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(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.
(11/16/17 1:25am)
As Republicans in Congress move forward with tax reform legislation, administrators at Middlebury and at colleges across the country have expressed concerns about several provisions that could significantly alter the federal government’s role in higher education.
Most significant is a proposal to impose a 1.4 percent excise tax on the investment income of private schools with endowments worth over $250,000 per full-time student. Middlebury enrolls over 2,500 undergraduate students, with an endowment of $1.1 billion — or about $440,000 per student. It therefore ranks among the 60 to 70 colleges that would face new tax burdens if the legislation passes.
Republican leaders in the House introduced their tax reform bill on Nov. 2; the Senate rolled out its own version on Nov. 9. The endowment tax exists in both bills, along with other provisions that could impact alumni donations, student loans and tuition discounts for college employees.
“There’s a lot in this bill that attacks higher ed,” said David Provost, the college’s treasurer. “It’s clear that they’re coming after us.”
Bill Burger, the college’s spokesman, articulated the college’s opposition to the endowment tax.
“Middlebury’s endowment, like the endowments of other schools, sustain generous financial aid programs that make a high-quality education available to admitted students regardless of their ability to pay,” he said. “The perverse consequence of an endowment tax would be to shift the burden of the cost of higher education to the families that are least able to afford it.”
Provost estimates that a tax of 1.4 percent could have reduced the college’s investment income by up to $600,000 in the past year.
“Our average financial aid package is $45,000,” he said. “That’s 12 or 13 students where we wouldn’t have money to give financial aid.”
Beyond this immediate impact, the college is concerned that passing an endowment tax could embolden Congress to levy additional taxes against private colleges in the future, or to simply raise the endowment tax rate far above 1.4 percent.
“If it starts at 1.4 percent, what’s to say that they won’t make it 5 or 10 percent?” Provost said. “Once it’s in place, where does it stop?”
The endowment tax is not the only provision that has drawn the college’s attention. Both the House and Senate plans call for a significant increase in taxpayers’ standard deduction, which would reduce the incentive to make tax-deductible charitable contributions, such as donations to Middlebury.
“We have a high participation rate of alumni that give,” Provost said. While this provision would not severely harm the college’s finances, “in the context of keeping alumni engaged, it could sting.”
Next, the House bill would eliminate the student loan interest deduction, which currently allows student borrowers to reduce their yearly tax burden by up to $2,500. The Senate bill leaves this deduction intact.
Finally, the House bill would repeal tax breaks for employer-funded educational assistance. Currently, faculty and staff can receive tax-exempt tuition assistance from the college, helping them, or a dependent, take college classes or pursue a degree. This provision, like the student loan deductions, would not impact Middlebury as an institution, but could negatively impact college employees who benefit from the deduction.
Provost, who spent the past weekend at Swarthmore College discussing the tax plan with financial officers from other small liberal arts colleges, said that Middlebury’s senior administrators would meet this week to develop an official response to the legislation. Options could include releasing a joint statement of opposition alongside other selective liberal arts colleges.
Republicans in Congress, anxious for a legislative victory, hope to pass tax reform before the mid-December recess. The House could vote on its bill this week, and is expected to pass it; the Senate is still finalizing details on its own plan, which will likely encounter more opposition. If both bills pass, GOP leaders from both houses would then need to collaborate on a final bill to send to President Trump’s desk.
“I think it’s fair to say that higher education’s view of these tax proposals is well understood in the halls of Congress,” Burger said. “It’s sad that this issue has become so politicized. We hope that the Senate, in particular, will be a place where sound public policy can emerge on this issue.”
(11/16/17 12:52am)
Last Thursday, Nov. 9, hundreds of members of the Middlebury community gathered in Mead Chapel for a town hall meeting. The event was originally planned by Women of Color and the Black Student Union with support from SGA and was subsequently co-opted by the administration, who claimed it had been already planned. While it was presented as a “community conversation,” it was more of a Q&A for students who wanted answers from the administration.
The unstructured nature of the forum allowed for administrators to dodge questions posed by students. Instead of one answer for one question, the microphone was passed around among students. Every few questions, an administrator would answer selectively. This was in part from the stream of questions and the inability to answer due to legal reasons. Either way, there was common theme of answering the least inflammatory part of questions posed. (Please look to the News section of this paper for a selected transcription of the event.)
The town hall meeting was an example of students’ qualms with administration coming to fruition — the primary issue in question being defensiveness. While the event was intended to be a conversation, flyers handed out listed the accomplishments of the administration. In an event framed to have a primary goal of listening, we find it specious to bring a planned response and hand out a rap sheet at the door. If there was in fact transparency, there would be no need to set up a line of defense before the conversation began.
Administrators’ primary response to stories shared and questions asked were to express how hurt they were, rather than asking why students felt that way or how they reached conclusions. This response stopped the conversation, making it about administrators’ feelings, rather than the issue that presumably brought us all there.
This town hall meeting clearly demonstrated the need for more transparency on the part of administrators. One of the most common responses from administration was, “we’re working on it, but we can’t share.” This frustrates us as students, deterring us from working to move forward because we don’t know how much progress is being made.
The need for transparency is not new; students have been asking for it long before the Charles Murray fiasco. We understand there are some questions that cannot be answered due to legal reasons. At the same time, leaving us in the dark forces students to make uninformed demands or actions that could be more complete if there was a better understanding of situations. Students should not have to visit deep corners of the Middlebury website or come to town halls to ascertain how the school is improving.
The administration also needs to match the vulnerability of the students who share their stories. At the meeting, speakers noted that this issue goes beyond what happened to Addis Fouche-Channer. Many students have been vulnerable in public and private arenas, without much resolve from the administration. Administrators say they appreciate the vulnerability of students who routinely share their stories, but fail to give them the same courtesy.
These “community conversations” then become spaces where students retelling stories of hardship and silence are met with sighs and shaking heads. This is not to say administrators need to match students’ stories with their own, but preplanned answers to complex questions are certainly not the answer.
While the town hall brought light to issues students have been talking about for years, it did not leave its attendees with a concrete understanding of where to go. If anything, it was cathartic and allowed students to give an uncensored and unobstructed message to the administration. But the work is not done there, especially since the administration is notorious for listening to students share their thoughts and stories without doing anything to follow it, other than make a committee.
Other than a need for increased vulnerability and transparency on the part of administration, we have suggestions for moving forward.
Administrators should not look to students to do their jobs. Students have done the work to provide frustrations, reasons and ideas to the administration on multiple occasions. The task is now to listen. If students are not presenting reasonable ideas, tell them. If there is information that would make students’ ideas better, tell them.
Marginalized groups are putting down effort and showing why they’re uncomfortable, often with no return. Further, all members of the community should be informed of the feelings and sentiments that students at the town hall shared. We cannot move forward if some of us are ignorant of the problems a significant amount of our community face.
Whether we encourage cultural sensitivity training beyond the first year or invite students to bias training for faculty and staff, we need to all come to this conversation. We all need to continue to come because the work is not done. Instead of asking why people are sharing “negative” stories, ask why the stories exist. Ask what you can do to decrease the amount of stories or care for those who have been affected by oppression.
Everyone can see the administration is trying. We cannot call on the administration to fix racism. We can call on them to make concrete steps to combat institutional racism here, now, at Middlebury College. This is a difficult ask but not an unrealistic one, considering this is the work for which administrators are paid.
Students are paying and going into debt to be here. It is not the job of marginalized, or really any, students to fix the problems they did not cause. We’ve seen plenty of disingenuous promises and productive discourse; now let’s make some concrete plans.
(11/14/17 7:19pm)
College president Laurie Patton sent a school wide email on Wed., Nov. 8, inviting students, faculty and staff, to a town hall the following day, Nov. 9.
“It is clear to me and, I believe, to many of you, that the essential bond of trust and assumption of good intentions that should unite us is broken,” she wrote. You can access the email here.
Co-sponsored by the Black Student Union and the Student Government Association, the audience filled Wilson Hall to capacity, causing event organizers to move the event to Mead Chapel. At the event, which was monitored by SGA and BSU members, students had the opportunity to ask administrators direct questions.
Below is a full transcript of the meeting, which has been edited for clarity. Please look for further analysis of the event in our issue after Thanksgiving Break. This transcription was done by features editors Sarah Asch and James Finn. Editor-at-large Elizabeth Zhou and managing editor Will DiGravio helped edit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO6XMI8V1oI&t=1749s
Jin Sohn (’18, SGA President): "SGA would like to acknowledge the presence of everyone in this room, and to thank you for taking the time to join us, together, as a community for an imperative conversation on respect and inclusivity. Over the past week, members of the SGA student cabinet have been working to support the student body in light of the recent painful and alienating events and dialogues. Likewise, many cultural orgs including BSU and other student activists have been working overtime to support students. We want to recognize those efforts especially because they were led by students from marginalized backgrounds. Today's conversation is not a solution in itself. But it can and must lead to transformations on our campus. We are here today because, in whatever way, we care. We care about our friends, we care about our peers, we care about our community. Please let us join together in that shared core value in order to foster change on our campus. In order to make this discourse constructive, active, and supportive of everyone, we are requesting that all comments, observations, and questions be respectful. We would like to encourage individuals to acknowledge their own identities and privileges when speaking. Please acknowledge the role and position with which you inherently enter this conversation. Further, while this event is crucial in providing a voice for students who are affected by the actions of others on this campus, it is important to remember that active listening is meaningful and important to engage with others in this room. Please listen and wait until someone finishes speaking before wanting to speak so that we can be respectful of all that is being said. To encourage collaboration and abolish any hierarchies present today, we will be limiting questions and answers to two minutes each. Additionally, to be conscious of everyone's time, we will be ending this event promptly at 6 pm. Ultimately, for the SGA, the goal of this meeting today is both to facilitate learning and listening in our community and to work toward establishing active next steps that students, faculty, staff, and administrators can collaborate on and be held accountable for. This is not the first conversation. It likely will not be the last. The point is that we all, all of us, are trying, and by simply being here today are actively working to change. Thank you, and I will now hand over the mic to President Patton for her to speak on her hopes for this event and then Wengel Kifle will provide some background and context on the current campus climate. Once the floor has been opened for conversation, Ishrak Alam, the SGA chief of staff, Annie Cowan, the SGA deputy chief of staff, and Rae Aaron, the SGA speaker, will ensure that a single voice is heard at a time by distributing a microphone. Finally, we recognize that these are really difficult issues, and if anyone needs to step out of the room or take care of themselves, please do so."
Patton: "Thank you so much. I'm really, really pleased to see everyone here. Thank you for being here, thank you for hanging in and staying in the difficult conversation. I want, particularly, to thank student leadership, particularly BSU and SGA for hosting this event, and we really look forward to hearing the voices of the members of all of our communities. We are in new territory at Middlebury, where we need to begin building a new kind of community, one that includes voices that we either have not heard or only partially heard. There are so many ways that such communities need to be built and the first is to give voice to experience. We want to pay attention to structures that cannot give voice to that experience, the economic, social and status hierarchies that limit us. Because of acts of racial bias on this campus and in this town, many students, faculty and staff have called us to account and are hurting. And while we are in new territory of trying to build a new kind of community, we are also in very old, unacknowledged territory. Part of Middlebury's unspoken story includes our acting according to racial stereotypes, acting in ways that serve to alienate. We have not acknowledged that enough. I want to acknowledge that hurt. I am deeply sorry that members of our community are in pain, and that people feel they have not been heard by the administration. It is our job to make better structures and more equitable relationships where voices can be heard and where people feel that they belong. It is our job to make a more inclusive public square where not just individual acts of bias but structural racism can be addressed and challenged. Middlebury can and should be a challenging place where we experience intellectual discomfort, and part of that discomfort includes listening to unheard voices better. For students who live here at Middlebury for only four years, this can take on a particular sense of urgency. We are working on many ways to address this and look forward to sharing those with you, but most importantly, today we need your help and creativity and thoughts. We also look forward, as Jin said, to follow up conversations from this one, to continue to visit student groups in dining halls, commons houses and other meeting spaces such as AFC, and to continue to move forward with concrete actions and timelines where we can work together both what our community is and what our community means to us. Together, I do believe with all the hard work we can build a new Middlebury. Thank you for bringing your voices to help begin that task today."
Charles Rainey (’19): "Hello everyone, thank you guys so much for coming today. I really appreciate and it really warms my heart to see this many people in this building to come and talk about some of the hard issues that are affecting racial minorities, particularly black students, on our campus. My name is Charles Rainey. I serve as president of the BSU this year, and what we hope to create through this conversation is a way for black students and racial minorities and other marginalized groups to be able to voice concerns about things that have really been festering on this campus for a long time. A lot of students have been jaded and have been really, really scared, really frightened and upset and we hope that this space is allowed not only for solution oriented steps to prevent a lot of the things that have been happening on campus, but also to serve as a forum where people can express their truest and deepest feelings about a lot of those things as well. We want to center this conversation by bringing up Wengel Kifle, who has prepared some remarks to share with you guys today. Thank you.
Wengel Kifle (’20): "Thank you so much for coming. When we discuss the current state of our campus, it's important to keep in mind what happened this past spring. Many students voiced deep and urgent pleas to Middlebury concerning not only Charles Murray, but also the deeply ingrained institutional and social aspects of Middlebury that do not make it a welcoming and inclusive space for students of color. After the start of this semester, there have been more events that have made students of color feel uncomfortable and unsafe. These events include the racial profiling of Addis; violent and explicit images and messages on chalkboards in Munroe directed toward Addis, racial profiling of a black female professor, harassment of black women on campus, faculty and students alike, and daily incidents, big or small, that students have to deal with in and out of the classroom in such white spaces. Personally, this semester has taken an extreme toll on me and my mental health. I found it impossible to have the motivation to survive my schedule and everything else Middlebury threw my way. And the lack of action by the greater community and the school in general to say 'we see you and we will fight for you' was all the more crippling. And I couldn't help but ask myself: why am I expected to give my best to a school and a community that was clearly not giving me its best? I hope that after today, that people that share my narrative can go away with seeing that administration and this school is recognizing them and is finally going to address these issues. Thank you.
Ishrak Alam (’18): "Thank you, Wengel, for your comments. We are going to open it up now to everyone -- we're going to have two mics upstairs and one down here."
Sohn: "If everyone can just be respectful of the two-minute rule. And also, faculty, administrators, students, everyone in this community, please feel free to weigh in and speak. If you could raise your hand if you'd like the mic, we can come to you."
Madeleine Bazemore (’19): "Hi, my name is Madeleine Bazemore and I'm a junior at Middlebury. I was in a meeting yesterday with some students activists...members here of the SGA, President Patton and some other administrators. We talked a lot about moving forward on campus, and something really concerning happened in that meeting. Our Title IX coordinator said that she didn't believe that white supremacy existed, was in her office or in the decision that was made regarding Addis in racial profiling. And I think the refusal of this campus and this administration to admit that white supremacy is present is very concerning. And I think that -- I don't even know how to address that, to have to take the time to explain what white supremacy is to a white woman felt like such a waste of time. Like, why are we having this meeting if I have to explain something so basic? Now, I don't know how to move forward with that, with the refusal that white supremacy exists, and because of that refusal that Addis will not receive an apology for being racially profiled."
Patton: "Yeah, thank you, Maddie. I did say that white supremacy existed, so I just want to make sure that there is a correct narrative. I would say, the really important thing that is true, structural racism exists and it exists at Middlebury. White supremacy, a way of being in the world, where the heritage is that white people have built something where they are unconscious of their own perspectives and unconscious of the way that they take up space, those are absolutely present at Middlebury. So that's a really important thing that I want to make sure I say, and that I said yesterday. And the other thing, in terms of the question, if we mean conduct that is based on or motivated by someone's personal characteristic that creates a hostile work environment, Middlebury is absolutely a place where that happens. Racism exists at Middlebury. Structural racism exists at Middlebury, and we have to work together to move forward to change that. And in our system, there is that conduct...or any other violation of our non-discrimination policies, we will act upon it and we have acted upon it. And we have a well-developed system in place to deal with those situations. The hard part of this conversation is that we can't apologize based on a narrative that wasn't supported by an investigation. I myself as a president have no part of that investigation. I want to make sure that's clear to everybody. So I don't know.... I didn't know that this investigation was going on. The reason why that office is independent is because they could investigate me, and that's really important for everyone to know. I want to say very clearly here, we are moving towards restorative practices as a culture, particularly in student life. And I and other members, individual members of SLG, are willing to sit with anyone -- anyone -- in a restorative practices circle, with trained facilitators, that acknowledges harm. I will sit with anyone [for] as long as it takes, in as many restorative practice circles as it takes, to change this community. And I would welcome any request to do that."
Sohn: "This is a quick announcement. We're also aware that some people might not be comfortable speaking up on a microphone, so we're gonna pass around some index cards if you'd rather pose a question that way. And then one of the students here can help ask that question. Thanks."
Liz Dunn (’18): "Going along with the point that President Patton just made, if there is white supremacy and structural racism at Middlebury, and if that is present in the Title IX Office, and if the investigation found that there was no evidence that Addis was racially profiled, does that not draw into question the investigative practices that Middlebury uses, and the standards that are currently in place? And is there any direct way to address that and to change that?
Patton: "Is our Title IX person here? I think there are a couple of things that probably should get clarified. The first is — and thank you, Liz, for your question — the fact that we need to always think about structural racism that we have, that doesn't mean that we don't stand by the integrity of the work that we've done, and that's the hard piece of this. And I need, as a president, and I do, as a president, stand by the integrity of the work that was done... Again, standing in restorative practice circles is part of acknowledging all of the different impacts for all of us here. But it's really important that even if there is a constant need for us to look at making the systems better, we still have to abide by the integrity of the process that exists here now."
Sue Ritter, Title IX Coordinator: "So I'm in a difficult position here because I can't discuss much of what I did in terms of the investigation that we did. I also completely reject the characterization that was just given of my office, and will continue to reject that. I have spent since 2008 here working really hard to make sure that the investigations that we do are free of bias, that they're fair, that they are full and fair investigations done by trained experts. My job is to be the guardian of our anti-discrimination policy. If I thought that this operation that I'm overseeing was grounded in white supremacist principles, I wouldn't be here. So people are going to have their opinions. I understand that. And I know I'm going to get blasted for everything that I'm about to say, but I am very confident in the people that conducted this investigation and worked extremely hard to make sure that all of the evidence was being considered in a careful and thorough and fair way. I don't know what else to say about that. And to get the response that I'm getting, that I don't have an understanding of what white supremacy is, in this context, is insulting. I didn't speak in that meeting yesterday because I was too flabbergasted to speak. I understand that people are entitled to their opinions. I have offered and will continue to offer to talk to anyone about the language of our policy and the process that we follow and will always be open to suggestions about how we can make it better. I never want to exclude somebody from coming into my office and saying, 'hey, this is language I think you ought to include,' 'this is language that I think you should take out.' I welcome anyone to look at the anti-harassment policy at any time and tell me what they think and I'm probably over my time speaking. But it's hard for me to stand here and speak without looking defensive, but I'm very confident in the work that we do, the work that we've been doing for ten years and the office that we've built. And that's all I have to say."
Rainey: "Hi, I'm Charles Rainey. I have a question. Sue, thank you so much for the contribution to the conversation. I am personally curious about how many people of color were involved in the investigation process and making this determination that came out of your office. And I think that that's a very important question to get us to understand what influences and what overwhelming perspectives may be in the office that may impact what the perception of the reality of the situation is in this regard... and creating definitions of what racial profiling is when there are no people — racial minorities in the room. And that may not be the case, but I just want to know — specifically, the question is: how many people of color were involved with this determination?"
Ritter: "Charles, I just want to make sure I understand the question. Are you saying how many people of color were interviewed in connection with the investigation? Is that what you're asking?"
Rainey: "So I think my question is not necessarily interviewed -- in terms of the process, the members of the administration who made the decision on what the determination is, how many, if any, were people of color?"
Ritter: "I have two people that work for me; they're both white. Is that what you're asking me?"
Rainey: "Yes."
Ritter: "Yes, so one was the investigator and one was the adjudicator. Correct."
Rainey: "Right. And I don't want to go over my time and I don't want to take up too much space in this conversation -- but I think my point in making this is that -- you know, what effect does the overwhelming whiteness in terms of the people who were involved in the determination have on the conclusion? And do you think personally that that may have affected what is going on here in terms of what the determination is?"
Ritter: "If I personally thought that, we would be having a different conversation. So I don't think it had an effect, no."
Shatavia Knight (’20): "On the idea that there are three white people in the Title IX office, I want to talk about the idea of administration. And one thing that I learned in my high school is that you can't be what you can't see. And there are very, very few professors of color here on campus. And so as a black female here, it's very hard for me to be in an environment where everyone says 'you can go on, you can be successful, you can learn a lot from your Middlebury experience' when I don't have many examples of, you know, black professors here on campus. And I wanted to know what Middlebury is trying to do about that, because I know that if I was to go into academia, Middlebury wouldn't be one of the schools that was on my list to get hired to. And I want to know what the administration is doing about that, to get more professors of color here so that students like myself don't feel like they're learning about race from white professors, and they're not learning about problems in society that they probably haven't actually experienced themselves."
Miguel Fernández (Chief Diversity Officer): "Thank you, Shatavia. That's an excellent question. You're absolutely right. Our diversity efforts within the student body over the last 20 years have been quite successful. I was a student here in the early '80s and I look out across this room and I see lots of diversity present here, and that was definitely not the case in the '80s. Some people feel as though we have a long way to go, and I won't disagree with that, but there has been significant change in the student body. That process has not been nearly as quick in the faculty -- you're absolutely right. We have been working on that hard lately — let me explain a couple of things that we've been doing. Over the last two years, we've been working with outside consultants who have been coming in, and it's mandatory now for all the search committees that are searching to go through a series of four workshops to work on how to diversify their pool, how to learn about bias in the evaluation system, et cetera, how we are going to present ourselves in interviews, the kinds of questions we're asking and the kinds of signaling we're doing in our advertising, and working with all the departments in that way. We're producing data for the search committees and working very hard. This year was the first cohort that came from having worked with them, and it was possibly the most diverse entering class of faculty in recent memory that we've seen, and we hope that this will continue. One of the frustrations is that faculty turns over a lot slower than students and so it's a slower process, but we're really working hard there. Some of you are aware of the C3 program — that's the idea of bringing in post-docs. We're part of a consortium of liberal arts colleges. The diversity officers are working to bring post docs in, folks from underrepresented groups and first generation, and also working on different topics to bring some diversity to give them exposure to what a liberal arts college is like. We visit the research universities to talk to the the graduate students about what a career is like, because oftentimes advisors in grad school advise their advisees not to go to a liberal arts college. They have this misconception that it's only teaching, and they don't maintain their research. So we go to break those myths and try to get folks -- and we take colleagues from the faculty to go talk to them about what that experience is like, what it's like to teach at a liberal arts college to try to get them into the pipeline. So those are a couple of the efforts we're doing, a lot of efforts in that way to try to address that. But you're absolutely right."
Student, Unknown: "So I thought it was great that you talked about some of the training that certain administrators get, and I was wondering if that training — if the faculty, as well as the people in Title IX, also get that training?"
Fernández: "Yes, so that's a good question, too. So the search process — there isn't mandatory training right now, and that is something that we have been talking about that's been made very present. And I think that is something the discussions are going toward, to make it for faculty, staff, students and the administration. There is currently for staff and faculty a -- I would say a minor training... there's a bigger thing around sexual harassment and other things that also talks about bias and discrimination. And everybody has to go through that. It's not enough. And that's exactly the kinds of discussions we're in right now. What we've done is we've had a lot of opt-in types of things, and we also do sessions with the new faculty as they come in. But that is part of the ongoing conversation."
Jeff Holland (’19): "I have a question directed generally at the administration. I understand that there's a desire, even possibly a requirement, an obligation, to stand behind the integrity of the judicial process and also to maintain confidentiality about any processes that may be undergone. But also there has been a very blatant contradiction in the judicial process involving Addis that was pointed out in The Campus, which is the most widely read student-run media outlet we have. So I don't think that there's any way that it could be more widespread that there was a contradiction between the judicial officer who said there was no need to move the investigation further, and then later came the guilty verdict after that. And at the same time, that same article pointed out that there was an ample amount of evidence that Addis was not present at that event. So I'm just wondering -- I know you want to uphold the integrity of your judicial process, but at what point does that break down, when there's evidence in the most widely read student publication there is, pointing that there's been a contradiction and pointing out that there's evidence to the contrary of what the judicial officer said? Thanks."
Hannah Ross (General Counsel): "I am a lawyer and I am responsible for Middlebury's compliance with laws. We did a full, fair and thorough investigation over the summer in response to a student's complaint that an employee acted wrongly. We looked very seriously at the question of whether our employee had engaged in a violation of our anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policy. Commencing an investigation about employee misconduct does not start a student conduct case. There is no student conduct case that can be brought against a person who's not a student of Middlebury. The investigation came to a conclusion following our policy and our process. The facts, as we understand them, do not support the narrative. That's where we are. It's not a guilty verdict. There is no proceeding that remains pending, and as I said, there is no process that Middlebury engages in that relates to a student's behavior when that person is no longer enrolled at Middlebury. That doesn't happen."
Sam (’18): "My name is Sam and I'm a senior here. Uh, what if you were wrong? I didn't mean that in a rude way, but seriously, what if you were wrong? Because you're talking about this as if, since Addis doesn't go here anymore there's nothing more you can do, it's not your problem. But I don't think that's even the point of it because the public safety officer who racially profiled her is still here. That person is still here. People say that the same public safety officer racially profiled a professor on campus this fall, which is something that the administration has also not addressed in particular, except for some rhetoric. So my question is, where's the process -- is it in Title IX? Is it in the judicial office? Is it through legal counsel? -- that would actually seek to respond to the allegations made against that officer who's still employed."
Ross: "I certainly didn't mean my comments about the fact that there's no student conduct process that gets started against a person who's not enrolled as a student at Middlebury to suggest that because a student has graduated, we don't care about our alumni. That's not at all a reflection of what I said. What I was trying to say is, there is no action that Middlebury takes that can impose a guilty verdict on a person who's not a student of Middlebury. And the investigation's conclusion, as I assume a number of you have read in the statement that we posted on Monday in the newsroom, the investigation concluded based on a wide array of evidence, including 22 interviews of members of our community. That investigation concluded that our public safety officer told the truth and acted within our policies. That's where we are."
Zeke (’21): "I realize that as a white male coming from an upper-class background, I hope a different perspective in this conversation. But at the same time -- I haven't suffered any racial biases here and I don't mean to detract from the Addis conversation going on -- but in my short time here I've also noticed that there are some serious institutional barriers preventing diversity from growing on campus. I find that we've touted our Posse and First at Midd programs ant stuff like that, but those don't actually account for a great deal of diversity percentage-wise in the student body. So I have a question for the administration as a whole. How can we make this a safer and less homogenous environment for future students? Could we, say, make Middlebury test-optional in the admissions office or perhaps look at tuition prices, as we clearly need a certain percentage of the student body to pay full price to account for the financial aid that we offer to other students?"
Patton: "Thanks, Zeke. That's a great question. I should just say that I'm a white woman who comes from a privileged background. So, in terms of financial aid, financial aid is the number one priority for this administration, to create more financial aid for students of all backgrounds. And it really, really matters to me that we do that. The other part of the balance that we have to make all the time is around questions of — we are required by law to balance our budget, so we kind of have to do both things. We are now, in any given year, we are between 42 and 48 percent of students on financial aid. The average grant is about 45 or 46 thousand dollars. And so we are in the top 40 or 50 schools in terms of giving financial aid. That doesn't mean that we can't and should do better, which is why this past meeting of the trustees -- the number one thing we did on a retreat with the trustees is to say, we want in the next 10 years to get to a much, much higher percentage of students on financial aid. Just so you all are aware, it would take us raising 360 million dollars to get to 55 percentage of financial aid endowed so we could just give that to folks. We haven't set a goal yet. One of my first jobs is to push the trustees, my 36 bosses, to set a goal, and that's we are now pushing to do. The last campaign, in terms of raising money, was 500 million dollars, and it took about 10 years to raise that, and a lot of it went to different kinds of things. So there needs to be a real concerted effort. That's what it's going to take to do that, and that is my number priority. So that is where we want to go and I hope we can get there. I hope that -- one of the things that would be really great to hear from people about is thinking about this larger question of, how do we get the word out about where we are and who we are without folks feeling like all we're doing is PR or touting a rhetoric or that kind of stuff. If there's a more real way that we could communicate both where we've come but also how much farther we need to go, that would be greatly appreciated, because we need help on making sure that we communicate in a genuine way. I hope that answered your question. I would love your help in making this a reality over the next 10 years. Is Andi Lloyd here, by the way? Can you address the faculty issue that was raised?"
Andrea Lloyd (Vice President for Academic Affairs/Dean of Faculty): "About diversity?"
Patton: "No, about the faculty member."
Lloyd: "So there was an allegation of racial profiling made by a faculty member. That case was also investigated. There was a determination that there was not racial profiling in that case. Um, what else?
Sohn: So, we just want to be conscious of people who don't feel comfortable speaking up on the mic, so we have collected some notecards. If we can just read one, so that we can be fair in that way, that would be great. So, one of the questions, is: isn't it important to address specific incidents of racism on campus quickly? What do you mean by inclusivity? Oh, so those are two questions. Just a blanket statement to avoid talking specifics of people's experiences."
Karla Nuez (’19): "My question was, in the email sent out to students regarding this event, it was stated that the community was broken. My question is why is there a constant need to describe the Middlebury community as a homogenous one, when that in turn avoids that there are people on this campus that struggle. By calling it homogenous, you're completely disregarding those struggles. And I feel like that makes it seem like the administration doesn't know the students that can pay the 60k-plus to attend this college. And when I was at the board of trustees meeting dinner, I told the chair about the racial profiling cases, and she looked at me, baffled. I think that is a clear indication that the administration and the board of trustees do not know their students, do not know what is happening on campus, and if their job is to protect us I feel like they're not doing the greatest job."
Weston Uram (’18): "I grew up at Kenyon College, where my mother is a faculty member, and one of the things I admire most about Kenyon is the president. Shawn Decatur, also known as D-Cat among the students, is a fun, approachable president who loves to talk with the students about any topic they bring up. One of his best qualities is his ability to find an autonomous voice. He was never afraid to say what he thought even if it differed from the public stance of the college. I hope to ask a few questions that Laurie, as the person and not as the institution, could answer. I want to know if you think Addis was at the Charles Murray talk. I'm not asking what the college has said or what they have not said. I want to know what you believe. I want to know what you believe because I want to know why you call Addis a friend. I want to know why you and your administration would take the time to mail a framed photo of you and Addis together to her personal residence, but don't seem to take the time to acknowledge the pain and suffering you have caused her. I want to know why the administration has refused to mention Addis's name in relation to the racial profiling or in response to the violent imagery found on the chalkboards in Munroe. I want to know why a photo of Addis walking at commencement, cane in hand, is repeatedly being used as promotional material for graduation. And I want to know when the administration will stop using black bodies as simply props and advertisements, and when they will recognize them as real people who have real feelings, who have real struggles, and who deserve real apologies."
Toni Cross (’18): "I have a mic up here, but I would love to hear President Patton's response to those questions."
Patton: "So, first of all, the comment about Middlebury communities, I absolutely agree. And I think that we should be continuing to talk about different communities. And if we haven't done so enough, I apologize for that. It's really important that we think through those questions of acknowledging different communities and acknowledging specifics about pain that you all have felt. One of the things that I really, really want to hear about, and I know we want to continue to think about, is particularly in classroom environments where people of color are not feeling that they can speak up. Or that they feel if they do speak up, that they will be misunderstood. Those are an incredibly important place for us, and I hope that as faculty and staff we can work together to change those experiences. So I think that that's absolutely right and that's really important to do. I also want to say that what Dean Loyd was talking about, I actually sat with that professor and apologized for her experience. And it's a very important thing that she was in pain, and that was acknowledged. So I think it's an unfair characterization of me to say that acknowledgement doesn't happen. It was important to reach out and engage. When I -- I don't know what the images are that are being used. I think it's really important in a conversation that we're all trying to do better, that we're all doing a lot of work every day to raise inclusivity where it's really hard. If we could find a way -- I don't know, I can't supervise every single thing that goes out. If that image that goes out is there, I'm sure that that was painful for people to see. I am willing to sit with anyone in the community in a restorative practices circle, including Addis, to hear the pain that she has experienced. I will do that with anyone in this community. And I think it's really important that we continue to think about those specific experiences. And that's why restorative practices matters. Part of what is hard in presidential speech, and I wish I could answer you as a person -- I can't right now, I'm here as a president. And so, I would be happy to walk with you and talk with you, but my role at this moment is to uphold all of the hardworking people. And so -- I do spend a lot of time with students and tell them what I think all the time in the luncheon halls, I'm in classrooms, I'm walking throughout the campus every day. And so, I'm more than happy to sit and talk to you. I'm sure the president of Kenyon also wouldn't be able to speak about a case in this way, but I will say again, those images were very, very disturbing. And perhaps, yes, we should have used Addis's name. I will sit with Addis, I will sit with any of you in restorative practices and talk about harm any time. That is me both as a person and as a president. I hope that answers your question, and let's go for a walk."
Jasmine Crane (’18): "It really hurt my heart to hear Wengel's struggle, because her struggle is my struggle and as a black women in science, there's only one black female teacher in all of BiHall. And I really look up to her. She's a shinning example for me who contemplates going far and taking the extra mile, but when I'm with some of my colleagues I don't feel like I'm very far, I don't feel like I'm their colleague. I just feel like I am a black face here. And I feel like as a black, African-American woman here, I feel like community which is being thrown around so carelessly I feel it's just a word it's not a feeling. I feel like it's just a structure like a church. We come in here and do we really do anything pertinent? I don't seem to feel that. I feel that I see Latinos coming together, from different countries, I see South Asian, East Asian people coming together, and I feel like they have to do that on their own because there is no place even for them. And especially for black Americans here, I feel like that's a diaspora, there is no place for us on this campus. I feel like African's stick together, that's great to hear, but I feel like as an American black woman I have no place here. No voice. And I don't know how to change this, honestly, because it doesn't start with the people of color. We have to start all together as one body, as Middlebury. We have created this iconic self-image of being woke, of being liberal, of knowing more than ourselves. But do we even really know ourselves? And so I ask not only students to look in their heart and think about oppression. But I want the administration to look at themselves and how they conduct themselves in their everyday lives. And how they treat not only the students but each other.
Cross: "I just had a couple of questions: is there a timeline for fixing this broken Middlebury community? I know when I visited here for preview days in 2014 at least six people told me: do not come to this school, it will crush you and I don't know that I could in good conscious tell a black senior in high school to come here. It's been four years. Is there a timeline for making it better. And also I would like to ask the administration who have spoken here today how they would grade themselves in presentation and the image that they are giving to us? With the defensiveness that we constantly see, with the willingness to label actions, or to call themselves victims or point out unfairness towards themselves but not necessarily extend that same courtesy to the students. So I'm asking how would you grade yourselves? What kind of message do you think you're putting forward?
Treasure Brooks (’21): "I haven't been here very long but earlier Charles mentioned the overwhelming whiteness at this school and I just want to bring attention to the overwhelming blackness that doesn't come in the form of bodies. I live in Battel and I can't walk to the bathroom or back to my room without hearing trap music. And there is an overwhelming amount of black culture here but it's not represented in the population, in the student body. We've had CupcakKe come here last week, we're having Elle Varner come, and before that we had Noname Gypsy, she came here as well. And I think that how can we allow for the student body to be consuming black culture at such an alarming rate when we don't even value the black women that are walking around on this campus? I think that is remarkably grotesque, honestly, and if you really want to show support, if you want to show a greater cultural sensitivity towards black students then maybe we should make those events exclusive until we can show a general respect for all of the black diaspora, all of the black faculty, of the black students, and not just black culture. And additionally, to respond to something you said, President Patton, I would hope that you did not see your presidency and personhood as mutually exclusive because in the event that you do I think there needs to be a greater consideration for what leadership is."
James Sanchez (Assistant Professor of Writing): "I want to say a couple of things. I haven't heard anyone from faculty speak yet and I don't want to absolve us from any of these issues because this is just as important for students and administrators as it is for faculty. A couple of things I want to mention is one I feel like faculty needs to do a better job of modeling anti-racist behavior for our students in the classroom. I say that because when I did my interview here I spoke with a Latina student and this was before Charles Murray and she was telling me with issues that she had with white professors in the classroom and how as a Latina student she often felt that racist, bigoted viewpoints were held on equal playing field as anti-racist viewpoints and I think that's something that I challenge all faculty to really consider when having classroom discussions. I also want to say that faculty have a lot of agency in creating change on campus environments and that's something we all need to remember as faculty members when conducting our classes, creating new courses, interactions with students, we have agency in creating change. So I really want to challenge my colleagues here to on campus to really consider that in the future.
Sha (’19): "This is more a clarifying question. I understand a lot of time when it comes to the judicial process there's need for privacy but I also I feel there has been a lack of transparency with a lot of things that go on at this college. And I would like to be informed or educated in possible: is a student assumed guilty until proven otherwise? Or is a student assumed innocent until proven guilty? Why is it that when there is a sexual assault case reported, the victim is often the one asked to prove that there was actually assault, when in this case a student was accused and she was actually asked to find evidence to prove that she was not there?"
Ross: "Under all our policies individuals going through any kind of discipline are innocent until proven guilty. And the obligation is not on them to provide evidence. That's why we employ people and pay their salaries to gather evidence but people are free to offer evidence if they chose to offer evidence. If you want to learn more about how our policies work or want to learn more about our processes Dean Baishaki Taylor has solicited volunteers to serve on a policy advisory group. I'll be working with that policy advisory group to get feedback from students on policies that are of importance to you. We welcome other folks joining that committee
Júlia Athayde: (’19): "I want to raise attention to something that I found very troubling last semester and that was the fact that Bill Burger, who is the vice president of communications here, was personally involved in the Charles Murray incident and also very involved in writing all the articles and the communication that is written to alumni, articles in the New York Times, in the aftermath of the incident. First something I wanted to say, I work for the Office of Investment so after Charles Murray I actually had to talk to alumni and explain to them what was happening on campus so I'm very sympathetic to the fact that it was a very hard conversation and I know how difficult it was for administrators to deal with all of that. Since then, I've been thinking about the fact that [Burger] was personally involved and I'm not sure if he's here or not, this is not a personal attack, I just wanted to raise awareness for that. He was there, and he was also writing the communication for the college. And this latest article in the newsroom talking about racial profiling, I was wondering if that was the first time that we addressed that to the outer community and our alumni? And who wrote that article, because there was actually no author? And the last paragraph of that article actually talks about his involvement and that he was found not guilty. And I was wondering if that process involved the same kind of investigation that Addis had to go through? Why was he found not guilty, and why was that written in an article in the newsroom this week?"
Ross: "I was one of the folks who helped write that statement and the final paragraph addresses the fact that there were two separate investigations about what went on March 2. One was the Middlebury Police Department Investigation. The Middlebury Police are of course responsible for investigating criminal behavior, driving a car dangerously would be criminal behavior. The police did not find any evidence that caused them to have concern about that. They did not investigate that, they did not bring charges. The independent investigators concluded based on unanimous testimony from all the witnesses to the event that Mr. Burger drove carefully. Those are the facts in that case found by two different investigations."
Esteban Arenas-Pino (’18): “I would like the administration to expand on their stance on activism on campus. It feels like after last spring activism has become a dirty word and is often vilified. Is the administration willing and ready to accept activism as a part of the campus culture, and is the administration willing to foster this as a value? After many years witnessing activism especially by women of color on this campus I would like to see this fermented as a stronger value? We will leave Middlebury to be organizers and activists in our communities. Shouldn't Middlebury foster these skills?”
Sedge Lucas (’19): "I have a quick question for President Patton. I saw online that you and Professor Stanger are going to be having a talk this coming February titled "Campus Speech: when protest turned violent" at the Cronkite School of Journalism in Arizona. Can you explain what the goal of this talk is? What do you think other schools or academia as a whole can learn about how Middlebury handled the situation last spring?
Patton: "Thanks for the question. Lots of different thoughts there. There are so many ways in which we could have done better. We have been slow to respond to graffiti incidents. I would just ask people to understand that we are living in the world where immediate response and the fact that we have to get the facts right is we want to make sure we get the facts right before we actually make a statement and so sometimes if we can't do it in 12 hours it's because we're wanting to make sure we have all the facts right. That being said it's really important that that slowness of response is something that we can do better on. And we want to do better on. Secondly, the things that I have learned as a leader and a person here at Middlebury, number one, I was hoping that all the work that we've done in the last two years about inclusivity and scholarships raised and C3 developed and AIM, and the alliance on disability, the bias response team, the more funds raised for financial aid, the restorative practices, all of these are things that have happened since 2015, since I got here. My mistake was in thinking that all those things and inviting everyone to do more of those things and invite us into those conversations would heal the hurt and it didn't. I did not understand the degree of hurt in this community and again I want to say how deeply sorry I am for that. So in response to that, part of what I push on in everywhere that I go is that inclusivity has to be part of any conversation around freedom of expression but we have to do both in the 21st century. And that we do not become more free unless we focus on inclusivity and all the ways that we've been talking about. And we do not become more inclusive if we can't have that freedom of expression as the basis of who we are. And so that is a very powerful message that we want to send in as many different places as possible. So I hope that gives you as sense of both what I have learned personally as well as the kind of push I want to make on creating both inclusivity and freedom of expression as a balance, as well as the only way we can become more free in the 21st century is to become more inclusive. I also want to say that in our conversation yesterday, Liz [Dunn] said something really powerful. And I want to make sure that we say that and say something about that and talk more about it. And that is "What do you need and how can we help?" was a question that one of her common's deans asked her and how powerful that was. And I think that even as we have to uphold policies and procedures, I think that having student advisory groups as well as the faculty motion that was really fantastic that I publicly endorsed and was thrilled to publicly endorse last week, where we are going to be doing an external review of our diversity practices. Again the big learning that I had last semester is clearly all the stuff that we've done since 2015 is not enough, and it's not effective enough, and that's really powerful so we are developing an advisory group on diversity for faculty and for building faculty I have been really powerfully advocating and only faculty can build a black studies program but we are really excited because faculty are moving to create that and I want to say here how important it is that we create that black studies program. So, lot's more to say, and I know I need to hand over the mic.
Hannah Pustejovksy (’18): "I wanted to bring it back a little bit to the point about financial aid. So I am a white student, I'm also on almost full financial aid, and I am pretty lucky being a student who is white having had a lot family who have gone to college and have dealt with this system. But if having difficulty with the financial aid system here I cannot even imagine what other students, of color, are having on this campus because I have been here for four years and I have yet to understand what happens in the financial aid office. I was incredibly hurt by an email that came out last week or the week before encourage students to consider if they actually could take on the loans that they were being given because I have no choice. I don't know what I'm supposed to do if I can't personally take those loans on, am I just supposed to drop out? I also think that financial aid is one of the most important things to making sure that students here also feel welcome because we do have only 48 percent of students here on campus who have financial aid and if students of color are on campus and we are not making it easy for them to be here including the huge financial responsibility we are putting on them, how are we even supposed to start and feel like equals? Every day I am aware that I have so much less money than people here. And how is the financial aid office going to make that easier?"
Nia Robinson (’19): "I don't really have a question, more so a comment. Looking around this room most of the people in here are people I expected to be here. There are some surprises, like good surprises but nonetheless a surprise. And I think that it's really important when we're talking about community we claim who we are talking about. Because for example, the people who have called me the n-word are not found in this room. And I understand that people have commitments, I understand that people have other things going on, but everyone in this room ahs something else going on and so I think we need to make at who is making sacrifices for global community. A lot of people in this room are part of my community and I respect and love them a lot. But I think there are people who are not found in this room who have no stake in building a community and that's okay whereas if I take a step back then suddenly it's a problem. So that's not really question, just more so a call for everyone in here to talk to your friends, talk to your commons, talk to your professors, because if we are building a community we need to make sure we're reaching everyone and not just the people who self select to be here."
Kifle: "To touch upon the faculty member who spoke about faculty responsibility and accountability as well as Nia's comment about community, and also Treasury's comment. So we do consume a lot of black culture here and it's amazing how much we consume it and then don't acknowledge black people. I'm also in the classroom I'm so sick for having to stand up for something problematic that arises. If my professor is here, I'm sorry, I meant to have a private conversation with you, but this going to happen. So here we are talking about [solar] power in Africa and then the professor says 'There's 40 countries in Africa" and I said, 'no.' And then my art history professor was talking about Western Art and then mentioned Egyptian art and I questioned why that is because it's African art. The thing that surprised me is not the fact that it happened but in both of those classes where there's a huge amount of people in there I was the only one that had a problem with this and I was the only one that was expected to speak out, and of course I did because nobody else was doing it. But I'm so tired of taking on that mental labor. If you call yourself an ally, if you say you care about us, this movement, please speak up because I am tired. I am so tired and if you say you support this community and if you say you support these conversations and whatever Midd needs to progress on then take your part. And it's not just on the administration and it's not just on the faculty, it's on students as well. Show us that you care."
Sandra Luo (’18): "I really want to appreciate all of you for offering to have conversations with us but we're really tired of just talking. When is the administration going to show that they care beyond just sitting in a circle and talking and continuing to exploit the vulnerability and emotions of students? When are we going to see some sort of tangible, concrete action that comes from these conversations. And if you want to talk about helping us maybe address the list of demands here that we've been passing out. Apologize to Addis and provide reparations for all the trauma the school put her through, actually investigate Bill Burger and take anonymous sources seriously because that's the way of providing safety for people who are willing to come forward and share their experiences, fix the judicial system instead of just telling us that it's flawed but that's just how it's always going to be. And I want to recommend that a lot of people have been talking for years and a lot of work has been put towards inclusivity and diversity for years, long before March 2. It would be great if they could do something more than just conversations. It's one thing to acknowledge pain and flaws it's another to actually address the flaws so that current and future students won't continue to experience pain. I know a lot of people around me really want to listen to answers from the administration so I'm just going to hold on to this mic until we get an answer from the administration. I really want to hear about a concrete action plan that is something beyond a conversation."
Fernández: "Where to start. So in regards to the demands that you referenced, I think you heard in regards to the judicial piece I think Hannah made the invitation to serve on a policy committee there. That's a very direct way of impacting judicial change. The second one is about the mandatory training for everyone and I hope I addressed that earlier but that's in the process. It's not going to happen tomorrow but there are things in process and more to come, can't be more specific about that because that part to come is still being worked on and I don't have the details. I did share details for things that are ongoing. More things that are happening that are on the ground that we are doing: I did mention that we're working hard at diversifying the faculty, I think we had a good example and make some comments and probably just fill his spring courses. The bias incident thing was a new effort by the community bias response team, I will grant you it is imperfect, and if you will continue to work on it it's been an effort to try to address a lot of the issues we've been talking about. It is imperfect, it is new, we're going through that rocky start that many things do. I expect communications to improve and we will continue to work on that. Concrete things that are going on other things, more things we've been working on: we've been trying to work a lot around the support o DACA and undocumented students, putting a lot of effort on resources there, supporting them in many different ways. The first generation programs, those kinds of things. Opportunities to engage, one of the things a lot of folks have been talking about today is the administration, how it acts and why it doesn't change and one of the things we heard yesterday and I think this is valid is more student input in decision making, and that's been heard. And the SGA has had a proposal to create student advisory boards that will meet with the different VPs, so there you've got advisory boards that will meet with different folks to learn about the process how decisions get made how does the process work and to have a direct influence on that so for instance with finance, with a lot of the different areas. There's much to talk about, but there's a lot more to do, too."
Rainey: "I have a really quick question. There's been a lot of talk about this in the black community and many other communities especially in the after math of Charles Murray. We all know how many of us feel the complete community embarrassment of how interrogating and punishing students for protesting on campus. And as we more forward in terms of restorative practices from the administration, going back to what Toni and others have said providing a timeline with that but also after we put in these new restorative practices and these new restorative justice measures, are they going to be retroactively implemented and have retroactive application regarding people who have gone through unfair processes in the past and students who have gone through extremely unsettling and unfair disciplinary procedures here at Middlebury, for case by case basis? If anyone in the administration could speak to that?"
Katie Smith Abbott (Vice President of Student Affairs): "I have been charged with leading our exploration of how to bring restorative practice to Middlebury. We are partnering with a firm called the Consortium for Equity and Inclusion and the two anchors for that are a woman named Stacy Miller who is the associate provost of inclusivity at Valparaiso and Dennis DePaul who is from the Dean of Students Office at UVM which has had real success for a very long period of time with restorative practices, grounded in Residential Life at UVM. So they came to explain the basic concepts of what is referred to as RP to the SLG in June, the Senior Leadership Group which is the Presidents and all the Vice Presidents. They came back for a subsequent training because we didn't fit everything in, they came back in September, they have met for an introductory session with a broad range of faculty and staff who work in student life. And they're coming back for a three-day training December 18, 19, and 20 and if there are folks in this room who want to participate in that training I'd be happy to talk to you. The only requirements are that you're able to fully commit for the three full days. It's 8:30-5, it's three full days, and you're willing to be part of the ongoing implementation conversations. It is not a fast process to implement but we're fully committed to it. The other thing I would just note is that restorative justice and restorative practices are kind of getting used interchangeably, and I do want to be honest about the fact that I'm learning, this is not something I knew about before I started on this journey working with Stacy and Dennis, being part of a group that's being doing some deep diving into this work. But what I will offer is that they have explained to us very clearly that restorative justice is a small subsection of restorative practices, and the reason we're drawn to restorative practices is because they can be used proactively not just reactively so that a moment like this one wouldn't be appropriate for a restorative circle, like President Patton was referencing earlier, but something called a conference that's very intentionally facilitated. Although I've got to say that I think the student leaders of this session are doing a pretty amazing job. So that's the timeline, we're moving into this training in December with an eye towards hopefully grounding it in student life and residential life by next fall."
Vee Duong (’19): "I had a question: so something kind of disturbing that I have been noticing this year being involved in more cultural orgs is that a lot of students say "Oh wow I didn't know that existed, when do y'all have meetings?" And then we're like oh well we had a booth at activities and we have a mailing list that's been open, we operate out of the AFC which is always open, and to have these open discussions that we have been having about race, to have people who do not identify as that come into that space, that is acceptable and that's fine and we encourage you to do that but to have people come in and not be aware of the space they're taking up is very frustrating. So this is a point for faculty and staff and/or administrators, in that what are you all doing to provide real educational resources for students, incoming students especially, so that the burden doesn't fall on cultural orgs where we are already working really hard to provide a space to take care of our members mentally and emotionally to support each other so we don't have to take on the additional burden of educating people because all the educational resources I have seen have been put together laboriously through hours of our personal time.
Baishakhi Taylor (Dean of Students): "Vee I hear your question and I agree that we also need to do more. We have added sessions during the MiddView. President Patton has now made JusTalks mandatory for the entire class. We have also added more training in our reslife program and among colleagues who are in the reslife group and that's obviously not adequate so on top of having all these sessions that introduce with the incoming class this year we'll continue to build on that and I also acknowledge that having those sessions only during MiddView and JusTalks is not sufficient so we need to build on it throughout the year so the responsibility is not on the Anderson Freeman Center and thank you for doing the work that you're doing and raising the question."
Anonymous question (read by Rainey): "It seems like both Alison Stanger and Laurie Patton have been taking a lot of public, national opportunities to speak about the events of the spring, including at a congressional hearing on C-SPAN, the Free Speech Conference Laurie spoke at. For the purpose of transparency, are President Patton or Alison Stanger being financially compensated for these talks? Are they profiting off the terrible situation the administration has put us in?"
Patton: "I was not paid to go to the University of Chicago and I have no interest in profiting any situation that happened at Middlebury. I am very clear that any conversation that's part of the national discourse where Middlebury is mentioned we need to create balance so at the Chicago conference part of what we pushed on with many, many people there is where is our inclusivity? Where are our inclusivity efforts? We've always got to balance those two things no matter what happens. I had no intentions of profiting in any way my intent is to work on moving a national conversation where people who are constantly talking about free speech also talk about inclusivity. So both of those things are balanced and fair and appropriate, so that's the very direct answer. I had a couple more responses to questions I didn’t get a chance to answer but if there’s time later [I’ll answer].”
Victor Filpo (admissions counselor, class of '16): "I hope I really speaking for myself here rather than any hat of student, alumn, or staff member here on campus. Something that is frustrating, honestly, about this conversation is that we've really been centering around the case that happened with Addis or the case that happened with the professor. And that's completely legitimate because they are people who've been struggling a lot and they've been carrying a lot of the heaviness of what's going on. But I would like to say that the reality is that a lot of people of color deal with this. It is not surprising. We are tokenizing them right now by only brining up those instances. When I was freshman, when I was walking with my Posse member in Battell, a public safety office stopped us and told us, 'I haven't seen you on campus can you show us your IDs?' When we were first years here at Middlebury. He still works here. I have also gotten accused by other Public Safety officers for other things. It turns out completely fine because my dean loves me, obviously. And all the deans here do an amazing job at really caring for their students and really trying to look out emotionally for everyone. But this continues happening on the daily. Just this last summer I was crossing with two other students, and I'm glad this stuff happens to me when I'm with other people because I would not be able to believe that it happens to me on this level, weekly or biweekly, it's insane. Crossing the street, people start accelerating and then they stop and they yell the n-word at you. You are walking to your house or walking to your dorm and someone stops in a car and just yells at you, 'that looks stolen,' yells a rap lyric at you, choses another slur. It really does baffle me that this happens so often and I was just here as a senior two years ago and we had the same conversation about a sombrero right here. And every year we will continue to have this conversation right here. And yet I still have to walk home and have this experience all over again. And the only time I will be taken seriously isn't even when I'm with another person of color but rather when I have the kind, woke, white lady who is willing to represent me and say whoa he's going through some pain let's do something about it. I don't want someone to have a voice for me. I want to be able to talk for myself to be able to talk for myself, to be believed, for something to happen when I ask for it. When a person of color is going through a lot they don't have means to be able to express it. Do we really understand the amount of people of color who haven't said anything about their experiences. And when you sit with someone and they say, 'that baffles me,' does it really? Does it really? It shouldn't because it honestly happens on such a daily level. And you yourself you're all very smart people. We know that this happens. We ignore it. We choose to ignore it because it makes us feel comfortable. And I wonder when we're going to stop with this comfort because we just sit here every single year and have this conversation all over again in this comfort and I hope that in future instances when the next one comes up it's not Shatavia, it's not Victor, it's not the professor. It's a collective group of people who are going through a lot."
Student, unknown: "You said something about conversation and us being free and all that. There's a lot of dark forces in general on this campus and beyond this campus and a lot of what was just talked about were references to instances where students are facing racism from other white students on this campus that I'm sure a lot of people don't know about. If we look we have Donald Trump as our president and there's just crazy things going on while we're sitting here having restorative conversations, there's evil things going on and this stuff that we're talking about is just a small sample of something that's going on. It comes to a point where people have to decide whether they're going to actually be on the side of what's right or what's wrong and everyone has to make their own choice. I hope that especially the white people here will make that choice and not hide behind good sounding rhetoric or kind words, because those things are good and genuine kindness is good but a lot of people here feel like unless the school addresses the issues that are going on at the institutional level how are we going to be able to talk about what's going on in the world?"
Patton: "I wanted to mention that we're working with public safety, public safety has gone through a mandatory de-escalation training as well as diversity training this fall and will continue to do so. Concrete action. Concrete action: we created a seizing the opportunity fund for any student at Middlebury who wants to and needs to do something different, whether they need their parents to come here, or whether they need to go to MiddCore, whether they need more money for something they need more access to at Middlebury. We have raised that money so that every student has access to all educational opportunities. We started that last year, it's available, talk to Katy Smith Abbott, another concrete action. Third, one of the things we're really excited about is, I really appreciate what you said about facing racism and acknowledging and the everyday racism that happens on this campus that I acknowledged in the beginning. I think that if we could create an archive to create news stories of what is happening to people that would make it even more powerful for us so we need to get those kinds of stories on the books. We need to do a lot more mandatory training, that concrete action is happening in the next year, and in the back there are about 15 more concrete actions, none of them are enough. We need your advice on how to make it more effective and again I want to acknowledge the hurt that people are feeling and we are going to create a lot of student advisory committees to be better and more effective. And I am so proud of this community for being here tonight. Thank you very much."
Sohn: "We also know that tonight not all of your questions have been answered and we want to thank everyone for raising those question."
Anonymous notecard (read by Sohn): "Hoping on Wengel and Mia's point on allyship, please understand that these may be very sensitive times for POCs, QTPOCs on campus and on that note if you find yourself going to the AFC I hope you take the responsibility to learn about what it means to the POC/QTPOC community. You could speak to the directors and student staff in the space, and it's very central to understand what it means to take up space in times as sensitive as this one. On that note please come feel free to come learn more about the positive impact the AFC is making on this institution."
(11/09/17 1:03am)
College faculty met for over three hours in a plenary meeting on Nov. 3 in which they passed a motion declaring their commitment to promoting diversity and discussed the investigative procedures resulting from allegations of racial profiling by Public Safety.
Diversity Practices Motion
The motion, formally entitled, “Moving Forward on Diversity Practices” passed with 113 yes votes, 8 no votes and 1 abstention. Faculty voted anonymously by paper ballot.
Professors Gloria González, Darién Davis and Michael Sheridan of the spanish, history and anthropology departments, respectively, presented the motion on behalf of Middlebury Faculty for an Inclusive Community, a caucus that formed in the wake of the Charles Murray protests last spring. The motion cited the college’s inability to address issues of racism without estranging members of the community as justification for the suggestions.
The motion suggests four measures aimed at making the college more inclusive: conducting an external review on diversity policies and practices; creating a standing faculty diversity committee that would work with the administration, board of trustees and other faculty bodies; establishing a protocol for recording, reporting and responding to harassment and racism; and hiring an external facilitator to lead discussions aimed at fostering diversity within the community.
“As we continue to debate issues, create committees, and hold executive sessions, many of us are feeling more alienated and perplexed by the inappropriate actions and words of some of our colleagues, and the racist atmosphere that has affected our health and well-being,” reads the motion.
“We believe that we need a clear institutional policy for how to respond to such acts and how to change the social environment in a productive and respectful manner ... the college, on its own, is not prepared to guide us through difficult conversations without alienating many colleagues.”
The passing of a motion does not result in an immediate policy creation or change. The motion will go to the faculty council and the chief diversity officer, Miguel Fernández, for consideration and potential implementation.
“What we’re doing here is making an expression of our collective will. We leave it to the administration to decide what steps to do and what timing,” Sheridan explained.
“I think this is an urgent thing to do, especially given what we read in The Campus newspaper about issues of racial profiling,” said Patricia Saldarriaga, a Spanish professor. “In spite of everything that we’re doing that sounds very, very efficient, I think we need to make some changes. And those changes in my opinion, when there are students and faculty suffering, I think we need to do something now.”
Davis views the motion as a way to demonstrate the college’s commitment to progress and improvement.
“This could help us create new narratives of continually getting some place where we want to [be.] This sort of gives us a sense, not just for PR, but for PR, that we are, as a Middlebury community, not what is said on C-SPAN or in The New York Times. That we as a faculty agree that this is something important and that we’re moving as educators to try to become wiser,” he said.
Fernández voiced his office’s support for the motion, informing the room that he had discussed both an external review and standing faculty committee prior to the meeting. He said he supports hiring an external facilitator, and has already sought out recommendations from chief diversity officers at other schools.
College president Laurie L. Patton echoed similar sentiments of support.
“I think the time for us to do it is now,” Patton said. “We have put a lot of things in place...over the last couple of years but they’re clearly not effective enough and we need to think about how to make them all better...so I see all four of these, particularly the committee, as a way of our being able, as an administration, to check in.”
Investigative Procedures
The college’s General Counsel Hannah Ross and Title IX Coordinator Sue Ritter provided information and answered questions relating to the college’s investigative and disciplinary processes. Ross referred to Addis Fouche-Channer’s ’17 allegations of racial profiling with veiled language, emphasizing that she was prohibited from discussing most of the details of the case, due to federal and state law.
Ross emphasized that the investigation into Fouche-Channer’s involvement in the events of Mar. 2 resulted in a finding of “no determination,” rather than a finding of guilt or innocence.
Fouche-Channer did not undergo a judiciary hearing last spring following the conclusion of the investigation.
“A judicial affairs officer makes a decision at a particular moment in time about whether or not to proceed to a hearing before the community judicial board. No hearing before the judicial board occurred,” Ross said.
Ross stressed that when Fouche-Channer brought a complaint of discrimination to the college over the summer, the resulting investigation focused solely on the employee accused of discrimination and not on Fouche-Channer’s conduct.
“The student made a complaint that she had been discriminated against in violation of our anti-harassment policy. This is a claim of misconduct by an employee, which doesn’t start a conduct investigation about a student’s behavior, it starts an investigation about whether one of our employees violated our anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policy,” Ross said.
Ross added that the investigation found the student’s claim of discrimination to be unsubstantiated, which indicated that the employee did not violate the anti-discrimination policy. She cited newly acquired evidence, specifically eyewitness identifications, as the corroborating evidence for the officer’s testimony.
“Other evidence that came to light through the painstaking investigation that Sue’s office conducted corroborated that the testimony of the public safety officer was accurate and truthful. The other evidence included eyewitness identifications...There was no evidence that he had acted based on race,” Ross said.
“That’s not a violation of our anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policy, to accurately and truthfully identify someone. A belief that someone acted based on race or any other protected personal characteristic, as sincere as it may be, is not enough under this process, we need to find evidence of that,” Ross continued.
Sujata Moorti, a Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies professor, raised concerns over the use of eyewitness identifications that Ross mentioned.
“Is that the only basis on which you decided that there was no discrimination, there was no violation of the college policy? Because there’s tons of scholarly evidence saying that eyewitness accounts and eyewitness testimony is really unreliable,” Moorti said.
“I don’t feel that I can go into detail and summarize all of the evidence...Our investigators and adjudicators...are sensitive to the fact that memory is flawed and that there are eyewitness accounts that are not credible. There are eyewitness accounts that are credible, for a variety of reasons,” Ross said.
“I would just say that we need to be particularly careful when we have evidence from students where students of color are mistakenly identified on an ongoing basis,” Moorti replied.
Ross agreed. Ritter also addressed Moorti’s question, explaining the ways that investigators assess credibility.
“We evaluate factors like the clarity of their observations, their ability to recall events accurately, the consistency of the witness’ claims, the witnesses’ demeanor during the interview, the witness’s potential interest or bias in the outcome, whether the witness’ statement was consistent or inconsistent with other evidence, and the existence of corroborative evidence. we are always looking for... the reasonableness or unreasonableness of a witness’ claims,” Ritter said.
Patricia Saldarriaga asked whether a case is treated differently if an accused party has been accused of acts of discrimination in the past.
“In talking about patterns, I wonder whether you have considered in this particular case, hypothetically speaking, let’s put it that way, when somebody who is accused...of racial profiling, has other cases where he’s also been accused of racial profiling...how would that affect the reliability of that testimony from an officer?” Saldarriaga asked.
Ross replied that she wasn’t sure the question was entirely within the realm of the hypothetical, and said she could not be more precise, but that they do look for information in order to construct and consider a pattern of behavior. Ritter emphasized that this pattern has to be “substantiated.”
“There has to be evidence that other than just a report,” Ritter said.
Student Government Association (SGA) Chief of Staff Ishrak Alam ’18 asked whether Ross or Ritter could provide information pertaining to the allegations that a professor was racially profiled by a public safety officer.
“It’s been resolved,” Ross said.
Peter Johnson, a computer science professor, proceeded to question the policy of confidentiality with regard to the case of alleged racial profiling of the professor. Johnson expressed frustration with the way his colleagues have been affected by the lack of information.
“I understand that there are confidentiality issues...I think there’s a conflict though, because in some cases where the resolution is not disclosed, then other members of the community are adversely affected,” he said. “Even if it’s resolved from the administrative standpoint, other members of the community may be scared. If they don’t know that someone who may have done something is, say, still employed by the college, then these friends of ours, these colleagues, may be walking around uncertain if this is a person they may have to face in a law enforcement-ish circumstance.”
“I would guess that the reason for confidentiality after the resolution is to protect the person who may or may not have been disciplined. But on the other hand that’s affecting our friends. So basically what this boils down to is my friends are scared and I don’t like it,” Johnson added.
In response, Ross emphasized the importance of confidentiality in the investigative process.
“Middlebury didn’t dream this up on its own. Every other institution, every other employer I know of has confidentiality provisions in these exact same policies that look exactly like this, and they are there to get people to bring complaints forward, because it is very, very common that when people want to report they have concerns about confidentiality...They’re concerned about retaliation against them, they’re concerned about retaliation against the people who may be called to testify as witnesses,” Ross said.
Michael Olinick, a math professor, who wrote the aforementioned letter to the editor detailing the alleged racial profiling, further questioned the practice of investigating patterns of behavior, wondering how reports of benign interactions with Public Safety officers would be obtained, since they would presumably not be reported.
“I understand racial profiling to mean that a person treats someone of color differently than they would treat a white person. So let’s take a hypothetical case, that I am leaving my office late at night which I often do, walking towards my car and a campus security officer comes up to me and demands me to stop, raise my hands, explain what I’m doing here. And I’m a person of color and believe that that was racial profiling. And I talk to some of my colleagues who say they do this all the time, they leave their buildings at night quite late and they often see campus security people who just wave at them. In an investigation of racial profiling, would you attempt, do you normally attempt to investigate how that person who’s been charged with profiling, has behaved in similar situations with a white person?” Olinick asked.
Ross responded that yes, they look at patterns of behavior. She then went on to reflect on the use and meaning of the term “racial profiling.”
“Racial profiling is a label that is loaded and that is about a particular set of police practices in law enforcement,” Ross said. “The choice of saying this is a racial profiling case I understand is to get at the feeling that that decision should not be made based on race. And I agree with that. We shouldn’t be making decisions based on race about speaking to someone who’s leaving a building and presuming that the color of their skin means they don’t belong there. No question.”
Ross then explained that certain instances that appear to be discriminatory might not meet the legal standard required to result in a guilty finding.
“In order to comply with the law, it has to rise to the level of harassment or discrimination. And we have a challenge in our culture at this moment where we talk about things as harassing or discriminatory and we use that in a broader sense than the law does. The law has a standard of severe and pervasive and an ongoing basis, and we have to apply the legal standard,” Ross answered.
Olinick inquired again about whether investigations look into patterns of behavior.
“I’ve heard a lot about persistence of behavior where you can say well, there are a number of cases where this particular person acted in an inappropriate way toward persons of color. But this could be a single incident where there are many instances where this person has exhibited a pattern of behaving in a non-hostile, friendly way toward white people. And you’re telling me that part of the investigator’s responsibility is to seek out instances of parallel actions that involve--”
“Yeah, so in the law we talk about this as ‘are similarly situated people treated the same?’ And ‘are dissimilarly situated people treated differently?’...Our investigators ask for and get information to allow them to evaluate that,” Ross replied.
“Okay and how would they go about doing that. Is that up to the person bringing the complaint to suggest specific individuals to talk to or?” Olinick asked.
“If the individual bringing the complaint has information they can give that information to the investigator,” Ross answered.
“Yeah, but if they don’t?” Olinick asked.
“The investigator can get information from any Middlebury office that will help them resolve the investigation. So they can ask for information from relevant offices about that person’s interactions with other people. They get that information they evaluate whether it shows us patterns,” Ross explained.
“There isn’t going to be much of a record of innocent transactions between people...If a public safety officer behaves toward me in a friendly way or just ignores me, I’m not going to report that. So there isn’t going to be a record of how that person is treating people who’ve been in the majority up to this point,” Olinick said.
Ross responded by listing alternative ways that investigators can obtain information that allows them to construct an understanding of an employee’s past performance.
“There could be information from people who’ve worked with an employee for a number of years who’s witnessed a number of interactions that that employee has had on our campus. There could be information about an employee’s past performance from the way that they’ve been performance managed...we look for that information every way we can,” Ross said.
By 6:05 p.m., the three remaining participants scheduled on the meeting’s agenda had left the room. Michael Roy, dean of the library, and associate professor of Chinese Hang Du had been scheduled to provide information reports. President Laurie L. Patton had been scheduled to make closing remarks, but had left the building. As a result of their absences and consequent unavailability to speak, the meeting was adjourned.
(11/09/17 12:18am)
Middlebury College is a truly strange and absurd place when it comes to campus politics. To the outside world — including potential students abroad, first-year and transfer students — Middlebury is marketed as this progressive, liberal, environmentally-friendly, socially-aware place. And once you get here, it is very easy to continue to believe in this image — to just get wrapped up in school and the beautiful surroundings and ignore everything else that is going on around you. I had heard people say that Middlebury College is a bubble, and yes, it truly is.
Obviously, the college and its administration don’t exactly make it easy to engage with politics on campus. My first weeks here were pure, ignorant bliss; the Early Arrival Orientation and the Exchange/Transfer MiddView were completely apolitical. I had heard about the Charles Murray protests back home but I did not understand what they actually meant for the college community. I came here and no one told me much; it was just a “thing” that happened last spring, talked about like Voldemort is talked about by wizards in the Harry Potter universe.
And in the past few weeks it has become even more evident to me that students cannot rely on the college to address issues and to mobilize against racism. Cryptic emails are being sent out days after things actually happen — and can only be decoded when you read the Campus or the WRMC blog. The college is incredibly good at hiding everything under a mantle of rural-environmentally-friendly-progressive-granola-bliss and makes it very easy for students not to engage.
However, there must be something seriously wrong with a community if several blatantly racist incidents transpire on and around campus and new students still don’t know what is happening, are just going on with their lives, and are not aware or not willing to engage. I just don’t understand why more people are not angry and shocked, and why it is so easy for the white majority of this campus not to care or not to know. When you choose to study at a college like Middlebury for four years, shouldn’t you be aware that it is your responsibility to care and engage?
We were literally walking by huge posters titled WANTED: ADDIS FOR THE CRIME OF BEING BLACK AT MIDDLEBURY for several days in the dining hall. The Campus is full of articles and opinion pieces about racial profiling and other racist incidents. And yet, I don’t hear anyone talking about it in the dining halls. And when several buildings were sprayed with graffiti, my exchange student friends were still surprised that there are people here who are so unhappy, frustrated and angry that they would do something like that.
The fact, though, is that not everyone is privileged enough to not know. If you experience racism, classism and discrimination, it is impossible to continue living in happy ignorance and shy away from subjects that make you uncomfortable. It must be so frustrating to go to this college for four years, continuously surrounded by people who are just not willing to pop their own bubble of bliss.
As one of my friends said, some people will leave this institution as educated liberals without having had to engage with racism and their own privilege even once because this campus is so white and so apolitical. I chose Middlebury for my exchange because I wanted to go to a university that leads progressive political discourses and because I wanted a “Stückchen heile Welt” — a small piece of an intact world for a year. It didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t really have both at the same time. People, who have chosen to go to this college to receive a liberal education, should realize this too.
(11/08/17 5:44pm)
In Middlebury, Vermont, two men, a team of horses and a carriage are reversing the trend of globalization currently overtaking the country.
The Draft Trash Company was founded in 1997 by Patrick Palmer of Bristol, Vermont. Operating like any other private trash removal company, Draft Trash is individually contracted by its customers to remove trash from the ends of their driveways. The trash is carried away in a long, low trailer pulled by a team of gray-and-white Percheron horses. In Bristol, the idea gained popularity, and nearly 20 years later, Palmer and his horses now service more than 200 customers.
“He got the idea 20 years ago from a magazine article about a guy who used horses for a trash route in Washington,” said Nick Hammond, Palmer’s partner in Draft Trash’s Middlebury operations, which began in 2015.
About three years ago, changes in Vermont recycling codes prompted Middlebury to drop its contract with Casella, a local trash hauler who had been hired to service residents of the town. “I saw this as an opportunity,” Palmer said. This was his chance to expand business into Middlebury’s larger and busier market. After going door-to-door for several Saturdays to publicize the business, Palmer felt confident that there would be sufficient demand from the Middlebury area, and he made the decision to officially begin operations. He partnered up with Hammond, a carpenter and farmer from a few miles outside of town, and together they started Draft Trash Middlebury, which now services nearly 200 customers in the Middlebury area.
The company has each customer pay $6 for a sticker sold at the Otter Creek Bakery or Martin’s Hardware & Building Supply and put the sticker on a trash bag at the end of their driveway. The horse and carriage pick up the trash on Monday or Tuesday, depending on where one lives in town.
“We divide the town in half by Route 7 ... [and] do a Monday and a Tuesday morning every other week in Middlebury. [The] first day we picked up like 20 bags of trash. Now we’re up to ... about, oh, 75 or 80 bags of trash a day. ... It works out to be about 1800 pounds of trash a day,” Hammond said.
The growth and success of Draft Trash Middlebury in the last three years is due in large part to the popularity of the animals. The substitution of a couple of Percheron horses for garbage trucks, which are often noisy, often draws appreciation from locals and visitors alike. “We always stop for all the kids to come out and pet the horses,” Palmer said. “We’ve never done [a route] without somebody taking a picture someplace.”
The business also represents an environmentally friendly approach to an often environmentally costly business. Compared to a garbage truck’s average 2.8 miles per gallon, the horse-drawn operations have considerably less impact on the environment over their 25-mile route.
Given the environmental advantages of the business, Palmer also approached the college as a potential customer.
“When I first started in Middlebury I tried to get into Middlebury College because I thought that because they’re really environmentally conscious, they’d be willing to do it, ... [but] they felt that their way was efficient, and they didn’t want to [make] any changes,” he said.
Although the economic and environmental gains of the business are valuable, Hammond explained that his enthusiasm for his job is based on his love for the animals as much as anything else.
“I think it’s great because it is an environmental thing and it kind of saves fuel and is cool, but also it allows me to use the horses because I love them. ... I try to find as many ways as possible to use them,” he said.
The consistent work and engagement is beneficial for the horses. “[The horses] weigh close to 2,000 pounds, and they’re designed to be using their muscles for a long time. … If they don’t, they start to break down,” he said. “The trash wagon, when it’s full, weighs close to 8,000 pounds, and the two horses pull like it’s nothing. We’re some of the very few who use them on a consistent basis to do what they’re designed to do.”
Palmer, now 70, plans to leave Draft Trash Middlebury’s operations fully in the hands of Hammond as soon as he can find a full-time replacement for himself. Palmer will then continue on for another five years, focusing on Bristol, before retiring from the business after 25 years.
In and around Middlebury, Hammond hopes to continue operations as long as he can. “I think it adds to the town,” he said. “It’s a good reminder to people not how things used to be, but of a different pace of life.”
(11/03/17 8:01pm)
It's hard to believe that the month of October is already behind us. As I enter my third November as a member of this paper (my first as managing editor), I've come to realize just how easy it is to forget all the great work produced by our staff. Between classes, personal commitments, extracurriculars, and putting out The Campus every Thursday, we don't often take the time to reflect on some of the great reporting and commentary that appears on our pages each week. That's why I've decided that on the first Friday of each month, I will publish a selection of what I consider to be our paper's best and most important work from the previous month. 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 be 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, as is the case this month. In those instances, I will have already reached out to another editor(s) to confirm that it belongs. If you disagree, also feel free to email me or comment!
Now, please enjoy some fabulous work, in no particular order, by our team:
NEWS:
Late-Night Alarm Jolts Atwater Residents From Saturday Slumber
By Elizabeth Sawyer
Students, Admin Confer at Open Forum
By Nick Garber and Dom Tanoh
Campus Is Vandalized, With College Labeled Racist
By Will DiGravio
Patton to Attend Free Speech Conference
By Ethan Brady
Barney Frank, John Sununu Discuss Campus Free Speech, Political Climate
By Nick Garber and Will DiGravio
Students Talk Study-Abroad During Trump Era
By Bochu Ding
Discussing Free Speech, Attorney General Implicates Middlebury
By Nick Garber
LOCAL:
Student Teachers Connect College and Community
By Rebecca Walker
He's 13 Years Old and He's Running For Governor
By Bridget Colliton
Pennies for WomenSafe
By Ally Murphy
OPINION:
Letter: Racial Profiling By Public Safety
By Michael Olinick
Racism and Responsibility
By Laurie Patton
Student Reflects on Surviving Sexual Assault
By David Vargas
For the Culture: Savage
By Josh Claxton
Sharp Left: When the ‘Common Ground’ Is a Swamp
By Tevan Goldberg
I Cover the Waterfront: On the Alt-Weekly
By Will DiGravio
ARTS & SCIENCES:
Women Safe Presents “I Rise”
By Sarah Boyle
Cocoon Storytellers Share Pain and Love
By April Qian
Teach-In Examines Recent Hurricanes
By Asher Lantz
Professor Researches Acid Mine Runoff
By Caroline Jaschke
FEATURES:
Students Navigate Misconceptions and Challenges of Veganism
By Elizabeth Zhou
Professor Delivers Talk on Trauma and (Post)memory
By Benjy Renton
AFC Hosts Dinner in Honor of Hispanic Heritage Month
By Haoyang Yu
Annual Security Report Shows Increases in Crime, Sexual Assault
By Sarah Asch
Student Spreads Joy Through Nonprofit Organization
By Eric Masinter
SPORTS:
Activism in the NFL: Two Takes on One Issue
By Rob Erickson
Field Hockey Forges Ahead
By Claire Messersmith
Men’s and Women’s Tennis Holds Own in Cambridge
By Nick Nonnenmacher
Men’s Soccer Sinks Trinity
By Riley Smith
A (Re)Defining Moment for the Quidditch Club
By Emily Bustard
(11/01/17 11:08pm)
On a sunny Saturday afternoon, a group gathered inside Mead Chapel to celebrate the life of Juana Gamero de Coca, a Spanish professor, who passed away suddenly on Oct. 6. The room was full of photographs and colorful flowers that the attendees brought with them and placed in vases. Juana’s family and friends spoke in three languages about a woman full of love, life, and passion. To celebrate Juana, The Campus has gathered excerpts of those eulogies and statements from Juana’s students, published with permission. Some of the passages have been edited for length.
I used to always complain that you weren’t a normal mom. You wore a lot of black. You never once made me chocolate chip cookies. Or meatloaf. You always kissed me a lot. And I mean a lot. On my cheeks. My arm. You really liked to kiss my knee. You had an accent that made it sound like you were saying “bitch” instead of “beach”. The first time you took me on a vacation, you chose Peru instead of the Florida Keys. You didn’t live in a big home, with a picket fence and a photogenic dog. You smoked cigarettes. You cried a lot. You laughed a lot. You yelled a lot. You weren’t the mom that hid your feelings from your kids. Or pretended that because you were a mom you had life figured out. You told Carmen and I to feel the weight of this world. To let our emotions in and let them blanket us from all sides. You never told us to pick ourselves up. We were allowed to feel the comfort of staying fallen. To take a break from the exhausting demands of being eye-level with everyone else.
Why can’t you just be normal? I used to say. Why do you always have to embarrass me? I would say. Now, what I long to say most is that I loved the way you were. I understand that this world weighed down on you. It was hard on your body. Tough on your heart. I don’t blame you for leaving so early. For wanting to escape Trump America and leave while Cataluña is still a part of Spain. The last few years, I met you in a new capacity. You opened up to me about your heartaches and troubles. You showed me what happens behind your bold red lipstick. That there are times when you feel fragile, too. Sometimes when you woke up in the morning, you would ask me if I thought you were pretty. When your relationship was stung by conflict, you lay paralyzed for days. When your sickness took you to different hospital beds, you asked to borrow my hand to be fed. And when you realized life isn’t always as happy as in the books, you asked Carmen and I to be happy for you. It was hard for my self-absorbed college student self to understand the gift of being able to take care of my mother. I’m sorry I didn’t offer more, but thank you for letting me in.
I stay up now thinking about the stories I never heard. About the memories that never had the chance to become memories. But just like you used to say to me. We are more than the same blood and bone. We are mother and daughter. Carmen and I will carry on for you. We will travel the world, go to India, have your grandchildren, and fall in love.
The last time I talked to you was the night that you passed away. I told you I was having a sad day. I had broken up with my boyfriend and I felt lonely. You called me and again, for the millionth time, told me that it was okay to feel sad. You said that hard things happen and I shouldn’t expect to get over them. Instead, sometimes you just have to leave sadness in a little pocket nearby. Life will carry on but the sadness will stay to help you remember and to help you grow. I’ve put you in a brand new pocket that I made out of silk and cashmere. You’ll stay there forever. And I’ll never mix you up because you were not a normal mom. You were special. And as my sister already said, you are the most beautiful woman we will ever meet.
by Izzy Fleming ’17, Juana’s Daughter
...
Mi mama era la mujer mas hermosa que conocí en toda mi vida. Y no lo digo por como se veía físicamente porque eso es obvio. Lo digo por su forma de pensar, su manera de bailar, su pasión para la justicia y la importancia que daba en asegurar que todos los demás estaban bien. Ella lucho mucho con ella misma durante su vida y creo que eso la hizo querer mas para los demás que para ella.
She taught Izzy and I to be aware of the world and what was happening to people everywhere. She taught us to be proud of being different. She taught us to speak our minds. And she was successful, because she taught me to really, really speak my mind, which meant that when I grew up we had similar ways of arguing and discussing issues. When we discussed issues of social justice and politics we would start calmly and then without fail begin to yell at each other for 10 minutes until we realized we were agreeing with each other and just saying the same thing in different words. We used to scare my sister Izzy and my friends because they would think we were fighting but really she just taught me to be passionate like her about what I believed.
When my mom came to the U.S. her father told her that he had lost her and she would never go back. She told him he was crazy and that she was just going to work as a nanny and take English classes and would be back soon. She met my father and everything about her life changed and her father was right, she stayed.
The other day our dad said that he was always so impressed and so proud of her for what she accomplished, coming to the US without speaking English and making it to where she did. Izzy and I are so lucky that we had our mother and father as parents, who unlike other divorced parents always truly cared so deeply for each other that we all remained a very close knit family.
Mi mama fue alguien con quien todo el mundo se enamoraba con solo conocerla. Hizo sentir a todos que eran importantes y felices. En su presencia todos se reían y bailaban y reían y bailaban. Creo que mi mama es la persona mas hermosa que todos aquí hemos conocido y somos todos mas hermosas con solo haberla conocido.
My mom was someone that everyone fell in love with after meeting her. She made everyone feel important and happy. In her company everyone laughed and danced and laughed and danced. I think my mom is the most beautiful person that everyone here has ever met and we are all more beautiful just from having met her.
by Carmen Fleming ’10, Juana’s Daughter
...
Lo que viví toda esta semana no tiene nombre ni palabras. Por eso fue tan difícil tejer el manto delgadisimo y frágil que quise venir a compartir hoy con todos porque a todos nosotros pertenece. La red de protección que es el amor de los otros por mí, por ti, por ustedes, por ellos, hasta convertírsenos en amor de nosotros por nosotros.
Gracias de todo corazón... Roto.
Finalmente para dar remate a la más tierna ceremonia que los vivos pueden hacer por los muertos - recordarlos que significa literalmente “volverlos a pasar por el corazón”- subieron Isabel y Carmen, la verdadera sangre viva de Juana, su verdadera mirada y su verdadera sonrisa hecha dos seres humanos. Subieron a decirnos con muchas historias y pocas palabras que son ella, que ellas son su madre - la más amada, la más admirada, la mejor del mundo- y que en ellas perdura nuestra Janita, aquella bendecida por todos los dones y todas las virtudes que hoy perduran porque Juana es Isabel y Juana es Carmen, e Isabel y Carmen están salvando siempre a su madre por ellas y por nosotros.
Y así llegó a su final lo que será el principio de nuestra vida. Nuestro “sin ti” , que es el larguísimo porvenir, pero “con nosotros”, que es el presente y que ya está aquí.
Qué puedo decirte, Jana mía. Voy a ser tú, voy a intentar ser tú, yo, como tus hijas, voy a emprender la increíble e imposible tarea de multiplicarte.
by Visting Lecturer Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Juana’s Partner
...
No le puedo escribir cartas
porque en la muerte no hay dirección.
Ayer para clase (como si hoy
o mañana nos importaran las clases)
leí una flor amarilla. Los árboles
eran chispas bajo la lluvia y hoy
lloramos por ella.
Juana nunca volverá a verse
en autobús, sudando, la línea 95.
Todos somos inmortales pero
ella fue mortal. We’re never too grown
to stop growing but what if we just
stop.
No creo en el cielo y de hecho
prefiero imaginarla en la biblioteca
de Babel (Borges, sé que por el velo
me puedes escuchar). En el laberinto
en las estanterías infinitas
se sienta tranquilamente en un sillón.
Sabe que un día vendrá la locura
para comernos crudos, salados,
más lindos que lo rojo en una capilla.
Yo soy joven y torpe y no sé
que tipo de flores llevan al velorio.
Pensaba rosas pero ahora
girasoles que brillan hasta morir.
by Hayley Jones ’18.5, Juana’s Student
...
Eso que acabas de leer es una juanería.
Juanerías. Juanerías extremendas. Juana es de Extremadura. Extremeña. Y bien sabemos, es tremenda. Extremenda.
Gestos excéntricos, salados, brillantes.
Bailar vestida de rojo, con la mano en alto, curveando la muñeca, su cuerpo esbelto y grácil. Sonreír como nadie.
Llenar de flores la casa de la amiga que sufre por sus seres queridos. Repartir abanicos a las chicas guapas.
Saber la importancia del contacto. Aplicarlo sin hacer cuentas. A alumnos, a colegas, a amigos. Sea políticamente correcto o no.
Insistir en cuidarnos, y bueno, por desgracia, no siempre cuidarse muy bien.
Defender a quienes lo necesitan, arriesgue lo que se arriesgue. Hace meses en Crossroads café, rodeada de estudiantes que habían protestado racismo e injusticia. Estudiantes investigados porque le habían gritado al racista. Ante la noción de que gritar es peor que cuestionar la humanidad de alguien, qué hizo Juana? Gritar. Es una juanería.
Qué es la ética, sino abrazar al débil, ver su dolor, la injusticia, y nombrarlos en voz alta? En voz muy alta.
Cariño: Manejar horas y horas al hospital Dana Farber, tomar la mano de nuestra amiga Ana. Hacerla reír con chismes y gracias mientras le metían la quimio en el sillón de los venenos.
Subirse a un estrado como éste—es decir, a este estrado, y dirigirse a un público como éste que lloraba a nuestra Ana, la primera chica guapa que se fue. Con su vestido rojo y unos tacones tan altos que Ricardo le dio el brazo, no fuera que tropezara al bajar.
Saben que Juana era ombudsman del profesorado? Ahora no tenemos ombudsman.
Juanerías. Juana es todo eso. No es una santa. Es una persona que iba y venía por el mundo, repartiendo abrazos ante el dolor, el dolor que terco la rondaba. Repartiendo el antídoto: besos y abrazos y cariños.
Juana dio y dio y dio. Intuía que la vida no podía durar mucho viviéndola de juanería en juanería. Que la vida se va gastando al vivirla. le decíamos que no, que claro que no. que mientras más das más tienes.
Aquí estamos. ¿Y tú, extremenda?
Pues no sé a dónde huyes, ni sé a dónde voy,
¡tú que lo supiste!
by Professor of Spanish Gloria Estela González Zenteno
