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(05/03/20 2:22am)
William Garrett Nash lived without fear. His family and friends will remember him for his ability to live with joy in the present, his passion for innovating and the boundless love he held for those around him.
Will died on March 7 at Middlebury. He was 21 years old.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]The world needs fearless people like Will Nash. They are our risk takers, our astronauts, our explorers, our entrepreneurs and our front-of-the-line first responders.[/pullquote]
Will grew up in San Anselmo, California with his twin brother, Drew, and younger sister, Cate. At Middlebury, he studied economics and Spanish, competed on the track and field team in pole vaulting through his sophomore year, and spent summers and much of his free time pursuing entrepreneurship.
“The world needs fearless people like Will Nash. They are our risk takers, our astronauts, our explorers, our entrepreneurs and our front-of-the-line first responders,” said Ross Sullivan, his pole-vaulting coach at Sir Francis Drake High School.
On the track, Will was intrepid. His mother, Kristen Nash, recalled that after watching the 2012 Olympics, Will decided he wanted to become a pole vaulter. And so, he did.
“By the start of his senior year in high school he was the leading vaulter in our county and third on our school’s all-time list,” Sullivan said.
That same year, a basketball-stunt-induced accident left casts on both of Will’s arms, putting an almost certain end to his high school vaulting career. But rather than accept defeat, Will spent the next several months training for speed and strength — broken arms and all. His casts were taken off right before the county meet and he still managed to qualify for California’s NCS Redwood Empire Championship Track Meet, where he finished runner-up.
“I have seen a lot of gutsy things in the 10 years I’ve coached pole vault, but without a doubt, watching Will on that day stands out from all others,” Sullivan said.
At Middlebury, he would achieve his personal record in pole vault, qualifying for the NESCAC Championship his sophomore year.
In the classroom, Will could be a quiet student, but you would be mistaken to assume that he wasn’t engaged, said Middlebury Economics Professor David Munro. “When he shared, it was often some of the most insightful thoughts and questions which enriched our discussions,” Munro said.
“He was a searcher, reflecting with care on the meaning of our reading and our collective work,” said Jonathan Isham, an economics and environmental science professor.
Outside of his studies and athletic pursuits, Will was constantly innovating. Known as the “idea man” among his group of lifelong friends from elementary school, Will was always coming up with shenanigans or new business ideas. He could be found designing desks with built-in toasters or discussing ideas for a craft brew label with his father, Lenny Nash.
This entrepreneurial spirit continued to flourish at Middlebury. Will was selected for MiddCORE, an intensive experiential-learning program for leaders and innovators. Along with close friend and roommate Ayman Quadir ’20, he founded Semi Aquatics, a luxury streetwear brand focused on sustainable sourcing, in November of 2019.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Will embraced the possibility of failure better than anyone I know. He welcomed risk and adventured into the unknown with the wisdom of someone far beyond his years.[/pullquote]
It was Will’s fearlessness and creativity that made him so well-suited to the temperament of a true entrepreneur.
“Will embraced the possibility of failure better than anyone I know. He welcomed risk and adventured into the unknown with the wisdom of someone far beyond his years,” said Blaine Shira, Will’s older cousin. “I can only hope that at the end of my life, I have lived as much as Will did in his far too short, but full life.”
Whether it was skiing on the Alpine Meadows Big Mountain team in high school, rallying his friends for endless games of pick-up basketball or chasing wild boars in Spain, Will packed his days with action and adventure. Venturing far from his childhood home, Will lived in Barcelona with his family during his eighth-grade year, and studied abroad in Madrid during his junior year at Middlebury.
“His spirit of adventure was awesome. His humor was the best kind: quick and dry,” said his mother Kristin Nash. “But mostly, his capacity to love his family and his friends was beautiful and big.”
Above all, Will’s friends and family remember him as a true companion. He cultivated friendships with the same devotion and passion with which he approached entrepreneurial endeavors and athletic feats.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]His innate freedom to explore and appreciate each moment, and to love so easily and completely, is the stuff that people might meditate for years to experience, but to Will it came naturally.[/pullquote]
Will remained close with a group of friends from his hometown – the self-proclaimed “Selmo Crew” — but made new friends easily wherever he went, whether at Middlebury or in Barcelona. Even as a kid, he never wanted to leave anyone out, Kristin Nash said. Childhood sleepovers would often entail pitching a tent and unrolling tons of sleeping bags to make enough room for everyone.
“His innate freedom to explore and appreciate each moment, and to love so easily and completely, is the stuff that people might meditate for years to experience, but to Will it came naturally,” Stephanie Nash, his aunt, said.
Friends at Middlebury attest to Will’s huge capacity to love. “He’d always be down to play one more round of NBA 2K, to stay up one more hour on a Saturday night, to cook one more meal in our suite even if GrilleMe was on the way,” Christian Chiang ’20 said.
His circle of friends was deep and close, Chiang said, and to those who loved him, Will reciprocated a generous and true friendship. “Will was the life of the party,” said his friend Christopher Woodburn ’20. “I don’t know a better way to describe him than that.”
“Above all else, he had a big heart,” added Chiang. “I don’t think there was any room for negativity in his life; he was always occupied with living his life to the fullest.”
The Nash family hosted a virtual candle-lighting ceremony on Wednesday, April 29 – Will’s birthday — to celebrate his life. He would have been 22.
They remembered him on this day by taking in one of his favorite sights — the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean — and making lamb and beef Bolognese, one of his favorite recipes that he learned from his friend Ayman.
“Will was a friend to everyone. He lived fearlessly and on his own terms,” Kristin Nash said. “Although I was his mother, Will was one of my greatest teachers; he embodied everything I wish I could be. Now I will live everyday trying to live that way for him.”
Nash is survived by his parents Kristin and Lenny Nash; his twin brother Drew Nash, also 21, a senior at Wake Forest University; and his younger sister Cate, 19, a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley.
A video recording of the memorial service held in Will’s honor at Middlebury this March can be found here. The college will award him a posthumous bachelor's degree in economics.
Will’s family has set up a William G. Nash Memorial Fund in Will’s honor, dedicated to promoting wellbeing among Marin County youth. To learn more about donating to that fund, please click here.
(04/30/20 10:01am)
The state’s already struggling dairy industry has been destroying its sitting supply of milk in a reluctant response to Covid-19 economic realities. Due to the indefinite shut down of restaurants, schools and businesses, Vermont’s dairy farms have been faced with a steep drop in demand and nowhere to store excess product. A high demand in food retail does not nearly make up for the lack of food service. And across the nation, farmers are destroying the fresh food that they can no longer sell.
“We are deeply concerned about all dairy farms at this moment in time,” said Laura Ginsberg, agricultural development section chief of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets. “After 4 years of really poor milk prices coming into this, it's not like farmers were set up in a strong financial position, because milk prices have been low for so long now.” Ginsberg anticipates that it will take a toll, but is uncertain how drastic the magnitude of the shock will be in the industry across Vermont and New England.
Prior to the virus outbreak, U.S. dairy farmers overproduced and oversupplied their milk to salvage a shrinking profit. Because agricultural goods are not adjusted to inflation, the surplus lowers milk prices. This forces dairy farmers into a cycle of production expansion in response to price reductions. New England’s small-scale farmers are left especially vulnerable, since the USDA sets milk retail prices at the highly industrialized national standard.
“It’s cheaper to produce milk out west, so their cost of production is lower than ours. And you can't have a large farm in Vermont because of topography and weather, so there's no way we can compete on cost of production. This is a really troublesome spot for our producers,” Ginsberg said.
Doug Dimento, director of corporate communications at Agri-Mark and Cabot, speculates that there may be a fundamental shift in dairying in the Northeast. “Small farmers have been financially fragile,” he said. “We were expected to see rebounds in farm prices this year, but now we expect them to go down over the next few months because of oversupply of milk forcing prices downward.”
Jon Rooney, owner of Monument Farms in Weybridge, where the college sources its milk, has seen significantly reduced demand from restaurant closures. “Due to the fact that Middlebury College students are consuming less and less milk, the lack of [Middlebury College] Food Service has not had a big impact on our fluid milk usage,” Rooney wrote in an email to The Campus. “Restaurant sales represent a substantial portion of our overall business, but it’s the extras, primarily cream, the most valuable portion of the milk, that are piling up.” Ancillary products, such as cheese, sour cream, heavy cream and half & half play a big role in the farm’s overall revenues, but the milk is being dumped rather than processed.
For example, Cabot, a dairy processing company that sources from 160 Vermont dairy farms, is working overtime to alleviate the effects of oversupply. Cabot has four plants that run for 20 hours each day, leaving four hours to sanitize the facility. “We are running full speed, as hard as we can,” Dimento said. “In Springfield, Mass., we’re making butter and milk powder as quickly as we can, but it's not fast enough to absorb all this extra milk.” The Middlebury plant, located on Exchange Street, continues to employ a full staff.
Monument Farms has already been dumping its skim milk for three years. “We had a great need for the cream, but not the skim milk,” Rooney said. Previously, the farm dumped its skim milk into a digester to generate electricity. Monument Farms would truck its milk to a plant, where workers skim off the cream and return the fat-free milk to the farm. Now, the farm dumps full fat milk without selling the cream.
Other co-ops and processing companies claim milk from farmers, only to dump it in mature pits or co-op facilities, according to Ginsberg. “A farmer may not know their milk is getting dumped out, or a farm might have a milk truck come, pump the milk out of the tank, then back up to the manure pit and dump it there,” she said. Ginsberg said that although there is a misperception that individual farmers are making the decision to dump milk, this is never the case — it is ultimately the decision of the cooperative or company with which the farmer is affiliated.
Molly Anderson, professor and director of Food Studies at the college, believes the best solution is for the government to purchase the excess milk from dairy processors and distribute it to food-insecure households. The USDA has allocated $19 billion in Covid-19 relief to the agricultural sector; $3 billion will purchase commodities for food insecure households. “If the processors are selling yogurt, cheese and butter to the government, it means they can take more from the farmers,” Anderson said.
While donating the milk is a potential remedy, it brings new challenges. “We are working on getting that excess fluid milk into the charitable food system,” Ginsberg said. “That is not as easy as it sounds. There are very strict federal regulations on how milk moves through the marketplace.”
The Vermont Agency of Agriculture is working with a number of charitable organizations to bypass these barriers.
“I had a conference call involving Cabot and several other groups to get as much food as we can to the food banks, but we don’t borrow any fluid milk; we have no way to get it: no trucks,” Dimento said.
If milk dumping becomes a long term practice, farmers will eventually reduce their herd numbers to decrease the amount of food, water and other inputs. “There is going to be some killing of cows that wouldn’t otherwise have happened in such a quick manner,” Ginsberg said. Despite recent supply management efforts, this poses a serious threat to farmer income.
"There are going to be lots of tough decisions made on farms,” Dimento said. “We are very scared for what may take place on farms in months ahead.”
As for Monument Farms, Rooney said that he does not plan on reducing his herd size. “Due to the fact that we need to be ready once restaurants open back up,” he said,” it would not be a good idea for us to reduce cow numbers.”
(04/30/20 10:00am)
Aaron Petty ’02 missed his own graduation. A few weeks before the ceremony, he contracted tuberculosis; by the day of graduation, he was bedridden. As the valedictorian of his class, he was scheduled to give a speech entitled “On the Existence of God” to close out the ceremony. That speech, sadly, was never delivered, leaving a significant gap in the program. His absence was especially awkward, though, because Petty was the only person set to graduate that day.
Middlebury’s first graduating class, the class of 1802, consisted of one person. That person was Aaron Petty. A shoemaker by trade, Petty wanted an education so that he could become a minister. He entered the college as a junior in 1800, the year Middlebury was founded, and split his time between shoemaking and school to pay for his classes.
Graduation in Petty’s time was a rather solemn affair. Considering the ceremony included 24 speeches over the course of 24 hours (two orations in Latin, two orations in Greek, three declamations, two colloquies, three dialogues, three disputes and nine orations in English, plus four sets of sacred music and two sets of instrumental music), you could argue that Petty was lucky to have fallen ill when he did. If modern graduation ceremonies are a bit of a snooze, this must have been an excruciating puritanical night terror.
Despite the ceremony’s inexcusable dreariness, though, Petty must have been pretty disappointed to miss it. He was known “for his ambition to advance himself in life,” according to historian David Stameshkin, and he hoped that an education would provide the bootstraps with which to pull himself out of … well, boot-making. After two years of hard work and many pairs of shoes, Petty was expecting to have a ceremony to honor all that hard work — graduation was, quite literally, his day. But, for reasons out of his control, he had to celebrate commencement from his bedroom.
Petty’s story seems especially relevant this year, when, once again, the entire senior class will miss graduation due to illness. We will observe commencement, at least for now, from our respective bedrooms.
Two hundred and twenty years later, an old Middlebury tradition has found new life.
Like the Panther Parade, this is not a tradition anyone had really hoped would continue. Nobody wants to fear for their health. And nobody wants to miss graduation, except maybe for younger siblings.
Just as Petty did in 1802, we want recognition of our efforts. And rightfully so! The multiplicity of experiences and challenges that the members of our class have lived through over the last four years (and the last four weeks) should be honored, publicly. Every person has their own reasons for feeling a sense of accomplishment this May, and to suddenly lose the recognition of that accomplishment is like finishing a marathon only to find there was no one watching the race.
There’s no sugar-coating it: losing graduation sucks. (Losing Senior Week sucks, too, but for slightly more Dionysian reasons.) It sucks for us, it sucks for our families, it sucks for local businesses, and it sucks especially for the hungry campus squirrels.
Yet amid all that suckiness, there are also reasons to rejoice. Recently, I’ve found myself turning to a favorite poet of our generation, who says, “Ain't about how fast I get there, ain't about what's waitin’ on the other side … it's the climb.” Miley Cyrus’s corporate-spawned clichés hit home for a reason: it is about the climb, and that’s especially true for college.
Whether there is a ceremony or not, nothing about the four (well, three and three-quarters) years we spent at Middlebury will change. We still filled our brains with useful information and economics; we still formed beautiful, lasting friendships; we still figured out that Atwater is not the place to find love; and we still leave Middlebury with memories of immense happiness, with the scars of immense stress, and, most importantly, with a whole lot of love. We will also hopefully still leave with one of those weird old-timey canes.
In loss, we have been granted clearer vision of what we have been given. And we’ve been given so much.
Six months after graduating from his bed, Aaron Petty died. He had never recovered from the tuberculosis that had forced him to miss commencement. Thus the class of 1802, half a year after leaving Middlebury, ceased to exist.
Unless I’m horribly mistaken, the class of 2020 has a much brighter future ahead of it. Whatever may happen in the coming months, and whenever we hold our eventual physical graduation, that future — our future — is something to have faith in.
Will O’Neal is a member of the class of 2020.
(04/30/20 9:56am)
Early this fall, on a quiet evening, Community Council Co-Chair Roni Lezama ’22 was in his dorm room doing homework when he received a call from Baishakhi Taylor, the dean of students and Lezama’s fellow Co-Chair of Community Council.
“Where are you?” he recalled her saying. “Come to Old Chapel.” Lezama, fearing the worst, hopped on his bike and zipped across campus as fast as he could, just as the sun was beginning to set. But when he arrived at Taylor’s office, it was clear that no school-wide, calamitous emergency had taken place. Instead, Taylor just wanted Lezama’s advice to ensure student voices were represented in the midst of confusion and pushback in response to the announcement regarding the installation of new security cameras.
To Lezama, this immediate inclination has characterized Taylor’s overarching mission as Middlebury’s Dean of Students — to have each and every voice within the student body inform her decisions. Known for responding to emails in mere minutes, she has been described by those who worked closely with her as exceptionally communicative and uniquely receptive.
“I can’t even put into words how accessible she was to students,” Lezama said. “There was a sense of urgency, but not from an optics perspective. She actually cared about what students were thinking about.”
Such instincts, in essence, make clear the sorrow that many are feeling in response to the news of Taylor’s departure. President Laurie Patton, in a school-wide email earlier this month, announced that Taylor would be leaving Middlebury to assume the position of Dean of the College and Vice President of Student Life at Smith College, a private women’s college in Northampton, Mass. and member of the Seven Sisters, effective July 1. As an assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and the faculty mentor for the BOLD Women’s Leadership Initiative, women’s education has been paramount within Taylor’s own life.
“I came to the U.S. to study women’s studies,” Taylor, who grew up and completed her undergraduate education in India, said. “More than ever, I would like to focus on women leadership at an institutional level, and I’m grateful that Middlebury prepared me for that.” She also cited accessibility to her family as another motivation for the transition. The majority of her family lives in India, and proximity to a major airport — Boston Logan in this case— has proven to be even more critical in the context of her father’s passing last year. Her husband works in Washington, D.C.
Before coming to Middlebury, Taylor served as the Associate Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University, where Patton was her mentor and supervisor. Taylor was also a faculty member at the Duke Center for South Asian Studies and the program in Education.
A focal point of Taylor’s tenure at Middlebury has been fostering a productive, harmonious relationship between academic and student life. Once a week, she fielded advice and facilitated conversation with her student advisory group, which is composed of students representing different grades, interests and backgrounds.
“No process is perfect, but I’ve tried to get us to a more student-centric approach,” she said. “It’s about how we continue to meet student needs in a holistic and integrated way.”
Student Government Association President Varsha Vijayakumar ’20, who worked closely with Taylor, expressed gratitude for her insight and support during her presidential term, specifically citing her balanced feedback, institutional knowledge and general openness.
“She’s really good at tapping into our thoughts and is really keen on listening to our fears and what excites us,” Vijayakumar said. “She harnesses that and truly takes it into account.”
For Vijayakumar and Lezama, Taylor has stood out as a member of administration who has routinely kept them and other students in the loop regarding the goings-on in Old Chapel. While Taylor may have paved the way, they hope this precedent will continue.
“She was not afraid to separate her role as an administrator and [her role], dare I say, as a friend,” Lezama said, also noting her consistent support for first-generation and low-income students. “She just wanted to care for and support you, and if she couldn’t do it through her powers as an administrator, she would use whatever devices she had.”
Vijayakumar also believes that having closer, more personal relationships with administrators will only serve to help promote more productive and empathetic conversation.
“[Baishakhi] should be the rule, not the exception,” Vijayakumar said.
Lezama believes that the next dean of students will have big shoes to fill when it comes to student advocacy and administrative clarity. “I’m really going to miss her,” he said.
Meanwhile, Taylor’s advice for her successor is simple: “Listen closely to the students.”
(04/28/20 10:19pm)
During Preview Days every year, The Campus invites prospective students in to chat about what it is we do in our subterranean Hepburn Hall office. We like to tell prospective students at that event what we worked on that year to give them a sense of how we cover our college community. We’ve tried to replicate that conversation, electronically, below.
We always joke at The Campus that each year brings with it its own spring scandal. For seniors graduating in May, their first spring scandal was also perhaps the most significant in the college’s recent history: Charles Murray’s infamous 2017 visit to Middlebury sparked acrimonious debate about free speech and inclusion, leaving behind deep scars that the community continues to grapple with today.
This spring, which marks the final semester for the same seniors who witnessed the events of Murray’s first visit unfold, The Campus braced for his return. After breaking his invitation to campus by the Young Republicans, our editorial board expected Murray’s third visit to be the defining moment of this academic year.
And boy, were we wrong.
On March 10, the college announced the cancellation of in-person classes in response to a rapidly unfolding Covid-19 crisis. As we traversed across the country and around the globe, we wondered how The Campus — along with everything else — would change. As we wrote in our notes from the desk, we found it critically important to continue our coverage from home. That decision has been a defining moment in our year as student journalists.
The Campus continued our coverage from afar, reporting on changes to the grading policy, the struggles of local businesses and the lives of students who remain on campus. We launched The Middlebury Off-Campus project, a collection of stories from the wider Middlebury community, hoping to connect us when we are the furthest apart physically. The recent Love Issue put all the breaking news and the end of the world on a brief hiatus, bringing levity in a time when we all need a little bit of love.
While on campus, our stories have also shaped the conversations we’ve had as a community and, in many cases, pushed for and inspired change. Diligent reporting of unionization efforts and custodial shortages turned the spotlight on staff wages, culminating in the college’s promise to increase compensation for certain staff. Poignant opinion pieces, such as one student’s essay on her struggle with eating disorders, encouraged us to talk about topics that are oftentimes considered taboo. An editor’s repeated reporting on on-campus vandalism provoked year-long conversations about the treatment of our campus.
This year, we editorialized on cancel culture and the role of this paper amid tightening constraints on college journalists. We interviewed a Middlebury alumna who found herself at the center of the #MeToo movement and covered protests of New England’s biggest coal power plant. We also published a litany of sports features about Middlebury’s athletic community.
We tried to push the creative boundaries of our paper, from the annotated map of campus from our first issue of the year to the inclusion of more artwork to accompany our opinion pieces. On campus, our arts reporters covered student productions and exhibits; now, they are keeping us sane in quarantine with book and movie recommendations.
We have also striven to cover the diverse interests that make our community so vibrant — from the Ultimate Frisbee club’s bizarre traditions to the Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of ancient Chinese gold. And we expanded our scope to explore unique narratives that were oftentimes neglected, such as stories of queer love set against the backdrop of rural Vermont. Even this spring, as coronavirus news has been at the forefront of everyone’s minds, we sought to explore the stories beneath the surface, from an article about professors’ children intruding on Zoom sessions to a commentary on a world without sports.
When we reconvene on campus and meet many of you for the first time, we hope you will join us in telling the stories that you care about.
Bochu Ding ’21 is one of The Campus’ managing editors and next year’s editor in chief elect.
(04/27/20 3:00am)
Middlebury featured a photo of a student protesting Charles Murray’s 2017 campus visit in a promotional Instagram story last week, sparking anger among current and former students who accused the college of attempting to rewrite a painful chapter of its history for marketing purposes.
The Instagram story was posted Wednesday as part of the college’s “Midd Daily” campaign, which aims to give prospective students a taste of campus life. It featured a photo of Austin Kahn ’17.5, originally taken by Michael O’Hara ’17 on assignment for The Campus, protesting Murray’s visit in Wilson Hall. In the photo, Kahn holds a sign reading “this is an appropriate response” in front of the livestream of Murray’s conversation with Political Science Professor Allison Stanger. The Instagram story bore a caption that read, in part, “Social Justice and Activism: At Middlebury, we don’t just talk about social justice; we also act on it.” It was deleted later that afternoon.
In the hour before O’Hara took the photo on March 2, 2017, protesters shouted down Murray as he attempted to deliver his talk in Wilson Hall, forcing him and Stanger to livestream their conversation from a different room. Stanger was later severely injured by protesters while leaving the building.
Kahn was one of 74 students sanctioned by the college that spring for his role in the Murray protests (he did not reply to requests to describe the extent of sanctions he received as of press time, but has written publicly about being sanctioned on social media in the past). Severity of sanctions ranged from probation, which stayed on students’ records until the end of the semester, to official college discipline, which would remain on students’ permanent records.
If it intended to embrace a longstanding part of campus culture, the Instagram story of Kahn also prompted anger that Middlebury was using an event for which students were disciplined as part of an advertising campaign.
“Funny that you would punish students for protesting and then use their protest as part of an [sic] big advertising ploy,” wrote Cora Kircher ’20, a member of the environmental activism group Divest Middlebury, in an Instagram story of her own on Wednesday. Divest Middlebury later shared a screenshot of Kircher’s story to its Facebook page.
The Campus previously reported on the lengthy disciplinary process Murray protesters faced, which in part used photo and video evidence of the protests to pinpoint who was involved. That process garnered criticism from people on many sides of the free speech debate, with Murray lambasting the punishments meted out as "pathetically” insufficient while others decried the “terroristic” effects of a disciplinary process meant to “satisfy national audiences,” in the words of a professor.
“The funny thing is that after these protests, Middlebury launched an investigation where they used images like the one neatly featured on their account to discipline dissidents among the student body and intimidate sympathetic faculty,” Kahn wrote on his own Facebook page Thursday in a post that has since been shared 26 times.
In an email to The Campus, Social Media Director Andrew Cassel acknowledged criticisms of the Instagram story as “fully justified.”
“When we realized our mistake, of course we were concerned about any hurt it would bring to our community,” Cassel wrote. “In this case, both the admissions and communications teams recognized that we had made this oversight, and deleted the post.”
Kahn said he saw the promotional intent behind the posting of the photo as stripping away the “socio-political context” of the protest it captured. “The phenomenon of removing that meaningful act from its context totally perverted it and makes it meaningless,” he said. “It’s absurd.”
In what he saw as a silver lining, Kahn received a “wave” of messages from friends, many of whom had gone through the disciplinary process with him, notifying him that the image had been used in the college’s story on Wednesday.
O’Hara, the photographer, said that the Office of Admissions previously asked him permission to use the image, which he granted, but that he “was not provided context for how the photo might be used.” He granted permission under the assumption that the image would be included in #SixtyScenes, a collection of photos documenting campus life separate from the “Daily Midd” series that are shared as Instagram posts, not stories.
Cassel, who began as the college’s social media director last December, previously told The Campus that photos featured in the “Midd Daily” series are chosen collectively by multiple members of the admissions and communications offices. Midd Daily and #SixtyScenes fit Cassel’s vision of giving the college a more personal social media presence that better captures day-to-day realities of campus life, goals he described in a recent Campus profile.
Debate over Charles Murray’s work and his right to a platform at Middlebury had revived at the college in the months prior to Kahn’s surprise shoutout: Murray was scheduled to speak in Wilson Hall on March 31 on a new invitation from the College Republicans. But Covid-19 led to the cancellation of his visit, which would have been his third to Middlebury since 2007, along with the rest of in-person spring programming.
(04/23/20 12:00am)
Boy, what a ride it’s been.
When we first got to campus as doe-eyed teens, I don’t think any of us knew we’d be signing up for a rollercoaster ride. Within our first three months, Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States. Shortly thereafter, anti-Muslim hate speech was found on a classmate’s whiteboard and a swastika on the door of a Jewish congregation in town. Our second semester was marked by Charles Murray’s infamous visit and all the protests, multiple racial profiling cases and ensuing sanctions. It was a jarring start to our college careers, to say the least.
Sometimes I think back to when the letters of the word “RACIST” were spray painted across the pillars of Mead Chapel back in late 2017. Honestly, I think that image perfectly encapsulates Middlebury. That graffiti was a stark reminder of the not-so-pretty side of our school, that we have a long way to go; at the same time, Mead Chapel is also an edifice of hope and opportunity and celebration.
Late one night after I learned that the college would close early because of the pandemic, I found myself sitting at the steps of that very building. I stared out at our dimly lit campus and suddenly began crying uncontrollably — not because of all the sh*t we’ve gone through, but because of how we’ve persevered and even found some beauty along the way.
I’m thinking about the excitement of Preview Days, or the first time we experienced the Winter Carnival bonfire and fireworks in all their glory. I’m thinking about how we didn’t always have to swipe in to get into the dining halls, and how the lines would be out the door just for black pepper tofu or Midnight Breakfast. How every weekend the Grille would be packed after Cafe con Leche, and how at least one person most definitely lost their jacket or student ID along the way. Free & For Sale, anyone?
And then there was the snow. Do you remember that one tree on Mead Chapel hill that was always decorated like a Christmas tree around the holidays? Random snowmen and the occasional igloo would pop up all around, new playthings for our feisty campus squirrels. MiddKids are generally really smart, but for some reason we would always try to cut across Battell beach even though walking around would probably be much faster.
With the chilly winter of our third semester, though, came The List. Our campus plunged into conversations about just how widespread sexual violence is at Middlebury. But it also inspired our community to gather more intentionally around It Happens Here, a storytelling event that centers on the voices of survivors of sexual violence. There were only about 20 of us in Wilson Hall the year before. After The List, I couldn’t even get in.
We protested the Muslim ban and spearheaded divestment. We cheered on our peers at dance and cultural performances, a cappella concerts and comedy shows. We learned to tell when it’s spring because everyone would start walking around in shorts, even though it was still 50 degrees outside. And soon enough, students would pull out their hammocks as Facilities set up the outdoor dining tables. Even Sean Kingston was excited about warmer weather at Middlesbury.
But we weren’t so excited about a chemistry test question referencing Nazi gas chambers, or a slave trade joke in a geology class. And before we could catch our breath, the invitation of Ryszard Legutko threw us in for another loop. Just like that, our junior spring, too, was marked by controversy.
In moments like that one, I would dream of eating too much at the all-school barbecue, of milling around campus late at night during Nocturne, of throwing paper airplanes in BiHall, and of seeing President Patton’s adorable dogs. Sometimes I even missed the carillon chiming away for what sometimes feels like hours.
But back to reality. We learned of Charles Murray 2.0 (technically 3.0) near the end of this past J-Term, and it suddenly felt like we were time-travelling back to our first year. But we were ready this time. Many of our peers had worked alongside the administration to revise the protest policy. We saw the creation of the Black Studies major and got to talk about the 1619 project with Nikole Hannah-Jones. We mobilized in a way that recognized the past and looked to the future.
And of course, just when we thought we could handle everything that came our way, Covid-19 forced us to abruptly leave behind everything we knew and held dear.
There’s no denying that we’ve been dealt a pretty sh*tty hand. Yet somehow, despite it all, we’ve made the most of our time at Midd —our response to the pandemic is proof. In just a few days, we developed an abridged Senior Week, cheekily hung up crush lists and took a good look at that beautiful Middlebury sunrise one last time.
These are the things that shape who we are, seniors, and I don’t want you to forget it. I want you to remember just how excited you were when you first got here, and I want you to take a deep breath and celebrate the fact that you’re almost done. Maybe we don’t get to walk down the stage in a cap and gown come May, but our accomplishment is so much bigger than that because we’re true Midd Kids: quirky and resilient, no matter what life throws at us. And when it comes down to it, that is what we will be remembered for.
I love you so much, class of 2019.75. Maybe we’ll be reunited someday.
Varsha Vijayakumar is a member of the class of 2020 and this year’s SGA president.
(04/22/20 9:58am)
College is an exciting three-and-three-quarters to four years for the raging hormone machines we call our bodies. It can also be a time of great angst and confusion. While many of us are simply looking for love, our college environment can sometimes lead us to act in ways that are ultimately counterproductive and harmful to those around us. This moment of social isolation has given us space from our peers — an opportunity to reflect critically on sex and romance in our college community.
Okay, now that that’s over with, let’s talk about how to get laid at Middlebury!
Never text first. If you get somebody’s number, always wait for them to text you. Otherwise, you’ll come off as “creepy” and “interested” and “having emotions.” Yuck! And, if you both wait so long for the other person to text that you never actually talk — eventually pretending not to know each other in the Proc panini line — it’s for the best. You don’t want to be with somebody who isn’t cool enough to pretend they don’t have feelings.
Only flirt with someone if you’re drunk. That way, you can avoid taking any personal responsibility for your emotions. Plus, if you get rejected, it doesn’t count! You were drunk, you didn’t really care anyways.
Use Tinder to see who’s into you and then never talk to them in person. This way, you can reap the benefits of knowing you’re desirable without the bothersome encumbrance of putting your self-image on the line. You would talk to them, but you’re not that interested. Like, you’d go on a date with them, but you don’t want to make it weird, you know? Since Middlebury is so small, you’ll get the extra perk of learning first-hand what cognitive dissonance feels like every time you see that person on campus.
Be hot, or rich enough to pretend you’re hot. As long as you’re attractive, or rich enough to pretend, the emotions of others don’t exist. So go for it: treat that person like sh*t and don’t let it trouble your beautiful, effortlessly-manicured confidence. Isn’t being better than everyone great?
Always string someone along, just in case. If it doesn’t work out with the person you were really trying to get with, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got somebody on deck to fill the gaping hole in your ego. It doesn’t matter if you actually like this person (it’s actually better if you don’t) because after one or two nights, you’ll be on to bigger and better things. Remember: Manipulating others in order to console yourself is the highest form of self-care!
Ghosting people is cool. At one time or another, we’ve all ghosted and been ghosted. Why bother breaking the cycle? Nobody’s ever gotten hurt.
And finally … Always pretend you’re not interested. If you take away one thing from this piece, let it be this. Having strong, genuine feelings for other people is decidedly not cool, and it leaves you vulnerable to the undesirable disruption of your personal fantasies and false self-confidence. Curate a disinterested but vaguely flirtatious persona, and then put it on so much that you eventually forget what it’s like to experience any semblance of authentic, life-affirming emotion. Deadening your inner self is hardly a high price to pay for the luxury of avoiding any kind of sexual or romantic rejection! As the saying goes, Virginia is for lovers and Middlebury is for pretending not to have feelings.
Will O’Neal is a member of the class of 2020.
(04/22/20 9:58am)
Each May, graduating seniors plaster the bulletin boards at the entrance of Proctor Dining Hall with so-called “Proc Crush Lists” — posters ranging from simple printed lists to elaborate craft projects, emblazoned with names of the creators’ crushes from their years at Middlebury.
Proc Crush Lists originated in 2005, when the tradition was brought to campus by then-senior Jason Lockhart ’05. Crush lists, originally intended to be written lists of romantic interests students had developed from their first year onward, have evolved to include lists of platonic love and appreciation.
A tradition Lockhart experienced as a student at Stuyvesant High School in New York inspired his desire to create the first crush lists. During his final year at Middlebury, he joined the Senior Committee, and while his peers planned the classic 100 Days party and Senior Week, Lockhart had one main goal: bringing crush lists to Midd.
Armed with the emails of every senior, Lockhart introduced the idea to his classmates, and then hung a long, large sheet of paper between two columns in Ross Dining Hall — yes, Ross — where students could post their lists. He started by hanging lists solicited from friends, around 30 or 40, and provided paper and pens so that students could create their own on the spot.
Initially, the display was intended to last only one day. But Lockhart’s friends encouraged him to leave the lists up indefinitely, and the collection eventually grew to around 100.
“It was a minor success,” Lockhart said.
The first year of crush lists elicited some drama: a friend of Lockhart’s put 200 people on his crush list, prompting the creation of the Facebook group, “I’m on John Parker’s* Crush List and I Don’t Feel Special,” and later the follow-up group, “I’m not on John Parker’s Crush List So What Does That Say About Me?”.
Lockhart graduated, and had nearly forgotten the lists until the following spring, when a friend who hadn’t yet graduated sent him a message: “You’d never believe it, the crush lists are back!” along with a picture of a new set of lists.
The lists have been a fixture at Middlebury ever since, although their location, content and style have all evolved over the past 15 years. Some of the lists have been archived by Special Collections, although they are not publicly available due to privacy concerns.
Initially located in Ross, crush lists have moved locations a few times over the years, sometimes split between Ross and Proctor; sometimes in Atwater, according to Lockhart; and now at their current home on the Proctor bulletin boards.
Seniors over the years have certainly raised the bar when it comes to crush list creativity. Now, they come in the form of Spotify playlists (with names as song titles), QR codes, athletics rosters, maps and more. They also exhibit a mix of intentions. While some students lean into the “crush” aspect, sometimes even including their phone numbers, others use the forum to list friends, professors, organizations or peers for whom they want to express appreciation. Most end up creating a hybrid of the two.
Others jump further outside the box, like Taite Shomo ’20.5, who posted a list this spring titled “List of Places I’ve Cried at Middlebury College: 2017–Present.”
This spring, as students were informed that they had just three days to evacuate the college due to Covid-19 concerns, the tradition appeared to be at risk. As seniors and senior Febs rushed to create their lists before a premature departure, a miscommunication about where lists could hang resulted in their removal from the Proctor bulletin boards. However, a March 11 email from SGA president Varsha Vijayakumar ’20 clarified the situation. Even in the complicated hurry to leave campus, the crush lists persisted.
Not every student is an advocate for the lists. Last year, our Sex Panther columnist addressed some of the concerns with the practice, like the power dynamics of seniors listing mostly younger students and the publicness of the lists that some may find uncomfortable. In 2016, a student tore down many of the lists and posted a manifesto in their place, denouncing the practice as predatory, according to one student who graduated that year.
The lists seem to invite a short fling or hook-up (or series of hook-ups) during the final days of college. But can crush lists help find long-lasting love? The fact that they crop up only in the final moments of a senior’s time at Middlebury means, probably not. But for some, like Harry Cramer ’16.5 and Masami Cookson ’17, the lists were the catalyst of a long-term relationship.
Cramer had seen Cookson at a couple of parties and they had some brief conversations, but they traveled in different circles: Cramer was involved in a cappella and was a Local editor on The Campus; Cookson was on the swim team.
“I decided, What the hell, I’ll add her to my list,” Cramer said. A mutual friend saw the list, asked if she could put the two of them in touch, and they went on a date shortly after.
“We got lunch outside of Proc,” Cramer said, “I remember that I had just come from frisbee practice, so I was all sweaty.” They went on a couple more dates after that and when they returned in the fall (Cramer was only a senior Feb when he hung up his list) began dating.
When they first formally met, having hardly talked before, things were a little awkward. But Cramer appreciated how a crush lists had pushed him to get to know somebody outside of his social circle.
“People at Midd tend to get stuck in their social bubbles too much, and it was nice to interact with Masami because the fact that we didn’t have a lot in common was refreshing,” Cramer said. “A lot of people get to their senior year and fall into the same routines, always talk to the same people: Proc Crush Lists can be a good way to meet people you wouldn’t otherwise interact with.”
The couple have been together for nearly four years, and now live together in Washington, D.C.
As for Lockhart, love wasn’t in the cards in the inaugural crush lists season. However, today he is engaged, and had planned to get married in May, although social distancing and restrictions on gatherings have put off the wedding for a bit. Lockhart still keeps up with the crush lists, looks forward to seeing them at reunions and appreciates that the tradition appears to be a permanent fixture at the college.
* Denotes pseudonym
Editor in chief Sabine Poux ’20 contributed reporting.
(04/22/20 9:57am)
The more I reflect on my four years at Middlebury, the more I am overwhelmed by how much love I felt for my friends and how loved by them I felt in return. In honor of this week’s Love Issue, I reached out to a few senior friends and asked them to answer a couple questions: how they defined love at Middlebury, if there was anything they wish they had realized sooner or done differently with regard to love during college, and when they felt most loved at Middlebury.
When I reflect on those questions, I always gravitate towards two moments. The first was during the last week of my junior fall, when I was living in Palmer. One night, my friends congregated in the suite across the hall from ours, about 15 people were seated around the room in a loose circle, on the floor, on top of desks and on chairs we had crammed into the suite. One friend, splayed on one of the room’s two twin beds and with a beer in his hand, was receiving a stick-and-poke on the back of his calf. Conversation zipped by and around me as I sat on a lofted bed, next to a best friend and a more-than-a-friend. I felt like I was being held in place by the threads that wove around the room, in between people, across my lap and through my two shoulders. It was quintessentially, even obscenely college-esque; still, it remains one of the best nights from the last four years.
The second moment that comes to mind is from the last week of my senior year. On Wednesday, the day following the announcement of our untimely departure from campus, my friends and I rallied for a 4 p.m. Mad Taco salute. Over margaritas and overpriced but decent Mexican food, my six closest friends and I tried to come to terms with what it meant to say goodbye to Middlebury, well before any of us felt ready to leave it behind. When I asked everyone to remember when at Midd they had laughed the hardest, we were left in hysterics remembering all of the famous and infamous moments of pure, belly-shaking, tear-inducing laughter we’d had over the years. Someone once observed that my friends and I are always laughing; until then, though, I never realized just how apt that description was. Right then, as we felt our collective chapter at Middlebury closing, I felt unmistakably, completely loved. That moment with my friends is one of hundreds that I can think of where I felt completely loved, but this one just happens to be my favorite memory of a chapter closing.
If nothing else, college helped me understand how I love. I guess that is how I define love at Middlebury: putting aside your time and stress to take a moment to care for someone else, whether that is making them a cookie, or just taking the time to be quiet and present together. In my experience, I have felt the most love in quiet, routine moments: mornings in bed with someone, homework in the library, rambunctious lunches in Atwater and prolonged dinners on the Proctor terrace. I wish I had realized sooner that these small moments of love would be what I would carry with me after I left Middlebury, but I am so grateful to always carry them with me.
Without further ado, here is how people responded to my prompts. When asked how they define love at Midd, they answered:
For me, love at Middlebury is defined by my incredibly kind, smart, funny, thoughtful, perceptive closest friends who, after four years, are like an extension of myself. I wish everyone at Midd the same deep-rooted, immutable happiness of knowing, beyond all doubt, that you’ve found your people. I still can’t really believe that we all ended up here together— what are the odds? That infamous Middlebury statistic proved true for me: here, I found my soulmates.
I define love at Middlebury the same way I define it everywhere: an intangible sentiment that draws us to people indefinitely in both romantic and platonic contexts.
A meaningful and fulfilling connection between two people that allows each individual to bring out the best in themselves. In essence, love is when two (or potentially more) people come together and are more than just the sum of their parts. I would actually say in my time at Middlebury I have more often come to love someone or some group in a non-romantic way than in a platonic way.
When asked what they wished they had done differently or realized sooner, they answered:
At several points, I remember saying to friends, “There’s just no one left here that I’d be interested in dating.” Of course, that never turned out to be true, and a week or two later I’d meet someone great who I never knew existed. I wish I had had more faith in the dating pool at Middlebury. It’s a cliche, but when it feels like you’ve exhausted your options, do try to keep an open mind— you truly never know who you’ll hit it off with.
I was single for a lot of Middlebury and for some reason I always felt this kind of guilt. I knew hookup culture wasn't ideal, but I always felt bad for getting into brief one-to-two month relationships, only to bail out before it got really serious. Now that I'm really happy in a relationship, I see how stupid that mentality was; unless things really feel right, its pointless to feel guilty about not wanting to commit to something, as long as you communicate with the "other" partners ahead of time.
I wish I hadn't felt so rushed to find a long-term romantic partner. This had little to do with Middlebury itself, but I came into college on the back of a long-term relationship, and the only kind of relationship I was interested in was one where I could fill that deep void I had for a very close romantic partner. I think I missed a lot of the growth and learning associated with more casual dating and romantic encounters, and I wish looking back I hadn't been so concerned with something you ultimately cannot force. It either happens or it doesn't, and I shouldn't have been so caught up in it all.
When asked about when they felt the most loved at Middlebury, they responded:
One friend would make me soup whenever she noticed I was sad. There is no sadness that cannot be eased (at least in part) by a cup of hot, homemade soup.
I think it was after I went to Nationals this senior year, and all my friends were hitting me with a slew of supporting messages, asking me how it went. It showed me how much they care and it hit me in a really special place.
The moment I felt most loved at Middlebury, though there have been many other instances where I've felt loved as well, was on a day of no particular importance. I had been feeling a bit down on my luck for a variety of reasons, and I had gotten through the week just putting my head down, not saying anything to anyone else, and keeping all that sadness to myself. I didn't think anyone would really notice, but that Friday morning when I walked into the dining hall, someone had thought to bake me a batch of cookies because they thought it would be a pleasant surprise and make me happy. I highly doubt they knew I was having a rough week, but the reminder that there are people out there, and especially my friends, who do genuinely care about me, changed my entire week. Sometimes it's the smallest acts of kindness that go the farthest. I still have the ribbon that tied that bag of cookies shut to this day.
(04/22/20 9:56am)
First-years’ identities are inevitably tied to the dorms they live in — Allen, Battell, Ross and Stewart — where neighbors forge friendships. These relationships, generated by proximity, often become the support systems that carry students through the transition to college life. Yet they are sometimes the least expected friendships.
Emma Wheeler ’23 and Emma McKee ’23 are hallmates in Battell. Recalling the first time they met each other over lunch, both admitted that the connection was not immediate.
“I was so uncomfortable that I’m pretty sure I didn’t speak at all,” Wheeler said. “For some reason, I had this false assumption that I wouldn’t end up being best friends with my hallmates.”
Orientation offers first-years many opportunities to interact with their hallmates through Commons-based activities. Through workshops, which are designed to build relationships and push students out of their comfort zones, first-years are often constantly around the same people.
Ella Jones '23 lives in Hadley Hall and her core group of friends consists of her roommate, suitemates and a few hallmates. She traced the roots of these friendships to her first weeks at Middlebury.
“It is just so convenient. Going down to meals with people, hanging out after class, it all becomes easier the closer together you live,” Jones said.
McKee described the pressure first-years feel to go everywhere in packs during orientation.“It’s comfortable to have a group of friends right away, even if you’re not going to stay friends with them forever, just so you feel less alone,” McKee said.
But as first-years become more integrated into the rest of the college community, they often seek ways to branch out. Clubs, classes and parties all become important vehicles for social interaction.
Wheeler and McKee both became part of the water polo team. The team gave them a passion for the sport — and a new group of friends.
“I feel a close sisterhood with my waterpolo gals and guys,” Wheeler said. “And I feel like I’ve also met so many amazing people through my water polo friends.”
While students have agency to find and choose their friends, placements of first-years in dorms and halls is arbitrary. Friends by proximity are a testament to a combination of chance and fate that becomes the perfect recipe for human relationships.
“There are so many people on campus, and I think there are a lot of people that I am compatible with enough to form a friendship,” Wheeler said. “But it takes the combination of being compatible and having a shared experience to bond over.”
Three years later
For some students, these “proximity friends” carry them through all four years of college. As a first-year, Jack Kagan ’20 lived in the basement in Allen. He was not close with the other students on his floor, but a friend from high school looped him into his floor in Hadley. The floor was close, and many of the students who lived there have remained in a tight-knit friend group.
“We all got along so well and I'll never be able to thank those people enough for being so open to me, letting me crash on their floors and their couches, and being true friends,” Kagan wrote in an email to The Campus.
For Kagan, the keys to these friendships lasting through the ups and downs of college life were openness and humor. Even when the people in his friend group do not see each other for a while, they always pick up where they left off when they get back together.
His group of friends has expanded over the years, collecting new people and remaining open to new friendships, ideas and activities.
“I think we can always have fun together and joke around together and that's when we're at our happiest. We all would be so happy to just sit in a room and talk and just laugh,” he wrote.
Kagan, who does not identify as outgoing, considers himself lucky to have found the people he now considers some of his closest friends so early on.
“I think the lesson out of this is, freshman year, you really have to push hard to leave any expectations of college at the door. You have to try not to blame yourself or anything for your situation,” he wrote. “You have to trust that it will work out if you try to do what makes you happy because you'll find those people doing the same thing.”
The Sophomore Shuffle
As MiddKids return to campus for their sophomore years, they often observe shifts in their friendships.
With a year of college under their belts, many sophomores discover that they have a greater sense of self-confidence and familiarity with themselves and their surroundings, as well as a better understanding of what they care about most. Daily routines adapt as they delve deeper into their academic specialties and dedicate themselves to a handful of extracurriculars. These factors can all shape the changing landscape of existing — and developing — friendships.
Gracey Carroll ’22 believes that college friendships are more fluid than commonly thought. “I think a common myth about college friendships is that you have one circle of friends,” she wrote. “I don’t know anyone who has that! I have my roommates, my Model UN friends, my Radio Theatre friends and friends from classes.”
Carroll explained that she made fewer new friends this year than she did last year and is no longer as close with some of her first-year friends. Instead, she opted to strengthen her existing relationships.
“There were a few people I was very close with last year that I don’t talk to as much anymore,” she wrote. “I think part of it was that Battell got separated into Gifford and Pearsons, but I also realized at some point that I just didn’t like some of the people I’d grown attached to.”
New activities, new friends
While first-year relationships are decided by proximity, sophomore connections are often based on common interests. Claire Moy ’22 expanded her social circles in her sophomore year while also prioritizing certain extracurriculars.
“Like a lot of MiddKids, I joined so many orgs my freshman fall that I barely had time to attend any of them,” she wrote in a message to The Campus. “This year, I dedicated more time to my extracurriculars like ISO and Riddim, took on leadership roles and was just more confident, which helped me to reach out and really get to know people.”
This increased confidence also helped her connect with her peers outside of class. “As I took higher-level courses in Economics, I found I was spending a lot more time with more of the same people,” she wrote. “It was an incentive to get to know them and hang out outside of class.”
Moy explained that, although she made several new friends this year, her main friend group from her first-year hall hasn’t changed much. “Sophomore year definitely solidified this friend group, while expanding my network to include really diverse-thinking and interesting people,” she wrote.
Justin Cooper ’22 reflected on the role of confidence in his personal relationships. Like Moy, he found that his first-year friendships strengthened after returning to campus in the fall.
“I think what really allows us to both solidify and expand our social circles in sophomore year is confidence and comfort on campus,” he wrote. “With these as the building blocks for the sentiment coming back to a now-familiar place and lifestyle, it is easier to reach out to someone you wouldn’t have before or to spend your time with your friends how you please.”
Long distance friendships
The transition to distance learning strained social life at Midd for students and clubs alike. Michael Simons ’22.5 said he finds it challenging to build and maintain connections from a distance.
“I’ve tried to keep my relationships going, but it seems hard to build new friendships over Zoom,” he wrote. “I’m not connecting as regularly because everyone has busy schedules and it’s a lot harder to plan meetings when we live in different parts of the country and have changing family and work responsibilities.”
Like many other students, Simons began to branch out from his main group of friends in his second semester. He said that while he enjoyed having a group of Febs that he could reach out to at any time, it isn’t until the fall that many Febs start to meet new people.
Simons chose to live in Weybridge House and joined the sailing team this fall in order to broaden his network of friends. He has also been a member of Community Friends since his first semester and currently serves as a community coordinator.
“Joining the coordinator team was a great way to meet a kind, sincere group of friends,” he said. “It was nice having a friend group centered around giving back to the community.”
For now, Simons is staying connected through snail mail. “Writing lots of letters and postcards to friends is the biggest thing that I’m doing to stay connected,” he wrote.
Carroll acknowledges the difficulty of constantly saying goodbye to familiar faces at the end of each semester. "Middlebury is a revolving door of new people," she wrote. "Given the Feb program and the popularity of study abroad, I always feel like I am saying goodbye to someone and hello to someone else."
However, she remains optimistic about her next two years at Middlebury. “While the constant change can be challenging, I welcome the opportunity to maximize my pool of wonderfully diverse and ever-transforming friendships!” she wrote.
Editor's Note: Jack Kagan ’20 is a sports editor for The Campus.
(04/22/20 9:56am)
With Middlebury students now scattered across the globe, many have found themselves in long distance romantic relationships they had not planned for. Following the evacuation of campus in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, students had to make quick and unexpected decisions about their relationships.
While some of these students already had experience with distance dating, the announcement to leave campus came suddenly and threw many students for a loop.
Katelyn Mei ’22 has been dating her boyfriend, Cater Wang ’21, for over a year. The couple dated long distance last summer.
Still, the new challenges brought about by the sudden evacuation of campus took the couple by surprise.
“There was definitely a shock to [realizing] we weren’t going to see each other for half a year,” Mei said. “It was like, ‘We have four days we need to spend together, now.’”
Wang, who is still on campus, is an international student from China. For now, they are both in the same time zone, with Wang in Vermont and Mei at her home in Brooklyn.
But Wang will return home in May, placing a 12-hour time difference — and thousands of miles — between them. Mei said she’s worried about when Wang returns to China.
“There’s definitely a day’s delay of conversation unless we make time to meet each other [over] FaceTime,” she said regarding the time difference. “At least I have this person [who] I can share my emotions and my feelings [with].”
[pullquote speaker="Katelyn Mei ’22" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]There was definitely a shock to [realizing] we weren’t going to see each other for half a year,” Mei said. “It was like, ‘We have four days we need to spend together, now.’[/pullquote]
Will Hoppin ’22 from Mill Valley, California is dating Chloe Zinn ’22 who lives in South Hero, Vt.
“Vermont is a much different place than California and [Chloe] is a much more humble person and a much more caring person,” Hoppin said. He noted that his Bay Area private high school, on the other hand, fostered a culture of elitism and narcissism. “It’s so refreshing to be around someone who’s so genuinely present and caring, and I think I have a lot to learn from her.”
Hoppin and Zinn now sit on opposite sides of the country.
“I was at her house for a week before I decided to go home,” he said. “That was a really hard decision to make because [I had to decide,] do I want to be with my girlfriend — her family was really excited about me staying there — or with my family?”
He said that while he is “at peace” with his decision to go home, he misses Zinn greatly.
“I’m not going to see her until August, if things keep going this way,” he said. “We have plans for her to come out to California if she doesn’t have a summer job that’s in-person, but it’s scary to be like, ‘I’m not going to see this person that’s so important to me.’”
Maeve Callahan ’22 expressed similar concerns.
“It’s definitely a bit more of a roller coaster,” she said regarding hopes to see boyfriend Jose Morales ’22. “Some days I think, ‘yes, I am going to road trip as soon as classes are done.’”
But other days, she feels nervous about making the 27-hour-journey from her home in Massachusetts to Dallas, Texas, where Morales lives.
“I don’t want to endanger people if I go on a road trip, I still have to get gas and I still have to eat,” she said.
Nick Wagg ’22 decided to stop waiting and travelled from Maine to Minnesota on April 16 to be with girlfriend Elsa Soderstrom ’22.
Wagg, who arrived in Minnesota on April 16, decided to follow Soderstrom after a few weeks at home.
“I felt I wasn’t totally understood at home,” he said. “I was seeking some type of normalcy of what college was like and I felt that coming [to Minnesota] would feel a little more like how things were.”
Wagg said that he ultimately decided to make the flight because of the indefinite nature of the situation.
“We’ve had to deal with distance before, but what was different about this time was not knowing when we’d be able to see each other again,” he said. “This time there was no light at the end of the tunnel.”
While Wagg and Soderstrom are together in Minnesota, Matt Fliegauf ’22 is still waiting until he can safely head to South Carolina to see his girlfriend Raeanne Smith ’22.
“I’m going to head down to South Carolina as soon as it’s safe, but we don’t know when that’s going to be,” Fliegauf said. “I can’t put myself in a situation where I’m threatening either my health or her health or her family’s health.”
Fliegauf and Smith recently celebrated their one year anniversary over FaceTime.
“[Celebrating our anniversary] was tough,” Fliegauf said. “We knew that it was going to be spent apart, but it was really hard to have such a significant anniversary so far apart.”
But he has enjoyed the opportunity for them to have longer conversations together since heading home.
“At school … you don’t have the chance to just sit down and have a long conversation,” Fliegauf said. “I think that this has given us a little more time to just sit and talk, which I really appreciate.”
In addition to long FaceTime conversations, Fliegauf said that he and Smith frequently have movie nights together.
“Netflix party has been a blessing,” he said. “We’ve been watching ‘Tiger King’ together.”
[pullquote speaker="Matt Fliegauf ’22" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]At school … you don’t have the chance to just sit down and have a long conversation,” Fliegauf said. “I think that this has given us a little more time to just sit and talk, which I really appreciate.[/pullquote]
Despite their distaste for technology, Madison Middleton ’22.5 and Sean Lovett ’22.5 have also found using Zoom and FaceTime necessary since leaving campus.
“Even though I hate FaceTime, I hate not seeing Mads more than I hate FaceTime,” Lovett said.
For Middleton and Lovett, quarantine has been particularly unusual, as they both live in the D.C. area.
“We’re lucky in that we live only a 45-minute drive from each other at home, but since we can’t leave home, it’s become difficult,” Middleton said. “My routine with seeing [Sean] has changed.”
Instead of seeing each other a couple times a week as they usually do when they are home, Middleton and Lovett have not been together in person in over three weeks.
“It’s torture. It doesn’t feel right at all because part of my natural inclination at home is to go visit Sean and his family,” Middleton said.
Lovett agreed, but said that he is glad that they are not too far apart.
“I have been in a long distance relationship before — both across the country and on another continent — and I feel a lot more secure having Madison so close,” Lovett said. “We’re not able to see each other, but being only 25 miles away is really reassuring.”
(04/20/20 8:48pm)
Alexander Herrera
Former member of the class of 2022, who transferred out of Middlebury at the end of fall 2019
Locations: Ciudad de México, Mexico and New York, New York
Submitted March 26, 2020
I transferred out from Middlebury in December 2019, but instead of going back home to NYC, which is now deemed the "epicenter" of the coronavirus outbreak in the country, I moved to Houston, Texas. At this point, the virus was spreading in the U.S., but this had not affected my daily life. At the end of February, I then moved to Ciudad de Mexico, where I currently reside and work for an NGO that works with kids with cerebral palsy. I am set to stay in Mexico until the end of May.
While I am aware that New York and other parts of the U.S. are under quarantine, here in Mexico, the picture looks different. Honestly, the outbreak to us doesn't seem too serious given that it hasn't hit the country at an alarming rate (yet). As someone who lives in New York City, it feels unreal seeing my family and friends having to completely move out of their colleges, stay at home and stop all non-essential business. As someone who's currently taking a gap semester and living alone in another country, I have been experiencing the outbreak in the U.S. as an outsider.
Most people, including myself, are going about our daily lives as usual. While there has been a spike in cases of coronavirus in Mexico, very few people here are actually alarmed. There are people who wear face masks outside given that CDMX is such a densely-populated city, but other than that, not much has changed. At the NGO I'm currently working with, the administration has discussed the possibility of pursuing distance learning for our students given that their disabilities make them susceptible populations to the virus. In the case that this were to happen, I would probably have to move back home. I have taken a total of five flights so far this year and I still have two more trips planned for the upcoming months. But as of right now, I don't plan to postpone or cancel any of my upcoming trips.
What has been your greatest worry or day-to-day concern as coronavirus has spread?
I would say that my greatest worry has been my family, especially because they are under quarantine and are living day-to-day the crisis and alarm that the virus has created in our city.
What has made you happy over the past few weeks?
I'm very much happy with my decision to no longer attend Middlebury. Besides traveling, I have really enjoyed getting to know Mexico and working with so many students in the past two months.
Update as of April 20, 2020:
A couple of days after submitting this to The Campus, the NGO I was working with announced that it was transitioning to a virtual platform for the rest of the academic year. At the same time, on March 23, Mexico City announced the National Campaign of Healthy Distancing, a national program of non-pharmaceutical measures based on social distancing. That same day, Mexico entered Phase 2 of the coronavirus outbreak, according to WHO, and non-essential businesses were ordered to close.
Currently, there are over 8,000 confirmed cases of the virus in the country. Due to the outbreak in CDMX, I made the hard decision to leave Mexico and go back to New York. I've been in the U.S. for a couple of weeks now, doing my best to follow stay-at-home orders and social distancing rules.
(04/17/20 1:37am)
Editors’ note: This op-ed was originally shared as a Facebook post by the author. The original post has been adapted for publication in The Campus.
After reading the open letter to faculty on the opt-in policy yesterday, I felt the need to respond with counter-arguments, drawn from both #FairGradesMidd communications around this issue and my own opinions. I’ve also admittedly talked way too much, virtually, with friends about this topic on both sides of the debate.
I’ll start off with a concession:
Neither universal pass/fail nor opt-in pass/fail will be the best grading system. The perfect grading system simply does not exist when students have to quickly leave campus and move to remote learning while also dealing with the impacts of a pandemic. In any system, some students will benefit and others will not.
Now, onto my juicy hot takes in response to the open letter:
Yes, a universal pass/fail system will disadvantage students who could have used this semester to raise their grades. However, I also acknowledge that this inequity is by no means parallel with inequities faced by students who simply won’t have the time, resources or space to focus on courses which I have the privilege to enjoy.
To the point that an opt-in policy respects choice: inequities dictate who has the power to make those choices. If some students have the ability to social distance, stay healthy and dedicate their normal amounts of time to school work, but other students do not because of circumstances at home, then that is inequitable. Theoretically, any student can then choose to pass/fail a course, but, in our current system, students facing challenges lose out on the theoretical “GPA boost” that the authors reference.
Not only that, graduate schools like Georgetown Medical School have stated that they will continue to “highly prefer” applicants who take all prerequisite courses for grades if given the option. So, a student who might receive a C while taking courses remotely — even if they normally earn As — has to make the catch-22 choice of taking a C so they can still apply to top-tier graduate schools, with a lower chance of success; or taking the pass and also lowering their chance of acceptance.
More offensively, the notion that some Middlebury students “slacked off” during the five weeks we were on campus while others “worked diligently,” in the words of the letter’s authors, is blatantly false and uninformed by the reality of who Middlebury students are. We have a stellar graduation rate, high average/median GPAs and excelled in high school to gain admittance. Who among our peers are the slackers?
In their second point, the authors contend that grades serve as a form of motivation or underpinning to college scholarship. However, grades do not and should not underpin academic scholarship, nor should they be the sole motivation to engage in this scholarship. If the loss of a letter grade causes a student to spend less time on academic work because they suddenly lack the motivation, then we have a deeper issue to address about why students engage in academics. But I do not believe most students will lose motivation.
The authors also point to the further confusion that may arise from the change in policy. But just because a policy has been in place is no justification for that policy to stay in place, especially policies instituted without significant consultation with faculty or students. Furthermore, an unignorable student-led campaign for alternative grading policies has existed nearly from the very first day that the college announced its policy, so I for one was never operating under the assumption that this policy was set and fixed.
To call a poll of 1,843 students (roughly 70% of the student body) irrelevant simply because it included an option that turned out to be unviable for accreditation is a blatant error. Even when removing that option, universal pass/fail still has more first choice votes than opt-in. To insinuate on a clerical error that the student body has not vastly voiced support for an alternative grading system is a blatant and intentional misreading of the data leveraged to serve the authors’ own opinions while silencing the vast majority of students.
In closing an email I sent to my current professors — something I encourage every student to do, no matter which policy you support — I said the following and I think it fits here as well:
“Though apparently some of my peers might argue that people should be allowed to ‘write their own stories’ about how they persevered through this time, let those stories be about persevering over a virus by contributing back to society through extra volunteer hours or aiding their family when family members fall ill or lose their job — not about persevering by getting that A in that one class because Middlebury continued to enforce artificial and inequitable grading standards.”
Mendel Baljon is a member of the class of 2021.
(04/16/20 10:02am)
Of all the forms of isolation bred in this national distancing experiment — physical at best, and at worst its insidious cousins of the emotional, mental and social varieties — literature has borne witness to each. Whether we’ve staved them off or found ourselves embroiled in them, we’re all experiencing at least one: the government-mandated type. (The only type that might have driven Thoreau out of the woods.)
But I’m not going to tell you to go read “Walden” — it feels a bit condescending to be told to “live deliberately” when the only thing keeping one compos mentis is a two-pound bag of Swedish Fish and the Apple podcast app. I’m also going to leave off much of the other seemingly go-to isolation literature — Virgina Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and anything by Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and James Joyce. (Which is not to say I don’t recommend them.)
In lieu, here’s a list of six books to help you lay bare, dissect and anatomize your own isolation in all of its mordant and oft-unseen incarnations.
1. “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh
If I could recommend one queen quarantine book, it would be this one. Truth be told, any of Moshfegh’s books could fill this slot — she was once described by Jia Tolentino as “the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible” — but this novel seems particularly germane. Maybe it’s because the book features a recent college graduate in self-inflicted exile from her own life in New York City, or maybe it’s Moshfegh’s all-too-apt shrewdness in accounting the experience of little-to-no experience. Either way, this novel is a bleary-eyed walk worth taking through a life where time itself is held captive.
2. "The Trial” by Franz Kafka
Kafka, a literary horseman of self-isolation, is another author whose entire body of work could essentially fit this list. “The Trial,” his standout novel among a slew of short stories and novellas, follows Josef K. around a tortuous bureaucratic carousel as he tries to make sense of a life that does its best to spin him into disoriented monotony. A recent essay in The Los Angeles Review of Books pinpoints this well — of all the doors opening and closing for Josef K. in “The Trial,” we see a frustratingly similar number in front of us in this pandemic. Yes, watching them swing in real time can get disheartening, and yes, this novel understands.
3. “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine
This book engages with a topic that seems to stare down those of us in quarantine: what’s the right role for the individual within this writhing political culture? “An American Lyric” is one of Rankine’s signature literary forms, quilting segments of prose, poetry and television imagery. The first time I sat down with it, I read it twice before leaving my chair. If you don’t know how to think, feel or act on all the things going on in the news, happening around you or stirring within you that make you feel alone, this book will deliver headway.
4. “The Friend” by Sigrid Nunez
This novel is at once a meditation on grief and a portrait of the relationships we may increasingly have with our pets as we inevitably spend every hour with them. When the narrator’s worshipped literary mentor dies, she is pressed to adopt his grief-stricken Great Dane named Apollo. Through her own deep grief and waning grasp on her writing, she pushes further into her own isolation with Apollo, all the while ruminating on expression itself. As many of us lean into the solace of our pets in inadvertent replacement of those we can’t see, this book can at times feel like a pat on the head. “I know this is all moronically anthropomorphic,” writes Nunez, “but sometimes that is the form love takes.”
5. “Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life” by J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee’s 1998 novel “Boyhood” is one of two fictionalized accounts of his own childhood in Cape Town published in the years leading up to his Nobel Prize. This one, the first, roams through a life cut into sections. Within each, there is a boy under a new identity, reconciling action and self-perception in a life that he has yet to feel comfortable in. This book holds water for the many whose lives have been disrupted by the pandemic, and those who themselves are reconciling with identity when left alone to define it.
6. “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead
In his latest novel “The Nickel Boys,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead follows a young Elwood Curtis through the most odious form of isolation on this list. Amid the Civil Rights movement, Elwood, a black teenager about to enroll in college in Florida, is sent to the Nickel Academy reformatory for a mistake. Together yet alone, remembered yet forgotten, the reformatory’s occupants contend with their notions of humanity while forced to source it from within. Though I could not possibly argue that this experience runs parallel to ours in quarantine, Whitehead's insights ring true across them. “If it is true for you,” he writes, “it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”
(04/16/20 10:01am)
In a normal year, over half of Middlebury’s junior class studies abroad. Next year will likely be different. As students look to the fall semester, many who had planned to study abroad are reconsidering due to Covid-19-related travel and safety concerns, with questions over whether the Middlebury Summer Language Schools will run, and disappointment about the loss of the current semester on-campus.
The decline in students studying abroad will affect housing and course registration in the upcoming semester, and will have academic implications for students whose majors require a semester abroad — such as International and Global Studies (IGS) and International Politics and Economics (IP&E).
“We have seen a higher percentage of students than usual withdrawing their study abroad applications between the application deadline and now,” said Liz Ross, associate dean for international programs and off-campus study. Students who applied to study abroad this fall have until June 15 to seek readmission to the college.
At this time, it is uncertain how many juniors will choose to remain on the Vermont campus, or will ultimately be forced to stay as a result of cancellation of programs abroad. Some schools, like Binghamton University, have already canceled their study abroad programs for fall 2020. Ross said that all Middlebury programs are proceeding as planned at the moment, but said that her office is paying “especially close attention” to what’s going on in areas like the southern hemisphere and India, where programs have early start dates in July and August.
In a worst-case scenario, in which no students are able to go abroad this fall, the college anticipates having roughly 200 more students on campus than during a typical semester, according to Senior Associate Dean of Students Derek Doucet.
Many students attend Language Schools the summer before studying abroad in a non-English-speaking country to attain the necessary level of proficiency to meet Middlebury’s requirements for studying abroad. Uncertainty about the fate of these programs has also contributed to doubts and anxieties for students in this situation.
The college has not yet announced a decision about summer programming, which includes Language Schools. The announcement is set to come sometime in mid-April. Other northeast colleges, such as Harvard and Wesleyan, have already canceled on-campus summer programming or moved programs online.
The Registrar’s Office announced on April 15 that course registration for the fall semester would be pushed to mid-summer, as the office is currently unable to estimate how many students will be on campus next semester. The office also requested that students planning to study abroad register for classes as a fall back option.
Opting for a semester in Vermont
Many students pin study abroad as a cornerstone of the Middlebury experience. Choosing not to go, on the eve of that semester, has been a challenging decision. Some have reconsidered pursuing their travels because of the disappointment associated with the premature departure from campus this spring.
“My primary motivation to reconsider study abroad was because I felt like I, like all other students, was ripped away from my life at Midd too early and abruptly,” said Massimo Sassi ’22, who was planning to study in Florence, Italy in the fall.
Maia Sauer ’22 was planning to study in Paris, France, but has changed her mind since the college’s transition to remote learning.
“I think the study abroad decision is difficult, because I have to weigh both the short- and long-term consequences. Do I prioritize what could be the experience of a lifetime, and miss out on a semester at Midd with people to whom I’ve already had to say premature goodbyes?” Sauer said. “Or, do I forgo study abroad and regret my decision later, when it becomes harder and harder to plan a similar experience?”
Sauer also expressed that being away from campus prompted her to reconsider her priorities for the upcoming semester, and helped her realize that she is not interested in the lonely adjustment to life abroad, especially now.
Anna Wood ’22 had planned to study in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the fall — one of those programs with an early July start date — and is not confident that her program will happen.
“I figure that the program will most likely be canceled,” Wood said. “I also don’t want to spend more than one semester away from the campus and community that make Midd so special.”
Caroline Ritter ’22 was planning to study in Germany, but if Language Schools do not occur, she won’t be able to.
“Even if I could, though, losing the last half of our spring semester has made going abroad seem much less desirable,” she said. “I think it is probably a short-sighted decision to stay just because I miss my friends, but ultimately that is kind of the way I am leaning.”
All of the students interviewed noted having conversations with friends, peers and teammates who were also preemptively reconsidering studying abroad.
Academic implications
Several majors at Middlebury, including International and Global Studies (IGS), International Politics and Economics (IP&E) and some language majors, have a study abroad requirement. Although department-by-department decisions have not been made yet, these programs are aware that they may need to adapt to the crisis situation.
“Given the fact that we are dealing with a global pandemic and travel will certainly not be possible for a while, IGS will amend the requirements as needed,” said Tamar Mayer, the director of IGS.
Mayer says that after the programs in China were canceled before they even began this January, the IGS program amended their requirements and replaced the abroad experience with more language courses for those students. A similar process may occur in future situations, as language proficiency is also a requirement for the major.
Associate Political Science Professor Amy Yuen, the director of IP&E, reached out to students on April 7 to let them know that the department would make accommodations for the situation.
“If the college begins canceling study abroad programs, then the IP&E program will consult with administrators and faculty on how to accommodate students who have not fulfilled study abroad,” Yuen said. “There are many options to consider if this becomes an issue, but we will not leave students in the lurch. We will make some kind of accommodation.”
But for some students, the situation has caused a total reconsideration of academic priority.
“As I grappled with [study abroad], I began to think about if the IGS major was really something I wanted to do,” said Sassi, the student who was scheduled to study in Florence. With time at home to step back from academics and think about his trajectory at Middlebury, Sassi began to rethink his plans. “I started thinking about life after college, and to be honest, I didn’t really see a future for myself in the IGS field.”
Sassi has since taken steps toward becoming a joint music and anthropology major.
Correction: A previous version of this article said that Boston University, not Binghamton University, had canceled its programs abroad. The error has since been corrected.
(04/16/20 9:57am)
Two-and-a-half weeks ago, President Laurie Patton signed off her college-wide email with Middlebury Discount Comedy’s rendition of “Imagine,” urging the community to use imagination and support each other while off campus. Embodying the message, student clubs have continued to function as creative outlets and community spaces amid the Covid-19 crisis. To some clubs, the unexpected halt is a great challenge and disappointment, especially since the spring is typically a time of celebration; for others, it’s allowed for innovation and new perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/yqVBGj0ibGA
Middlebury Discount Comedy, a sketch comedy club, was pleasantly surprised by Patton’s shout out in her email. Their original intent was to satirize the viral video of celebrities singing “Imagine,” as the group champions humor and a good laugh. Before leaving campus, they were beginning to write for their final show of the year, a performance which may now happen on Zoom.
President of the club Will Koch ’21, is pleased that the tight-knit group is able to communicate and laugh virtually but admits that the energy of creating collectively is lost when the group cannot be together.
“The unique part of the group is that we all love to create, but we create the majority of our stuff together. In that respect it's tough to be apart right now, but we still maintain our banter within the group despite the distance,” said Koch.
The group is looking forward to their return and future shows. For now, they will be active on social media, where fans can still engage with their content.
An all-male a cappella group, The Dissipated Eight, is working on an album recording to keep motivated. The group had to cancel its spring break trip and concerts for the remainder of the semester, which were all fundraising efforts for the album. However, having budgeted wisely in the past, the group still plans to record its album at Two Visions Studio later in May.
Eli Abbasi ’20, president of The Dissipated Eight, said that the creative vibe is different when making music remotely, especially because rehearsals are self-taught and solo auditions will take place via Zoom. Nevertheless, Abbasi is confident in the group.
“The bond of this group is that we hold each other accountable and we can put things like this in perspective. That’s a testament to the bond we created at Middlebury and while touring,” Abbasi said. As a senior, he’ll be leaving the group for good this year, but said the album is keeping all the group’s members from being too sad about missing out on its final concert and saying a real goodbye.
Members of Radical Asians (RAISINS) are seeking alternative ways to connect with each other as they navigate a novel political environment brought on by the crisis. RAISINS is a non-institutionalized Asian and Asian American student collective, together with a network of Asian professors, that raises political consciousness for their racial experiences with a focus on community building.
The club has shifted into a book club format. Co-presidents Jasmine Chau ’21 and Anton Gallegos ’21 were inspired by an ethnic literature class and took book recommendations from professors.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-uiQmKhj6p/
“Personally, I find it really hard to not have a space like RAISINS. It’s definitely hard to talk about [Covid-19] with my parents because I’m not sure if they really understand what’s happening in the world,” Chau said. “They express concern differently, so I really miss those RAISINS conversations where we can share without feeling like we won’t be understood.” With the rising racial tension surrounding Covid-19, literature is a way for the club members to talk about their experiences, particularly those who are struggling with feelings of not fitting in with the current political landscape.
“This crisis really brings out the foundation for Asian resentment and yellow peril,” said Gallegos. “The perception of foreignness mixed with being seen as a danger is similar to Asians being seen as bringing in the coronavirus. It’s also amazing to see people navigating towards building grassroot support for Asians, which I have not seen before.”
GlobeMed has also shifted focus for the semester, making its meetings more optional and infrequent than before. GlobeMed at Middlebury is a chapter of a national organization that focuses on public health issues for marginalized groups. The club had to cancel fundraisers for its partner organization in Rwanda and re-evaluated the schedule of its weekly meetings due to the sensitivity of Covid-19.
In a survey conducted by the club’s leadership, members expressed strong interest in meeting over Zoom and sharing webinars and articles.
“We know it would be a burden for us to talk about global health now as it affects everyone,” said Ansley Harralson ’20.5, co-president of GlobeMed. We decided that we would create a separate group for an opt in process. This is a way to support people’s needs and reevaluate commitment.”
Members discussed Covid-19 at meetings before it escalated in the U.S. and kept awareness of the interconnectivity of public health issues. The constructive framework of the club in addressing the seriousness of every issue has prepared them to talk about Covid-19 in a strikingly similar manner.
Co-president Margaret Maxwell ’20 shared that the club now talks about the U.S healthcare system more than it had before. They are actively in touch with their partner organization in Rwanda, who have tailors making masks, and it appears that they have the crisis better controlled than the U.S.
Across the collegiate community, many debate tournaments have migrated online. Justin Cooper ‘20, president of the Middlebury Debate Club, had to cancel a tournament at Middlebury and a chance to compete at the Pan-American Universities Debate Championship in Curaçao. The team will resume practices virtually via Zoom, and other debate tournaments are held over online platforms such as Discord and Minecraft.
“The team has stayed largely connected through the last couple of weeks, doing group calls and staying in touch to support each other,” said Cooper. “It’s really great to see everybody making a real effort to stay connected and in touch with each other in times like these.”
(04/16/20 9:55am)
As a child of Generation Z, I do not remember 9/11, but I do remember my parents downgrading from our “beep beep” Road Runner High Speed Internet to our “screech screech” dial-up internet. My family was pretty early to the home-internet game, so at my elementary STEM magnet school, I was one of the only kids in my kindergarten class who knew how to access the internet. Therefore, I was the girl who proudly showed all the boys how to play computer games on the Playhouse Disney website.
Five years later, it was 2009. Ethernet, desktop internet, was still king. “Zoom” was just a television show on PBS Kids and “Google it” was not in my vocabulary. My most memorable internet experience was the fateful day that my stock-tracking buddies in my math class and I logged on to our desktop classroom computers to learn that the market had crashed and our imaginary investments had vanished. (Except for that one quiet kid who invested in a stock we'd never heard of called “Netflix.”)
In middle school and early high school, I really only used the internet for recreational purposes. Back then, it was perfectly normal for me to leave the house without my phone and go for an entire week without using the internet. I only began regularly using the internet in the 11th grade when I went to boarding school. At home, I occasionally borrowed a computer from my parents; at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, however, every student was required to have their own laptop. Despite dreaded 1 a.m. WiFi cutoffs, I relied on my institution to make sure I had sufficient internet access to submit my assignments on Canvas and to upload coding assignments to the server in the computer science department.
Fast forward six years. Everything, including WiFi, was big in Texas. During my gap year, I lived at an Austin seminary where my rent was $250, utilities and internet included. WiFi was pretty simple. My housemates and I simply picked up a modem and plugged it into the wall. We made our WiFi password something along the lines of "WeHaveInternet!" to mark the momentous occasion.
Back in school at Middlebury, I never had any particular problems connecting to the internet. I only used FaceTime about twice a year, and I used Zoom once this past January to interview for a consulting internship. I don't have an Instagram, Snapchat or Tik Tok. Even at Midd, I really only used the internet to check my email. If I needed to complete an intensive technology task, I was headed to a campus computer lab.
My relationship with the internet was fine until Middlebury announced that it would be closing as a precautionary measure due to the Covid-19 crisis. It is now 2020, and the world is officially in a WiFi era. With the extended spring break, I decided to start a new virtual workout program. Sadly, my Covid-19 self-quarantine resolution met a brick wall with my parent’s internet. It could sometimes take minutes to refresh my email, so accessing HD Video Teleconferencing platforms such as Zoom was a far-off dream.
On Wednesday, March 25, I reached out to the CCI about the Middlebury Student Emergency Fund, but I was told to seek help elsewhere. The judgement was that my slow internet was not an urgent situation, and I needed to try harder before coming to the college for help. Thus, I was annoyed by President Laurie Patton’s March 29 email, praising the initial success of the Emergency Fund. Even decisions about whose emergency merits a response reek of privilege.
Yet other institutions are responding to student needs in the Covid-19 crisis quite differently. For instance, UC Berkeley’s Student Technology Fund is rapidly deploying laptops and WiFi hotspots with service plans to students in need free of charge. In addition, students can request a Cost of Attendance Adjustment if they need to purchase a new device or take on other expenses to participate in remote learning.
During the second week of spring break, the provost sent out a survey asking if students had access to home high speed internet. I now realize that I provided false information because I naively assumed that all internet access of any speed was equally sufficient. Post-epiphany, I now plan to take advantage of internet service providers who are giving households with at least one K-12, college student or teacher two months of free high-speed internet access. Still, this leaves me wondering just how many low-tech users like myself may have overestimated their access to high speed internet, not realizing that a WiFi connection that can connect to Facebook cannot necessarily reliably support an hour long Zoom conference call.
Christine McDow is a member of the class of 2021.
(04/13/20 3:09am)
I was one of the lucky few to be approved to stay on campus, but on the first Monday of spring break, the administration sent out a mandatory survey on which we were to initial our understanding that the college may require us to leave anyway at any point in time.
Two days later they initiated room changes, and I realized that my housing situation no longer felt safe. Thanks to the extreme generosity of a few online friends, I managed to get down to Boston to crash on a friend's couch. What little time I had left to prepare for life post-graduation is gone now. I'm trying to take things just one day at a time.
What has been your greatest worry or day-to-day concern as coronavirus has spread?
Housing insecurity weighs on my mind constantly, as does my paramedic sister’s health. Anyone I could stay with is in the at-risk group, and I constantly worry that I’ll accidentally infect them.
What has made you happy over the past few weeks?
Seeing the first blossoms of spring. Eating spicy rice cake.
Submitted March 26, 2020.
(04/13/20 12:54am)
Like most seniors, having to leave school two months before graduation was really hard. I had so many things and final college experiences I was looking forward to. As a senior athlete, I missed out on my senior season of track, NESCACs and our San Diego spring break trip. This was especially hard because I missed all of my junior year season because of injuries. I was looking forward to senior week, days spent at Dunmore and making memories with my friends. I miss my friends, my house, my teammates, my classmates and my professors. I’ve been isolating at home alone and I really miss human interaction with people my age. Also, as a senior it’s been scary leaving college and going into an unstable economy. Most of the places I have applied to have suspended their hiring process due to the pandemic.
What has been your greatest worry or day-to-day concern as coronavirus has spread?
I have severe asthma and so I’m really at risk of getting very sick if I get the virus. My biggest worry is getting sick and needing to go on a ventilator. My small town not having the medial infrastructure to deal with a massive outbreak. I don’t want to get sick and be separated from my loved ones and potentially die alone on a ventilator.
What has made you happy over the past few weeks?
I have been doing a lot of single-track mountain biking on the trails near my house. I like whipping down the hills; the trails remind me a little bit of Rikert, which is my favorite place to go at Middlebury when I get stressed. I also have been doing a lot of virtual happy hours with my friends and teammates. In between all that, I've been sewing masks for our local hospital which has kept me busy and gives me a feeling of purpose again.
Submitted April 9, 2020.
