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(11/01/18 9:52am)
Men’s golf ended its fall season on a high note, when it finished in third place among 23 teams at the New England Intercollegiate Golf Association Championship (NEIGA). The tournament took place from Saturday, Oct. 21 to Sunday, Oct. 22, and was held at the Captains Golf Course, a par-72 course in Brewster, Mass. Brewster, which is located on the bayside of Cape Cod, would have offered the Panthers a coastal retreat from the chilly and landlocked mountains of Vermont. But the weather on the first day was extremely far from ideal. The temperature hovered around the low 40s and was accompanied by wind gusts of up to 20 miles per hour.
The team’s performance was hot in spite of the cold temperatures. Middlebury’s third-place finish was the result of a two-day total of 618, just shy of first-place Babson’s 613 and second-place Williams’ 614. Rounding out the top five were Husson University, which totaled 627, and Nichols College with 628. The other NESCAC rivals that competed, Tufts and Bates, landed at seventh and 22nd, respectively.
The Panthers’ solid outing could be attributed to the strong individual performances of senior captains Reid Buzby and Philippe Morin, as well as junior David Packer. Buzby took home first-place-medalist honors, scoring 73 in the first round and 72 in the second. His overall total of 145 was just one above par. Morin finished in fourth place, which is remarkable considering that he was tied for 17th after the first round. He ultimately carded a total of 151. Packer, meanwhile, managed to tie for eighth place after scoring 154. He showed consistency throughout the tournament, scoring a 77 on both days. The other Panther golfers, Chris Thompson ’22 and David McDaniel ’19, tied for 75th and 106th, respectively.
The explanation behind Buzby’s success could be his ability to excel in difficult weather. “I knew going into the tournament the conditions were going to be really tough,” he said. “I usually perform better than most people in bad conditions, so I was really confident [that] I would have a good chance of winning if I stuck to my normal game.”
Regional ties also could have played a role in Buzby’s performance. “I’m from San Francisco and I play at a course out there by the ocean, so it gets really windy and cold at all times of the year,” he said. “I’ve gotten really comfortable playing in the wind and cold, while most people are playing in hot and sunny conditions over the summer.”
With men’s golf not returning to action until the spring, Buzby will no longer need to compete in harsh conditions, provided that winter doesn’t last into April. The team will now set its sights on the NESCAC Championship, which will take place at the Ralph Myhre Golf Course from Saturday, April 27 to Sunday, April 28, 2019. This comes after Middlebury finished first at the NESCAC qualifier in September, winning the right to host the championship.
“Individually, I am hoping to bring some of the momentum I had from these last few tournaments into the spring season, and get as many wins as I can during my last year,” Buzby said.
While for the next several months Ralph Myhre will lose all of its leaves, be covered in snow and experience less sunlight, one thing will remain constant: the hope that Middlebury golf will soon reign victorious.
(11/01/18 9:48am)
As our taxi inched along, I watched all the students in their school uniforms, adults on their way to work and the countless Yaoundéens in the street, selling papayas, corrosols (my new favorite fruit), plantains, credit for telephone calls, fabric, tires and really anything you can imagine, and all I could feel was happiness. At 8 a.m., I arrived (surprisingly on time) and met up with my classmates for our étude de terrain or field trip, as if nothing had happened. We climbed into the bus with my professeur de géographie, and started off for the village of Okola, to walk around a cocoa plantation, talk to the Cameroonians working there, and of course, to suck on the sweet inside that envelopes the cocoa beans as we walked through the forest. The village was just a bit north of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon and the city of about three million people where I’ve been studying for more than two months now.
As we bumped around on the bus (you’d be hard pressed to find a street in Yaoundé without bumps and holes), it didn’t feel like I had just gotten off a plane at 4:30 a.m. from Casablanca, Morocco. It didn’t feel like I had just spent an entire week exploring Morocco, staying in Rabat and visiting the beautiful surrounding cities by train and bus. It didn’t feel like the country of Cameroon, situated between West and Central Africa, had just elected the same president, Paul Biya, for the seventh time, after having lived under his power for 36 years. Middlebury’s decision to send us to Morocco for a week felt like a dream. I understood the reasoning: the necessity to avoid possible election violence breaking out after the announcement of the results, which could have caused the airports to close and trap us inside the country.
When I first came to Cameroon, I never expected to be asked by my host parents: “Et toi? Tu as vécu pendant combien de conditions présidentielles aux États-Unis?” which is French for the question: how many American presidents have served during your lifetime? The answer for me is four. The answer for my host siblings, even my 25-year-old sister, is one. In the month leading up to the election, you could see the evidence of Paul Biya’s (and the state’s) power everywhere in the streets. The posters of his face were everywhere, on billboards, the walls of stores and houses. His face was on t-shirts, dresses, hats, backpacks, umbrellas and more, which people received for free at organized meetings. There were eight other candidates, but they were hardly visible.
The week before the election, we were told not to discuss politics in the shared taxis (the main form of public transportation) and on the streets. There was a rumor that people were positioned in Yaoundé, trying to find secessionists and stop their voices from spreading throughout the city. The secessionist movement in the country is part of the Anglophone crisis, a long-running conflict that intensified in Cameroon in 2016 between English-speaking separatists and a national government dominated by French speakers. The police presence grew in various locations. There was another rumor that a series of random arrests was going on throughout the city. When we went out, we had to carry copies of our passports with us. The phone connection went in and out, making communication harder. However, no violence or anything of significance occurred in Yaoundé leading up to Oct. 7, the jour de vote. Walking through the streets, I could feel in so many people the hunger and readiness for a change of power. On election day, the streets were eerily calm, especially for Yaoundé, a city of bustling disorder. It was said that it would take two weeks for the Supreme Court to officially announce the election results, on Oct. 22.
A week and three days after the election, the students of Middlebury’s School in Cameroon were abruptly told that we would be leaving for Morocco (a North African country that speaks Arabic and French) for a week, with the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to return. I was devastated. At the airport in Yaoundé, the program director told me, “Tu vas rentrer au Cameroun, Emily,” or, “You’re going to come back to Cameroon, Emily” and I took her words to heart. Luckily, she was right. We watched Paul Biya’s smiling face from Rabat, Morocco, as it was announced that he had won 71 percent of the vote (but who really knows how much of the vote he won given that the government also falsely claimed that Transparency International watched over the election process, according to a statement on the organization’s website). Following the results, there have been small incidences of violence in the Anglophone region, as well as a peaceful protest march in Douala, another major city, organized against fraud during the election.
It saddens me to imagine the future of Cameroon under the power of an 85-year-old president, who has failed to follow through on initiatives for his people in his 36 years of power. However, I know that this October’s election awakened the spirit of many Cameroonians. I’m sad for my adopted country and its questionable democracy, but I’m also a little bit hopeful. Now that I’m back, I just get to appreciate everything in Cameroon: my host family, my classmates, the markets, the rainy season and all the adventures, a little bit more.
Editor’s note: Cameroon held national elections on Oct.7. On Oct. 17, students participating in the college’s study abroad program in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, were flown to Morocco on short notice amid concerns that the threat of violence following the announcement of election results would shutter airports and trap students in the country. All students returned safely to Yaoundé on Oct. 26. Yaoundé has not been stricken by election violence that other parts of Cameroon have seen, and the step to extract the students was precautionary. In this piece, Emily Ray ’20 reflects on this experience.
(10/25/18 9:57am)
Editor's note: a video of the event can be viewed here.
Professors Allison Stanger and Keegan Callanan criticized ideological homogeneity at the college and emphasized empathy and free thinking in response to controversial ideas at a Princeton University panel discussion last month.
The event, titled “Speak Freely: Lessons from Middlebury and Evergreen State,” centered on the duo’s reflections in the aftermath of the March 2017 protests of Charles Murray, the controversial conservative author whom protesters labeled a white supremacist.
Stanger had engaged in a back-and-forth with Murray via a livestream after the protest. On their way out of the building, after their exchange, Stanger was assaulted.
At Princeton, Stanger said she views what happened to her during Murray’s visit as “somewhat of a gift,” in that it deepened her empathy and opened her mind.
“I don’t have any regrets for what I did,” she said at the panel. “I would do exactly the same thing over again, and I have learned so much through that experience and talking to people around the country about it and related issues concerning our country and our democracy.”’
Stanger repeatedly stressed the importance of empathy, particularly for those with whom one might not agree. She encouraged her audience to use an open mind when engaging with those who are unlike them.
“I really think that you can be a positive force in the fight against racism and injustice by simply thinking for yourself, encouraging others to do the same and listening empathetically to those with whom you disagree,” Stanger said. “I would put it this way: bell curves don’t matter. Individuals do.”
Callanan spoke after Stanger on the panel. Reflecting on Murray’s visit and on his own experience as a professor, he described the college as “ideologically homogeneous” and a place where leftist politics often shape the curriculum, not unlike many of its peer institutions. Callanan criticized the behavior of some of his fellow faculty members in the lead-up to the protest.
“There are even some professors who see their role as mobilizing for left-wing political causes rather than seeking the truth,” Callanan said. “They are scholars in the same way Al Capone was a beverage distributor.”
Callanan warned against pursuing inclusion through censorship, and stressed his belief that inclusivity can only be achieved through open inquiry. He cited the protest as an example of silencing speech in the name of inclusivity.
“Real academic inclusion in its fullest sense is inclusion in a community of truth-seeking through open inquiry,” Callanan said. “Freedom of inquiry is the value most emphatically under threat when speakers like Charles Murray are silenced or no-platformed,” he said.
Since the protest, Stanger has publicly spoken about the incident several times, at universities, conferences, on television and in New York Times op-eds. Stanger also testified before the United States Senate about the protest, during which she condemned the actions of her colleagues in the Sociology/Anthropology Department, accusing them of rallying students to protest. The department chair, Michael Sheridan, in a letter to the editor published in The Campus, said her claim was untrue.
Stanger’s public appearances, as documented in a March 2018 article in The Campus, have been a contentious subject among some members of the faculty.
“I think that the story of what happened last year has cohered into a single dominant narrative, but overall I think there are other stories of what happened too and a lot of those other perspectives have not gotten into that dominant narrative, precisely because they’re small, they’re local, they’re personal, they’re not amplified on the national stage,” Sheridan told The Campus in March.
The Campus reached out to both Stanger and Callanan for comment on the Princeton lecture via email. When asked why they continue to speak publicly about the event, Stanger identified what she believes to be the gravity of current threats to freedom of speech as her main motivation.
“Because I believe both freedom of expression and democracy are currently in grave danger, I am speaking out whenever given the opportunity,” she wrote in an email. “This authoritarian challenge is global. I am particularly concerned that many younger Americans do not seem to place their understanding of injustices in the United States in comparative and historical perspective. It is the job of educators to provide that broader context and to speak truth to power.”
Callanan said the panel was tied to Princeton first-year students’ summer reading. The students were assigned “Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech” by Keith Whittington.
When reached via email, neither Callanan nor Stanger said whether they were paid to speak on the panel.
The Sept. 14 discussion lasted for about an hour and a half in Princeton’s Arthur Lewis Auditorium. The other two panelists were Heather Heying and her husband Bret Weinstein, two former professors at The Evergreen State College. Weinstein was a prominent critic of the “Day of Absence” at Evergreen State, an event that requested white students and faculty members leave campus for the day. After he and Heying faced confrontations with students and accusations of racism, both professors resigned and sued the college.
The talk was sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a program within Princeton University’s Department of Politics. A link to a video of the full panel discussion can be found with the online version of this article at www.middleburycampus.com.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this article made a mistake in quoting Professor Callanan. The error has been corrected.
(10/25/18 9:55am)
This fall at the Student Activities Fair, the Pregnancy Resource Center of Addison County had a booth alongside other organizations from town. The booth included shower flip-flops, business cards, pamphlets on parenting classes and healthy relationships and a game of “STD Jeopardy” positioned out front.
The booth was operated by the center’s director, Ms. Joanie Praamsma, who greeted students with a smile and offered her materials. When I introduced myself to Ms. Praamsma as the student who had previously written an article about her Crisis Pregnancy Center in The Middlebury Campus last fall, her smile disappeared. She considered my work an “attack” on her organization. She politely offered me her materials, and I took an example of each pamphlet before leaving the fair.
Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) often look like healthcare providers. When you drive by the Pregnancy Resource Center of Addison County on Route 7, you might mistake it for a legitimate women’s health resource. It has “free pregnancy testing” posted on large signs in front, and its website states its goal as “empowering women to make informed choices.”
The information that CPCs provide, however, is biased, ill-informed, and designed to intimidate women who may be considering abortion. Last fall, a student — Kelsie Hoppes 18.5 — visited the center to conduct research on how CPCs operate. (Kelsie wrote a blog post about her visit to the local CPC, titled “I Went to a Fake Women’s Health Center, and Here’s What You Need to Know,” for the National Women’s Law Center.) When Kelsie suggested that a fictional friend might be considering an abortion, she was offered a pamphlet outlining the “risks” of the procedure. (You can see the pamphlet here). The pamphlet dramatically exaggerates the risks of abortion and suggests that abortion leads to increased risk of breast cancer and future infertility. Neither of these statements are supported by facts.
Moreover, the center claims to offer post-abortion counseling to those struggling from the “physical and emotional trauma of abortion.” The center includes a description of “Post Abortion Stress Syndrome,” a fictitious mental disorder that the Diagnostic Standards Manual — used by psychologists to define and diagnose mental disorders — does not recognize as legitimate.
In fact, a study from 2015 found that the majority of women who have abortions feel confident that their decision was the correct one, and do not struggle with emotional distress. While the Pregnancy Resource Center of Addison County’s website claims that it offers “evidence-based” information, it is clear that its information is ill-informed and biased, and that it intentionally associates abortion with medical risk and trauma.
Following the Student Activities Fair, a group of students mobilized to take action against the local CPC. We met initially to establish our goals and to identify a tangible action that could be taken to protect our campus community from false information and threats to reproductive autonomy. The petition was proposed, with the stated goal of having the Pregnancy Resource Center of Addison County banned from advertising on campus or attending the Student Activities Fair. The language of the petition was then drafted, revised by students and staff, and shared online at go/stoplyingtowomen. At present, the petition has more than 240 signatures from faculty, staff, and concerned students; I am in contact with campus organizations about endorsing the petition.
When I approached the Pregnancy Center’s booth at the student activities fair, I made no effort to misrepresent myself. I introduced myself as the person who had written an article about the center previously and expressed some concern that the center was advertising on campus. The Pregnancy Resource Center, however, intentionally misrepresented itself to the student body. Ms. Praamsma informed me that she did not bring any of the center’s pamphlets on abortion, despite its website clearly disseminating information about abortion. The local CPC intentionally withheld its biased information and marketed itself as a reproductive health resource for the Middlebury community.
CPCs threaten reproductive autonomy. Women should not be scared away from a safe and frequently practiced procedure, and students should not be implicated in the spread of biased and ill-informed information. Sign our petition at go/stoplyingtowomen, and protect your peers’ ability to make informed decisions about their own bodies.
Editor’s note: Victoria Isquith helped organize a petition to bar the Pregnancy Center of Addison County from participation in Middlebury College events. See our front page for news coverage of the petition.
(10/11/18 9:58am)
On July 11, 2018, I joined the London-based group Refugee Tales on the fifth day of their pilgrimage through London’s busy streets, neighborhoods, parks and commercial throughways in an act of protest and in solidarity with refugees and asylum-seekers in the United Kingdom. Inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Refugee Tales stops each night to commune with locals, and listens to stories of refugees by established writers.
Refugee Tales calls for an end to the policy of indefinite detention and the creation of humane policies for migrants fleeing their homelands.
As we walked in solidarity with migrants in London, many across the Atlantic were protesting the inhumane practice of separating children from their parents as they crossed the Mexican border. Closer to Vermont, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 25-year old A (not his full name), a migrant farmer from Addison county, and was holding him at a detention center in New Hampshire, separating him from his family.
These policies are reminiscent of colonial and post-colonial abuses endured by non-white migrants for generations. I think of my own family’s history of migration across the British, Portuguese and Spanish empires, and through four Caribbean countries before we arrived in the United States.
Europeans and North Americans have also experienced migration, some with more privileges than others. Consider the U.S. southerners and the Quebecois migrants who fled to Brazil in the nineteenth century, the intellectuals and artists who sought refuge in Paris, or the thousands of Irish and Jews who left Europe to build new homes in places from Cuba to China. Stories of migration have shaped the lives of many at the college and in the communities where we live.
Today British authorities detain tens of thousands of people in eleven ‘immigration removal centers,’ at a cost of over a million pounds per year. While the United States does not practice indefinite detention as a principle, it directs its resources towards immediate deportation. Both policies are inhumane.
Halfway through our pilgrimage, we stop at Queen Mary University, where state-of-the-art buildings surround the old Sephardic Jewish cemetery. Cemeteries and burial sites become important signposts of migration and memory even as modernization destroys the cultural history of the less powerful. At Middlebury, the Christianization and burial of Egyptian prince Amun-Her Khepeshef in the graveyard next to the Rohatyn Centre for Global Affairs exemplifies these tensions.
Migration is connected to the histories of slavery, racism and genocide. It is also connected to scientific innovation and the quest for equality. The Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury and the Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburg document many of these contradictions.
In London, I walk alongside Amazir (not his real name), one of the ten million migrants who have no nationality. He was caught between two countries that refused to recognize him but gladly wanted to conscript him into their armies. Hannah Arendt describes his conundrum in “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man.”
The work of scholar Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us that borders have often crossed people rather than the other way around. Later on our walk in London I meet AJ, a university student studying social work with his own complicated story of crossing borders and detention. AJ, who may have been born in India or Nepal, is still trying to understand his story after having lost his parents.
When we get to Whitechapel, we stop at the Cable Street Mural, commemorating the October 1926 demonstrations against fascists who terrorized the migrant and Jewish residents. Confrontations like the one in Charlottesville are not new in the Atlantic world. The mural documents history, but the astute artists have also found a way to embrace the demographic shifts in the neighborhoods by including South Asian subjects in the mural.
As we leave the park, I meet Patience Agbabi, British Poet Laureate of Canterbury. Agbabi, a child of Nigerian parents, has published the ‘tale’ of Samia (not her real name), a Coptic woman who fled Egypt for the United Kingdom. We talk about poetry’s ability to document suffering and portray the complex truth of Samia’s story. Later that day, I will hear other stories read by the actress Vanessa Redgrave and Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others.
The sharing of stories is part of a long tradition of healing and activism. Walking with migrants and listening to their stories help us notice the migrant signposts in our surroundings. It also creates a new awareness that can lead to a shift in consciousness. The goals of Refugee Tales align with the ambitions of many groups calling for more humane migration policies.
Today, I look at landscapes and architecture differently. I consciously notice the signposts shaped or touched by migrants globally and locally.
According to the American Immigrant Council, migrants make up 4.5% of Vermont’s population. Historically, these numbers have included Italian and Irish migrants who worked in the mills and helped build St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Towns and businesses with Anglicized French names and the sound of Bosnian in the aisles of Hannaford are potential fragments of the migrant tales waiting to be uncovered.
And then there are the environmental and cultural ironies: The Mexican dairy farmers and Jamaican apple pickers who travel thousands of miles to help produce goods “Made in Vermont.” Migrants have also shaped Middlebury’s curriculum. They have helped prepare our food and take care of our grounds.
In the current climate it is important to recognize the stories and signposts of migrants and refugees. Refugee Tales encourages us to listen, to notice, to walk, and to act to transform our politics. It is a beautiful model for both sides of the Atlantic.
David Herd and Anna Pincus will bring Refugee Tales to the Abernathy Room in Axinn on October 15 (4:30-6:00pm). They will discuss Refugee Tales and read several migrant stories written by established writers in the United Kingdom. Please join us for a cross-Atlantic discussion. Weather permitting, we will take a short walk of solidarity with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from Proctor Hall terrace through the cemetery to the Centre for the Arts beginning at 12 noon.
(10/11/18 9:53am)
Everybody wants to start class on the right note. At Middlebury, the hardest part can be getting into the class. The sign-up period is an intensive two minutes when your webpage is liable to crash, your BannerWeb account might not load, or your slow typing results in missing out on first choice classes. Back-up courses might also be full, triggering a frantic search for any available courses that fit your schedule. There are simple solutions that can reduce the stress and difficulty associated with course registration.
The upperclassmen frequently advise disappointed first-years that registration becomes less stressful with each semester. But that is an improvement in individual standing, not a solution for the larger issue. Any registration system will prioritize upperclassmen. That does not mean the only solution should be waiting to move up the proverbial totem pole. Any system can be improved.
A simple solution to reduce stress and increase the frequency of positive outcomes would be to create a multi-round registration system. The first round would allow everyone to enter their top choice classes. A break between rounds one and two would allow students to identify the availability of second choice courses in a calm environment. The break could be anywhere from an hour to a day. This slight variation on the current system allows time to process and prepare, instead of rushing to find another course in the heat of the moment.
It is worth noting that departments do a great job responding to long wait lists and assisting as many students as possible during the add/drop period. Some courses added new sections due to higher than anticipated registration requests. Adding sections to in-demand classes should be encouraged. It is important to respond to student interest in a subject and assist everyone in developing a course of study that fits their needs.
Adding last-minute sections is an important step in easing the stress and negative feelings that are associated with a bad course registration experience. However, it would be preferable to have the necessary number of sections at the start of the registration process. Adding a new section at the start of the year might be complicated by needing to find open rooms, available professors and a time that works for the greatest number of students. Another simple solution could help avoid the problem of overflowing waitlists for classes without an appropriate number of seats. A survey of interest could be sent to college students before the number of sections for each course is finalized. The survey could ask students to list five courses they are interested in taking during the next semester. Departments would be able to better identify courses that need more sections before registration begins, limiting the need to add sections at the last minute.
The current course registration process can quickly spiral, leaving some students scrambling to create a full schedule. The add/drop period and the creation of new sections can help students recover from the registration period, but it is preferable to have a strong registration system that limits the need for adjustments. A few simple changes will create a calmer system and result in higher student satisfaction.
(09/27/18 9:57am)
Re “Remembering a Former College Employee Who Froze to Death” (news article, Sept. 20):
A note of appreciation for the feature piece about Suad in last week’s edition of The Campus. I’ve shared this among fellow alums and received an influx of notes, as many had not heard the news of his death.
Your piece not only shared what happened, but shed light into the life of someone we knew and cared for. Learning more about Suad brings great joy and an opportunity to reminisce fondly.
I laughed reading Richard O’Donohue’s comments about the VHS tapes, having felt the same way — “not the VHS again” — as Suad so often tried to lend [Libby Pingpank ’04] and me his favorite movies which we’d never have time to watch.
After hearing the tragic news of Suad’s passing last January, I looked for acknowledgement from the college. Middlebury espouses values of welcoming the immigrant and of ending injustice such as homelessness — yet when a tragedy occurred that hit at the core of these issues, nothing was said. Social issues aside, to have had a beloved former employee of 10 years freeze to death one mile from campus and say nothing is wrong. The lack of recognition felt like we were leaving Suad alone all over again as a community.
Thanks to you, this is no longer the case. Suad has been recognized and celebrated by the community he gave so much to. He can be remembered in the best way. And those of us that knew him can find closure about his death. Thank you so much for not only doing the right thing, but for authoring such a well-written and heartfelt piece. If Suad were with us, no doubt he would be smiling ear to ear.
Megan Rzezutko is a member of the Middlebury College class of 2004.
(09/27/18 9:56am)
I hope everyone has had a great start to their semester!
This week, I thought it would be a great idea to talk about something that has been on the minds of many students,--dining changes. Specifically, the recent Grille closure two nights a week and the changes to the dining hall hours that has worried many students. In conversations with Dan Detora and David Provost, we discussed the reasons behind it, how it impacts students, and where to go from here. This is all part of a larger issue concerning space. Because students use the dining hall as a social space, any changes are bound to affect the way students access food and ultimately each other.
While these changes are in dining, they are also part of a bigger financial picture. Currently, we are planning to have an event where David Provost can present on the challenges and changes we now face to a larger student audience. This will allow students to not only understand the issue, but provide them the opportunity to offer informed suggestions about space, dining, and how to better improve these areas. Hopefully this will not be the only event of this nature. Along with MiddWorks, a series that allows students to learn about administrators and what they do, presentations like these can invite students to understand challenges and how they influence Middlebury and its students. More details will be provided in the future, but I hope students see these steps as moves towards transparency and encouraging student involvement.
I also want to take part of this column to talk about space and how important it is to everyone’s experience. We never acknowledge places like the dining halls or McCullough as places to do homework, eat, and socialize until changes make us realize it. Similarly, we fail to acknowledge the general disrespect these same spaces are shown when we leave parts of our meals on the table for someone else to clean up. If we are going to talk about The Grille and dining hall as important centers on campus, we also need to treat them, and the people, that way.
Nia Robinson is the president of the Student Government Association and a member of the Middlebury College Class of 2019.
(09/27/18 9:54am)
Three years ago, The Middlebury Campus Editorial Board published “The Coddling of the Middlebury Mind.” The editors critiqued what they perceived as Middlebury’s “culture of protectiveness.” They argued that the college’s emphasis on safe spaces and political correctness insulated students, depriving them of opportunities to confront uncomfortable or offensive viewpoints and thereby become better at refuting them with reason and evidence. “The world-at-large is not Middlebury,” the editors wrote, “and we fear we are leaving here unprepared for the ‘unsafe spaces’ that await us.”
Less than two years after The Campus published that editorial, the Charles Murray incident took place. The protests, which turned violent and left one faculty member injured, came to epitomize progressives’ flawed understanding of freedom of speech as a principle that does not apply to offensive ideas.
In the world beyond Middlebury College, the Supreme Court has repeatedly, clearly and correctly stated that, while we are understandably disturbed by offensive speech, and therefore logically want to silence this speech, it is a key function of the First Amendment to protect hate speech. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is the difficulty of deciding who will determine when speech becomes “offensive” and what criteria will be used to make this decision. I, for one, do not want President Trump or Attorney General Sessions deciding what speech they will use the levers of government power to punish because they determine that it is “offensive.”
In the recent case of Snyder v. Phelps (2011), the Court, by a vote of 8-1, held that the First Amendment protected the Westboro Baptist Church’s admittedly offensive and hateful speech, even though it was delivered in the presence of a funeral for a soldier who died in Iraq. The Court acknowledged the odious and homophobic speech at issue and the pain it must have caused the family to endure that speech while burying their son. Nonetheless, both liberal and conservative justices (only Justice Alito dissented) agreed that, while a majority of people may speak back and refute offensive speech, they cannot prohibit it.
The Murray fiasco kindled a national debate within the left. Some scholars, journalists and prominent Democrats demanded a renewed commitment to the open market of ideas. They asserted that if we allow vigorous debates about policies and ideas, liberalism would win based on facts and reason, not censorship.
Others argued that attacks on political correctness reflected a lack of understanding of the challenges that offensive speech inflicts on marginalized groups. Progressives, like New York Times writer Charles Blow, argued that nothing valuable comes from engaging conservatives in discourse. “The Enlightenment,” Blow declared, “must never bow to the Inquisition.”
Blow’s comments, however, represent a problem with modern American political dialogue. While we often hear about how alternative facts and echo chambers have corroded bipartisan conversation, the left has failed to address some of its own issues. One such issue is our tone. Polls show that Americans particularly dislike the righteous condemnation of the left, and that is one of many factors that have driven the Democratic Party into the wilderness (we now control fewer elected positions in the United States than at any time since the 1920s).
Part of that sentiment arises from the idea that the left, particularly on college campuses, should be empowered to censor ideas that it considers offensive, instead of prevailing through open argument based on facts and reason. “When the loudest voices on the left talk about people on the right as either beyond the pale or dupes of their betters,” writes libertarian journalist Katherine Mangu-Ward, “it is with an air of barely concealed smugness.” The left’s tonal issues have handicapped our ability to talk to — let alone appeal to — voters who may help the Democratic Party win some elections. At the risk of stating the obvious, in a democracy, if you consistently lose elections, the other side dictates policy.
Right-wingers have responded to the left’s self-righteousness with increasingly toxic trolling. It is a self-perpetuating cycle of worsening discourse: “the more smugness, the more satisfying it is to poke holes in it; the more toxic the trolling, the greater the sense of moral superiority,” Mangu-Ward notes.
If liberals can restore the primacy of debate and dialogue at Middlebury and beyond, they will win many of these debates. More importantly, they will persuade some previously skeptical voters and thereby restore the Democratic Party’s political relevance. This process starts with dropping demands for censorship in places where we have the power to do so and realizing that we can learn from people who disagree with us. Equally important, we can win some of these arguments as opposed to simply stopping them from happening in the first place.
Joey Lyons is a member of the Middlebury College Class of 2021.
(09/24/18 4:06pm)
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(09/20/18 10:00am)
For three days following the tragedy, the public did not know his name.
It was in the early morning of Saturday, Jan. 13, that Middlebury police found the body of a man who had frozen to death overnight off a path on the Town Green, covered with snow and sleet. The following Monday, local media began to report his identity: Suad Teocanin, a 45-year-old Middlebury resident who had been living at the Charter House during a recent period of homelessness. Following a night of drinking, Teocanin tried to make his way back to the Charter House before apparently collapsing, just yards from the shelter’s front door.
Reports of Teocanin’s death circulated around Middlebury that week, accompanied by photographs of his smiling face, descriptions of his recent homelessness and statements by police that alcohol had been a “significant factor” in his death. What these relatively brief media accounts could not capture, however, was the totality of Teocanin’s experience before his death — a life that began in the Bosnian city of Zvornik and led to ten years of employment at Middlebury College and another decade in the kitchens of several restaurants in town.
To the many people who knew him at the college and in town, Teocanin was not only a friend and coworker, but also a generous neighbor, a fellow immigrant and a bright spot amid the stresses of college life whose broad smile was cited without exception.
“The best antidote”
Teocanin came to America as a war refugee.
From 1992 to 1995, Bosnia was torn apart by ethnic conflict, as Serbian forces targeted the Muslim Bosniak population, burning cities and towns and massacring entire communities. In Teocanin’s hometown of Zvornik, tens of thousands of residents were driven from the area, and almost 4,000 were killed.
Teocanin was not Bosniak, however, but Romani, the historically itinerant ethnic group known colloquially as gypsies. Romani people, persecuted in Bosnia as they are in much of the world, were targeted specifically in the killings that took place in Zvornik. Those who knew Teocanin in Middlebury would recall that he rarely spoke about his life in Bosnia, or about the family he left behind. One former Proctor Dining Hall colleague, however, said Teocanin had spoken of witnessing the deaths of his parents and siblings.
Over 1,700 Bosnian refugees were resettled in Vermont between 1993 and 2004, and Teocanin was one of them. In Middlebury, a small community started to form by the mid-1990s, centered in the Pine Meadow Apartments near the Pulp Mill covered bridge. From their homes in the apartment complex that became known as Little Bosnia, Teocanin and his fellow refugees began to rebuild their lives in Vermont.
Jovanka Jandric was among the Bosnians who settled in Pine Meadow during that time, along with her husband, Refik, and their children. Refik came to the United States first in 1994, to a New Hampshire hospital, having lost both of his legs in Bosnia after stepping on a landmine. Jovanka came with their children several months later, and the family moved to Middlebury.
The older couple found jobs in town — Refik at Danforth Pewter, and Jovanka at the now-closed Greg’s Meat Market — and cared for Teocanin, who, in his early twenties, had arrived in town alone. “I loved him like a son. I’m old enough to be his mother,” Jovanka said. “He was too young.”
Teocanin’s childhood education had been minimal and he never learned to read or write. In order to communicate with his brother, who fled to Germany, Teocanin brought his letters to Jovanka, who would read them and help him compose replies.
Teocanin, after a stint at Mister Up’s restaurant, found his way to the college, where he began work in 1998 as a pot washer in Proctor Dining Hall. His coworkers, several of whom remain at Proctor today, were struck by his ability to adapt in what must have been a daunting new environment.
“You always start out in a different place, not being sure of yourself,” said Claudette Latreille, who still works at the college. Colleagues watched Teocanin transform from an inexperienced new hire who spoke little English to a skilled worker who mastered the language and the intricacies of food service.
“He was the kind of guy who fit in by watching, and then doing what the cooks were doing and saying,” said Richard O’Donohue, now retired, who worked as Proctor’s head chef. Coworkers helped Teocanin study for a driving test, went with him to college hockey games and invited him to Middlebury Union High School to watch their children play sports.
A few years into his time at Proctor, Teocanin began to work in the main dining area known as the servery, and students began to gravitate toward his warmth and near-constant smile.
“College can be a little intense, and literally, Suad was the best antidote for that,” said Megan McElroy Rzezutko ’04, who formed a close bond with Teocanin at Proctor. She recalled the feeling of “being in the library for many hours and then seeing his smiling face, so elated to see you.”
Libby Pingpank ’04 remembered meeting Teocanin soon after her arrival on campus. “It was the first time we were away from home,” she said. “He was just this welcoming, friendly face that we always knew we would see when we went to eat.”
Teocanin became known for stopping by tables to chat and joke with students, and for his vast collection of movies on VHS tape that he offered up as gifts and even as betting payments, when a group of fellow employees began placing bets on football games.
“Suad had some money, but not a whole lot, and he’d make side bets,” O’Donohue said. “When he couldn’t pay the bet, he’d bring in a bag of VHSs. Everybody got to the point of, ‘No, Suad, we’re not doing VHS.’”
To employees like Dawn Boise, the current Proctor manager, memories of Teocanin’s socializing feel like symbols of a bygone era, when the smaller student population meant that staff could talk freely with students without the looming threat of the mealtime rush.
“You used to have a little down time, where you could chat with people,” she said. “Now, you really don’t have time to get to know a lot of the students, which is hard.”
For the students who knew Teocanin, memories of those conversations have only grown in value in the years since their graduation.
“Honestly, when I think back, it’s my advisor and Suad who had the most impact on my time in college,” McElroy Rzezutko said. “There’s obviously faculty and administrators there that are a part of your life, but this was different. It was comforting, and wasn’t forced.”
“He was too good”
After over a decade, Teocanin left the college in 2010 after accepting a voluntary separation package offered by Middlebury following the 2008 financial crisis.
“When he decided to leave, we were pretty upset,” O’Donohue said. “But we couldn’t talk him out of it. He had his mind set.”
Years earlier, during his stint at Mister Up’s, Teocanin had worked alongside Megan Brady. When she and her husband Holmes Jacobs prepared to open Two Brothers Tavern, Brady insisted they hire Teocanin.
“He had a reputation of being a golden soul, a great person, a great work ethic and just a big heart,” Jacobs said.
Teocanin remained at Two Brothers until his death, working his way up from dishwashing to food preparation. There, like at the college, he became a beloved and visible figure, famed for his humor and, of course, his enormous grin. “Even though he had so many things stacked against him, he brought out the best in other people,” Jacobs said.
Work was steady, but Teocanin’s personal life was not. Over the years, the Bosnian community in Middlebury splintered along many of the same ethnic lines that had been present during wartime, and prejudices welled up against Teocanin’s Romani heritage.
“Not so many people liked gypsies,” Jovanka Jandric said. “Some people would open the door for him, some people would close the door.”
To make matters worse, friends say that a girlfriend extorted Teocanin out of what little money he had. Generous to a fault, Teocanin supported her unquestioningly. “Suad was one of those rare people who gave of himself to anyone without expecting anything in return,” Jacobs said.
For years, Teocanin had moved around frequently, often camping or living out of a truck when he had no reliable source of housing. As cold weather approached in the fall of 2017, Jacobs helped Teocanin move into Charter House.
“We’re so grateful for the Charter House,” Jacobs said. “But if he had been less generous with all of his time and money he probably would have had a housing setup that was more permanent.”
“He was too good,” Jovanka Jandric said. “Too naïve.”
“Richer and happier”
Jacobs remembers the day of January 12 vividly.
“It was a really weird, beautiful, sunny, 60-degree January day,” he said. “As the sun fell, the weather turned really quick.”
Temperatures that night dipped to 30 degrees and falling rain turned to snow. And Teocanin failed to make it home to the Charter House after a night of drinking in town.
The amount of alcohol that Teocanin had ingested came as a shock to those who knew him, as alcohol did not seem to play a major role in his life. News of Teocanin’s death left many in the community with the impression that he had long struggled with drinking, a notion that Jacobs feels compelled to refute.
“I don’t believe that he had a real substance abuse problem,” Jacobs said. “But that’s how he died, and that’s perhaps part of the perception that comes from that.”
In the days and weeks following his death, posts made on the Two Brothers Tavern Facebook page memorializing Teocanin garnered hundreds of reactions and dozens of comments.
“We have lost one of the biggest hearts we have ever known,” the first post read. “But deep down, somewhere hard to find tonight, we realize, as we always have, that each of us is so much richer and happier for having had Suad in our lives.”
However, months later, his friends still puzzle over the circumstances of his last night, and why Teocanin was in such a situation in the first place.
“It still confounds me a bit how he was left alone,” Jacobs said. “It’s unclear to me why the police weren’t called sooner to try to find Suad, especially when there had been witnesses to where he was. I feel like a phone call to the police could’ve saved him.”
Of all the ironies surrounding Teocanin’s death, including that he passed out just steps from shelter and that alcohol, a substance he seemed to use only rarely, was involved, what most disturbs those who knew him is the disjunction between the way he lived and the way he died.
“To me, the most horrific thing is that he was alone,” McElroy Rzezutko said. “This person that created such warmth, human-to-human.”
Amid their grief, James and Jacobs planned a memorial befitting Teocanin’s legacy at Middlebury’s Congregational Church. After first offering a small room, a church official eventually agreed to open up the entire building for the January 27 service.
Among the many attendees were Jandric, Jacobs and several Proctor employees. Speakers recounted how Teocanin made an impact on their lives in Middlebury.
“Everyone had a story, even if they didn’t really know Suad, about how he would help them cross the street, or [how] he would hold the door for them when he was walking into their shop with a big smile,” Jacobs said.
Since January, mementos of Teocanin have accumulated inside Two Brothers Tavern. A framed photograph hangs on the wall in the dining area, near the bar. Another sits above the sink, where Teocanin spent many hours washing dishes. And Jacobs is proudest of the life-sized poster of Teocanin, showing him beaming in his cook’s uniform, that now sits in the kitchen to greet Jacobs every day as he walks into work.
“It’s not Suad,” he said. “But it still makes me smile.”
(09/20/18 10:00am)
The community-initiated conversations have been hosted, the survey results analyzed and invitations to facilitated talks no longer populate student inboxes. The next phase of Envisioning Middlebury begins this semester, the phase in which the framework will start to have a concrete impact on the institution. Yet, despite the fact that this process has been in the works for well over a year, many in the broader Middlebury community still do not understand what it is.
That is in part because Envisioning Middlebury is not the typical strategic plan college presidents implement upon assuming their roles. Instead, it is a set of guidelines and values that inform decision-making, big and small, across the institution. Since Envisioning Middlebury’s adoption in 2016, members of every facet of the Middlebury community have engaged in dialogues centered around the future of the institution. Those discussions shaped and informed Envisioning Middlebury, and under President Laurie Patton’s direction, then-Provost Susan Baldrige took the lead in developing the new framework. The Board of Trustees approved the framework last October.
The decision to create a framework, rather than the typical checklist plan, came after issues that arose with the institution’s last 10-year-plan, Knowledge Without Boundaries, implemented under then-President Ronald Liebowitz in 2006.
Knowledge Without Boundaries took a more traditional approach, offering 82 concrete recommendations that were hindered when the 2008 financial crisis interrupted the subsequent fundraising process. According to Vice President of Communications Bill Burger, Envisioning Middlebury is intended to be “crisis proof,” to provide more flexibility and withstand unknown future obstacles.
This fall, the project will move into the implementation stage. With all the major building blocks of the program now in place, centered around a new mission statement, the institution is ready to accept proposals for “first moves” that will lead to changes based on the values and goals laid out in the strategic framework.
FRAMEWORK COMPONENTS
Envisioning Middlebury is comprised of five distinct pieces. First, a new institution-wide mission statement, which emphasizes immersive, engaged and creative learning. Second, a vision statement, which underlines the need for a “robust public sphere” in which citizens work across boundaries. Burger said the goal of the vision statement is to provide a more short-term focus in service of the broader mission statement.
The framework also highlights “distinctions,” or areas in which Middlebury already succeeds, and “directions,” which are areas for growth. Distinctions include Middlebury programs around the world, as well as more local programs like MiddCore and Oratory Now. The “directions” aim in part to bolster existing resources and programs, like the Anderson Freeman Resource Center and the Middlebury School of the Environment. Lastly, the framework includes four principles: promoting community, making intentional choices, responsible use of resources and committing time and space to collective goals.
Burger explained the principles as values that would guide intentional choice making. “That means holding ourselves accountable for the fact that Middlebury tries to do so much, or not allocate sufficient resources to our ambitions.” he said. “We have a tendency to stretch ourselves a little too thin sometimes and so these exist to help check ourselves as an institution.”
The entire framework can be found at go.middlebury.edu/envisioningmiddlebury.
With the framework in place, the Envisioning Middlebury Committee set about developing transformational goals, which the Board endorsed in January 2017. The three goals are to turn Middlebury into a center for persuasive and inclusive dialogue, a laboratory for curricular innovation and experiential learning and a globally networked changemaker. Each goal now has a working group led by a senior administrator who is responsible for brainstorming programs in pursuit of that goal.
ALL OF THE INSTITUTION
The framework also incorporates for the first time each part of Middlebury: the Language Schools, C.V. Starr Schools Abroad, Bread Loaf School of English, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, School of the Environment, Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) and the undergraduate college.
Amy Morsman, interim dean for faculty development and research, believes the broad framework model is particularly useful for an institution with so many branches, though she acknowledged that it may feel undefined.
“It is a set of guidelines and that sometimes can feel frustratingly vague, but Middlebury is a big place and it doesn’t make any sense to create a fixed plan that is one-size fits all,” she said. “Some folks may not like that, but that is the reality of Middlebury, and so our strategic planning process should reflect that.”
The Campus reached out to three of the four undergraduate students who served on the advisory committee. Two felt that the inclusion of MIIS and other branches of the institution in the Envisioning Middlebury process made it harder to address issues specifically related to the college during the conversation phase.
“I had to keep reminding myself that Envisioning Middlebury was about all of the programs that fall under Middlebury’s umbrella,” said Tabitha Mueller, who graduated last May.
“I’d hoped Envisioning Middlebury would be a campaign to develop and strengthen the undergraduate college, but it took a macro-scale approach rather than a micro-scale one,” she said. “This macro-scale approach may have achieved the administration’s goals, but as a student, I remember getting frustrated because there was so much I hoped to address at the more micro-scale.”
Morgan Rawlings, a MIIS student, served on the advisory committee and wished more students and staff at the institute had participated. She felt the Envisioning Middlebury process was relevant to MIIS and hopes the framework will have an impact in Monterey. She also felt, like many at the college, that students at MIIS did not understand what Envisioning Middlebury was.
NEXT STEPS
Jeffrey Cason, the interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, began overseeing Envisioning Middlebury on July 1 after Baldridge stepped down, and has been tasked with moving the framework from conversation to implementation.
“Envisioning Middlebury was designed to hear from as many voices as possible across Middlebury,” Cason said. “Now that those voices have been distilled into strategic directions and transformational goals, we have a solid foundation from which to act, and to build.”
According to Cason, the next stage of the process, which is already underway, is to solicit ideas from programs, departments, offices and self-organized groups on how to move forward within the framework. Cason received initial proposals for programs and initiatives on Sept. 14, though he says the submission process will be ongoing. Working within budget constraints, academic leadership will determine which projects have priority and help refine proposed ideas. “There will also be some great ideas that we will have to say no to, because they require resources that we don’t have or don’t align with the strategic directions,” Cason said.
Cason acknowledged that resource allocation is especially important since Envisioning Middlebury took shape as much of the institution is working to cut costs and rein in financial deficits. But he argued that a strong strategic framework is exactly what Middlebury needs in the face of tough financial decisions. “In a sense, the Envisioning Middlebury process is even more important now, when we know we have to limit our expenses,” he said. “We need to decide what is most important to invest in, and we need to prioritize.”
ENDURING CHANGE
Envisioning Middlebury is designed to create change gradually while asking big, complicated questions about what Middlebury is and where it is going. Given the wide scope of the project, it is unclear whether current students will see the effects of the framework before they graduate. With time, though, the foundation laid so far during Envisioning Middlebury, and the work that has yet to be done, could fundamentally change the character of the institution.
For that to happen, Morsman believes, faculty and staff will need to continue to frame their work with the aforementioned directions and principles in mind. She acknowledged that this can feel like a big ask when everyone is already so busy.
“If people don’t stay engaged, then they are just leaving decisions to be made by a smaller group who have to pay attention to this, and that will reinforce the notion I have heard several times on campus that the administration is ‘just going to do what it wants anyway,’” she said, adding that the framework can create lasting change.
“I see the possibility of a Middlebury that is more focused, more collaborative among faculty and staff as well as students,” she said. “And more in tune with helping learners become highly capable participants and contributors to the world that is developing in this century.”
(09/20/18 10:00am)
An exhibit featuring over 100 exquisite works of Islamic art is now on display at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, making it the first Islamic art exhibition in a Vermont museum in at least 30 years.
Located on the first floor of Mahaney Center for the Arts, this rich collection embodies the long history and intercontinental reach of Islamic art.
“Wondrous Worlds” features artwork in nearly all media, including ceramics, clothing, glassware, jewelry, metalworks, musical instruments, paintings, photographs, prayer rugs and textiles.
Highlights include 19th-century Indonesian crowns (fashioned from palm leaves, gold wire, animal fibers and wood), prayer-books adorned in leather and gold, Egyptian tent hangings inscribed with calligraphic and geometric patterns (measuring 160 square feet) and much more.
“Wondrous Worlds” officially opened at the Middlebury College Museum of Art on Sept. 14 and will stay through Dec. 2.
Middlebury community members and college students gathered for a first look at the exhibit during an opening reception at 5 p.m.
The diverse media presented in “Wondrous Worlds” reflect principles and practices of Islam across the world and throughout time, including pieces that date back to the ninth century as well as contemporary works. However, the exhibit is organized in a thematic sequence rather than a chronological one.
The show opens with an introduction to the Five Pillars of Islam: declaration of faith, daily prayers, charity, fasting for Ramadan and the Hajj Pilgrimage.
The exhibition then expands upon five themes, ranging from calligraphy and architecture to clothing and food. Each theme provides perspective into the utility, artistry and cultural history of the featured objects.
Because the Islamic faith discourages the creation of images of sentient beings, Islamic art is largely dominated by traditional geometric patterns and calligraphy. Not all Islamic art is strictly religious art, as it also includes the art of the varied cultures of Islamic societies.
Cynthia Packert, a professor of Art History and guest curator of the collection, gave opening remarks while guests snacked on tasty Middle Eastern delicacies last Friday. Packert highlighted the cross-cultural nature of the exhibition.
“In the centuries before amazon.com there were still lots of things moving around the planet in both directions,” she said.
The rapid spread of Islam was accompanied by the development of trade networks for material goods. Objects with imagery of carnations, tulips and birds reflect European influence.
Packert also discussed her role in Middlebury’s acquisition of this exhibit, which had been a three-year process.
“Wondrous Worlds” originally opened in February 2016 at the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, N.J.
A few years ago, Packert spoke with the museum’s Curator of Asian Art, Katie Paul, about obtaining Islamic art for Middlebury’s collection. At the time, the Newark Museum was renovating its Islamic art section and Packert’s request inspired Paul to turn the collection into a moving show. Two recent Middlebury graduates were interns at the Newark Museum and helped put together objects and information for the original opening.
Since its inception, “Wondrous Worlds” has had an active life. After its debut in Newark, it moved to Houston, Texas. After its time at Middlebury, it will travel to Emory University.
Packert emphasized the importance of bringing an exhibit like “Wondrous Worlds” to Middlebury.
“It makes all the difference in teaching and understanding the arts if you actually have real works of art to look at,” she said. “My hope is that after seeing this exhibition [audiences] will emerge with a much richer appreciation for the diversity and complexity of the arts of the Islamic world.”
More information can be found at go.middlebury.edu/museum.
(09/13/18 10:00am)
Have you ever wondered what makes the music that so often drifts across campus from Mead Chapel?
It is the sound of the carillon, a bell instrument that plays Bach, Lady Gaga and everything in between.
This summer, Middlebury College hosted its 33rd Summer Carillon Series.
College carillonneur George Matthew Jr. explained that carillons are defined as instruments with 23 bells or more. Matthew played the third and last concerts of the series. When summer language schools are in session, he also plays music from the respective origins of the Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian schools for their graduation ceremonies.
“We all know each other,” Matthew said, “the carillon players throughout the world. People in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia.”
It is through these friendly relations that carillon artists find their way to Middlebury for the long-running Summer Concert Series and through these same networks that Matthew is invited to play at concerts all over the world.
Between the Summer Carillon Series and Matthew and his students, the carillon at Mead Chapel averages over 100 playings a year.
According to Matthew, the bell corresponding to the lowest note on the carillon, an E one octave below middle C, is 2,300 pounds and weighs more than the Liberty Bell. Playing this note on the wooden manual keyboard requires about as much force as stapling together a ten-page paper. After the keyboard at the console is pressed, a clapper connected by wire to the keyboard strikes the corresponding bell in the tower above. Though the bells of Mead Chapel ring clear over almost all of campus, inside the tower, the music of the bells above ismuted and sounds far away.
During the school year, pieces such as Middlebury’s alma mater, various Bach chorale preludes, Hedwig’s Theme from the Harry Potter movie franchise and even a few of Gaga’s billboard hits can occasionally be heard.
Though he doesn’t name favorites, Matthew says that ragtime is a genre for which the carillon works surprisingly well — his European debut, in fact, was an all-ragtime program in Ostende, Belgium. In addition to pieces written for the carillon, any pieces he plays were originally written for the organ or piano and arranged for the carillon, sometimes by Matthew himself, to adjust to the monumental instrument’s unique characteristics.
“Just think of a piano transcribed down a fourth or an octave,” Matthew says. “You wouldn’t want to play very fast on that.”
Matthew’s carillon repertoire ranges from Bach to ragtime to music from around the world, and his students come from a similarly diverse range of musical backgrounds and experiences. Despite varying degrees of exposure to the instrument, most found their way to the carillon at Middlebury serendipitously. When he plays, Matthew leaves to door to the bell tower open and unlocked as an implicit invitation for students to come see the carillon for themselves.
Benjamin Feinstein ’20, who started playing in his freshman year at Middlebury, discovered the carillon “a bit by accident.” Wandering up to the bell tower one day, he found at the carillon Mr. Matthew, who was “super enthusiastic about getting more people involved with lessons and concerts.” Feinstein has been taking lessons on the carillon ever since.
One of Matthew’s accomplishments in teaching the carillon is to help his students see the variety of expressions and possibilities in the carillon. Feinstein said“a giant, echoing contraption” such as the carillon, pieces such as Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” sound “particularly ridiculous” in a good way, but even more contemporary works such as “Into the Unknown” or Harry Potter tracks can feel “very satisfyingly powerful, emotionally.”
As a freshman, Hannah Blake ’21 had been intrigued by the variety of pieces played on the carillon bells throughout the day and wondered, “What the heck is going on up there?”
Though her three years of playing the clarinet in elementary school gave her limited musical background in keyboard instruments, Blake enjoys her weekly lessons with Matthew.
“It’s quite an experience when you play the real one in Mead Chapel knowing the entire campus can hear you,” Blake said.
“There’s something a little nerve-wracking about knowing you’re guaranteed to be heard, but it’s honestly pretty exciting for the same reasons,” Feinstein said.
Coming from a background in English handbells, he is familiar with the dynamics of “working together as an orchestra of sorts,” and “usually prefers to blend in the background” musically, but found the resounding presence of the carillon to be “a fun change of pace.”
Tiansheng Sun ’20 reflects on the nuances of playing an instrument that is meant to be heard from near and far.
“When you inevitably make a mistake,” Sun said, “you can’t panic. You have to smooth it over, and create the illusion that there were no mistakes in the first place.”
The mechanics of playing such a large instrument can present another difficulty.
“The bass notes of the carillon are particularly loud, and sometimes tend to overpower the higher-pitched parts of the melody,” Sun said. “We don’t get this feeling on the practice carillon,” whose sound is produced by a xylophone, he said, so figuring out how to appropriately practice and play in a controlled manner becomes an important issue to resolve.
The only student of Matthew’s with prior experience on the carillon, Abigail Stone ’20.5, had played on a 23-bell carillon in high school as part of a student group.
“We didn’t really have a teacher and we had no idea what we were doing,” Stone says, “but we figured out some basics with our combined music knowledge.”
Stone is thrilled to be playing on Middlebury’s 48-bell carillon, which she views as “a fun challenge to adapt to,” and points out that the larger number of bells means that “there’s a much more diverse array of repertoire that can be played on Middlebury’s carillon.”
Student lessons on the carillon are free, Matthew says, and provided without financial incentive.
Filling the walls of Matthew’s office are posters from concerts in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Russia, where he was the first American to play in St. Petersburg in 2004. Hanging among the posters is a poem by a former student of Matthew’s at Middlebury, which captures the expressiveness and sweeping presence of an instrument that deserves to be heard as more than just background noise.
“Now an evanescent whisper,
Soon a burgeoning cry.
Ever clanging, yet softly shining.
Hark, from on high there
Floats a glorious sound!
Oh, triumphant bells,
Echoing throughout the world.
Breathing, speaking, ceasing not.”
At busy times in the semester when entire days and weeks can seem like a blur, the carillon is a grounding presence. It reminds us to be present, to be aware and to be appreciative of where we are.
(08/29/18 4:33am)
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We spotted the marker of the day’s purpose to the left of the giant stone gates, a sign inscribed in black Sharpie: “Cheese Festival SOLD OUT."
We had decided some weeks before that a summer spent in Vermont called for a quintessential end. Attending the 10th Annual Vermont Cheesemaker’s Festival was our celebratory send-off. I had been studying French at one of the college’s language schools when I learned of the cheese event and immediately thought of my friend Griffin — a fellow French student, cheese lover, and a begrudging lactose intolerant. I sent him a text message with a picture of the poster, a quasi-ironic invitation that somehow evolved into our investing a New York-music-festival amount of money, all to indulge in a ritual well-suited to the state with the highest number of cheesemakers per capita.
The event was held at Shelburne Farms, which sits on 1,400 acres overlooking Lake Champlain. We quickly came to the realization that the ticket price wasn’t the only element of the Cheesemaker’s Festival that mimicked a music festival: with deft arm movements, volunteers directed vehicles to park in meticulous rows while colorful wristbands indicated the various tiers of prestige.
The leisurely hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. left many festival goers, like ourselves, rolling into the event about an hour late; sampling cheeses and ciders for six hours on a humid mid-August day seemed like overkill.
The shuttle bus rattled over the estate’s dirt paths, guiding us along the lake to the cavernous Coach Barn, a temporary temple of cheese. Dismounting the bus, we promptly received a branded tote bag and glasses for sampling wine and beer throughout the day.
Entering the first of two steamy tents and overtly overwhelmed, we were approached by an enthusiastic volunteer. “Not sure where to start?” he inquired. Nope, no idea. Hoping he would tell us there was some structure to the swarms of people flooding the nearly 200 vendors, we were told instead that there wasn’t a clear way to tackle the crowds or the cheese. “I’d suggest heading to a corner and just working your way through,” he offered.
We started at the far right with Jasper Hill Farm. The Northeast Kingdom producer is renowned for its on-site “cellars,” a 22,000-square-foot underground facility devoted to cheese maturation, also known as affinage. Its selection of a dozen cheeses ranged from the spoonable Harbison, a runny substance swaddled in strips of the innermost layer of tree bark to the nutty Haley Bazen Blue, which I deemed one of the day’s frontrunners.
Despite the volunteer’s advice, the crowd was no more penetrable at the far end of the tent. Fifteen minutes in, we had already brushed against a few too many sweaty shoulders for our liking. The aisles were congested and the cheese patrons overly excited. It was the dairy equivalent of a mosh pit.
But I was undeterred. My lifelong love affair with cheese dates to my earliest months. My first two-word combination, in fact, was “more cheese,” and by age four, I was attacking tubs of cream cheese with a spoon. In middle school, while other kids were stuck on Swiss and American, I was consuming ripe slabs of sheep’s milk cheese from the Hudson Valley and stinky rounds of aged goat from southern France.
Despite my amorous relationship with cheese, I was out of my league here. This event was filled with professional cheese purveyors who had come from across the country to sample potential candidates for their shelves. As we ducked out of the tent in search of fresh air, we made our way into the Coach Barn, which had workshops and seminars led by experts in the field. Intrigued, I leaned through the doorway during “The Future of Cheese with Rory Stamp,” only to hear him discussing something along the lines of “prime time cheddaring.” Other seminars included “Cheese Science 101” and “What is a Cheesemonger?”
The festival went well beyond cheese and beer to encompass other forms of dairy. In the courtyard of the Coach Barn, Griffin and I stumbled upon a homemade butter demonstration. Gripping clear, round basins, children churned handles round and round, turning cream into butter. A woman behind the stand offered us sweet-peppercorn and chive butter created moments earlier.
Of course, if anything can reinvigorate two overwhelmed cheese tourists, it is soft butter and fresh air. We were finally ready to head back into the tent. This time, we had a clear goal of finding the makings for a picnic. We spotted Red Hen Baking’s stand, a bakery located just outside of Montpelier, and were instantly allured by the bread’s offbeat ingredients. The company adds polenta or potatoes to bolster flavor and texture.
Adjacent to Red Hen Baking’s stand, family-owned Parish Hill Creamery handed out cheese samples while explaining the unique source of its milk. Co-owners Rachel Schall and Peter Dixon use cream produced at the Putney School’s farm. In keeping with the school’s philosophy, students not only study agriculture but also handle chores on the farm, which include milking cows. That leaves them with a surplus of fresh milk. Parish Hill transforms this raw milk into memorable cheeses, with whimsical names like Humble, Reverie and West-West Blue.
After sampling a dozen more cheeses, we were feeling more than a little sated as the crowds began to thin. At this pause in the action, Griffin remembered to take another lactaid pill. Then we walked past the V.I.P. area where we spied a man, semi-comatose, sprawled on a lawn chair sleeping with his mouth wide open. Hoping to avoid the same fate, we walked toward the lake. As the buzz of cheesemongers faded into the background, the lake’s surface mirrored the gathering clouds above. Griffin waded in up to his knees and, without saying a word, dunked his head in the water.
(07/13/18 8:37pm)
Middlebury administrators have begun implementing a program to reevaluate faculty and staff positions across the institution — a process that, once completed at the end of the next academic year, could result in significant cuts to the college’s workforce.
The plan was announced to college employees in a series of emails late last month, beginning with a June 19 announcement from President Laurie L. Patton concerning “staffing and workforce planning.” In Patton’s message, she noted that the effort would eventually produce “an elective, incentive-based separation plan for staff as well as a set of elective, incentive-based retirement and separation plans for faculty.”
Involuntary layoffs remain a last resort under the plan, and will take place only if an insufficient number of employees accept buyouts and leave by the end of the 2018-2019 academic year. The cuts are part of the college’s ongoing effort to reduce its annual operating deficit, and administrators are hoping to shrink staff compensation costs by $8 million — about 10 percent of today’s level — once the process is complete.
Administrators haven’t yet specified how many of the college’s 1,100 staff positions would be affected, nor have they announced the benchmarks in faculty reductions that they are hoping to reach. The cuts will apply to faculty and staff at the college, and also at Middlebury’s Institute for International Studies in Monterey, California.
A June 27 email from David Provost, Middlebury’s executive vice president for finance and administration, and Karen Miller, the vice president for human resources, said that human resources would soon begin working with staff vice presidents across the institution to develop plans for each department. Those plans could result in redesigned departments and job responsibilities, and, eventually, a smaller overall workforce.
“We want to emphasize that workforce planning does not mean increasing the workload for fewer people,” Provost and Miller wrote. “It means prioritizing work and stopping less important work so that the workload is sustainable.”
Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing, told a reporter on Thursday that every department has already held internal meetings.
“Those are discussions to help people with questions they might have, to talk about how the workforce planning will take place in those departments,” he said. “There are also some Middlebury-wide discussions in workforce planning, so we’re really just in the early stages of this process.”
The first staff buyouts will be announced around October, but only for the small number of departments whose responsibilities are slated to be merged into the Green Mountain Higher Education Consortium — a cost-saving partnership founded in 2013 between Middlebury, Champlain College and Saint Michael’s College. Services that could be affected include payroll, accounts payable and benefits administration.
For the rest of Middlebury’s staff, buyouts are expected to be announced around April 2019 for the departments identified through the workforce planning process.
“We will contemplate an involuntary reduction in force only if we do not meet our goals,” read the email from Provost and Miller.
Buyouts for faculty, meanwhile, would necessarily be structured differently from those of staff, due to the existence of tenure. Provost and Miller said only that buyouts for faculty at the college, and in Monterey, would be announced “later this year.”
Nick Garber is one of the paper's managing editors.
A version of this article was originally published in the Addison Independent.
(05/09/18 11:35pm)
Over the past year, the legal use of marijuana has been attracting more and more attention in Vermont. Just last month, PhytoCare, a cannabis company from Waterbury, opened the state’s fifth licensed medical marijuana dispensary in Bennington.
The dispensary is capitalizing on the interest in cannabis as a treatment option for a variety of medical conditions. Owners of PhytoCare expected about 20 registered patients at opening day, but demand swelled, and 86 people had already registered, according to the VTDigger.
With more interest, laws governing the legal use of marijuana continue to evolve. But the changes have been accompanied by some confusion. What’s legal and what’s not? Where can you buy weed? Can’t you just smoke already?
It’s high time that The Campus bring together all the recent news and laws to give a snapshot of marijuana regulation, production and consumption in the state today.
(Almost) Legal
Signed into law in January, Bill H.511 is the most significant victory for the legalization movement so far, allowing recreational marijuana use for adults over the age of 21. It will go into effect on July 1, meaning that possession today is still illegal. And there will be limits.
Compared to the laws of other states that have legalized recreational use, Vermont’s is one of the strictest. The bill removes penalties for possessing up to one ounce of marijuana. But buying or selling in the state remains illegal. Instead, people can grow up to two mature and four immature plants at home.
There are also provisions in the bill that increase criminal penalties for those who sell to minors.
Medical Use Continues to Rise
Since 2004, when the first medical marijuana law passed the legislature, the number of patients has grown every year to reach around 5,000 today, according to data from the Vermont Marijuana Registry. Every patient is required to register with one of five licensed dispensaries, and is only permitted to purchase treatments from that facility. The highly regulated system leaves little room for loopholes often associated with medical use.
Because H.511 doesn’t allow for the establishment of a full-fledged recreational marketplace, these dispensaries maintain a monopoly over the commercial production and sale of marijuana in Vermont. That means if any changes happen, they are likely to be the first to profit, writes VPR.
The new dispensary in Bennington, for example, is now hoping to create a cultivation facility nearby. And if the plan goes forward, owning infrastructure that can grow plants on a large scale would position them well to take advantage of any opportunities that may soon come up in the recreational space.
Meanwhile, new state laws are continuing to facilitate medical marijuana. Last June, Act 65 went into effect, authorizing existing dispensaries to open one additional branch each, as well as to allow for a sixth license when the number of patients reaches 7,000. Due to this law, several dispensaries are looking at new locations, including Middlebury, in which to build additional branches.
The Push to Tax and Regulate
According to a 2015 report by Rand Corporation, people in Vermont collectively spend about $165 million every year on marijuana. For the state, the figure represents a significant potential source of tax revenue.
Supporters of legalization are itching to take the system to the next stage— implementing a full tax and regulate structure that states like Colorado have. In fact, two weeks ago, lawmakers in the Vermont House brought up a bill hoping to do exactly that. The bill faced fierce resistance from both Democrats and Republicans, which, with the legislative session ending in a few weeks, would leave little time to flesh out specific details. As a result, the house voted 106 to 28 against the plan.
Still, many lawmakers are hesitant to vote for full legalization. Governor Phil Scott has repeatedly said that he would only consider new bills when his marijuana advisory commission comes back with recommendations on addressing safety concerns.
In particular, police are concerned about the difficulty of issuing marijuana-related DUIs, since there are no breathalyzers for the drug. A proposal in the Vermont Senate Judiciary Committee would have authorized the use of roadside saliva testing, but that was also rejected last week. Without a clear threshold to determine influence, lawmakers felt that the test was unreasonable.
H.511 will remain the standard for the near future.
Still Prohibited at the College
Despite the shifts in the state, Middlebury’s policies have not changed. The general council sent a notice to the school community in response to Vermont’s legalization reiterating this message, highlighting federal law and student health as main concerns.
Because the drug is still prohibited on the federal level, any easing of Middlebury rules would jeopardize its access to federal funds. With more than $22 million of federal financial aid money at stake, it’s unlikely that the school will consider easing its guidelines.
(05/09/18 10:02pm)
President Laurie L. Patton announced changes this week within the senior leadership group, the 17-member advisory council. A nine-member cabinet will be formed out of that group to “improve the efficiency of decision making” in Old Chapel.
The new cabinet represents some of Patton’s closest advisors. It includes provost Jeff Cason, treasurer David Provost, spokesman Bill Burger, diversity officer Miguel Fernandez, advancement VP Colleen Fitzpatrick, human resources VP Karen Miller, general counsel Hannah Ross, dean of students Baishakhi Taylor, and chief of staff Dave Donahue.
The non-cabinet members of the senior leadership group include admissions dean Greg Buckles, academic officials Andi Lloyd and Tim Spears, philanthropic advisor Mike Schoenfeld, and representatives from the schools — Jeff Dayton-Johnson, Stephen Snyder and Carlos Velez.
With the announcement, Patton fulfilled a pledge to faculty to maintain the costs of SLG and to shrink its size. But the change to a smaller cabinet does not demonstrate an actual change in executive compensation. In an interview, spokesman Bill Burger said that compensation is not increased or decreased when a person is either designated or removed from a senior leadership position.
“Just because they are not sitting on the senior leadership group does not mean that you (do not) need that person in the job they have,” Burger said. “You could make a decision to not have the head of schools abroad and the language schools sit in the (senior leadership) group, it still does not mean you do not need the head of schools abroad and language schools,” he said.
Provost added, “Their pay is for their job, whether they are on one committee or another.”
When asked where the cost-saving measures would occur if compensation was not altered by shrinking the size of the SLG, Provost and Burger pointed to a more long-term strategy of either merging roles or organization restructuring after key individuals resign.
“When Katy Smith Abbott stepped down, (Patton) took two student life positions and made it one,” Provost said. “So that is one fewer SLG member. That demonstrates (Patton’s) commitment to that. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of that.”
Burger added, “You might have people leave over time and then you do not replace them — that is a possibility. Sometimes these (changes) are done through organizational changes.”
The announcement comes at a time of increased scrutiny for administrators, who faced criticism for the practice of “stay bonuses” involved in the 2015 presidential transition.
During Patton’s briefing at the faculty meeting, she cited that costs of the SLG were already $300,000 less than the previous year. In an interview with The Campus, Provost supported Patton’s claim by citing a lack of increases for executives in the previous year.
“Last year there was zero [net change] for anyone with a salary of $200,000 and above — no increases for senior leadership last year,” he said.
According to research done by faculty, executive bonuses and payouts were above market-competitive rates. In the context of the college’s financial crisis and increasing tuition fees, some argued that these policies were a gross mismanagement of college finances.
Treasurer David Provost has argued that stay bonus payouts appearing on the 990 tax form made executive pay look higher in some years, but that base compensation has consistently been in line with market rates.
The bonuses effectively encourage key officials to remain at Middlebury during presidential transitions, two administrators said, and that years that appear especially high in executive compensation are the result of stay bonuses and should not be viewed as the norm.
Two officials close to the president said that while she intended to reduce the number and size of stay bonuses, she would not commit to ending the practice altogether.
“I’m still interested in maintaining a very modest use of these bonuses because they are used in higher ed to prevent a kind of constant searching and turning over,” Patton said during a faculty meeting in February. “But as you saw from the data, my interest and commitment to them is very modest. They are one tool among many, and I am committed to moving to most of those other tools before we do that.”
During the same meeting, college treasurer David Provost revealed that beginning in 2009, 11 different retention bonuses were distributed among seven administrators. The compensation ranged from annual amounts of $50,000 to $100,000, with total payouts summing $150,000 to $250,000. His presentation also revealed that Middlebury’s total executive pay of $4.1 million was higher than the $3.6 million average of peer institutions.
Three administrators are have stay bonuses that are still being paid out: provost Jeff Cason, admissions dean Greg Buckles and finance VP Mike Thomas. Bonuses are only paid when the recipient stays at Middlebury for the agreed-upon number of years.
At the faculty meeting in February, Provost reported an additional bonus for President Liebowitz that had not yet been disclosed in form 990 filings. Because the college received an extension to the reporting deadline last November, the amount of this bonus will only be made public on May 15.
(05/03/18 1:12am)
BURLINGTON - This past month, South Burlington’s foremost music venue, Higher Ground, celebrated twenty years of successful operation. The establishment’s prosperity rests on a drive for constant improvement, and its transformative history and lasting impact on the community, including on Middlebury College, embodies this very ambition.
Higher Ground’s conception came out of frustration. One of the founders and a current co-owner, Alex Crothers, had just graduated from the University of Vermont and wanted to create a space for people of all ages to enjoy live music. The other venues in the area served the 21-and-up crowd almost exclusively. Inspired, Crothers enlisted the help of his friend from school, Rob Hintze, to further his vision.
The two began hunting for spaces, when their real estate agent introduced them to Kevin Statesir and his partner, Matt Sutte, both of whom were looking to start a similar project. Soon after, the four partners came together and bought what was once a Denny’s in Winooski, turning it into the first iteration of Higher Ground.
Through occasional performances by Phish, whose guitarist’s brother-in-law is Statesir, the venue gained traction. After six years, a growing base of patrons and a steady stream of national and local acts led to the establishment’s complete reinvention. Higher Ground moved to where it still stands today— in a former movie theater in South Burlington.
The facility boasts the Ballroom, which has a holding capacity of 750 people, and the Showcase Lounge, which has room for 300 others. Along with three bars, Higher Ground can host up to 3,000 people for its outdoors concerts in the warmer months. But the changes haven’t stopped there.
Hintze, Statesir and Sutte have all left Higher Ground amicably, leaving Crothers as Higher Ground’s only original partner still in control. About five years ago, Vermont entrepreneur Alan Newman began working alongside Crothers. To commemorate two decades of growth, Crothers and Newman oversaw the installation of a new sound system in the Ballroom and an updated sound system in the Showcase Lounge. Additionally, Crothers hopes to further expand the facility to accommodate more people; this dream is stalled indefinitely, however, due to logistical obstacles.
While the physical appearance of Higher Ground stays in flux, the venue continues to book recognizable names to attract crowds. Fleet Foxes, Sylvan Esso and Jason Mraz are scheduled to make appearances within the coming months. These industry giants are balanced out with local acts, such as Madaila and Steady Betty, who performed for Higher Ground’s twentieth anniversary.
Higher Ground’s impact on the community is widespread. Vermont native and current Middlebury College first-year, Galen von Wodtke, described his experiences at the venue. “You go there and see people a lot of people you know. And it’s a huge space, but it still feels really intimate. It just brings the community together in a way, and it offers a lot of diverse types of shows for a diverse crowd, which isn’t common in Vermont,” said von Wodtke.
Those new to Vermont, like first-year Rayn Bumstead, also feel Higher Ground’s influence. “Higher Ground gives you a unique experience. You see a show that would sell out a big arena otherwise, but you get to see it in a smaller setting and be a part of a crowd that seems to really enjoy the music,” said Bumstead. “Everyone there is just in it for the music.”
Though Higher Ground is located about forty-five minutes away from Middlebury, this doesn’t stop students from seeking out the venue - especially because of the all-ages policy. This gives students at Middlebury, and students everywhere in Vermont, the opportunity to attend quality shows at a good price regardless of whether they are of legal drinking age.
With two decades of community empowerment under its belt, Higher Ground continues to expand its reach. On May 3, Higher Ground’s new show with Vermont PBS, a local public-broadcasting station, is scheduled to air for the public. The first episode focuses on a performance by a local artist, Kat Wright, at Higher Ground. The show is entitled “Bardo: A Night in the Life” and features tapings of shows paired with conversations with Ryan Miller, another local resident and host of another show that once aired on the network, “Makin’ Friends with Ryan Miller.”
Higher Ground is a Vermont staple for both musicians and music-lovers. Statesir, who only just recently departed from Higher Ground, spoke to the Burlington Free Press about the current state of the venue.
“I’m just hoping to see it continue with the warmth and the community feeling we started out with,” Statesir said. “It’s time for me now, and I really feel the place is in good hands to carry on the tradition and legacy that is so important to me.”
With Crothers and Newman in charge and new developments on the horizon, Higher Ground rings in its twentieth anniversary with the same momentum it’s always had.
Happy birthday, Higher Ground!
(05/02/18 11:01pm)
CW: Domestic Abuse
Andrew Sebald:
I have one older half-sister, one younger sister, a mother and an abusive father. My mother is an alumna of Middlebury, which is what spurred my interest in Middlebury College.
When I was 14 years old, my mom and dad divorced. The separation was violent. My father had always shown abusive tendencies throughout my life, but his anger had intensified significantly the few months before. He started to physically abuse my mother and older sister, and verbally abused me when I even considered challenging his authoritarian control over my family. On the night before the separation, he called the cops on my mom. She had hidden his eleven guns somewhere in fear that he might transition from fists to bullets.
The police strongly encouraged my father to leave that night. For the sake of wanting to maintain our relationship, I tried my best throughout high school to make inroads with my father. All efforts were unsuccessful, but he still lingered in my family’s life. My mom has testified numerous times in court to prevent him from returning with his abuse and guns. He remains in our lives till this day, and I know he probably will be until my own death.
Middlebury Student Financial Services is complicit in that.
My background, although it may not seem to have much to do with my financial situation, provides necessary information for what later unfolded. By the time I applied for Middlebury my senior year of high school, I had not communicated with or seen my father for the better part of a year. I applied Early Decision 1 for Middlebury. My mom and I absolutely trusted that Student Financial Services (SFS) would grant us sufficient financial aid. There is a “need-blind policy,” after all. After I found out about my acceptance, my mother and I were ecstatic. We truly believed that we would qualify for the non-custodial waiver form for the College Scholarship Service (CSS) Profile.
A crucial part of the CSS Profile for any Middlebury student with divorced parents lies in the non-custodial waiver. When Middlebury SFS assesses the financial information for all students, they assess the income of both parents or guardians partly through the CSS Profile. If you have a non-custodial parent who is not in contact with you, getting them to fill out their part of the profile obviously becomes an issue. The non-custodial waiver’s purpose is to waive the non-custodial parent’s information from the CSS Profile, so that only the custodial parent’s financial information will be assessed. There are conditions, including: more than ten years have to have passed since the student has been in contact with their non-custodial parent. Since my father had abused my family in the last ten years, we didn’t qualify.
We filled out the waiver. We were devastated upon receiving a negative response. Student Financial Services contacted my mom and said that if my father didn’t fill out his part of the CSS Profile, I would not be eligible for financial aid, and therefore effectively enrollment at Middlebury for the 2015–2016 academic year. My mom desperately tried to explain to Student Financial Services that my father was not who he seemed to be. Providing court-ordered evidence, my mother informed SFS by email that “since [2012], my ex-husband has not been allowed to have further contact with the children. I do not know what other kind of documentation you need to consider me a single-parent.”
Student Financial Services ignored us. In an email dated Nov. 18, 2014, my mother offered to provide the 911 call record from when my father called the police on her, along with other reports made by therapists and a parent coordinator, to illustrate my father’s abusive nature. SFS never replied.
Instead, they asked to contact my father directly. My father stated he would “do his part” in paying the college for my tuition on the condition that I would meet with him to discuss my college plans with him. In an email dated Dec. 16, 2014, Student Financial Services instructed me to meet with my father and convince him to fill out his part of my CSS Profile. They apparently believed he had the best of intentions.
Due to binding Early Decision, I had no choice but to accept and meet with my father. We talked. The conversation was in public, so thankfully nothing happened. Still, he did not fill out the form until the day after he received news that I had seen a psychiatrist due to severe anxiety and depression arising from the uncertainty of whether or not I would be enrolled at Middlebury College.
Finally, we got our financial aid. My father had signed his name, so I could finally start at the school of my dreams. That was enough. After being forced to meet with him, attend follow-up counseling sessions, and tolerate anxiety-inducing waiting, my mom and I were glad that the process was done. But since we had not qualified for the non-custodial waiver, since I had been in contact with him during the “last ten years,” my mother would have to cover the family contribution burden for both her and my father’s incomes out of her one salary. She makes much less than my father.
My father, to this day, does not contribute a cent.
During the summer after freshman year, my mom informed me that I would have to take a semester off. Paying for the equivalent of two people had severely affected our financial situation. My mom and I called and emailed SFS. We urged them to revise our award substantially, so I could afford to continue attending Middlebury.
SFS wouldn’t budge. Even though my counselor, court-ordered family counselor, and our parent coordinator all showed evidence that my father was not fit to be a custodial parent, Student Financial Services simply said, “Unfortunately, we are not able to change our decision as your father’s information must be included in our decision for you” in an email dated July 6, 2016. They recommended I talk to my commons dean about taking a semester off.
In J-term 2017, we implored Student Financial Services again. My mom sent a letter to the dean of students at the time, Katy Smith Abbott, who was sympathetic to my situation. She met with me, and later contacted SFS’s Kim Downs-Burns to talk about my circumstances. I talked with Downs-Burns, and explained how significantly SFS making me go to meet my father had impacted both me and my family. I left the office feeling optimistic about the conversation. Maybe the situation would finally be resolved. But when I got our second financial aid revision back, we still were unable to afford the semester. The financial aid was not enough. To this day, I still don’t know why.
Thus, I was forced to take a “gap semester” from Middlebury in fall 2017.
In the end, none of our efforts made any difference. Repeated calls, emails and meetings, and yet we were back to square one. We had talked to the dean of students, a representative of the administration, and yet still ended with the same result of insufficient financial aid due to the refusal of SFS to consider my family’s special circumstance. The despair made me remember what a Student Financial Services employee had told us over the phone. I asked, “If my mom went to court with my father and proved that he was not paying child support, would financial services change my financial aid?”
The employee: “We don’t assess financial aid based on who’s paying for tuition, but the ability that both parents have to pay tuition.”
I would hear that same sentence countless times in the future.
Travis Wayne Sanderson:
The same sentence was said multiple times in Community Council, as well.
In early April 2017, Andrew approached me about his story. I urged him to present his case to Community Council (CC). The Council is the only real conversation body on campus that combines all constituencies — students, staff and faculty — and can summon staff members to report on their policies and activities in various departments on campus. We could get to the bottom of the issue. As Co-Chairs that semester, Katy Smith Abbott and I arranged times for both SFS and Andrew to speak to the Council.
On April 11, SFS’s Kim Downs-Burns and Michael McLaughlin were asked to come to Community Council to answer questions. They emphasized at three separate times that financial aid was assessed based on “ability to pay” and not “willingness to pay.” When asked why, the answer was always some variation of “it’s what our peer schools do.”
According to CC minutes, SFS said that each student’s financial aid case is looked at “individually,” each case taken into account as a “whole picture,” accounting for the “complexity in family situations accordingly.” Exceptions can be made, in theory, to stringent policies in the case of — for example — abusive parents. This was stated at 5:02 p.m. (just to be precise), April 11, and is on public record.
Their words are completely at odds with how they treated Andrew’s case.
On April 18, Andrew explained the above story to Community Council. On April 25, Maleka Stewart ’19 and Charles Rainey ’19 presented a recommendation on the matter of Student Financial Services and the non-custodial waiver. They recognized one of the main issues as the ten-year requirement, which Stewart described as “obscure and unattainable.”
SFS became defensive. On May 2, Katy Smith Abbott reported conversation she had had that week with Kim Downs-Burns to Community Council. According to that meeting’s minutes, Middlebury’s standards for financial aid consideration are mandated by its membership in the 568 Group consortium of “need-blind” institutions.
They reported that if willingness to pay is the rule, then anyone can take advantage of the system to get better financial aid. However, if SFS is indeed capable of accounting for the “complexity in family situations accordingly,” they can certainly distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims.
According to the minutes, SFS also informed Katy Smith Abbott that “[SFS’s] policies don’t need to be fixed.”
The 2016–2017 Community Council ended the year without passing the recommendation. We were prevented from action by a combination of time constraints and bylaws confusion. We officially asked the fall 2017 Community Council to review Middlebury’s financial aid policies, particularly the non-custodial waiver form, when the new semester began. Kyle Wright, the fall 2017 co-chair, agreed verbally to take up the case on May 8, 2017.
However, when fall came around, the council apparently had other priorities. According to CC minutes from Oct. 16, 2017, Co-Chair Wright only mentioned the issue in the context of reforming Community Council’s own bylaws. The non-custodial waiver problem itself was left unsolved, and SFS’s questionable policy and policy enforcement unpursued.
I prompted co-chair Baishakhi Taylor and co-chair Tina Brook ’18 to return to the case as co-chair Brook entered her position in J-Term 2018. Co-chair Taylor responded to me in an email dated Feb. 5, 2018, that she “understood Kim Downs-Burns addressed [the issue] when she came to CC last Spring and had a detailed conversation about it.” Co-chair Brook did not reply at all. It is quite possible that they had not read the minutes from spring 2017 that quite clearly illustrated the conversation remained unfinished.
In any case, Community Council also dropped the ball.
Andrew Sebald:
I felt manipulated and lied to by Middlebury’s Student Financial Services. As I stated before, both my mother and I did as much as we could to prove that my father was someone who was not interested in paying for my education, but for almost two years they seemed to brush our questions and qualms aside as if meaningless. Two years is an excruciating amount of time necessary in order to schedule and have a 30-minute appointment with the right person to tell them that the financial aid plan you have been given is thousands of dollars more than you can afford. Policy — which, as Travis noted, is questionably followed — was enough to force me to speak to my abusive father and continue to drain my family and my capacity to continue at Middlebury College.
This article is specifically a critique of the policies of Student Financial Services and how they are being enforced. It is also a critique of the actions of bodies complicit in the continued existence of this problem, like the 2017–2018 Community Council, which failed to take up the issue again until very recently. We hope that the Council follows through with the recommendation they are currently discussing, and returns to supporting students with non-custodial parents on financial aid more actively. The policy has a large impact on the lives of several students here on campus, and the problem cannot continue to remain unspoken within the sunken pockets of Middlebury College students and their parents.
We ask that Middlebury re-consider how it evaluates non-custodial waiver form requests. If “willingness to pay” is not an acceptable rubric, then we ask Student Financial Services to actually follow through on their policy to take the “whole picture” of a student’s complex family situation into account when approving non-custodial waiver forms. Since SFS already claims to do this, as they stated in Community Council, following through should not be an issue.
Secondly, we ask that Student Financial Services look into renegotiating the requirement that non-custodial parents and students not be in contact for ten years to qualify for the waiver. SFS — as well as the 568 Group generally — need to reform financial aid policies that have been put in place before to better suit the needs for students like me at their schools or they need to stop lying about successfully supporting a “need-blind” policy.
Finally, we ask Student Financial Services to reevaluate how they treat student financial aid cases. Instead of treating cases like mine as they do, they could make an active effort to maintain a good relationship with students with non-custodial parents on financial aid at Middlebury. The process is opaque, inaccessible, and decides like a divine force the entire college experience of many students on campus. I applied to this school thinking that our financial aid would be fair based on our circumstances. I applied to this school feeling that my mom would not have to take out loan after loan in order for me to attend here. Frankly, if I had known what was to come, I highly doubt I would have applied to Middlebury College.
