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(10/29/20 10:00am)
As the pandemic heightens the responsibility of state governments across the country, Vermont has emerged as a success story in controlling the virus — and for Republican Gov. Phil Scott, the proof is in the polling. Scott’s statewide acceptance rate peaked at 96% over the summer, and he remains one of the most popular governors in the nation. Up for re-election in the fall, Scott has eschewed typical campaigning to stay focused on pandemic response — but for his challenger, Progressive/Democratic Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, the race is far from over.
Working alongside each other in Montpelier, the two aren’t exactly allies. Scott has used his veto pen more liberally than nearly any other leader in state history, rejecting progressive legislation sent from the majority-Democrat Vermont House and Senate. These bills have included a minimum wage hike, a paid family leave program and, most recently, steps to combat climate change — all causes that Zuckerman has championed for decades.
“I’ve been fighting for environmental causes since before I was in elected office. It’s really at the core of who I am,” Zuckerman told The Campus. He announced his candidacy pre-pandemic in January 2020, citing the climate crisis as his primary motivation. His focus has not changed, earning him the endorsement of Sunrise Middlebury, Bernie Sanders and even the co-founders of Ben & Jerry’s. “The climate crisis did not go away because the global pandemic has occurred,” he said. “We have multiple crises happening.”
Yet Scott’s moderate “New England Republican” style of leadership has allowed for overlap between the two as well. In a heavily Democratic state, Scott has retained popularity in part by breaking with the national Republican party, openly supporting President Trump’s impeachment and signing perhaps the most progressive abortion rights legislation in the country in 2019. Both candidates have said, too, that if Biden wins the presidential election and Senator Sanders joins his cabinet — most likely as labor secretary — they would appoint a temporary replacement Senator who caucuses with Democrats.
Now, through mask mandates and careful science-based health guidelines, Scott has managed to steer Vermont away from the pandemic partisanship that other states have seen — even garnering praise from Dr. Fauci himself.
“The safety measures we have in place are there for a reason, and they're working,” Scott said at one of his twice-weekly coronavirus briefings. “We’ve put ourselves in a great position.”
These briefings have been conducted both in his capacity as governor and, some have noted, in lieu of traditional re-election campaigning. His campaign manager and only full-time re-election staffer, Jason Maulucci, told The Campus that the campaign is at the bottom of Scott’s priority list.
“Vermonters deserve a governor who’s focused full-time on the job he was elected to do,” Maulucci said. “For an incumbent, there’s nothing a campaign apparatus can say or do that can replace the effect of a good job performance.”
For Zuckerman, pandemic success is great — but not enough. Since his time as a student at the University of Vermont, where he was deeply engaged in the environmental movement and worked on then-Representative Bernie Sanders’s campaign, the lieutenant governor has advocated for cutting-edge progressive causes like marijuana legalization and LGBTQ rights.
He first ran for the Vermont House of Representatives while in college in 1994, though he won his first seat in the House in 1996. Ever since, his style of electoral politics has stemmed from both Sanders and the activists he worked alongside.
“I met a lot of people who were living the efforts they were espousing,” Zuckerman said. “They were housing advocates, they were fair pay advocates, they were reducing toxic substances in municipal services, they were fighting for universal healthcare. And they were all involved in not only electoral politics but also, in their daily living, working to make life better.”
This nexus is where Zuckerman resides: he and his wife, Rachel Nevitt, are organic farmers and have owned Full Moon Farm, Inc. in Hinesburg, Vt. for over a decade. The couple farms seasonal fruits and vegetables, meats and eggs, and CBD, which they sell at the Burlington Farmers Markets and through their Community Farm Share. “To me, our economy, our food sources, and our climate are all incredibly intricately linked,” he said.
If Zuckerman is cut from an activist’s cloth, Scott is cut from a businessman’s. Gov. Scott, too, graduated from UVM and bases much of his ideology in his entrepreneurial experience: he started his first business at 18, mowing lawns and renting boats on Lake Elmore. He worked his way through several other mechanics and construction companies before entering the Vermont State Senate in 2000, promising to fight for the voices of small businesses and working families in Vermont.
This experience has also been inextricably tied to his governorship, which he has used to keep state spending, taxes and the cost of living relatively low. “Too many families and employers are on the economic edge,” Scott said when announcing his run for governor in 2015. “I believe our state needs a leader who listens instead of lectures, someone who’s been in the shoes of the people who are struggling, and […] who will never forget where they came from.”
Priding himself on consistency and steady-handed guidance, Scott told VTDigger this year that he thinks of himself as the “only thing” standing between the Democratic House and Senate majority and “continuing to increase the unaffordability of Vermont.” Former Gov. Jim Douglas, also a Republican, has lauded Scott for playing “budget hawk” by rejecting progressive legislation that would be costly for the state.
Yet for Zuckerman, the status quo is no longer tenable — even financially. Zuckerman has proposed a Green Mountain New Deal, a plan that would impose a temporary tax increase on the top 5% of Vermont earners to be used to bankroll environmental and infrastructure projects. “My idea with the temporary tax is to sequester some of the Trump tax cuts to the wealthiest in our state,” he said.
This is also the reason that the lieutenant governor entered the race this year as opposed to waiting for a less competitive election cycle. “I just don’t think with the climate crisis we have two years to be casually waiting,” he said. In this vein, Zuckerman has committed to working with youth activists as he has done for decades. For him, meaningful climate policy can be something of a chicken-and-egg issue: when young people don’t vote, their interests can go unaddressed.
Heading into the gubernatorial election on Nov. 3, Zuckerman is campaigning hard, holding virtual events and “Honk & Wave” sessions across the state — and, as a fundraising gimmick, an opportunity to donate to either team “Keep it” or team “Cut it” to decide the fate of his signature ponytail. Meanwhile, Gov. Scott is unfazed. Running without a real campaign platform, Scott has kept his eyes on maintaining the state’s successful pandemic response.
Both candidates hope to prepare the state for a future that neither can predict. Above all, each sees protecting the well-being of Vermonters as paramount — and voters are tasked with choosing between their decidedly different visions in achieving it.
(10/29/20 9:59am)
This election season, the stakes are higher than ever before. Four years ago, the horrors of a Trump presidency were yet to be realized. Now, we are living them. Public trust in government is rapidly eroding while peoples’ fundamental liberties are being — or have been — taken away from them. Our democracy is on the line. While the outcome of the upcoming election is uncertain, we have been inspired time and time again by this community’s political engagement, solidarity and resilience in the face of adversity. This is why we’re publishing an election issue.
The U.S. has suffered in the hands of an incompetent, intentionally negligent and often malicious administration. More than 200,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 — a disproportionate number being Black and Latinx. Poor management of the pandemic spelled economic devastation for communities across the nation, as workers are plunged into financial instability and businesses shutter their doors. An unprecedented number of environmental protection regulations have been undone and climate change science disregarded. And as protests against police brutality and racial injustice have unfolded across the country, Trump has refused to denounce white supremacist organizations. The ripples of these national tragedies are also felt in Middlebury.
Politics has permeated every part of our world — and every part of our newspaper. Our election issue spans all five of our sections, from sports coverage of athlete voter registration and the surprising relationship between college football and the election, to coverage of local Vermont races, to opinions about the role of politics in dating and making Nov. 3 a school holiday. You’ll find news about how the mail center handles absentee ballots, how some professors choose to (or choose not to) bring activism into their classrooms and how students who are not eligible to vote in U.S. elections are making a difference. We have an elections forecast, a podcast about the intersection of athletics and politics and a dozen more stories that endeavor to capture the momentous and far-reaching impact of this election on each and every student, state and community.
Unlike in past elections, the majority of you have likely already voted by absentee ballot. For those of you who didn’t or couldn’t vote elsewhere, make use of our guide for in-person voting in Middlebury, which is an option for all students who can vote in the U.S., or use MiddVote’s resources for voting in Vermont. Even if you are someone who cannot vote in this election, we encourage you to vocalize your concerns and mobilize those around you to participate.
Thank you to everyone who wrote and edited for, contributed to and was interviewed for this issue — we hope that through these stories, you see the ways that this election has touched every part of life and fundamentally reshaped our relationships to politics. Thank you for reading, and thank you for caring. So much is at stake.
Bochu Ding ’21, Hattie LeFavour ’21 and Riley Board ’22 comprise The Campus’ executive team. Nora Peachin ’21 is the Senior Local Editor. LeFavour and Peachin oversaw the creation and coverage of the issue.
(10/29/20 9:59am)
In races as divisive as those in the 2020 general election, professors are faced with deciding whether to broach the topic in the classroom.
This year in particular, the question extends to nearly every academic department. “I think that it is often a pedagogical strategy to think of your course material in the context of what is going on in the world… So if it means talking about the election, then I talk about the election,” said Professor of Sociology Jamie McCallum, who is currently teaching a first year seminar called “U.S. American Left.”
McCallum explained that in the classroom, there is no non-political way to broach the topic. “On one hand, you don’t want to make the lecture into a pulpit. At the same time, I think it’s important to be clear about where you’re coming from,” he said. He explained that some professors may choose not to discuss politics in class, and while he believes that to be a valid approach, it is nonetheless a political stance.
In humanities classrooms across campus, political discussions are an expected part of the package. “I address the election insofar as the various policy positions on each ticket intersect with themes raised in the class,” Professor of History Amit Prakash said. He explained that the past can — and must — be used to understand our experiences in the present. “Otherwise it’s just antiquarianism,” he said.
Jennifer Wang, a professor of English and American literatures, found elections to be equally pertinent in her courses. “Given the nature of what I teach, literature and literary study, I don’t believe I could keep politics — topical, electoral, and otherwise — out of my classroom,” Wang told The Campus. “It’s really not about me, it’s about [my students].”
Meanwhile, in the Department of Film and Media Culture, Professor Jason Mittell takes a different tack. In his current course, he has spent time discussing the connection between television and democracy, as well as campaign ads and the mainstream media. “I acknowledge my positions and beliefs but make it very clear that students will never be evaluated on whether they agree with me or not,” Mittell said.
In his economic statistics class, Professor of Economics Akhil Rao finds that discussing the election allows him to touch on relevant topics like racial inequality, income inequality and public sentiment on climate change, although he does not believe that strictly addressing the election is necessary for his class. “I don't want to go too far afield from the important economic issues at stake,” he said.
For Mittell and many other professors, these conversations are not about disseminating ideology but rather acknowledging the effects of politics on their subjects. “I encourage them to argue for their own positions based on information and analysis,” Mittell said.
Professor Jason Mittell is The Campus’ faculty adviser. He is married to Vermont State Senator Ruth Hardy.
(10/29/20 9:58am)
This fall marks Senator Christopher Bray’s (D-Addison) fourth re-election campaign for the Vermont Senate. Despite almost 12 years of service under his belt, including two terms in the Vermont House, Bray has found that the Covid-19 crisis has created a completely new landscape for political activity.
“If you want to represent people, you have to know what is on their minds. Those informal conversations with people walking the dog or shopping at the grocery store have been disrupted,” Bray told The Campus. To supplement the loss of those casual interactions, Bray has increasingly engaged with his constituents over the phone and through email since the outbreak began.
Bray’s interactions with his fellow representatives had also largely been confined to the virtual arena, with the state government covening via Zoom throughout the spring. According to Bray, the Vermont legislature is one of only nine in the country that kept running full-time throughout the pandemic. “It was another example of Vermonters getting things done,” Bray said.
Unsurprisingly, Covid-19 will continue to influence Bray’s immediate priorities next term if his bid for re-election is successful. In an op-ed penned for VTDigger, Bray appealed to the nation’s founding values to advocate for wearing a mask, even when doing so feels like an imposition on individual liberty. Bray reminded readers that securing collective safety often means sacrificing a little bit of personal freedoms.
Bray has been following up on this editorial regularly by posting reminders for people to socially distance and wear masks. He recognizes the inevitable fatigue that results from following these onerous requirements every day, but he emphasizes the need to remain vigilant because “the pandemic isn’t getting tired.”
Fortunately, he said, most people responded positively, making Vermont’s infection rate the lowest in the country, even without instituting fines or other consequences for not wearing masks or failing to social distance. “Vermonters are pretty independent-minded, but, on the other hand, they are also civic-minded,” Bray said.
Bray believes that the virus has highlighted and exacerbated pre-existing weaknesses in Vermont’s infrastructure, and he is prepared to tackle some of these deeper issues through his next term. Some of his priorities include childcare, food insecurity and the accessibility of healthcare.
Bray is Chair of the Senate’s Natural Energy and Resources Committee, and he remains committed to tackling the towering challenges of climate change despite the obstacles of the pandemic. The state has already taken significant steps toward cleaning up its energy use, including passing the Global Warming Solutions Act, establishing Efficiency Vermont (the statewide energy efficiency utility) and achieving the title of cleanest electric grid in the country.
A believer in the power of incremental progress, Bray is pleased that the state is moving in the right direction, but he refuses to be complacent or accept “too little progress too slowly.” Now, he is looking to accelerate the clean grid project and turn to reducing heating and transportation loads, which together account for 80% of emissions in the state. He argues that there is not only a moral imperative to take action on this front, but there is also a huge economic opportunity to buy less power from out-of-state by generating more energy in-state and reducing consumption through efficiency.
In a time of highly contentious national politics in which many people are left feeling hopeless, environmentalists are no exception. Both presidential candidates have rebuked the Green New Deal and lauded fracking during recent debates. Senator Bray is finding a way to stay optimistic and maintain his faith in the political process.
He spoke positively about his experience in the Vermont Legislature, in which citizen politicians don’t just vote stringently along party lines and representatives are actually committed to listening to one another.
“When people come together in a respectful, constructive environment, we get things done. I have seen that over and over in Vermont – not just in the legislature but also more broadly in the work of activists, select boards and other organizations,” said Bray.
Ultimately, Bray is guided by this idea of normalizing goodness. Whether it is a small, practical change like banning single-use plastic bags, or broader-scale progress like changing the very standards of politics back to those of respect and collaboration, Bray’s overarching goal is to embrace change and “make doing the right thing the default.”
(10/29/20 9:57am)
Up for re-election in the Vermont Senate this fall is Senator Ruth Hardy (D-Addison), who was first elected to the office in 2018 and is currently running for her second term. Hardy described adapting her campaign approach this year and reflected on overall changes in Vermont Legislature sessions given the ongoing Covid-19 crisis during an interview with The Campus.
The Vermont Legislature typically convenes in January and adjourns in May. Disrupted by the pandemic this year, legislators worked largely remotely after a two-week recess in March and later adjourned in June. The legislature also reassembled in August for an unprecedented six-week second session to work out a number of items on the docket postponed earlier this year.
Continued efforts to combat the spread of Covid-19 have changed Hardy’s campaign and those of her colleagues. The senator noted a shift from face-to-face campaigning to phone calls, honk-and-waves and socially distanced outdoor events.
“In 2018, I knocked on thousands of doors around my district, just canvassing and talking to voters at their homes, and I’m not doing that this year,” Hardy said. “I just don’t feel like it’s safe for me or for them, and it doesn’t set a good example to show up at people’s houses unannounced.”
Although she was unopposed in the August primary, Hardy still worked to reach her constituents. She launched a socially distanced campaign that included making phone calls, mailing letters and using social media after the fall legislative session ended.
With two seats in the Vermont Senate apportioned to the Addison District and five candidates vying for a spot, Hardy faces some competition in the general election. But she noted that she views her race for re-election as less competitive this year than her 2018 race when she was a new candidate and stacked up against incumbents.
Separate from her campaign, Hardy said that she is particularly proud of the tri-partisan effort in the legislature to convene virtually after the floor closed. Members of the legislature ultimately voted unanimously to approve remote legislation, allowing the state government to continue working safely in a time of crisis.
“In normal sessions, we caucus with our parties,” she said. “But during the pandemic, we caucused as a whole. We never met separately. We always did everything together. And nearly every single vote on Covid-19-related things was unanimous. This is something I’m really proud of, and our state should be really proud that we have not approached this coronavirus crisis as a partisan issue in Vermont.”
On the individual level, Hardy was also among the senators advocating the closure of the Montpelier Vermont State House in March, advancing a proactive mindset and an emphasis on safety while confronting the pandemic.
At the beginning of the public health crisis, Hardy began reaching out to her constituents and helping them stay safe by providing resources and advice. “I was hearing from constituents about how worried they were and how scared they were,” Hardy said.
“It’s going to be incredibly important that our state continue its vigilance and the collaborative work during the recovery from [Covid-19],” Hardy said. “We still have a lot more work to get through the pandemic, and then a lot of work to recover and rebuild our economy, rebuild our healthcare system and, frankly, our educational system as a result of this pandemic.”
Hardy also serves on the Senate Committee on Education and the Senate Committee on Agriculture, significant to Addison County, which has the most farms of any county in the state. She also worked toward the adoption of climate change legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the state of Vermont.
Additionally, with a rise in anti-racist initiatives and the ongoing nationwide protests against police brutality, Hardy plans to continue being an advocate in the Vermont Senate for criminal justice reform, “holding our police accountable and… making sure that we’re passing antiracist legislation in Vermont.”
Hardy encourages Middlebury College students to vote this Tuesday in the town of Middlebury if they haven’t yet received or returned their absentee ballots. “This election is so important to the future of our country,” she said. “Wherever you vote, please vote.”
Senator Ruth Hardy is married to Professor Jason Mittell, academic advisor to The Campus.
(10/29/20 9:56am)
Congressman Welch has represented Vermont in the House of Representatives as the state’s sole delegate since he was elected in 2006. After launching his career in politics during the civil rights era, Welch’s career has focused on energy efficiency, housing discrimination and bringing broadband to rural Americans. Looking toward a likely win in his re-election bid this year, The Campus sat down with the congressman to reflect on over a decade of work in the House.
Reflecting on over a decade in Congress, what do you consider to be your biggest accomplishment and why?
On climate change and economic recovery…
I think the biggest accomplishments that we had were clearly during the Obama years: it was the passage of the Affordable Care Act. I served on the Energy and Commerce Committee and I was very, very active in that effort. The biggest accomplishment in the House — but didn’t pass in the Senate — was the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which we passed in that same session of Congress. That would have reduced emissions by 80% by 2050, and all of us are so disappointed that we lost that by one vote in the Senate. The last economic crisis, of course, was during the Obama Administration, when Wall Street collapsed and brought down Main Street. I played an active role in the American Recovery Act, which started to get us back on our feet.
I’ve been a leader on climate change issues. My role in the [Waxman-Markey bill] was to be the principal advocate for the energy efficiency aspects of that bill. Since then, I’ve been a champion in Congress on climate change, particularly the benefits of energy efficiency. I got involved in that when I was in the Vermont senate, and one of the things that I look back on with fond memories is the climate march that was organized by Bill McKibben when he was starting 350.org. He and Middlebury students led a march from Montpelier to Burlington in the election, back in 2006. I was one of the speakers at that original march.
How do you think we can build trust in politics again? Do you think politics have always been this divisive?
On Trump and social media...
[Politics] hasn’t been this divisive. Trump has embraced division as a tactic. One of his first acts as president was to ban people coming into this country on the basis of religion. That’s shocking. One of his policies was to separate children from families at the southern border — and I was one of the first members of Congress to go down there and witness that firsthand. I went to the Texas-Mexico border. And even today, we’ve learned that there are over 500 children where the government has no idea where their parents are. Trump plays racial politics to a degree that no one has ever seen. He won this election with three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, and he’s done everything that he can to intensify division rather than create unity since then.
There’s another issue here that will take significant thought and effort to overcome it, and that’s social media. What we see with the explosion of social media is an explosion of misinformation, of hate, of conspiracy theories — and it’s created a toxic, polluted atmosphere for dialogue about the problems that we collectively face. I think that’s a big challenge for our democracy. When there's no norms and no mutual respect, then it makes it much more difficult to find common ground.
That’s a big problem, and Trump is a master at understanding how this works and he exploited it and he was very successful at mowing down all of his Republican opponents in those primaries. This is a real challenge to our democracy.
On finding common ground with Republicans…
There’s two ways [to deal with partisanship] — personal and political. The personal way of dealing with it is that you show respect. You listen more than you talk. You look for where there’s common ground.
So, for example, I am a leader of the rural broadband caucus. I find ways of interacting where it’s about us trying to solve the challenges of the people who we represent. I have a colleague from West Virginia, [Rep.] David McKinley. He’s a Republican, and he is a good partner of mine when working on energy efficiency. On the other hand, he’s from coal country, and he attacks the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is causing a loss of coal jobs. I don’t agree with him on [attacking the EPA], but we agree on energy efficiency.
As a way of trying to build a relationship with him and show respect for the coal miners, I went to stay with him in his house in Harrison County, West Virginia, and we spent a day in a coal mine — we went down 900 feet and 4.5 miles in. We spent an afternoon being with coal workers who were working on a coal seam.
The point I was making was that I’m against coal [in that] I’m for clean energy, but I’m for the coal miners. Those coal miners did not create climate change. In fact, those coal miners are losing jobs, and they’re hard workers. I compared the coal miners to our dairy farmers as the hardest working people I’ve ever met. I saw how much that gave me an opportunity to be heard, by David and by many others who began to see that I’m advocating for clean energy, but it’s not because I’m against those coal miners. I’m against a lot of the coal company owners, but the miners are good people. That’s a way of showing personal respect and creating trust.
Institutionally is where Trump is pretty toxic. He is attacking institutions instead of building them up, instead of reforming them and strengthening them. When I say institutions, I mean everything from the court systems to the intelligence community to the EPA, where we have lost one-thousand scientists who have left in despair because of political manipulation. We have to build up our institutions and have trust in institutions to build trust in goals that are important to our society. So, on a personal level, it’s how you interact with people. On a political level, it’s a commitment to reforming, not destroying, institutions that we all need.
Do you have any fun stories from working in Congress for over a decade? What are some of your best days working in Congress?
On cheese (and getting the job done)...
One of my best days was when Mateo Kehler, who was the head of Jasper Hill Cheese, showed up at my office in D.C. in a t-shirt and cargo shorts. He was in a rage-slash-panic, because the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) just issued a rule that said cheesemakers could no longer store their cheese on wooden boards. Pretty crazy, because we have been storing cheese on wooden boards since the last supper. The background is that they did an inspection of a cheesemaking facility in upstate New York and found contaminated cheese, and there were woodboards there. As it turns out, the whole place was contaminated; it’s not that the boards were contaminated. [The cheesemaking facility in upstate New York] really had back practices and needed to be closed down, and they were. But the bad practices were the problem, not the use of wood.
So in any event, this would have been catastrophic for this award-winning cheese company, Jasper Hill. What do we do? So this was a while ago, when Paul Ryan was the chair of the Budget Committee. He’s Republican, and he and I don’t agree on anything. He represents Wisconsin, where they make a lot of cheese, and he and I used to kid a lot about who had better cheese. So, I went on the floor and found him, and I said ‘Paul, we got us a cheese problem.’ I explained it to him, and within a day, we called up the FDA to explain our problem. We said, ‘we’ve got a cheese problem, and you’re soon going to have a budget problem.’ And it got fixed.
It’s an only-in-Vermont story because you literally have this citizen, who is running this wonderful enterprise called Jasper Hill Cheese, show up unannounced in his t-shirt and cargo shorts to tell me what the problem was. It’s existential. And in a few days, it was solved. And it was solved in a significant part because I had a good pre-existing relationship with Paul Ryan, and I knew that, when it came to cheese and how it would affect Wisconsin cheese makers, Paul and I would be on the same page. It was an interesting combination of a Vermonter coming and dropping in and feeling completely comfortable in the office and asking for something that couldn’t be done, and we did it all in a couple of days.
On race and Representative John Lewis…
Another wonderful story: I got my start in politics in the civil rights movement. When I was in college, I dropped out of college to go to Chicago to work for a community organization that was fighting discriminatory housing. I dropped out of college for what would have been my junior year. I worked there, and then I returned to college, and then I returned to Chicago as a Robert Kennedy Fellow to resume my work when I got out [of college].
During what would’ve been my junior year in college, I went down to Atlanta to the Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King, at that time, was the pastor. And I was in the church, and he spoke. It was a powerful experience to be with him when he spoke in that church. And afterwards, I went upstairs when he had a press conference, and there were very few people there, and he was denouncing the Vietnam War. My whole beginnings in politics were inspired by the racial justice movements of the late 60s — the voting rights movement.
Fast forward, I’m in Congress and I had a colleague that I revered from afar for a long time, and that was [Rep.] John Lewis. We, in the House, were very frustrated that Speaker Paul Ryan would not take up any gun safety legislation. We protested on the floor, and I spent a good deal of time sitting on the floor next to John Lewis when we were protesting in Congress about gun violence. All of us who served with John regarded it as a special privilege to be with him and to be his colleague. That memory, of sitting on the floor of the House, next to John, is probably one of my favorite, most proud moments. His advocacy was [to] get in good trouble… cause good trouble.
Now we’re continuing with the effort to deal with the incredible racism in our county that is systemic and ingrained. With the leadership of the Black Congressional Caucus, we passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which, unfortunately, Senator [Mitch] McConnell won’t pass in the senate. That continuation of the opportunity to work on racial justice issues means a lot to me, and I really appreciate the work that the students at Middlebury are doing to bring attention to systemic racism and try to find practical ways to address it.
(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].”
