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(02/22/18 2:43am)
President Laurie L. Patton spoke for an hour with three Campus reporters last month in a wide-ranging interview which was by turns personal and philosophical.
Amelia Pollard ’20.5, Elizabeth Zhou ’18 and Ethan Brady ’18 interviewed Patton in her office on Jan. 31. Bill Burger, the college’s spokesman, was in the room for the duration of the interview.
The Campus agreed to provide Patton a summary of topics from which questions would be drawn, but not to give any questions in advance. The interview touched on Patton’s vision for the institution as well as topical issues, including free speech and the Me Too movement.
She said Middlebury is “committed to the First Amendment principles of free speech and by extension, academic freedom. That’s part of who we are as an American institution.”
“It is our responsibility to cultivate in our students active and critical inquiry which means exposing them to ideas that may be uncomfortable,” Patton said.
Patton called Charles Murray’s visit to campus last March “painful and difficult.”
“I have learned from and been forever changed by the degree to which people were hurt by the events that occurred — both on our campus and beyond,” Patton said.
Patton shared several personal anecdotes in the interview. She said she practices scholarship for an hour a day. She also shared some of her personal hobbies, including vipassana meditation and walking her dogs.
“Dogs keep you completely grounded. They don’t care about their image or reputation,” she said.
When asked who she turns to for advice, Patton spoke about a group of women presidents that she belongs to. The women “have started to hang out together, talk to each other, call each other when things are tense or when they need to talk through problems,” she said.
In response to a question about how she sees her role as president, Patton said she was committed to Middlebury’s values on a personal level.
“I wouldn’t have come to Middlebury if I didn’t believe as a person that this institution’s values were my own values,” she said.
Patton fielded several questions about financial aid, which she called “the number one priority for me for fundraising over the next ten years.” She said she favored “slowly” growing the number of students on financial aid “in a way that’s financially sustainable” and leaves a balanced budget.
But, Patton said, full-paying students are necessary for the school’s current financial model.
When asked about how the college will distinguish itself in higher education, Patton described Middlebury as an “elite liberal arts college with fantastic graduate programs.”
“I think there are days when we can’t decide whether we’re Amherst or Hampshire. We’re in between those two places,” she said.
Patton proposed ways for Middlebury to collaborate with other NESCAC schools beyond the athletic field. She cited Colby’s museum of art, which last week received a $100 million gift to establish an institute for American art.
“Wouldn’t it be interesting for them to collaborate with our museum, which is growing and changing and doing interesting things?” she said.
In the interview, Patton stressed her goal of balancing the institution’s budget. She said that Middlebury was meeting its budget goals and surpassing them slightly. Monterey surpassed its own goals “at a greater percentage than the college has,” she said, for which she was proud.
She defended how Monterey is valuable to Middlebury and to the world, citing the institute’s consistent citing in New York Times articles on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Patton also spoke about national and world issues. She called economic inequality “one of the major issues of our time,” and said that America is facing a “deeply difficult national moment.” She also cited Britain and Europe, where in the past several years populist movements have upended governments and institutions.
“Our challenge at Middlebury is that we need to embrace the difficulty of that moment and live through it.”
When asked about the nature of speech in the internet age, Patton said the instantaneous nature of communication “makes a huge difference to every minute of our days.” Students in 2018 exist “in a public sphere that nobody else has existed in, ever.”
It’s “very difficult to figure out at any given moment whether something is a public conversation or whether it’s a private conversation.” Because of that, she said, participation in the public sphere “takes more courage today.”
Patton often used terminology about travel to describe the school. “Middlebury now is not so much a noun, but a verb,” Patton said. “We are travelers.”
She mentioned travel across campuses — digital and physical. She cited interpreters for the United Nations who are affiliated with Monterey, professors who travel back and forth between Vermont and California, and video conferencing between Middlebury and Monterey, which occurred in the course on water Patton taught last spring.
Patton said she wanted to make sure “that instantaneous quality of life, as well as that hyper-connected quality of life, can be in service of liberal education.”
She said the college’s master plan, a campus planning document approved in 2008, should be connected to the school’s mission and vision. She used the temporary computer science building being built behind Johnson Memorial Building, in E lot, as an example of how her administration has adapted to changing times.
“This campus was not built for students from underrepresented backgrounds,” she said, but for “usually white” students in the 1800s going into “traditional male vocations.”
The spaces between buildings could be populated with works of public art, she said. She encouraged students to propose “pop-up contemplative spaces” on campus through the Fund for Innovation. She also praised a proposal by the Anderson Freeman Center to paint murals in buildings around campus.
Patton also answered questions about the Me Too movement and its impact on the college.
She said the movement “opened up all sorts of really important issues for everyone, around questions of sexual assault, around questions of reporting, and so forth.”
When asked how the college planned to address sexual assault in the wake of “The List,” Patton spoke about the Title IX office.
“If history is any indication, I expect and have confidence that the Title IX office will continue to respond to the needs of students,” she said.
She said the Title IX office needs to “continue to respond” to the campus’s changing needs while prioritizing “fairness for all students.” The college’s judicial system should be fair and open, she said, and the conversation about justice should be “always evolving.”
She spoke about three kinds of justice: one of equality, one of equity, and a moral justice, which deals with “righting historical wrongs.”
“All of those three ideas of justice should be at play in the mini-society that is Middlebury” — a society, she said, “of learners and teachers.”
Amelia Pollard and Elizabeth Zhou contributed reporting.
(02/22/18 2:34am)
College spokesman Bill Burger requested that the editors of this paper delay publication of an interview with President Laurie L. Patton, which The Campus had originally planned to publish in the Feb. 15 issue, after confusion and disagreement between Burger and Ethan Brady ’18, the paper’s editor in chief, regarding the nature of Burger and Patton’s role in reviewing and influencing the article’s content.
Burger’s request for the delay came twenty-four hours before that week’s issue was sent to print, and after the editors had planned to dedicate more than a page of the paper to the interview and a related news report. Brady agreed to postpone the interview and, as a result, The Campus published a blank page with the text, “This page was originally reserved for an interview,” printed in the center of page A3.
“Laurie and I would like you to hold the interview until the issue that closes next week,” Burger wrote in an email to Brady and Will DiGravio ’19, The Campus’ managing editor. “I have real concerns about ensuring the integrity of the various versions of the Q&A that we’ll need to review. My schedule tomorrow leaves almost no time for me to do this work.”
Brady and editors Amelia Pollard ’20.5 and Elizabeth Zhou ’18 interviewed Patton during winter term on Wednesday, Jan. 31. The editors planned to publish the interview in the first issue back from break, until Brady and DiGravio received the email from Burger quoted above.
The Campus finalizes print editions on Tuesday evenings, and the newspaper is distributed every Thursday morning. Brady and DiGravio received Burger’s email at 10:50 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 12, disrupting the paper’s plan to publish the interview that week. Brady agreed to delay the article’s publication in an email to Burger that night.
Brady and DiGravio first requested an interview with Patton in a Jan. 19 email. Patton replied on Jan. 23 with a directive to discuss terms of the interview with Burger.
“My guess is that we all would want the interview to be fair, accurate, and thoughtful in both tone and content,” Patton wrote. “In that spirit I’ll turn it over to Bill to discuss terms.”
That evening, Burger, Brady and DiGravio settled on a time to discuss the terms and timing of the interview. They settled on terms and scheduled the interview for Jan. 31 at 1:30 p.m.
At the end of the interview, Burger reiterated the previously agreed upon terms, and the reporters again agreed to them.
“Just to review our ground rules for this,” Burger said. “So you’ll transcribe this, I’m presuming, you’ll send it to us for a clarification, any clean up, if we need to expand on something, but not to fundamentally change the meaning of what was said.”
“Does that sound reasonable?” Patton asked.
Brady and Zhou responded in agreement.
On the Wednesday following the interview, Brady sent Patton an email with remaining questions that the editors had run out of time to ask, per an agreement made before and during the interview.
“We will send a transcript of the interview along in the next few days as discussed,” Brady added in the email with the additional questions.
On Feb. 5, Brady emailed Burger with the transcript of the interview. Burger replied on the same day that he expected the editors to compress the interview due to its length.
“No one wants to inflict an unedited 9,000 word transcript on the reader; its of almost no value,” Burger wrote.
Though Burger made some suggestions as to the type of editing Brady should do to the interview, he made no explicit request for an edited version of the transcript.
Brady received no further correspondence from Burger until Monday, Feb. 12., the first day of the spring term, when Burger inquired about obtaining an edited transcript of the interview. But Brady had sent the full, unedited transcript on Feb. 5, and had not finished editing the interview.
Burger expected Brady to send him the edited transcript of the interview that he would read before publication, and to allow him to approve each of Patton’s quotes to be included in the article.
“We will need to approve every quote — and of course the quotes in the piece will need to match the quotes in the abridged Q&A — and the full Q&A online,” Burger replied.
At 10:50 that evening, Burger emailed Brady and DiGravio and asked them to wait to publish the interview until the following week, citing “concerns about ensuring the integrity of the various versions of the Q&A that we’ll need to review.”
Brady agreed to delay publishing the articles. The next day, Burger emailed Brady, again asking for the edited Q&A and article.
“I hope you can get me the edited content (interview and written piece) by Sunday noon so I have time to look at it Sunday,” Burger wrote. “My Monday is pretty booked.”
On Feb. 14, Brady sent Burger an abridged transcript of the Q&A as requested, but did not attach the additional article. Brady said that he perceived Burger’s wish to approve the quotes included in the story as a violation of their original terms.
“The terms of the interview were that we would send you a transcript for clarifications/additions, not negotiate which quotes can or can’t be used in an article,” Brady wrote in the email.
Burger denied wanting to influence the quotes The Campus included in the article, and stressed his desire to instead protect their “integrity.”
“We have no interest in influencing which question/answers you want to touch upon in an article; our interest is in the integrity of the quotes themselves,” Burger said.
Patton sent a document with edits for clarification to The Campus on Monday, Feb. 20. Burger did not ask to approve quotes or view the articles prior to press time.
(02/16/18 11:33pm)
While the rest of campus enjoyed February break either in the sun or on the slopes, the men’s hockey team celebrated the competition in the rink. Middlebury earned a tie against both Conn. College on and Tufts, leaving the weekend before break with a 2–2 score against the Camels on Friday, Jan. 26, and a 1–1 count, Saturday, Jan. 27, against the Jumbos on Saturday. The men then fell to three conference teams over the next two weekends, losing to Wesleyan 3–1 on Friday, Feb. 2, Trinity 3–0 on Saturday, Feb. 3, and Williams twice by a score of 2–1 on Friday, Feb. 9 and Saturday, Feb. 10.
The Panthers kicked off the last weekend of January hosting the Camels in Kenyon Arena and looked to avenge a 5–0 loss earlier in the season.
Both teams’ defenses held tough throughout the first period, preventing either offense from gaining any advantage. It was not until five minutes into the second stanza when Conn. College’s Mason Evans capitalized off a power play. He slid a shot past the Panther goalie to lift his team ahead, a lead that would hold until the third period.
The hosts found the back of the Camel net just 56 seconds into the last period. Frank Cosolito ’20 worked his way past the Conn. College defense with ease, when he slapped the puck giving the Panthers their place on the board. The pressure was on both teams as they skated around Kenyon searching for an opportunity. The Camels were the first to respond five minutes later when Ryan Petti reacted quickly to his teammate’s rebounded attempt, and knocked a shot past Middlebury.
With time running out, the Panthers were anxious to equalize the competition. Although the Conn. College defense was impenetrable, Kamil Tkaczuk ’19 finished off Cosolito’s rejected effort with only a few minutes remaining, tying the game at two. Neither team scored in overtime, and the final score remained.
After their 5–0 loss earlier in the year, Middlebury tied Conn. College this time around, holding their own in Kenyon Arena.
“I think for us it comes down to being focused and playing our game for the whole 60 minutes,” said Danny Tighe ’20. “Earlier in the year we came out flat against them, whereas this time around we were ready to go from the start.”
On Saturday, Jan. 27, Middlebury faced Tufts for the second time this season, after beating the Jumbos 2–0 in December, and hoped to sweep the visitors. Their hopes were not realized as the Jumbos put up a tough fight, tying the Panthers 1–1.
Neither team was able to edge past one another in the first period. Stephen Klein ’18 played well all game, allowing only one of the 40 shots on goal past him.
“Klein has been playing great in net for us, but we just need to bury more of our own offensive chances,” said Tighe. “I think that starts with us placing heightened emphasis on executing when we work on scoring in practice.”
At the 9:31 minute mark in the second period, Tufts broke the tie. Ross Delabruere quickly jumped on a rebound, and Tufts led 1–0. But Middlebury had an answer for the visiting Bostonians less than eight minutes later, when Vincent Gisonti ’18 scored his third goal of the season on a power play opportunity. Brendan Dawson ’20’s shot was blocked, but Gisonti stayed with the play and hammered the rebound past the Jumbo goalie, tying the game at one. The score stay that way, as neither team could break through the rest of regulation or in overtime.
The Panthers traveled to Connecticut the following weekend to face Wesleyan on Friday, Feb. 2, looking at another opportunity to redeem themselves after dropping their last matchup 6–1.
Neither the Panthers nor their opponents scored in the first period for the third straight game, but Wesleyan snuck their way past Klein at 10:12 in the middle period on a powerplay. Four minutes later, the Cardinals doubled their lead when Matthew Zandi slapped the puck Klein
In the final stanza, Brett Dineen ’20 found the back of the net to put Middlebury on the board. The Panthers hope of knotting the score was quashed soon after when Jordan Jancze increased the Cardinal lead to two. Middlebury could not respond to that goal, and fell to Wesleyan 3–1.
On Saturday, Feb. 3, the men continued their journey in Connecticut when they faced Trinity. The men once again fell to the No. 5 Bantams by the same 3–0 score.
Following the same pattern, Middlebury defense proved impermeable in the first period but could not score either, entering the locker room knotted at zero still. It took the Bantams until the 17:34 mark in the second period to get by Middlebury. Michael Grande earned Trinity their first of three goals after a creating his own opportunity in a remarkable effort.
The Panthers refused to back down from this one-goal deficit. They continued to hold Trinity at bay, despite the Bantams offensive onslaught on Klein.
Trinity closed out the game in the final period. Ryan Pfeffer hammered in an easy shot six minutes into the stanza, giving the hosts a two-goal lead. Nicholas Polsinelli followed up Pfeffer, scoring on an empty net to give Trinity a 3–0 victory.
Heading into this past weekend, Friday and Saturday, Feb. 9 and 10, the Panthers had two good opportunities to topple a Williams team in the bottom half of the Nescac standings as well.
In the first contest on Friday at Williams, neither team scored in the first period. This continued Middlebury’s trend of strong defense, despite Williams significant advantage in shots. Finally, 10 minutes into the second period, Gisonti broke the silence. Off a Williams turnover, he broke past the Ephs to drive home his fourth goal of the season.
Gisonti’s goal fired up his teammates, as well as the Williams offense. So much so, that the Ephs has a response at the 17:40 mark in the same period. The hosts matched the visitor’s tally when C.J. Shugart got past Klein to make it anybody’s game once more.
Both teams grinded for the win in the final stanza but neither could break the tie in a highly contested third period, and the game entered overtime.
With no score in the first 4:30 of overtime, Middlebury pulled its goalie, needing a win to if they wanted to move out of last place and into the Nescac playoffs. But the move backfired when Williams’ Colby Cretella found the back of the empty net with ten seconds remaining to give Williams the 2–1 win.
Middlebury trailed Williams in shots on goal by 22 shots (43–21), as Klein turned in another impressive performance, stopping 41 shots.
On Saturday, Feb. 10, the two teams returned to the ice, this time in Kenyon Arena.
For the seventh game in a row, the Panthers held off their opponents in the first period. Although the Panthers did not score, they Trevor Turnbull ’20 and Kamil Tkaczuk ’19 had separate opportunities when they almost did beat the Williams netminder.
In the second period, C.J. Shugart again proved to be a danger to the hosts. Within the first minute, he took advantage of a power play and redirected a shot from his teammate to put his team in the lead. But, the junior from Toronto was not satisfied yet. With just a few moments remaining in the period, Shugart’s teammate found him after collecting a rebound, and whipped a shot past the Panthers.
Despite going down by two, the hosts were determined to find a way past Williams. The Panthers found some life in the eighth minute of the final stanza. Alex Heinritz ’21 slid in his second goal of the season on a power play to give bring his team within one and give it a fighting chance.
Middlebury found some opportunities in the final remaining minutes, but was unable to finish them off, losing its fourth straight game.
Middlebury will look for a way to end its losing streak when they play their last two games of the regular season this weekend. Mathematically eliminated from the Nescac playoffs, the Panther seniors will play their last two games in the blue and white on Friday, Feb. 17, when they host Hamilton, and Saturday, Feb. 18 when they welcome Amherst to Kenyon Arena.
(02/15/18 1:49am)
Tina Brook ’18 is the new face of the Community Council, serving as co-chair with Baishakahi Taylor, dean of students, for the remainder of the year. Brook, who ran a joint campaign with Kyle Wright ’18 last year, returned to campus this winter term from a semester at sea. She took the reins from Wright, who is studying abroad in Spain this spring.
Brook plans to pick up where Wright left off, prioritizing the three recommendations the Council has in the works. These include a proposal to review the residential life system, a proposal on supporting students and communities of color and an inclusive bathroom recommendation.
This academic year, the Community Council was tasked with kick-starting the process of reevaluating the residential life system.
“Residential life does not just mean dormitories, it also extends to libraries, it extends to the dining system,” Brook said, “So there will be an external review of that system and that will look at how we function as a whole community.”
In addition, the Council has been drafting a proposal on supporting students and communities of color in response to recent events at the college in the past year. The plan outlines seven points including hiring an anti-racist consultant and support for establishing a black studies major at Middlebury.
Though the Council has a developed draft, Brook also hopes to take into account of the voices of communities of color in moving forward with the proposal.
“We do not want to (take) over for communities of color on this campus so we are making sure that we are engaging with cultural organizations on this campus to ensure that they have a voice in this recommendation,” Brook said. “Although that may slow the process, that is definitely part of the process that we think is the most pertinent.”
Finally, Brook plans to finalize the inclusive bathroom recommendation pioneered by Wright. The recommendation drafts a timeline for the college to transition bathrooms in public spaces to all-gender and disability-accessible.
While Brook wishes to propel Wright and the Council’s previous work to the finish line, she also hopes to leave space for new recommendations in the second half of the year.
“I do not want to take away from the work that Kyle has done and so I hope to truly continue them, but also leave space to work on some recommendations of my own and to leave space for other Community Council members to bring up new recommendations,” Brook said.
Brook campaigned on a vision of encouraging inclusivity at Middlebury and plans on fulfilling that promise this term.
“I would like to support more recommendations to make sure that people from the athletics department to dance classes, from arts to sports to outdoors, all feel like they can have a vested interest without having to necessarily be a senator, or be on SGA or Community Council,” Brook said. “I think that there are always the same people speaking, which has not necessarily represented the entire student body, nor the full community’s interest.”
Community Council is a cross-sectional body comprised of students, faculty, staff and the administration which convenes weekly to seek multilateral solutions to community issues. The Council makes recommendations to specific offices or members of the administration and serves a consultative role to the President and the SLG. Weekly meetings are held on Mondays from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. in Axinn 104 and are open to the community.
(02/15/18 1:45am)
Transparency in the administration is an issue our board has raised numerous times over the past years, yet we still find ourselves writing the same editorial.
In the aftermath of recent discussions that have taken place in community forums and town halls, this issue has been raised again. The question we ask now is, How can administrators improve in order to make community discussions more valuable?
Many students feel that attending town halls and forums is not a worthwhile use of their time because they leave feeling more confused, angry and ill-informed than when they entered. Statistics, financial numbers and linear timelines often are skimmed over, ignored or diverted to examples of administrative successes.
There are significant opportunities for college administrators to exhibit greater transparency when discussing issues pertinent to student life and general operations of the college. Doing so would prompt a more fruitful discussion that leads to the “formation of community” that administrators have consistently called for.
We would like to acknowledge administrators who we feel could be emulated in providing students with transparent dialogue. College treasurer David Provost has provided a stellar example of administrative transparency that other administrators could aspire to when engaging in community discussions.
During a forum on Jan. 24, Provost thoroughly and transparently explained the reasons behind the September closing of college-owned restaurant 51 Main (now The Rough Cut). Instead of falsely painting 51 Main as a successful project, he told students candidly that the restaurant had been a financial disaster that had lost the college $250,000 per year.
Many feel that administrators often divert difficult or pressing questions about mistakes they have made to point out successes they have had. During the forum, Provost did the opposite when discussing issues like student diversity. He was engaging, funny and self-deprecating, answering student questions thoroughly and honestly.
Provost works with financial information that is often easier to disclose than the work of other offices such as judicial affairs, and we recognize that his candid style isn’t appropriate in every setting for community discussion. But aspects of Provost’s honest approach could still easily be translated to many other forums. If more forums are like last month’s, we gurantee more and more students will actually show up.
At the same time, this paper recognizes that complete and utter transparency is not always an attainable goal for every administrative position. The college may be legally obliged to maintain confidentiality when discussing certain topics, and is not always free to disclose details about sensitive issues that students might want to know during community discussions — for example, specific details of judicial cases, which are often bound by Title IX regulations.
The ability to disclose information in student forums depends upon the department of the given administrator engaging in discussion, the particular topic at hand, and a wealth of other factors. The Campus recognizes this fact.
Still, when these constraints around disclosure are present, administrators could provide students with thorough, transparent explanations of exactly why certain details aren’t available to the general public, as well as thorough background information that at least leaves students informed about the discussion they are engaging in.
This is another area in which Provost has excelled. During the Jan. 24 forum, he provided a wealth of background information that students found beneficial. Students who attended said they felt well informed about the topic they were discussing. Provost clearly and patiently provided background information concerning issues that gave the students the knowledge they needed to engage in a productive discussion.
This approach could be seen as a baseline for all administrators leading or engaging in challenging community discussions. When a sensitive question arises about a student engaged in a judicial process, for example, the administrator being questioned could provide as many facts as necessary and allowed. When they find themselves unable to disclose information, this point would ideally lead into an explanation of why certain information cannot be disclosed, rather than diverting the question to a discussion of administrative successes.
This open style of communication is also important because student dialogue and general gossip that circulates on campus has sometimes placed unfair blame upon administrators such as President Patton. More background and patient explanation during discussions would be a step towards remedying this.
Leaning into transparency are the first steps towards creating a community that is empathetic, supportive and committed to change. Time and time again, members of our administration have called for students to take on a role in “building community” and rebuilding a broken campus in which many of us feel isolated and alienated. It would be much easier for students to do this if they felt the respect granted through authentic, transparent conversation in student–administrator forums.
Without this transparency, students are left to draw their own conclusions, leading to false accusations and gossip. We hope this is the last editorial we have to write asking for transparency, and that we can work to fight for the future The Campus has sought to resist — one in which Middlebury dies in darkness.
(02/15/18 1:43am)
Middlebury’s Board of Trustees invests our billion-dollar endowment in a fashion that resembles a clandestine mission, code-named Operation Profit. We know little about where our money is invested, the global impact of these investments appears purposely obscured, and the college community of faculty, staff, and students has zero input on investment decisions. We only know that Middlebury’s endowment includes $60 million worth of stock in fossil fuel corporations due to years of campaigning for this basic information.
As a coordinating committee member of Divest Middlebury, I drove across the East coast to document the destruction of Operation Profit. I walked on blown-up mountains, visited impoverished communities living at the base of power-generating stations, and observed lakes blackened with coal slurry. As an Environmental Policy major, I was well aware of these acts of eco-genocide. However, witnessing the impact of Middlebury’s ownership of $60 million in fossil fuel investments and $750 thousand in coal assets specifically brought me to tear.
These investments hurt not only the places I visited, but contribute to injustices across the globe. Climate change, while produced primarily by wealthy nations, disproportionately harms those in the Global South, especially people of color, women, and those living in poverty. How could my beloved “carbon neutral” institution justify its ownership of any fossil fuel project? By defending these unjust investments, Middlebury has failed to listen to the 81% of students who believe environmental, social, and governance must be taken into account for our endowment, the 1000 students who have signed a divestment petition, or the more than 100 students who demanded divestment outside the Fall board meeting. Face to face with the repercussions of Middlebury’s decisions, I was ashamed to be associated not with the college community, but with those trustees who implement Operation Profit despite clear opposition.
Divest Middlebury’s sole demand since 2013 has been to “divest all endowment assets, both directly held and commingled, that include any of the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies.” Back in 2013, divestment would have made Middlebury a true environmental leader and sent a strong message to peer institutions. Instead, the trustees voted to remain owners of the fossil fuel industry, lending the college’s moral license and reputation for sustainability to corporations who profit off climate injustice.
When the trustees voted not to divest in 2013, they were able to hide behind a curtain of uncertainty. What would happen to our endowment returns? How would divestment work with our current money manager, Investure? These were legitimate questions at the time, but global institutions have repeatedly decided that divestment is not simply a moral imperative, but vital to their endowments’ financial security.
To date, 813 institutions with a combined divestment of $6.01 trillion agree that fossil fuel corporations will not reach current market evaluations without warming the Earth by 6 ̊C. As worsening extreme weather ravages the globe, low-lying areas face rising waters, tropical diseases continue to spread, and water supplies become increasingly stressed, governments will stop the burning of fossil fuels. The market for dirty energy will disappear, causing reserves currently valued at trillions of dollars to become worthless.
Peer institutions have acknowledged these stranded assets. Barnard College’s trustees unanimously committed to divest and have left Investure. The Rockefeller Foundation — the founders of ExxonMobil — divested and left Investure. Colby College became the first NESCAC school to divest. Even New York City and State decided to divest, causing billions to leave the industry and sending the endorsement of the world’s financial capital to the divestment movement. Every week, new Boards of Trustees determine that fossil fuel divestment is morally and fiducially responsible, it’s about time Middlebury does the same.
Divestment will eventually occur. But the question is, will it be too late? President Patton, Chair Parizeau, Mr. Provost, Mr. Truscott, and others, will you forgo your last chance to send a clear message that Middlebury demands a transition to a post-carbon economy? Will you forgo the opportunity to sell ownership in an industry whose current market evaluation is contingent upon the burning of all fossil fuel reserves and the irreversible alteration of Earth’s climate? It is too late for Middlebury to be a leader on divestment, but I hope that Middlebury’s noteworthy contributions to environmental stewardship will not be overshadowed by the moral outrage and fiduciary irresponsibility caused by your indefensible loyalty to Operation Profit.
Visit go/divest and join us Sunday 8 to 9 in Hillcrest 103 to get involved.
(02/03/18 7:32am)
This week marks the end of the Winter Term, during which we published two issues of The Campus. January is a time of transition for the paper, where we say goodbye to old editors who are heading abroad/graduating, welcome back editors from abroad, and invite new editors to join our board. This month we added seven new editors across four sections, and had other editors transfer over to different sections. We have a great team and are incredibly excited to return from February break and have a strong Spring semester. For now, here's our best work from January:
Disclaimer: It is my hope that our readership will use this monthly post to both rediscover old stories and find new ones they may have missed. Of course, most months I will probably leave out a piece that should have been included. It is important to note that I will be selecting stories more or less from memory, so I apologize in advance if I leave anyone out! I’m open to suggestions both before and after the post is published. Feel free to comment or email me at wdigravio@middlebury.edu. Also, there may be times when stories by me appear in this post. In those instances, I will have already reached out to another editor(s) to confirm that they belong. If you disagree, also feel free to email me or comment! Also, the selection of any piece does not constitute an endorsement.
News
Middlebury Dodge GOP Bill's Endowment Tax - By Bochu Ding
Panel Reopens Murray Debate with Legal Perspective - By Catherine Pollack
Residential Life Negotiations Reach SGA - By Elizabeth Sawyer
Student Who Posted 'The List' Faces Discipline - By Catherine Pollack & Elaine Velie
Local
Carol's Nears Closing - By Amelia Pollard
Vermont Sugarmakers Reflect on New Challenges - By Sadie Housberg
Vt. Lawmakers Legalize Recreational Marijuana Use - By Amelia Pollard and Andres Velazquez
Vt. Guard Proposes Waived College Tuition - By Kenshin Cho
Opinion
A New Presidential Tradition Is Needed - By The Editorial Board
Middlebury: Where White Supremacists, but not Survivors, are Worthy of Free Speech - By It Happens Here Past & Present
Grappling with 'The List' - By Members of the Distinguished Men of Color Board
The Law Should Not Restrict Speech - By Lukas Carvalho
Arts & Sciences
Five Hot Albums for a Cold Day - By Nate Obbard
Reel Critic: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - By Devin McGrath-Conwell
Esteemed Pianist Serenades College - By Bilal Khan
Features
Snow Removal Staff Tackles Winter Weather - By James Finn
'TIME' Editor Keynotes Women Leaders Summit - By Kayla Lichtman
Founder of Moscow Times Discusses Media in Russia - By Miguel Espinosa
Sports
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(01/25/18 12:48am)
After months of tense negotiations between residential life staff and college administrators, a bill calling for increased pay, training and support was introduced to the Student Government Association (SGA) on Sunday.
The bill, entitled “Student Residential Life Revitalization and Just Compensation Act,” proposed that residential life staff be compensated at the college’s Level B wage scale, or a minimum of $5,410 for their first year on the job. It requests that each commons administration add two live-in supervisory positions to their commons team to be filled by a recent graduate or senior, and that commons administration provide a first aid certification program for residential life staff.
The bill also states that if the college does not grant residential life staff Level B compensation for the 2018–2019 school year, the SGA would endorse a student residential life strike if one were to take place.
“There was some language in the bill that was a little disturbing too, which was the idea of this body supporting a strike of residential life staff,” said Doug Adams, director of residential life. “I hope that we’d look at this and say that’s not where our staff sits.”
Adams argued that the bill’s requests were more appropriate for discussion among the Residential Life committee, rather than through an SGA bill. However, when the bill’s sponsor, Feb senator Alec Fleischer ’20.5, was asked if he would rather take the conversation to the Residential Life committee or continue the discussion in the SGA meeting next week, he responded that he wanted it on the SGA agenda for next week.
Negotiations between residential life staff and administrators began in the fall, when student staff struggled to adapt to this year’s replacement of commons residential advisors (CRAs) with commons residence directors (CRDs), and felt they lacked sufficient training to deal with alcohol-related emergencies.
“Training as a consensus, ask anybody, bombed. Bombed so hard,” said Kyle Wright ’19.5, a Wonnacott community assistant (CA). “Doug Adams was on medical leave. FYCs and RAs were not trained how to handle the most common residential situations they encounter, which is instances of alcohol poisoning and drug misuse. Can you imagine the anxiety that creates for a 19-year-old running into someone who is passed out on the floor, who has a dropping pulse, covered in their own vomit and they have been told to just call Public Safety and do nothing?”
Wright expressed additional frustration that residential life staff believed that CRDs would function in a way similar to that of the former CRAs, only to find that the position functioned far differently in practice.
“Student residential life staff show up [in August 2017] having signed a contract, a legally binding document outlining their roles and responsibilities, understanding that CRDs will be one thing," Wright said. “Once the CRDs were hired, the job description changed rapidly. We come to find out that not only are [most] CRDs not living on campus, not only are they not recent graduates, but also that there was only going to be one on call for the entire campus.”
Wright said that last year, students could always turn to CRAs for in-dorm support, even when their CRA was not on call.
“There were five [CRAs] present 24 hours a day, six days a week in the dorms,” he said. “So you could go to your CRA even if the one on call was preoccupied. There was accessibility to [the CRA] position, there was direct supervisory support on the weekends. That support no longer exists.”
Residential life staff argue that this lack of support felt from the transition to CRDs has resulted in a large increase in responsibilities for First Year Counselors (FYCs), who now feel pressure to act as first responders and provide support and programming.
“It should be noted that that level of support from CRAs was largely unsustainable with their stress levels and obligations. However, now [the CRAs’] stress and responsibility has been laid on the FYCs,” Atwater community assistant Peter Dykeman-Bermingham ’18.5 said.
As a result of widespread feeling that FYCs have had to bear an increased burden with the transition to a system with CRDs, many staff members believe that a pay increase is now more necessary than ever. FYCs will make $2,400 this year, which breaks down to an hourly wage that is less than Vermont’s minimum of $10.50 if divided by the hours Wright says FYCs work per week. RAs currently make $1,800 per year, and CAs $2,ooo.
“Residential life has always been underpaid here,” Atwater FYC Samantha Pearl ’18 said. “A breakdown of the hourly pay in comparison to any other campus job is absurd. But the expectations have increased this year. We as student workers are now firstly and directly responsible for afterhours supervision during the week and on the weekends. It’s a different job, a bigger job, and many of us have multiple jobs on campus because of the poor pay.”
In October, residential life staff drafted a petition urging administrators to consider these challenges. As a result of the petition, administrators and students participated in conversations meant to address the complaints.
“A number of us launched into a dialogue in the fall where we got together with commons teams, administrators, other res life staff. We had a series of really big meetings where we said this is not ok, we feel unsafe, we feel as if the system is broken, and you need to address salary,” Wright explained.
After these initial larger meetings, a proposal with a draft of a new pay scale and job descriptions was sent to residential life staff sometime in late November. The draft proposed that FYCs, Resident Assistants (RAs) and CAs all be granted a rebate of $3,000 for 15 hours of work.
Pearl and other residential life staff emailed with feedback, criticizing this uniform pay for all positions in particular.
“I was initially insulted and found the idea of equal stipends trivializing to the FYC position. Doing so to me seemed to continue to devalue the tolls and responsibilities of the FYC position, particularly those aspects that can’t be calculated into weekly hours or a job description,” Pearl said.
Wright echoed Pearl’s sentiments, stressing his belief that commons administrators are out of touch with the realities of the responsibilities of staff.
“The deans and CRDs are so out of touch with the residential needs of this college that they actually thought that paying these positions the same thing, valuing them at the same level was even remotely appropriate, after six months of dialogue to the contrary,” he said.
On Jan. 8, Atwater Commons Dean Scott Barnicle sent out a finalized proposal. The final proposal sets RA and FYC pay equal at $3,150 and CA pay at $2,250. This proposal also included more similar job descriptions for RAs and FYCs.
“It is clear the new RA role and the FYC role are far more mirrored than they are currently. And so we felt strongly and I think appropriately, given the feedback we’d gotten, those roles should be paid more than the CA role,” Adams said.
Many residential life staff appreciated the proposal’s adjustments in accordance with their feedback, but believe they deserve to be paid Middlebury’s Level B compensation.
“I responded to an earlier proposal and some of my suggestions appeared in the final decision, though still shy of what I considered fair pay for the work,” Dykeman-Bermingham said. “This plan represents something like a $60K increase to wage spending and I understand the difficulty of so abruptly changing the res life accounting. However, this pay increase should be accompanied by a plan to annually increase the salary of student staff until they are paid a fair wage for the very stressful work they perform.”
“I am grateful for the pay increases, but also I agree with Kyle that we should be making minimum wage, especially now that there are expected hours listed,” Pearl said.
Fleischer stressed the reasonable nature of these requests, considering the skill required for the job.
“This is a skilled job. There is 2 weeks of training in the beginning of the year, plus its a competitive application process. At a minimum it should be a level B scale, that’s $10.82 a year for the first year. We’re asking to bring it in line with every other job at Middlebury,” Fleischer said.
After discussing the outstanding demands of residential life staff with Wright, Fleischer agreed to work with him to bring a bill outlining their requests to the SGA for deliberation and a vote.
In the SGA meeting, Doug Adams and Cook commons dean Ian Sutherland stressed the importance of awarding residential life staff a rebate, as they do currently, rather than a weekly paycheck based off of an hourly wage for a set number of hours a week, in part because the hours can vary significantly each week. Furthermore, Sutherland claimed that a weekly paycheck would actually result in lower net earnings because a substantial amount would be withheld by taxes.
“The actual money that a student would see in the academic year would be much reduced,” Sutherland said.
But a calculation from SmartAsset.com suggests otherwise. At a Level B hourly rate of $10.82, a student working 15 hours per week for 28 weeks plus 80 hours of training at the beginning of the semester would make $3,350 according to Vermont income tax rates for a single person paid weekly. This number is higher than the college’s proposed $3,150.
Wright stressed that Taylor and Adams participated extensively in conversations with students, and that if he had to pinpoint where communication fell through, it would be between CRDs, commons deans and their student staff.
“Baishakhi was very proactive, but because her job is to delegate the actual work, she delegated that work to commons deans and CRDs primarily,” he said. “To my knowledge, CRDs and deans solicited feedback over email, but did not go to many lengths to create space for their staff to provide focused, critical feedback.”
When asked whether he thought commons deans and CRDs had had sufficient communication with their student staff before drafting the proposals, Adams said yes.
“They reached out through their teams, through regular one-on-ones, to ask, ‘here’s what we’re doing, do you have any feedback?’” Adams said.
“In advertising for next year, email and posters can be inadequate, so we’ve done an information session so far, we’re planning another information session closer to the [housing application] deadline next week, saying we’d really like to answer any questions people have,” Adams said, referring to the housing information session held on Jan. 16. In later email correspondence, Adams clarified that this meeting was “targeted at new applicants for next year.”
In an email from the Undergraduate Housing office, the event was described as an opportunity to “ask questions related to the Fall Term Pre-Open Draw processes,” where questions could be answered relating to "Res Life Positions, Language & Special Interest Houses, Superblocks, Off Campus Housing, and Social Houses."
Current residential life staff were either unaware of the meeting or did not think it was an opportunity to ask questions about the ongoing negotiations. When asked if Pearl attended the housing information session on Jan. 16, she replied, “I don’t think so? I didn’t go and didn’t think it had anything to do with that.”
When asked if he had met with anyone in person about the proposal sent over winter break, about the second proposal, Dykeman-Bermingham said he had only sent an email with criticism against the equal pay for all positions.
“I am assuming that Kyle Wright had one-on-one meetings. I never met one-on-one with a dean or CRD either,” he said.
When Wright was asked whether he had had any one-on-one communication with a commons dean or CRD, he replied that he had no correspondence with either commons deans or CRDs throughout the process.
The Campus reached out to all of the commons deans and CRDs for comment. Some did not respond, while others replied that Doug Adams could answer all questions.
In response to calls for increased pay, Adams stressed the significance of the accomplishment of attaining a pay increase for the 2018–2019 school year.
“The college is going through a restructuring time where we are actually reducing budgets, but in this case we were able to negotiate going into next year an increase in the rebates that we’ll offer to student staff,” Adams said.
Adams also plans to continue to seek pay increases.
“The rebate should be larger. I’d love to see that. I think finding the balance is really important. I’m going to continue to advocate for a higher rate going forward,” he said.
In response to calls for an additional position to provide in-dorm support to residential life staff, Adams said it was a possibility, but that it will require continued conversation that would include communication with students.
“The SRA can potentially exist if it solves the problem. We’re going to continue to explore that with our student staff,” he said.
Adams has already begun efforts to provide increased first aid and alcohol training to students.
“I’ve already reached out to Jen Kazmierczak, she’s our environmental health and safety educator who helps coordinate first aid trainings about setting something up so that students and res life staff who are interested in getting CPR or first aid certified can take care of that. Alcohol training is through health and wellness, so Barbara McCall, the health and wellness educator has agreed to do that program, so she’s going to come in and do a program with them next week,” Adams said.
Editor’s note: Managing editor Will DiGravio, who is currently an FYC and participated in residential life negotiations, was not involved in the writing or editing of this report.
(01/25/18 12:38am)
In a college town like Middlebury, a local coffeehouse is a staple for study sessions, reunions, first dates and interviews. For the past 12 years, Carol’s Hungry Mind Café has served as a hub for students and professors alike to share ideas away from campus. Three weeks ago, though, owner John Melanson received an eviction notice after months of missing his rent payments.
Melanson said the recent downtown bridge construction has severely hurt the café’s sales and now, even though the building’s landlord has been patient and generous — a letting him pay, he said, “a thousand here and there” — he is left with no choice but to close.
After a few regular customers learned of Melanson’s decision, one of them, Doug Patterson, a local environmental consultant, started an online GoFundMe campaign to keep the café afloat. As of Jan. 23, the campaign had raised more than $2,800 from 46 donors toward the $20,000 goal. Still, Melanson said that while he was grateful for the GoFundMe effort, he doubts he can remain open much longer. (He declined to give a closing date.)
The business’s financial troubles began last summer when the downtown rail bridges closed on Main Street and along Merchants Row. The protracted construction has led to the loss of 14 parking spots near the coffee shop, as well as the obstruction of pedestrian walkways around the café, which is located at 24 Merchants Row.
“If I looked at my books from the year before last, it has cost about $30,000,” Melanson said. “The summers are a very important part. That’s when the tourists come, they sit, they spend 30 bucks and they go.”
Melanson started the café with the late Carol Ross in 2005. Melanson had been widowed a few years earlier, and in 2004 he met Ross through the online dating site Match.com. After meeting in person, Ross pitched the idea of starting a coffee house together. Just a few months later, the business plan was in place and the two opened Carol’s Hungry Mind. In June of that year, Ross was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and passed away soon after.
Although they met on an online dating site, Melanson and Ross were never romantically involved together. “That doesn’t mean that I didn’t love her. I did,” said Melanson. “I admired her, we shared much of the same musical and literary background.”
Today, Melanson is romantically involved with one of Carol’s closest friends. They started seeing each other after Carol passed away. “I am not only grateful to Carol for giving me the gift of the coffee house but also for introducing me to Karen and making my life whole again,” Melanson said.
Before opening the café, Ross worked at the Vermont Community Foundation and Melanson worked for a furniture design company. For Ross, opening a coffee shop was a longtime dream. She came into Melanson’s life, he said, at a point when he was lacking direction and purpose and so he was easily persuaded to give the café a try. “I did leave my work at Vt. Tubbs, the furniture factory, soon after deciding to start Carol’s,” he said. “It wasn’t a hard decision.”
“I had no idea I would love it so much,” Melanson said in an interview Sunday. “I was a very reclusive type of person. I wouldn’t go out and meet new people. And I knew I was going to be on stage at Carol’s. Now I love it. I go on vacation and I can’t wait to get back.”
Although the shuttering of Carol’s would be life-altering for Melanson, the Middlebury community — professors, students, and those not connected to the college — would also feel its sting. Just last summer, Middlebury Chocolates, another popular spot for meeting over café au lait or cocoa, closed when its owners converted the shop to a wholesale business and moved to Vergennes.
On a campus that can feel cut off from the town’s community, Carol’s provides students with a link to the outside world. Melanson sometimes furthered that connection by befriending students. “I was looking at the painting exhibition at Carol’s last February, and he started a conversation with me out of the blue about art and books,” said Daniel Cho ’19.5. “From then on, our relationship has grown to becoming actual friends who catch up regularly. He’s so eager to get to know students from Middlebury.”
Authors like Jay Parini, a professor of English and creative writing, have written entire books within the café’s confines. The café’s high ceilings, ocher walls and chalkboard menu seem to encourage linger over an espresso. “For many years I considered Carol’s my study,” Parini said. “I sat at a small table at the back and wrote poems and novels. I loved working there. It would be shame to see this café gone from Middlebury.”
Melanson insisted that the college was critical to the café’s success and, as a result, he has no plans to move the business elsewhere. “As I always say, without the college, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “I wouldn’t open up a place like this in Brandon, let’s say, because the college is essential to it and everything that surrounds the college—the students, the professors.”
Robert Cohen, a professor of English and American literatures, can often be found at Carol’s, planted at a table by the window. He lamented the café’s looming closure in an e-mail, penning an ode to the coffee house that also captured the solipsistic life of the academic. “It’s a good place to write or read or just stare into space, pretending I’m not eavesdropping on my colleagues’ conversations,” Cohen wrote. “Maybe for those of us who spend a lot of time in our own heads, the buzz of human discourse in the background serves as an important lifeline.”
As businesses come and go in Middlebury, the college has realized its own stake in a vibrant downtown, where restaurants and shops are a draw for prospective students. Employees of the college serve on committees and boards like those of the Better Middlebury Partnership (BMP), the Addison County Chamber of Commerce and the Addison County Economic Development Corporation (ACEDC).
Last year, the BMP and the ACEDC secured funding to help merchants whose businesses were disrupted by the construction. Although the grant has since expired, the organizations are now looking for more funding to assist businesses. “We have been an active partner in those conversations,” said David Donahue ’91, an assistant to college president and the college’s director of community relations. “Those organizations are also thinking about new and creative ways to bring energy, and customers, into the downtown.”
Still, some residents argue that local officials are not doing enough. In a recent column in the Addison Independent, Gregory Dennis expressed concern that the $52 million bridge project could have lasting consequences. “Without measures to protect existing businesses and fill empty storefronts,” he wrote, “in a worst-case scenario we could end up with fancy new bridges over trains running through Nowhere: a place that used to be called downtown Middlebury.”
Cohen, the English professor, also imagined the town without a meeting place like Carol’s. “Ideally the presence or absence of one little coffee shop wouldn’t be a world historic event,” he said. “But imagine this town without it. It’s hard to feel good about civic life without some civic spaces that draw people together.”
(01/25/18 12:19am)
MONTPELIER — State legislators are discussing a proposal that would provide free tuition to members of the Vermont National Guard. Supporters of the bill are hoping that the measure will increase enlistment and attract more working-age people to the state.
Vermont is one of few states in the country without full tuition benefits for their guard members. Currently, guard members can apply for interest-free loans and scholarships provided by the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC). About 2 percent of guard members take advantage of this program, tapping into state funds of about $250,000. But many say that the fund is not enough, and are concerned that the limited assistance is pushing recruits to enroll in the National Guard of neighboring states over that of Vermont.
“You’re willing to serve, you want to serve, but if you’re looking at New Hampshire or Massachusetts or any of the surrounding states, you’re like, ‘I can stay in Vermont and maybe get some money, or I can just drive an hour south and be fully covered,” explained VT’s education services officer, Capt. Brian Williams, in an interview with the Burlington Free Press.
With a declining population, Vermont is already experiencing recruitment difficulties in its National Guard. In a testimony to the Vermont House of Representatives, Maj. Gen. Steven Cray, adjutant general described the challenges.
“In the last year alone, the Vermont Army National Guard under recruited by 50 soldiers and the Air National Guard under recruited by 60 airmen leaving 350+ vacancies across the ranks of the Vermont National Guard,” Cray said in the statement. The solution, he said, was to provide education as an incentive, a strategy used successfully by all other states in New England.
The newly proposed bill is designed to expand the current system, adding $640,000 to the budget, for a total of $890,000 in state funding to VSAC. Based on historical data from other states, officials with the national guard estimate that about 195 to 235 members would utilize the tuition benefits. In order to reap the benefits of this bill, officers would need to be accepted into University of Vermont’s (UVM) State Agricultural College, or another Vermont State College, and commit to serving two years. If members opt for a private institution, they only receive a reimbursement equivalent to UVM’s tuition.
The bill is popular. In Vermont, a state with one of the lowest birth- rates and highest outbound migration rates, measures to attract and keep the working population are viewed as important investments. Republican Governor
Phil Scott underscored
the issue in his annual State of the State address. “These are the men and women who bravely serve our country and communities,” he said. “They have valuable skills that benefit our employers and economy. They can help us grow our workforce, and put kids back in our schools.”
Democratic legislators including Representative Helen Head of South Burlington, chair of the House Committee on General, Housing, and Military Affairs, have also advocated for its passage.
“Given the committee’s receptivity to it this year, I suspect an even stronger bill will get our support,” she told the Burlington Free Press. Independent US Sen. Bernie Sanders has also thrown his support behind the measure.
Nevertheless, the bill’s passage is far from certain. Despite the enthusiasm from both sides of the aisle last year, the proposed bill failed due in large part to a lack of clarity on where the money would come from. Vermont continues to experience a tight budget and with Governor Scott’s aversion to new taxes, raising revenue to fund this measure is difficult. Until the new budget is ratified in the coming weeks, the status of the bill will remain unresolved.
(01/24/18 11:35pm)
So many of the people of color (POC) that I’ve talked to on this campus are exhausted. When I first started to tell my white friends that I can’t wait to get off this campus, they responded “Really?” Yes, really. And I think most students of color feel the same. A short documentary called, “Abroad at Home: Accounts of the Invisible,” looks into the lives of students of color at Middlebury as they tackle whiteness at the College. It examines professors and non-POC students constantly mistaking students of color for other POCs, the microaggressions, and the general discomfort of being black or brown on this campus. The very essence of this institution, from the financial aid office, to public safety and judicial affairs beats down POC students.
Universities as a whole, are essential in reproducing and institutionalizing the dominant social paradigms that we see elsewhere in the country. This means that Middlebury College reproduces the same systemic white supremacy that we see in the form of police brutality, housing discrimination, predatory lending, the school-to-prison pipeline, and more every day aspects of our lives.
But in the past two decades, there has been a push to include students of color in universities. Diversity has been lauded as an institutional goal for universities around the country, seemingly as a response to cultural activism in the 1980s and 1990s pushing for universities to diversify the curriculums and student bodies. This push for “multiculturalism” was a message that resonated with wealthy donors, leading universities to admit more students of color (students of color are included because they are valuable to the university). The primary purpose of admitting higher numbers of students of color is to better the university. Educating POC students is just a side-effect of bringing them to campus.
Now, Middlebury College publishes statistics on how diverse the student body is, with numbers of students of color steadily increasing, to satisfy donors and publicists alike. And even though Middlebury’s Diversity and Inclusivity statement says, “We are deeply committed to creating a diverse, welcoming community with full and equal participation for all individuals and groups,” not everyone shares that labor equally.
The College has made some steps in the past few years. When I was a first-year, there was no Anderson Freeman Resource Center (AFC), any full-time qualified staff to support students of color and first generation students, and AAL (Asia-Africa-Latin America) was still a [orientalist/racist] distribution requirement (primarily based on the assumption that it doesn’t matter which black and brown people you study, because they’re all the same). These weren’t moments of heightened cultural and social awareness for Middlebury College. Students of color and their allies have been fighting for these improvements for years, and they won.
But it’s still obvious that this campus wasn’t made for students of color. There is still no Africana/African-American Studies major. The racial diversity of faculty remains low. Ironically, in its attempts at diversifying the College, it has never looked whiter.
In her book, “On Being Included,” Sara Ahmed discusses the plight of universities in trying to institutionalize diversity, without actually making any institutional changes, but instead leaves diversity work to what she calls “diversity workers.” That could mean people in the administration like a Chief Diversity Officer, the position itself only making it more obvious that diversity is not naturally occuring on any campus. But the more visible and numerous diversity workers on this campus are students of color who in addition to pursuing their degrees, have to perform anti-racism (the process of resisting systemic white supremacy) daily, whether it means educating non-POCs on the cultural implications of touching their hair or simply ignoring microaggressions.
The daily labor of students of color goes unnoticed and uncompensated. They, as diversity workers, engage everyday in what political theorist Michael Hardt calls “affective labor,” or labor rooted in the production and reproduction of emotional sentiment. Being a student means doing schoolwork, maybe having an on-campus job, networking for future jobs, and other daily-performed work. Being a student of color means all this labor plus educating white students, navigating being marked different from the status quo, and having to perform whiteness to gain access to resources, relationships, and opportunities.
While some students of color are able to lighten the load of this labor by floating around campus trying to remain unseen, others are thrust in the midst of the College’s diversifying.
Middlebury College is more concerned with diversifying the college’s image than tackling the institutional whiteness that permeates the walls of Old Chapel. It only takes a quick look at College media and resources to see how the College uses pictures of black and brown bodies as an advertising strategy. It coerces black and brown voices in debates about free speech and inclusion, making marginalized populations do extra diversity labor in presenting the POC view. The College uses black and brown lives to continue to accumulate capital in the $1billion endowment.
Meanwhile, inside Old Chapel, thirteen out of seventeen members (76%) of the Senior Leadership Group are white, and twenty-six of the thirty-three trustees (78%) (who are visiting this week by the way) are white. Cultural competency training for faculty is still only optional. The College values “free speech” more than the mental health of students of color on this campus, while simultaneously ignoring the suggestions and demands of students of color. And dare I say racial profiling still remains a poorly addressed issue.
Middlebury College should pay students of color. While students of color on this campus languish and struggle, the College undoubtedly profits. Its half-hearted attempts at institutionalizing diversity lack meaning, when students of color are constantly having their labor exploited.
As I said above, students of color and their allies have had major success on this campus. But until now spaces, like DMC, WOC, and PALANA house, and diversity initiatives have largely been made successful through their hard work. If the College isn’t interested or invested in institutionalizing antiracism, the College should take responsibility for paying students of color for their daily diversity labor, I am not kidding.
(01/17/18 11:20pm)
The Middlebury community came together early this week to celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. The events spanned three days. A Sunday talk was followed by a Monday breakfast, then by a mural painting project on Tuesday. The Alliance for an Inclusive Middlebury, the Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, the Center for Community Engagement (CCE), the Commons, and the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs organized the events.
The first event was a talk titled “Meditation vs. Detention: Empowering Youth with Mindfulness.” (See Page A4) Ali Smith, Atman Smith and Andy Gonzalez, founders of the Holistic Life Foundation, delivered the talk. Their nonprofit is a Baltimore-based organization which helps children develop through yoga, mindfulness and self-care.
The three founders explained that after attending college together, they moved to Baltimore, where they began teaching yoga to middle school students after school for free. The neighborhood they lived in at the time was one of the more violent in the city. As the program developed, the organization “started picking up less and less kids at detention,” said Gonzalez. They also noticed they were breaking up less fights. “We started changing dialogue in community,” Atman added.
Their program began attracting more participants, and even trained some to become yoga instructors themselves. The program initially served 150 students per week, but now serves over 10,000 students per week.
“[The Holistic Life Foundation] provided an alternative way of relating to these kids and it changed their behavior, which is just an incredible concept,” said associate chaplain Rabbi Danielle Stillman, who was one of the coordinators of the talk.
In reaction to the presentation, Mikayla Hyman ’20 said that “they had a lot of love, and that’s really what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was based on.” Using the founders of the Holistic Life Foundation as an example, Hyman added, “There’s so much people can do for social change but they don’t often think of themselves as instigators.”
Students, faculty and other members of the Middlebury community gathered in Atwater dining hall on Monday morning to discuss how to create what Dr. King called a “beloved community” here at Middlebury.
Will Nash, professor of American studies, explained that a “beloved community is grounded in the principles of nonviolence and the idea that power is not the most important thing.” Nash then prompted each table to discuss how Middlebury could work toward achieving such a community.
Many students and administrators discussed this question in light of the divisive events that have affected the campus during the past year. At one table, discussion centered around the idea that many micro-communities exist within the larger Middlebury community, making it difficult to feel connected as an entire school. Another table considered if “community is a given” and whether or not “inhabiting the same place makes us a community.”
Dean of spiritual and religious life Mark Orten said we must build a “beloved” community “as we might define it, by means that are present to us now.” He added, “The President’s support for initiatives like Restorative Practices and Mindfulness, as well as events facilitating dialogic processes around inclusivity and free speech, engaged in by many members of this community, are starting to form hopeful sinews.”
Middlebury College students and middle schoolers gathered at Middlebury Union Middle School on Tuesday to paint a community mural honoring Dr. King and the civil rights movement. Artist and visiting winter term professor Will Kasso guided the painting of the mural. Near the school entrance, Rosa Parks is now depicted sitting bravely in her bus seat, surrounded by words like “bold,” “dream” and “impact.”
“That one act of her not getting up made everybody stand up for themselves,” said Kasso. He went on to explain his belief that a community mural acts as an especially good medium for bringing people together and starting a dialogue. “Art should always remain fun,” said Kasso.
Many of the students at the mural painting were in of Kasso’s winter term class, Origins and Politics of Graffiti. Vishawn Greene ’21 added that the mural was a nice way to “cement [Park’s] legacy.” Alejandra Chavez ’19 spoke to its potential to “leave a little mark, as we all hope to do.”
(01/17/18 11:11pm)
I am aware of what most people imagine when they think of Ethiopia. Probably a scene of starving children, clinging to goats on the side of dirt tracks. While reasonably widespread, this image is not altogether accurate. Over the last few years, parts of Ethiopia have been transformed by an economic miracle. This year alone the Ethiopian economy is predicted to grow by 8.3 percent, which is around four times the global average and makes Ethiopia one of the fastest developing economies in the world. To some, this would seem like a blessing, but in fact, reading those numbers may leave a bitter taste in the mouths of the 91 million residents of the East African regional power.
In 2017, Freedom House gave Ethiopia a freedom rating of 6.5 out of 7, (with one being most open and seven being not free at all). They cited not only the brutal crackdown on protestors that had taken place earlier that year as well as restriction on the internet and mobile phones as reasons for Ethiopia’s low score. On top of this, a year earlier, the Ethiopian government jailed 24 Journalists because they were likely to “cause terrorism,” and in 2012 three journalists and two opposition leaders were arrested on similar grounds.
The Ethiopian example shows us that while the global North West debates the value of free speech, it is developing nations that need freedom of expression now more than ever if they are going to uphold their democratic human rights.
Free speech is crucial to Ethiopian democracy. Theoretically, Ethiopia has a 528-seat strong representative parliament that has to some degree been elected democratically. In reality, this has not prevented the ruling party from having absolute power over the Ethiopian state for the last 22 years. In that time the party has managed to pass the “Anti-Terrorism Proclamation of 2009”, whose rather broad definition of terrorism allowed the Ethiopian government to imprison or attempt to detain several journalists and opposition party leaders.
There is a reason that free expression was codified into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Theorists such as John Stuart Mill, Cass Sunstein and Timothy Garton Ash have all pointed out how crucial free speech is to allowing people to a fulfilled life. This may seem a little strange, but it all centers around the idea of self-fulfilment. If society is not able to express its thoughts freely, it will severely limit an individual’s ability to form their own opinions. This is because the sources that an individual can gain access to, in a restrictive place like Ethiopia, will be rather narrow. Thus, people may never be exposed to the vibrant debate that for Mill, is the only way to form a worldview. The next stage in self-fulfillment is the right to express your worldview. Again, for Mill and Garton Ash, it is the purpose of the marketplace of ideas to allow individuals to form and reform their worldview, and thus to mould and re-mould their opinions, and thus become more self-fulfilled.
The beauty of self-fulfillment is that it can be anything to anyone. It is the joy of trying to know what you do not know about yourself, to discover, to explore and to adventure. Middlebury College students will be excited to hear that this does not mean that you have to go outside, self-fulfilment spills from the pages of a life changing book in much the same way as it blows on a forest breeze. Self-fulfilment could even be described as the search for why you and I are here, the very purpose of existence. As such it is more than a crime to rob Ethiopians of this wonder, and make no mistake, that is what the combination of an unresponsive government and speech-restrictive laws are doing.
Many would hold this view to be nonsense, particularly in the context of Africa and Ethiopia. How is it that I, despite my Ethiopian heritage, can criticise a country that I have never lived in, or even seen for the last 7 years? For some this is the epitome of neo-colonialism. These people might further this point by noting that arguing for free speech and self-fulfillment, requires one to make a value claim; that freedom is more important than order. What if Ethiopians are happy with the current state of their free speech? What if they would rather have unity than freedom? What right do I have to claim that the western values of individualism are superlative to the concept of tribe, family and state?
I accept that there is an inherent value claim at the centre of my argument, but if I don’t have the right to make it, then what right does the Ethiopian government have to enforce its value claim, of unity, on the rest of Ethiopia?
Equally, if there was a such a clear-cut consensus on what Ethiopian norms are, why were they arresting people and putting down large, widely spread protests in the first place?
The point is that cultures changes. Not ideally, not instantly, but incrementally. Episodes like the Arab spring and Glasnost have shown how this process is natural and to some extent, inevitable.
Therefore, using culture as a defence for the harms of ruling party current speech-restrictive policies is like placing a castle on quicksand, structurally unsound and likely to collapse rather violently in the future.
Ethiopia needs free speech, or more specifically the Ethiopian people need free speech, if they are going to have any sort of control over their destiny.
(01/17/18 10:19pm)
The opportunity to ski and snowboard factors into the college decision for a good number of Middlebury students. With convenient shuttles to the Snow Bowl offered almost hourly and Sugarbush Mountain less than an hour away, opportunities to get on the snow are everywhere. The mountains are a place of escape for many, a destination that makes cutting class entirely excusable when it snows enough during J-term. But whether they ski at Mad River Glen or board down Mead Chapel Hill, the majority of campus probably approaches snow sports somewhat differently than members of the Division I Middlebury Alpine and Nordic ski teams.
Given the studied precision with which Panther downhill skiers attack the slopes, you can be sure that they take careful note of mountain conditions when they plan their runs. “Every day, every run is different from the last,” says Devon Cardamone ’18. Unlike track — another timed sport — “every course is different on any given day, and it’s not a sport where you have a ‘best time’ or a personal best.” As a general rule, fresh powder is enough to make the casual skier’s mouth water; the term “casual skier,” however, hardly applies to a DI athlete who loves nothing more than to get down the slope as fast as possible. With that in mind, could you really blame Cardamone for preferring his hills “steep and icy”?
Sure, many of us can get down the mountain just fine — but it probably looks much different than how Caroline Bartlett ’19 (also captain of the skiers’ IM hockey team, ironically named “Snowboard Club”) does it. Last year she took home three Carnival wins (all in Giant Slalom), five top-five finishes, an NCAA qualifying bid, and second-team All-East honors for the Alpine team. Jackie Atkins ’20 was the other Panther Alpine NCAA qualifier, posting a very strong season in her rookie year: she placed in the top-15 seven different times.
But those two aren’t the only ones on the Middlebury team with postseason races in their sights. Vermont native Lexi Calcagni ’19 is looking to build on a solid season after posting a couple of top-10 finishes, including an eighth place performance in giant slalom at the 2017 Middlebury Carnival. Fellow Vermonter Katie Utter ’20 will also challenge for a Carnival spot after posting six top-20 finishes in her first year. As a whole, the women’s Alpine team finished with third-place finishes in the final three carnivals of the 2017 season and 14th overall at NCAAs.
On the men’s side, Riley Plant ’18 and Cardamone will lead the way. Despite his warm-weather roots (average January temperature in his hometown of Auburn, CA: 46 degrees Fahrenheit), Plant has seven top-10 finishes over the course of his three-year career. Cardamone, a Coloradan, earned a second-place result in the Giant Slalom at the Vermont Carnival in addition to placing 12th twice over the course of the season. Veteran Angie Duke ’19 figures to challenge for a carnival spot after placing 10th and 12th in a pair of races last year.
Team chemistry could be the key to improving on these results. This year’s team “is the most cohesive unit I have seen since I’ve been here,” says Plant. “Our young skiers are huge sources of energy and enthusiasm, and our upperclassmen have done a tremendous job in fostering a balanced team dynamic,” says Plant.
The Panthers aim to build on those team dynamics with a work ethic that will play a large role in their 2018 success. The Alpine team spent an increased amount of time in the weight room this offseason, alternating between dumbbells, barbells, and balancing on Bosu balls. While the gym isn’t wholly necessary for the average skier, “it’s really important to develop explosive power, quickness, and endurance in order to take advantage of training opportunities and to prevent injuries,” according to Bartlett. But obviously, getting on the snow is just as important: to that end, the recent cold “provided some amazing early season conditions,” she said.
This “on-snow training” began in earnest over Thanksgiving Break. While many of us were gorging ourselves on turkey and pie (the present author being no exception), the team had traveled out west to Loveland, Colorado and was getting their first runs in.
Downhill skier Jack Schibli ’18 gave us an inside look into the rigorous training regimen required of a Division I athlete. It all starts with planning spring academic schedules, he said; in order to maximize training time on the mountain, the team chooses classes that start 11:15 a.m. at the earliest. While many of us are still sleeping, the Alpine team hits the dining hall when it opens at 7 a.m. before leaving for the Snow Bowl at 7:15. After around six to eight runs, they return to campus at 11 a.m.
After classes end, the team retires to the locker room to meticulously prepare their skis for the next day of training. “This includes sharpening the edges, waxing the base, letting the wax sit for at least 30 minutes and then scraping and brushing it out. Usually while we wait for the wax to cool, we’ll do a light workout… That whole process usually takes us into dinner around 6pm,” said Schibli. Next is homework (that’s right, even Division 1 athletes grind in the library) and some much-needed rest before starting it all again the next day.
It is perhaps due to this grueling daily schedule that Plant has seen “vast improvement from our rising upperclassmen. Our first-years have [also] shown great speed in training every day.
All in all, the team looks well-poised to contend with the best, especially in giant slalom.”
On the men’s Nordic side, experience will not be lacking. Just like the women’s Alpine team, Nordic placed third in the final three carnivals of the 2017 season. Massachusetts native Lewis Nottonson ’19 was the lone Panther to earn an NCAA Championship bid after placing sixth in the 20K Freestyle at Middlebury, topping his previous-best 11th place finish earlier in the year (10K Freestyle at St. Lawrence).
Coming extremely close to 2017 NCAA bids were New Yorker Adam Luban ’18 and Sam Wood ’19 from Maine. Both Luban and Wood’s season-best finishes were ninth in the 10K Classic (the former did it at Dartmouth while the latter was at the Vermont Carnival). Veteran Evan Weinman looks to finish his career strong after crossing the finish line in the top-ten five times in various events over the course of 2017.
Rounding out the men’s roster are Jacob Volz ’18, Gabe Mahoney ’20, Max Polito ’20, and a pair of rookies — Calvin Bates ’21 and Peter Wolter ’21 — looking to make a name for themselves.
For the women, success will be tied to their senior leadership. Cate Brams ’18 and Katie Feldman ’18 begin the 2018 season with NCAA aspirations after closing out the majority of their 2017 races as the top two Middlebury competitors. Last season, Brams achieved a fifth-place finish in the Freestyle Sprint at the Vermont Carnival and wound up sixth in the 5K Classic at the EISA Championships; Feldman’s top individual finish was 15th in the 10K Classic at the University of Vermont.
The rest of the squad is very young, with no juniors on the roster. Four sophomores will battle for Carnival spots (Alex Cobb ’20, Sophia Hodges ’20, Annika Landis ’20, and Orli Schwartz ’20) along with a couple of first years (Avery Ellis ’21 and Alexandra Lawson ’21).
Like the Alpine team, the Nordic squad believes their team chemistry will be crucial to 2018’s success. This year’s team is “more cohesive than we’ve been in the past,” said Feldman. “I’ve been really impressed by our first years and sophomores. They’ve done a great job stepping up in both training and racing, and I’m excited to see what they can do in the rest of the season.”
While the beginning of a season always brings promising new hope, this will be the last year of collegiate competition for eight members of the Panther ski teams. Like anyone who has devoted such a massive amount of time and effort to their passion, many of these seniors couldn’t help but evince some sadness as they looked forward to the end of their seasons. However, the moment also provided them an opportunity to reflect on how best to take advantage of their remaining months as a Middlebury student-athlete.
For Plant, that process involves taking the time to truly bond with the team. “Heading into my last season, I’m really looking to have as much fun as possible,” he said. “The results tend to be better when I focus on the things that remain consistently positive, and my teammates are particularly important for that,” he says. Most importantly, Plant plans to leave nothing on the table: “I also hope to take some chances and really ski aggressively while I still have the opportunity to do so.”
With one last season comes one last Winter Carnival, perhaps the defining moment of the ski season for students and athletes alike. Held at the Snow Bowl and the Rikert Nordic Center, Middlebury’s lone home event falls on February 23rd and 24th; numerous students attend each year, creating a one-of-a-kind home advantage.
Like the rest of his team, Cardamone loves this particular weekend. “It’s awesome racing at winter carnival just because there’s so much support from the rest of the school. There aren’t many college ski races where you can actually hear people cheering for you while you ski by… the students are having [so much fun] and it adds to the energy on race day.”
Asked to sum up the team’s aspirations for the season, Plant might have put it best: “Go big or go home, ya know?”
(01/17/18 10:02pm)
The men’s squash team will enter this weekend with an opportunity to beat teams more highly ranked in the College Squash Association poll. A win over either No. 15 Franklin & Marshall or No. 16 Cornell would go a long way to helping the Panthers stay in the running for a top 16 ranking to qualify them for the second division at the national championships and a chance to compete for the Hoehn Cup.
In their last match before winter break, the Panthers hosted No. 10 Dartmouth at the squash center. Already a tall task for the Panthers, they were without Jacob Ellen ’20, who missed the match with a leg injury. Despite the setback to Ellen and the eventual 9–0 defeat at the hands of the Big Green, there were many positive takeaways for the Panthers.
The most notable performance of the match was that of Will Cembalest ’20. Cembalest showed excellent skill, raw talent and a willingness to take risks throughout his first-year season last year. In the Dartmouth match, Cembalest was tasked with facing Dartmouth’s No. 1, Alvin Huemann, a senior who finished 12th in the top bracket at last year’s individual championships. For reference, Cembalest finished 67th at last year’s individual championships. For those of you doing the math at home, that is a difference of 55 spots. But you would never have known that by watching Cembalest put Huemann on the ropes in December.
“Dartmouth has a very strong men’s program,” Cembalest said. “I knew how good the No. 1 [Huemann] would be, so it was little pressure going into the match.”
Cembalest lost in straight sets, but that is misleading. He probably should have won the first two sets as he held an 8–6 lead and set point opportunities in both of them. Regardless of the outcome, Cembalest went shot-for-shot with Huemann, mixing in a couple of slick backhands, changes of pace and shots to keep Dartmouth’s No. 1 on his heels.
“I knew the kid was tall and physically strong,” Cembalest explained, “so my game plan was to be very patient and try to volley as much as possible. Making as few mistakes as I could and keeping the ball in play would get me the most success.”
While the loss to Dartmouth was not the way the Panthers hoped to leave things for the break, they showed signs of progress, especially among the slew of sophomores on the top half of the ladder. However, when the Panthers returned to action on Saturday, Jan. 6, they lost 6–3 at the hands of No. 21 Williams on the road.
Last season, the Panthers split their two matches with Williams, both of which were 5–4 nail biters. However, they were without Ellen in the match they lost.
This time around, the Panthers dropped the match 6–3, although they had the services of Ellen at full strength. Cembalest continued his roll with a straight-set victory, all by a score of 11–7, against the Ephs’ No. 1 Will Means. Ellen, in his return, fell in the second slot to John Fitzgerald who Ellen had split his pair of matchups with last year.
Part of the challenge in the Williams match was a hamstring injury to Nick Bermingham ’20. Without Bermingham to occupy the fourth slot, everyone from there on down had to play a spot up.
This proved to be no problem for the Panthers’ pair of first-years in the middle of the ladder, Wiatt Hinton ’21 and John Epley ’21. Hinton won a hard-fought, down-to-the-wire victory in the No. 5 match. In doing so, he managed to overcome a 13–11 setback in the first set and a 2–1 set deficit by taking a marathon fourth set 13–11 and an 11–5 victory in the rubber match. Epley won his matchup in the sixth spot in straight sets. He won the first two of those 11–5 and 11–4 before having to outlast the Williams No. 6, David Pincus, 12–10 in the final game.
Further down the ladder the Panthers had a harder time adjusting. Williams took all matches in the No. 7 through No. 9 slots, although Sam Giddens ’18 and team captain Ryan Swope ’18 managed to take a game off of their opponents at the bottom of the ladder.
After the setback against Williams, the Panthers had four days to recuperate before they hosted No. 24 Amherst a week before yesterday, Jan. 10, at the squash courts for a matinée. In a match the Panthers needed to win to keep their goal of cracking the top 16 in play, they rose to the occasion, easily dispatching the Mammoths 9–0. The top two-thirds of the ladder played exceptionally well for the Panthers as they made it through the match without dropping a set.
With the win over Amherst in hand, the Panthers began their yearly Maine round-tripper with their most important match of the year to date against Bates in Lewiston.
Bermingham was again not in the lineup, but the Panthers managed to win 5–4. Ellen and Jack Kagan ’20 headlined the Panthers’ efforts with wins in the second and third slots, each doing so in four sets. In the top slot, Cembalest lost in four sets, but did so in close fashion.
Cembalest dominated the first set with an 11–2 victory. After falling 11–7 and 11–6 in closely contested sets, he almost slipped by Yousry in the fourth set before dropping it 13–11.
“My match against Bates was a good experience for me,” said Cembalest. “[Yousry] came out slow in the first game and I was ready on the first point. This boosted my confidence, but possibly too far that I was a little bit thrown off by how he turned it around in the second game. He was a very talented player with a large crowd at his home courts, so it was difficult to outperform him on that day. I am happy with my performance.”
With Ellen limited by injuries and with Cembalest playing excellent squash, for the moment Cembalest has claimed the No. 1 slot on the ladder.
“I have been working extra hard this season on court and have put a lot of time into my mental game,” said Cembalest. “I put in numerous hours at the end of the summer working on fitness and my movement on the court. It feels awesome to see the results from my pre-season work.”
Following the Bates win, the Panthers travelled the next day to Waterville to play No. 23 Colby at the Mules’ Dunaway Squash Center, where they won easily 7–2. Kagan and Pearson continued playing well even though they were slotted up due to Cembalest’s tweak of an ankle in the Bates match the day before. Kagan continued to prove he is capable of winning in the No. 2 position as he played his opponent to scores of 11–5 and 6–11 before he finished off Colby’s No. 2 with a pair of 11–6 scores. Kagan is now 2–1 in the second slot on the season and 3–1 in the third slot.
“I’ve been really excited about and impressed with the top four this season,” Kagan said of the slew of sophomores at the top half of the ladder. “We don’t typically have a top group that we can count on to always put up points; we often rely on the middle or our depth to beat teams.”
This year has proven different and the most promising aspect is that the top performers are sophomores.
“I have to feel confident about our top four,” said Kagan. “It takes pressure off of the bottom guys while giving the top guys a big confidence boost.”
All of this has not come without hard work, though.
“I would have to attribute this to work everyone did in the summer and the fall,” Kagan said. “We’re all just better players than we were a year ago, simply put. We really have been able to match up with most of our opponents this year from the top to the bottom and that’s a good thing to see looking forward.”
Pearson and Hinton also kept the Panthers rolling against Colby, as Pearson won in the third slot in a set sequence of 11–9, 11–4, 7–11 and 11–7. Hinton split his first two sets against the Colby No. 4 before taking the third set 11–5 and holding on for a 13–11 victory in a marathon fourth set. After defeating his Bowdoin opponent, Hinton now has a five match winning streak, leading Kagan, Ellen, Swope and Will Kurth ’18 each by one match for the longest current winning streak by a Panther.
After defeating Colby, the Panthers got back on the bus and travelled approximately 50 miles south to Brunswick where they took on Bowdoin at the Polar Bears’ Lubin Squash Center to wrap up the Maine trip.
Still without the previously red-hot Cembalest, the Panthers nonetheless won easily against Bowdoin, 7–2. Ellen was dominant in the top position, allowing only four points in the first set and then only two each in the second and third sets. Kagan once again won in the second position, also in straight sets. The match of the match was probably Thomas Wolpow ’20’s.
In the No. 6 spot, Wolpow found himself down out of the gate when he dropped the first set 11–7. He nearly evened the match in the second set, but the Polar Bears’ No. 6, Uday Khanna, edged him out 13–11. Wolpow battled back even though he could have shut it down in the third set. In another nail-biter, he flipped the script in the third set and won 13–11, which shifted the momentum firmly to his side. After winning the fourth set 11–7, Wolpow gutted out a victory in the deciding fifth set 11–9.
With the annual Maine trip behind them, the Panthers now head into a weekend that can help their chances of qualifying for the top 16. By winning at least one of their two matchups with F&M and Cornell, they will be firmly in the conversation to qualify to compete for the Hoehn Cup.
“Success in this weekend’s matches,” Kagan said, “is [us] winning one or two of those. We beat Bates who is ahead of us, but lost to Williams who is behind us. There’s some teams in our range who we don’t play in the regular season, so to reach our goal of top 16 in the country, beating No. 15 [F&M] or No. 16 [Cornell] would be a huge help to our case. We lost a tight 5–4 match to F&M last year and we’re out to flip that one this year for sure, having them at home this time. We see these two matches as 100 percent winnable.”
Added Cembalest: “I am really looking forward to Cornell and Franklin and Marshall next weekend where I will be playing more top-ranked players. I’m looking to bring the heat on my home courts.”
You can catch both the men’s and women’s squads in action this coming weekend at the squash courts. They take on F&M on Saturday at 11 a.m. and Cornell on Sunday at noon.
(12/07/17 11:34pm)
In our last editorial for this fall semester, we think it is important to further compound our finals stress by considering some of the dangerous repercussions of the Republican tax plan, a bill passed by the House and Senate that is expected to soon become law.
The plan, touted by many Republican lawmakers as intended to benefit the working and middle classes, will in fact target some of the most vulnerable populations. According to analysis by PBS, the changes include tax hikes for those earning less than $30,000 per year, having disastrous implications for lower income families in particular.
Although the pernicious effects of this legislation are broad, affecting the tax deductibility of school supplies and student loan payments, we have chosen to focus more narrowly on the ways in which the plan targets higher education.
We recognize that much of the conversation has been too heavily slanted away from discussing the effects that the proposal would have on especially vulnerable populations, and appreciate that even having the ability to consider graduate school represents a manifestation of some relative privilege.
At the same time, we acknowledge that enrollment or completion of a graduate program does not guarantee a change in marginalization status of someone, whether that is low-income status, race or gender. Further, for some students at Middlebury, the most immediate effects do not lie in affecting their ability to go to graduate school. The tax hikes for lower income families will be more damaging than a graduate school tax.
The Republican tax plan is, simply put, an attack on systems of higher education, affecting both private and public institutions. Among its provisions, the plan would tax tuition waivers for graduate students, increasing their tax payments by thousands in most cases, by some estimations.
It would also make college and university endowments taxable. We encourage readers to visit an article by news editor Nick Garber, “College Officials Voice Opposition to GOP Tax Bills,” which discusses the proposed endowment and student loan interest tax — with its approval meaning 12 or 13 students could not receive financial aid.
We encourage Middlebury College to make an official statement opposing the bill — especially in the midst of current efforts to support marginalized students.
The immediate effects of the plan are astounding, but its long-term implications are even more bleak. The plan would make elite institutions such as ours even more inaccessible to people of lower incomes. A person of more affluent means will always be able to go to graduate school, just in the way that wealthy institutions like Harvard will always find the resources they need for their graduate schools to thrive.
The real concern here, the people and places being most profoundly hurt by this plan, are those with fewer financial resources — the students and institutions with less private funding. Although those who support this bill may take issue with how liberal many academic institutions have become, those are not the ones which will be most profoundly affected by the plan. The plan would make elitist institutions like ours even more inaccessible to those with less financial stability.
For more vulnerable students, modifications like taxing tuition waivers can be the difference between going to graduate school and pursuing employment after graduation. These are decisions that should not have to be influenced by finances. Regardless of income, all students should have the opportunity to pursue a more advanced degree, should they so choose. Limiting the access to higher education only further inhibits social mobility and suppresses the lower and middle classes in our already oppressive economic systems.
Beyond the independent implications of the plan, there are the broader concerns for our nation’s ability to compete in global economies. Disincentivizing people from pursuing higher education will set us back globally. As Inside Higher Ed reported, more than 50 percent of those studying in STEM fields in graduate schools in the United States are from other countries; at some universities, the number is around 80 percent.
Many of those students will leave our country (especially with the encouragement of our prohibitive federal immigration system), bringing their skills and knowledge elsewhere, in place of keeping that skilled labor here.
For those of us facing already daunting decisions after graduation, the Republican tax plan only adds to those worries. The general uncertainty we already manage will be compounded by the Republican tax plan’s attack on higher education.
For many, the effects of the plan will be an inconvenience. For others, it may radically shift the options available to them for their futures. In a world that should be dedicated to expanding access to education for all, this plan works against an admirable mission under the false claim of benefitting the middle class.
(12/07/17 12:43am)
President Laurie L. Patton announced in August that Katy Smith Abbott, vice president for student affairs and dean of the college, would step down from her position at the end of December to return full-time to her faculty position in the art history department.
Her resignation will bring an end to her long tenure in student life administration, which began in 2002 when she and her husband, Steve Abbott, were named co-heads of Ross Commons.
On Monday, Smith Abbott sat down with News editors Elizabeth Sawyer and Nick Garber and discussed her work in the administration, the challenges she has faced, and why student life work has remained her central focus.
Middlebury Campus (MC): You attended many years of school, studying and learning how to teach art history. What compelled you to give that up, at least in part, to do administrative work? Did it feel like a sacrifice?
Katy Smith Abbott (KSA): When I first stepped into student life work, it was 2002, and I was teaching art history part-time at the college. My husband had just come through the tenure process a few years before that, and we were asked to serve as the heads of Ross Commons. That was the first step, toeing the water of student life work. And we believed in the commons system. We were people who always had students over for dinner anyway. So when Tim Spears, who was in something like [my current] role at the time, asked us if we would consider it, first we said, “You’ve got to be crazy!” Our children were like two and four at the time, we were like, “No way are we doing that publicly.”
And then we thought about it and we said actually, it totally aligns with what we believe in, in terms of boundary crossing, in terms of blurring the boundaries between the classroom and intellectual life outside the classroom. That was the first step in. At that point it really felt like a complement to teaching, not as consuming as [my current] work.
We did that for six years, and then Tim [Spears] again asked if I would take on another administrative role, that was called associate dean of the college. And then from that I moved into being dean of students. I had a sabbatical before becoming dean of students, and while I was away in England on that sabbatical, Shirley Collado, who was the dean of the college at the time, called and said would you come back as dean of students.
So I guess it’s a long rambling way of saying it’s been incremental. And the real answer to what would have compelled me to do it, the first step, was the commons head role. It felt like such a wonderful complement to the way Steve and I were already thinking about teaching and the way we loved being with students. And when we stepped into that, we looked at each other and went, “This is going to be the end of our innocence as faculty members. We know we’re getting closer in to students’ experience outside of the classroom in all the glory and all the grit,” and we said okay, are we ready for this?
And it was true. When you’re really engaging students and are present for students in whatever experiences they’re having, you’re not just sitting with the beautiful minds in the classroom and engaging at that level. It felt important, and teaching is of course tremendously important. But it just felt like a different way to connect. It felt like a different way to commit to this thing that I really believed in, which was thinking of students as whole people. They bring their whole selves to the college experience and I wanted to be part of that.
MC: Despite the connections you’ve cultivated with students, is there anything about the role of an administrator that automatically puts you at a distance from the perspective of students?
KSA: I think a couple things are true. I’ll first tell you a story. When my son, who’s now a junior in college, was on the college tour circuit, I went with him on the Minnesota trip, and we were on the Macalester [College] tour in a blinding snow storm. And they did this brilliant thing there, where they made the family members, mostly parents, go on one tour and the students went on a different tour, so you couldn’t humiliate your kid by asking almost gunner questions like I wanted to ask.
So I went off with my tour guide, and of course I was the first one in line, and I said, “I would love to start with the question, ‘What do you love most about Macalester?’ ” and she did not hesitate, and she said, “I love the close working relationship students have with the administration.” And I thought I was going to fall over — I was so fascinated by that. And it was completely authentic. That’s not an answer you’re going to just come up with as a student, right?
Maybe that’s not what I need Middlebury students to say is their favorite thing about Middlebury, but I thought, “How do we get closer to that? What would that look like?” I’ve sort of been haunted by it for the past three years. I haven’t followed up with colleagues there about what makes that magic, but it must have something to do with a determined approach, a conscious approach, to thinking collaboratively about the good of the institution.
Not just, “What do we need right now in this moment?” Sometimes there is a tension between the urgency students feel, rightly, because they’re only here for four years, and the administration’s long view that says we’re the shepherds for the long-term good of the institution. I think it can feel as though that’s a stark dichotomy, instead of really being pieces of a whole. They both matter, they are the same thing, but we’ve chosen to break them apart like puzzle pieces. I think when we get to these places of division or saying “Old Chapel” or “all students,” we’ve decided that we’re not really all after the same thing, which is that Middlebury feels like a place where every student can flourish and where we are mindful of the things that aren’t working right now.
I do think there’s a way in which it’s “helpful.” Things persist because they serve us well in some regard. So for students to feel kept out of decision-making or to say “Old Chapel” or “the administration,” that serves something. It makes something somebody else’s fault. Which is not to say we don’t have responsibility. And in the same way, saying, “Well, these are administrative decisions, not student decisions,” because we have the long-term interests of the institutions at heart, serves something as well.
I think there’s rich potential in reframing that narrative and rewriting it in a way that starts with “What if?” What if we did this differently? What if we started from a different point or with different assumptions in mind, in my utopian world?
MC: Speaking of long-term versus short-term perspectives: to us, Charles Murray is the biggest controversy we’ve been aware of over the past three years. But you’ve been in administrative roles for such a long time, what have some other challenges been that you’ve experienced and had to work through?
KSA: You’re not alone in thinking that. I think a lot of us think that. That’s a dramatic moment, a marker in the college’s longer history and shorter history. People who were around during the Vietnam War will say that we had much bigger controversies or much bigger moments on campus or similarly impactful moments — maybe it’s not that one is more dramatic than the others.
While I do not in any way mean that March 2 was second-most intense on my watch, I will say that for me, as hard as this is and as divided our campus feels at times — and sometimes all the time — the most difficult thing I’ve had to do is to be with a community in the wake of a student suicide. It’s just unimaginably difficult. Well, not unimaginably — many of us were here for that.
That will stand out for me forever as something that certainly shaped my own approach to my work, my approach to working with the remarkable colleagues that I have had the opportunity to work with across student life, and to what it means to be with a campus in a place of crisis that’s really disorienting in a different way than what we’re dealing with now, which is also disorienting, but I think in a different perspective.
I think for me, these two moments are really different from each other. There are lots of individual student crises, and also moments of immense celebration with students that will stay with me as well. But in terms of other things in my own work that stand out as super difficult, those two are the places of weight and deep concern.
MC: In those really hard moments, how did your responsibilities as an administrator differ from what they would have been if you had been a faculty member?
KSA: Almost in every imaginable way. One of the realities of being an administrator is that, except in moments of crisis, you tend to be farther from students. And that’s the single biggest difference and the thing I’ve missed the most — the very close connection you have with students on a daily basis when you’re teaching.
I’ve taught one class a year the whole time since I’ve been an administrator, and a little bit more than that when I was a commons head, but in my commons, you have lots of students in your house all the time or you’re at events. But the more I’ve moved into administrative work, the more distance there’s been between me and regular interaction with students. That’s probably been the thing I’ve missed the most.
When I announced my decision to go back to teaching, people asked me, “Are you leaving your administrative job because of Charles Murray?” I get it, the timing would make you want to ask that question. But the truth is that, if the moment we’re in has had any impact on my decision to go back to teaching — and there’s more than one impact — the reality is that last spring, when I was in really hard conversations with students, as hard as those conversations were, I thought, “This is what matters. This is what matters to me: being in these conversations with students.”
It was a little bit of a lightbulb moment for me, of saying, “It’s time. It’s time to be back in a place where I can be more regularly connected to students.” Hopefully not talking with quite the same intensity all the time, but I would say that’s the biggest difference. You spend a lot of time in meetings, a lot of time on email, a lot of time doing strategic planning and problem-solving, and it’s important and it’s challenging and I’ve grown tremendously as a professional as a result of all that, but I went to graduate school so that I could teach. I enjoy scholarship, but my dream was to be regularly working with students. So that’s the single biggest difference.
MC: Do you wish you’d known certain things coming into this job that would’ve helped you perform better?
KSA: I don’t know the answer to that question, to be honest. There are a lot of people in my job who come from student affairs backgrounds, have PhDs in higher education administration and who are career student life professionals. I love meeting with those people. I have colleagues at other institutions whose wisdom I tap when I need it, which is often. So I think if I had that background there are probably some things I would’ve done or managed differently.
This is not at all to say that I haven’t made mistakes, because I’ve made plenty. I think that one of the joys and privileges of doing the work with my unusual background in art history has been that I really depended upon the remarkable colleagues that I’ve had in student life, and they’ve been incredibly patient and gracious with me. I think it’s meant that I’ve done a lot of on-the-job learning from 2002 — it’s ongoing. Probably in places where it’s felt uncomfortable, I’ve had to acknowledge my shortcomings and have some humility around where my gaps in knowledge are. I feel like the places where I could’ve really screwed up, I’ve been saved by the wisdom, support and collaboration of people here and elsewhere, like my colleagues at other institutions.
If I look back on the things I wish had gone differently, to be honest, it would’ve been about moving more slowly. It would’ve been about taking more time to listen before acting. It can sometimes feel like everything has to be decided in the moment, and like I said, there can be really urgent situations that present themselves, and when that happens, like any situation, your adrenaline surges, your problem-solving superhero cape gets on, and you think, “I got this!” Sometimes you have to act with that kind of alacrity, sometimes it is a life or death moment. But most of the time it’s not.
I think if I could have cultivated a deep well of calm and patience around decision-making, some of the things that stay with me where I wish I had made a different decision or I wish I had slowed down. Maybe it’s not even that I would have made a different decision. But I think there is a way in which most of the work that’s done in my realm is aided — not by moving slowly, because goodness knows students think we move too slowly! I don’t mean around big issues that the college needs to be tending to.
I just mean in individual moments, mostly one-on-one with students or in small group situations. The ability to say, “You know what? Emotions are running high, we’re not at our best, let’s come together tomorrow over tea and talk again.” Off the top of my head, that’s what I would say is the skill or practice that’s critical, and doesn’t get enough attention.
MC: What will you miss most about this role?
KSA: I will miss most the people I work with really closely. That’s a hard one to say without getting teary. I think highly about so many colleagues across student life, but I have a senior leadership team that is just an extraordinary group of people, and I lucked into them. I hired a couple of them, but most of them were already in their positions and were my peers, the people I was sitting around a table with, reporting to somebody else. They were incredible, when I stepped into this role, about saying, “You’re the leader of the division, we’re gonna make this happen together.” It’s nine people I sit with every Wednesday morning, and who oversee the other major areas of student life across campus. They’re referred to as the student affairs leadership team, or SALT, so I refer to them as the saltines.
I’m not going anywhere, I’ll have lunch with people and go on walks with people, but there’s something extraordinary about being in a really tough work environment where you work with people you know you can depend upon in a fundamentally unshakeable way. I was lucky enough to have that, and I know that’s what I’ll miss the most.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
(12/01/17 6:26pm)
James O’Keefe’s descent onto Middlebury’s campus, by infiltrating our email system from his cryptic Gmail account and another account belonging to the purportedly-fake Preservation Society, is infuriating. His impending attempts to manipulate interviews of students’ passionate beliefs are a slap to our entire community’s face. For O’Keefe to state that free speech is under attack on campus is one farcical claim. For him to arrive in Middlebury, though, and propagate this is a wholly blasphemous idea. He and his ideas have no legitimacy or space at Middlebury.
James O’Keefe is not the model figure for integrity. Ironically, this is a critical pillar of free speech. When integrity is bypassed in speech for the selfish and wrongful means of pushing one’s dangerous beliefs on others, the boundary between free speech and unlawful speech has been crossed. Hate speech, by virtue of being aggravated, disorderly, and connected to criminal action, is not protected by the First Amendment. Neither are libel or slander.
O’Keefe was arrested for entering the federal offices of then Senator Mary Landrieu under a false name. He had hoped to push a narrative of Landrieu ignoring her constituents — again, with a fake identity. This seems like it may question his speech’s legitimacy; one could even say he intended to publish libelous content about the senator, as it was unfounded with his false identity. O’Keefe and his organization, Project Veritas, have not been wary of the worst glimpses of the spotlight. Most recently, they paid a woman to offer The Washington Post an entirely fake story about sexual assault by Roy Moore. The Post, through its strict adherence to the highest standards of journalistic integrity, didn’t fall for the bait.
It is disgusting that O’Keefe and his group could create a falsified narrative of otherwise very real accusations against a prominent figure in American politics. His accusations demean all women and the sexual abuse experiences some have faced. He perpetuates a power structure that illegitimizes the terrible experiences of sexual assault victims. His attacks on the credibility of an organization committed to sound journalism are further incendiary. Ironically, it seems that O’Keefe may be the one going after the free, legitimate speech of others by haranguing the Post’s sound, factual journalism with unfounded claims of liberal media bias.
Here at Middlebury, where O’Keefe challenges us, there is little doubt that we are soundly committed to every person’s First Amendment rights. Higher education fosters a culture of choice: a person can choose to take courses of his or her interests, choose to open his or her mind, and choose to speak his or her beliefs. Professor Erik Bleich gave a presentation on the line between free speech and hate speech. One group of faculty actively admitted their commitment to free speech. The Faculty for an Inclusive Community group seeks to qualify the speakers brought to campus by stopping the imposition of debasing ideas. This group has shown that Middlebury, as a private institution, has every right to deny groups and dangerous individuals a platform on campus. This power is to be used sparingly, only with the most inciteful of figures, as it should be. These individuals and groups leave no doubt that freedom of speech is an unalienable tenet of each student’s experience at Middlebury College.
Similarly, we students are indeed exercising our right to speak freely. We have had and will have every right to protest the promulgation of ideas we deem pernicious. When speakers come who challenge our very humanity — our being — we have the right to resist their tacitly wrong ideas. We should never engage in violence; nobody should. Nonetheless, we can commit to preventing dangerous and harmful ideas from entering our precious academic space through our right to freedom of speech. We know this is our right, as we are well-versed in free speech. It seems as though O’Keefe is lost in his hunt for an attack on free speech at Middlebury.
At a time when the Middlebury community is engaging in a very serious dialogue, O’Keefe’s entrance is demeaning to the conversations being had on campus. O’Keefe and his ideas promote the narrative that Middlebury has an identity crisis that it can’t reconcile. On the contrary, we are facing our communal identity and who we want to be on the daily. We are engaging in the difficult conversations that determine the culture of our community. We are actively speaking together and against one another. We have offered our peers this platform; it is just a matter of us listening in full to our community that is so bothersome.
To hearken back to the town hall held in Mead Chapel not long ago, there are serious, raw feelings on this campus. These are not about a freedom to speak one’s mind; they’re about the antithesis, the need for empathy on an apathetic campus. These conversations are built around people speaking their beliefs in tune with their cherished right to speak freely. We already have free speech. We are now trying to get the rest of this school to listen to us. There are no laws to make people listen. Rather, this change has to be internal and community-driven.
I only hope that the Middlebury community is willing to engage in listening to our own, rather than outsiders trying to manipulate our dearest feelings. O’Keefe makes a mockery of the students who fought Charles Murray’s presence and are still fighting omnipresent slaps to their dignity on campus, through institutional racism and serious, connected incidences of racism. He makes a mockery of the conservative students he claims to be the savior to, as well, by claiming their very real, vocalized beliefs on campus to be lesser than their liberal peers’.
Students have fled from the perception of being connected with O’Keefe. He and his cronies are adamantly trying to drum up illegitimate praise for his efforts. In a time of invigorating debate on campus, claims of free speech being exacerbated are simply untrue. I’ve heard enough of the tired argument about a lack of free speech on campus, and we’ve definitely heard enough of James O’Keefe — before his arrival in town. It is crystal-clear that there is no desire for a vile outsider to come with a false narrative and puncture our integrity.
You are not welcome here, Mr. O’Keefe. I will not stand for such a divisive person as you to enter the College’s academic sphere. If you find your own free speech to be under attack, it is because what you stand for is incendiary and malicious. You should know that I will not remain idle and watch you attempt to break apart this community for your warped propaganda. I would much rather listen to my peers than you, who seek to vilify us. The discussions we are having on campus, about race and identity, about ideas and credibility, are happening because students and faculty alike are coming forward and using their free voices. Don’t get this twisted.
I say this because I am not out of line of my First Amendment rights. I say this after reading fact upon fact about you, and then making a founded argument based on these facts. I say this in The Campus because I am offered a platform by a private group to publish my opinions. I say this proudly because I stand by my own commitment to allowing others to speak, so long as they are not committing libel or slander or inciting hateful acts. I say this proudly because I can protest such harmful individuals and their speech if I so choose. I say this proudly because I can speak freely at Middlebury College.
Zeke Hodkin is a student the class of 2021.
(11/29/17 11:46pm)
We’re living in a powerful moment if you have been affected by gender-based violence or know someone who has — so, everybody.
Since New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey first exposed film director Harvey Weinstein, 35 men and counting have been accused of sexual misconduct. Emboldened by the #MeToo movement, many women have taken to social media to share their own experiences. Some claimed to be “shocked” and “surprised” by the prevalence of sexual violence. But victims are not surprised, and perpetrators are not naive.
The extensive research of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network reveals that every 98 seconds, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted. That amounts to more than 570 people a day. The Bureau of Justice reports that this violence is not limited to the private sphere; every day, about 50 people are sexually assaulted or raped in their workplace. Poor, POC or LGBTQIA folks are most vulnerable to this kind of abuse.
Weekly Reveal Journalist Bernice Yeung writes, “It’s a problem that affects people in all types of work, extending beyond film, media and politics to the women who clean hotel rooms, tidy office buildings at night or pick vegetables.”
Sexual violence happens all the time — and, depending on the identity of the victim or the perpetrator, it often isn’t acknowledged by mainstream media outlets.
Sexual violence is undoubtedly part of U.S. culture; it is part of our patriarchal, political heritage. From Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump, you can be an accused-sexual assaulter and become president in this country.
Yet, we’re still taught to think of rapists and gender-based abusers as “other,” as abstractions. They are nameless, faceless “bad guys.” But they have names; they have faces. To appropriate the title of a brave and important Middlebury program, “It Happens Here.”
The National Institute of Justice reports that “85 to 90 percent of sexual assaults reported by college women are perpetrated by someone known to the victim; about half occur on a date.” Queer folks are even more vulnerable. Here are some alarming statistics from the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey survey and the Human Rights Campaign.
Forty-four percent of lesbians and 61 percent of bisexual women experience rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, compared to 35 percent of heterosexual women.
Twenty-six percent of gay men and 37 percent of bisexual men experience rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, compared to 29 percent of heterosexual men.
Among transgender racial minorities, 24 percent of transgender Native Americans, 18 percent of transgender people who identified as multiracial, 17 percent of transgender Asians, and 15 percent of black transgender respondents experienced sexual assault in K-12 education settings – much higher rates than students of other races. Transgender women respondents experienced sexual assault more often than their transgender male peers.
Bernice Yeung said it well: “At the heart of any sexual harassment accusation is the abuse of power. Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had movie roles to offer. Reporter Glenn Thrush of The New York Times could help young journalists get in front of a top editor. Congressman John Conyers could open doors to a high-powered political career… [And] immigrant women from the working class... face the same kind of power imbalance as the women coming forward today, except the exploitation plays out differently. Their bosses aren’t famous but they still have real influence on the people who work for them. These supervisors can hire and fire, mete out extra hours or take them away. For women living paycheck to paycheck, that’s a significant kind of power to wield.”
We see this power dynamic play out at Middlebury between men and women, straight and queer folks, and upperclassmen and underclassmen. Inappropriate behavior, rooted in struggles of gender and power, happens all the time in our community. We see it when first-years are invited to senior sports team suites in Atwater; the senior men have all the control. We see it when the credibility of student survivors is questioned.
The onus is partially on our institutions. We commend “It Happens Here” and MiddSafe for their admirable work. Green Dot’s current form is a good start too, but we can do more to act preemptively and support women. We suggest more thorough Green Dot training for first years and sports teams.
Moreover, a more effective judicial system is in need for addressing perpetrators. We also call on the CCI to develop further resources for students on how to handle sexual harassment in the workplace. When students graduate they ought to be prepared for employers who try to use their power to take advantage of their employees.
Ultimately, this matter comes down to individuals and it is their responsibility to make a difference. Sexual and gender-based violence is inappropriate — period. To those who seek to trivialize the threat of sexual and gender-based violence: shame on you. Reread the statistics. If you haven’t experienced sexual or gender-based violence, listen to the people, especially women, who have. Their stories are the ones that matter most.
Perpetrators are beginning to be held accountable in a way they weren’t before and that is noteworthy progress. But even if someone hasn’t been indicted in the narrow legal sense — especially via the myopic system on college campuses — that doesn’t mean the perpetrator’s actions weren’t egregious.
There are many reasons why students choose not to report, from revictimization by an exhausting judicial process to concrete threats from perpetrators, whose status and power protects them.
As The New York Times columnist Charles Blow writes, “For most women, the perpetrator is not a Hollywood executive, or a sitting senator or an esteemed journalist. For most, there will be no press conferences if they come forward. There will be no celebrity attorney to sit at their sides and stroke their hands. There will be no morning news shows to praise their courage. For most, the decision to speak up will still feel fraught and without sufficient benefit to outweigh the possibility of negative repercussions.”
If you have behaved in a way that has facilitated sexual or gender-based violence, directly or indirectly, you need to change. Bystanders need to be held accountable too because they are complicit when they remain silent. We all need to be intentional about fighting gender-based violence.
Next time, be the difference between a good night and nightmare. Check your friends and check yourself. Risk losing social capital in order to prevent someone from trauma, and contemplate why holding back is considered “cool.” Junior and senior men, think about your power in spaces and your social capital on a Saturday night. Athletes, leave aggression and force on the field because that has no place in consent culture.
As Blow puts it, “We have to focus on the fact that jokes that objectify women are not funny. And we have to focus on the fact that society itself has incubated and nourished a dangerous idea that almost unbridled male aggression is not only a component of male sexuality, it is the most prized part of it. We say to boys, be aggressive. We say to our girls, be cautious. Boys will be boys and girls will be victims… [People] are not responsible for men’s bad behavior. The idea that horny men can’t control themselves is a lie!”
As one of our editors so aptly put it: Believe it or not, you are accountable for your actions — for the pain you do or do not cause. So act consensually, defend consent culture and, most importantly, be a decent human being.
(11/29/17 11:35pm)
We’ve all heard about the Salem witch trials. If you go into the scholarship, it turns out there were no witches in Salem — only victims of sorcery accusations. If Salem’s problem with witchcraft did not include actual witches, could Middlebury College’s struggle against racism not include actual racists?
Well, we might have a few racists, or more than a few. But both witchcraft and race have an equal basis in human biology — none. Animosity does not add up to sorcery and genotype/phenotype interactions do not add up to race. But once witchcraft beliefs turn into accusations, and racial beliefs turn into accusations, they share a frightening capacity for justifying intimidation.
Racial accusations in the U.S. have long revolved around conspiracy theories that black people pose a threat to white people. Americans might be less enamored of this and many other conspiracy theories if we realized that they are an updated version of witchcraft accusations.
Accusations of sorcery and of conspiracy have long found receptive audiences for the same reason — they concentrate blame in somebody we already detest. While disasters tend to be produced by many hands, conspiracy theories divert blame away from ourselves and send it in a single, satisfying direction — to a scapegoat. This is why, wherever you go in human affairs, scapegoating will always be a tempting activity.
In Donald Trump’s America, conspiracy accusations ricochet here, there and everywhere. At Middlebury College, they are peering around the corner at our community forums. The administration summons us to these all-campus events so that we can respond to the latest racial emergency.
The most recent are a Title IX allegation of racial profiling and a racist graffiti on a blackboard. The forums are billed as conversations and they are intended to build community. But the subject of racism, and the scale of the gathering, turns them into theatrical occasions. Students denounce their pain and suffering. Caring administrators announce dramatic new measures — to the surprise of other students, faculty and staff who haven’t been consulted.
Over the last two years, administrators have gotten more apologetic, student activists have gotten more accusatory, and the conversation has taken on the air of a tribunal.
The most recent community forum, Nov. 9 in Mead Chapel, focused on President Laurie Patton and Title IX coordinator Sue Ritter, as well as communications veep Bill Burger and a public safety officer (unnamed) who may not have been present. Students asked Patton and Ritter if they were in denial about white supremacy at the college. They also demanded apologies for alleged racial profiling.
As the questions became more personal and insulting, a student leader presided with the assurance of a hanging judge. The core of the audience, mainly students, broke into periodic applause. The margins of the audience, mainly faculty and staff, did a lot less applauding. With the exception of denials and assurances from Patton and Ritter, as well as from general counsel Hannah Ross and a few other administrators, no other sides were voiced.
None of what follows is to deny that local instances of racism require our attention. I’m especially concerned about increasing man-in-the-street animosity toward Middleburians with dark skin. There is also the longstanding problem of classroom and social life majorities that create a hostile milieu for minorities. The college can certainly do more.
What I wish to challenge are racial accusations that are so open-ended that they presume the guilt of the accused. For example, to refute one of the specific accusations against Sue Ritter, I wish to point out that an office staffed by white people is not evidence of white supremacy. If this were the case, then an office staffed by liberals would be evidence of a plot against America. That’s the kind of reductive accusation employed by rightwing conspiracy theorists.
Why would Middlebury student activists, who wish to oppose rightwing conspiracy theorists, employ the same kind of logic as they do? The most obvious answer: a wide range of Americans are entranced by conspiracy theories. What is the most easy-to-swallow version of conspiracy theory for both left and right? Racial classification! What scapegoat is easier to grasp than a bunch of black people or a bunch of white people?
Racial classification presumes that a person’s skin color tells us something important about who they are. It also presumes that a person belongs in the same behavioral category as other people with the same skin color. Both are far from the case.
Consider the following example of how simplistic and localized racial classification is. A Dominican who considers himself white gets on an airplane and flies to New York City, where he is judged to be black and/or Latino. If he then flies to Los Angeles, he will continue to be black, but not Latino in the eyes of this city’s Mexican-American population. If he then flies to Vermont, he will become a person of color. Four different places have four different racial systems.
What counts as blackness or whiteness appears and disappears as a function of assumptions and power differentials that vary enormously from one situation to the next. Everyone has the right to identify yourself as black or white, of color or not. In earlier days, who counted as black or white was enshrined by legal boundaries. Nowadays, who is designated by these labels has become far more unstable. This makes them a treacherous basis for administration and due process.
The superficiality of racial classification isn’t just a trap for racists. It’s also a trap for anti-racists when they make sweeping assumptions about who they represent and who their enemy is. Five days after Charles Murray’s famous visit to our halls, in March 2017, four Middlebury College departments and two programs hosted philosophy professor George Yancy of Emory University. Yancy’s theme was white fear of the black body. His evidence included excruciating details of Jim Crow-era lynchings, hate mail that he’s received after publishing provocative op-eds, and white fascination with black sexual prowess.
As for white people who struggle with racism and claim to overcome it, Yancy informed us, they’re wrong. So what are white people supposed to do? Their only hope, he told us, is to take their clothes off, look in the mirror and fall apart. An alternative approach, he said, is to vomit for two hours. But the best white people can hope for is to become “anti-racist racists” because, he concluded, “to be white is to be racist.”
Part (not all) of the Middlebury audience gave Yancy a standing ovation. What some of us were applauding is arguably a new form of religion organized around race, in which whiteness becomes an ineradicable stain. Like the Christian doctrine of original sin, and John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, white people are stuck with it. All Yancy can suggest for white people is a mental health crisis — but even that isn’t going to liberate them from the curse of whiteness.
Traditional race systems in the U.S. were organized around the stigmatization of dark skin. Yancy seems to be urging us to reorganize ourselves around the stigmatization of fair skin. Judging from the opinions page of The Campus, plenty of people here agree with him, and they have lost patience with objections. If whiteness proves racism, after all, then any protestation of innocence means that you are in denial.
Here returns the parallel with accusations of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, as well as with accusations of liberalism in some of today’s congressional districts. What makes racism, witchcraft, or the liberal conspiracy against America an irrefutable premise is deep distrust and anger, not empirical evidence. Once human beings regard such premises as irrefutable, the only proof needed is suspicion. Anyone who objects is soon under suspicion as well. Formulaic repudiation of witchcraft, liberalism or racism becomes the political litmus test for deciding who is a good person and who is a bad one.
Perversely, the logical result of George Yancy’s “anti-racist racism” will be, not transcending race or leaving it behind us, but a new racial system that reverses the polarity of the old ones. This new system will probably be confined to the college’s prosperous economic niche, but it will continue to provide sinecures for the most clever among us, who will tend to come from the middle and upper classes just as they do now.
Another logical result of our current campaign against race will be more layers of bureaucracy. In social science we call this state-building. The rationales for state-building are always seductive. Conservatives insist that we need protection from external enemies; liberals insist that victim groups need protection from victimizers. Whether you’re obsessed with enemies or victims, the shared idiom is vulnerability, protection, security. In social science we call these dangerization scenarios, and what they produce is audit or surveillance culture.
Both dangerization and surveillance have quite a capacity for spiraling upward in the same paranoid manner as sorcery and racial accusations. The more fears you express, the more investigations of these fears will be required. The more procedures you have, the more violations of these procedures there will be. The more people you hire to fight witches, the more witches they will find.
This is how our anti-racism activists could, contrary to their intentions, be generating rationales for a new regime that will be a larger and more cumbersome version of the one they oppose. It will not be as different as they want it to be.
David Stoll is a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College.
