our tax policies have to change. That's where the political structure has to buy into this and let us do what needs to be done.”
Byrne brought his experience developing Energy2028 — the college’s commitment to use entirely renewable energy sources, reduce consumption by 25%, divest from fossil fuels and integrate the commitment into its educational mission by 2028 — to the conversation. He emphasized the potential for other towns to draw from the college’s success.
Following more than an hour of introductions, Isham raised a question from the chat about including indigenous people in climate conversations. Finney responded by criticizing the idea of outreach and its implication of offering help, focusing instead on the need to build a relationship of trust with indigenous communities and respect the actions they are already taking to combat climate change.
Isham then invited atmospheric scientist Alan Betts to join the conversation. Betts spoke for several minutes about the inability of the capitalist economic system to withstand planetary crises like Covid-19 and climate change, and the need to construct a just and stable world. “We cannot have justice unless we confront the corruption of the system that we have bought into and make it pay all the costs,” he said.
As the panel’s time limit approached, Isham asked the panelists to summarize their own priorities. Duval reiterated the importance of establishing a comprehensive policy and regulatory framework centered around equity, while Finney pushed for honesty and truthfulness in legislation and education.
Both Putnam and Byrne referred back to Betts’s call for economic transformation. Putnam spoke about the need for climate policy with fixed goals, which is currently stalled in the state legislature, as well as a fairer tax structure that prioritizes climate solutions, and the inclusion of indigenous voices. Byrne cautioned against polarization, and said, “I echo Alan again. Truth to power.”
(04/16/20 9:55am)
Most of you probably think of Martha’s Vineyard as a summer paradise for the East Coast elite. In reality, this community that I call home faces a myriad of problems ranging from a lack of affordable housing to sea-level rise’s continuous assault on our shores. In 2018, I thought our County Commission, which was devoid of any members south of sixty years-old and known more for its dysfunction than anything else, could use a youthful, fresh presence to create the change and government transparency the Vineyard so badly needed. And so that year I ran for and won a seat on the Dukes County Commission.
In my campaign for elected office (as well as in my own political views more broadly), I was inspired first and foremost by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. I knew that I would be in for plenty of tough fights on the County Commission and these two politicians never backed away from a tough fight.
In 2016, I supported Sanders during his Presidential campaign. This time, I backed Warren, who I felt ran an unabashedly progressive, intersectional campaign focused on creating change through well thought-out, detailed plans on issues like climate change, LGBTQ+ rights and systemic racism. I also think that Sanders deserves an enormous amount of credit for mobilizing an entire generation of people who rightfully feel as though today’s politics don’t meet today’s challenges. The progressive moment that I am proud to be a small part of is better off because Sanders and Warren both ran spirited and uncompromising campaigns.
Now that Sanders has officially dropped out of the race, where do we go from here? I know that many of you are disappointed that Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee. So am I. He wasn’t my first choice. Or second. Or … you get the point. And his record and personal conduct leave many feeling understandably apathetic about supporting him. But unlike President Trump, he wouldn’t appoint grossly underqualified people to lifetime judgeships or put together such a grotesquely incompetent cabinet. And he certainly wouldn’t be the single most dangerous President any of us have ever seen. Our elections are choices between two candidates and Joe Biden is the candidate I choose. I hope you will, too.
Instead of allowing yourself to become disillusioned by the prospect of a Biden candidacy, I challenge you to channel the disgust you might very well feel after this primary to motivate yourself. Get, or stay, involved. If the Presidential race doesn’t inspire you, find a local one that does. A plethora of other candidates, from school board to the U.S. Senate, need your help. As someone who is involved in the lowest rungs of government, I can tell you honestly that change is being made right now from the bottom up, not the other way around.
And if you’re still struggling to find a race that speaks to you, be the race. Run for office.
If you care about the place you call home, then you’re qualified to serve. Endless government experience is no match for a genuine, persistent desire to make your community better. Warren and Bernie embody that kind of politics every day, fighting uphill battles for everything from single-payer healthcare to Wall Street regulations. Change is only going to be made if our generation leads the way. If you really want to honor the progressive Presidential campaigns of this cycle, then you should vote for progress, incremental or revolutionary, up and down the ticket this November. Better yet, think about being one of those progressive candidates on your ballot.
Keith Chatinover is a member of the class of 2022.5
