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(03/09/16 4:28pm)
At the monthly plenary faculty meeting on March 4, the faculty discussed a proposal to create an open-access repository at the College. The proposal was presented by Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Svea Closser on behalf of the Open Access Working Group and the Faculty Council.
A repository is a database where faculty can make their published articles available for free in one location. The repository would include scholarly journal articles, conference proceedings and book chapters. It would not include creative works, books, commissioned articles or other publications where authors are compensated directly for their writing. Though submission of articles would be mandatory, faculty members would be able to obtain a waiver should they not want an article included. The faculty voted to table the proposal and will vote on it after discussing it in open meetings.
Later in the meeting, Professor of Psychology Barbara Hofer, on behalf of the Faculty Council and Appeals Council, proposed changes to the Faculty Handbook. She presented six recommendations aimed at clarifying misunderstandings that originate from the current handbook language regarding the faculty review process.
One recommendation proposed changing handbook language to say that any candidate denied a reappointment or promotion would be provided with a written rationale for the decision. Another proposed modifying a passage to clearly state that all tenured faculty members, even when on academic leave, are expected to submit a letter regarding a colleague undergoing review. The faculty in attendance tabled the proposal and will vote on it after discussing it in open meetings.
The faculty approved a proposal, made by the Educational Affairs Committee, to clarify language regarding honors eligibility after a student commits an academic honesty infraction. The old language rendered students who received either an official or unofficial College discipline ineligible for graduation and/or departmental honors. Now only students who receive an official College discipline are ineligible from those honors.
Joseph Burr Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry Rick Bunt made a motion, on behalf of the First Year Seminar Steering Committee, to support the creation of an “All College Luncheon Day.” At the luncheon, faculty would sit at tables, grouped by department or program, and have lunch with undeclared students on one day, once a semester, to answer questions and provide guidance to students. The goals of the luncheon are to better communicate curriculum changes to students, build greater relationships between faculty and students and get students acclimated to the advising process. The faculty approved the motion, which formally recommends that the administration implement the luncheon.
(03/03/16 12:06am)
On Feb. 25-27 in the Hepburn Zoo, The Vagina Monologues returned in its third consecutive year at the College, but the fresh form and delivery of the play, renamed Beyond the Vagina (Monologues), explored changing definitions of femininity and womanhood in an inclusive and ambitious showcase of thought-provoking narratives.
In an effort to start a conversation about previously taboo subjects like female genitalia, sexual stigmas and violence against women, writer Eve Ensler ’75 compiled a theatrical celebration of vaginas and femininity based on two decades of interviews with over 200 women spanning age, ethnicity, nationality and sexual experience. Premiering in 1996 in New York City — and shown in a limited run in the same year at the Mahaney Center for the Arts — the resulting piece, The Vagina Monologues, featured a candid exploration of anatomical and sexual awakenings, feminine shame and historical and societal gender oppression through one common subject: the vagina.
After a five-year off-Broadway run and a subsequent national tour, the worldwide popularity of The Vagina Monologues continued to grow after the exposure of a Madison Square Garden engagement and an HBO television adaptation. In 1998, Ensler established V-Day, an organization originally staffed by volunteers whose mission demands that violence against women and girls must end. Since the organization’s inception, the number of annual February V-Day productions has grown to 5,800 worldwide, the proceeds of which benefit shelters and rape crisis centers to further V-Day’s mission. All of the proceeds from the College’s production were donated to WomenSafe, an Addison County organization working toward the elimination of physical, sexual and emotional violence against women.
Though The Vagina Monologues remains a global phenomenon 20 years after its debut, the play has garnered significant criticism for representing a largely white, cisgendered, heterosexual perspective that portrays a dated view of femininity and womanhood. Director, producer, script adapter and lighting designer Rebecca Coates-Finke ’16.5, who has worked on three consecutive productions of The Vagina Monologues, wanted to create a performance experience that addressed these criticisms and expanded the play’s reach and relevance. After launching the 2014 show with a student monologue and introducing an accompanying booklet of student voices in 2015 to make the production more Middlebury specific, Coates-Finke embarked on her most ambitious interpretation of the show’s potential with this year’s Beyond the Vagina (Monologues).
“I wasn’t satisfied with just doing the play as it was anymore and I was curious as to whether or not it was possible to use the script to undermine some of the central issues with it in a new play,” Coates-Finke said. “I believe that a show can’t be feminist if it can’t reflect the context that it’s in, and in that way it [The Vagina Monologues] does allow itself to become irrelevant over time because it keeps repeating the same story even when culture has shifted.”
Featuring an all-student ensemble of 16 cast members and six American sign language interpreters dressed in black and shades of red, Beyond the Vagina (Monologues) was presented in the round in the Hepburn Zoo, encouraging an interactive and physical performance style that — like the content of the text — did not allow for audience complacency.
In addition to familiar aspects like a compilation book of eight monologues written, edited and illustrated by students and performances of nine monologues from the original piece — including Anna Hoge ’19’s confident and unapologetic rendition of “Hair,” an exploration of the societal pressures placed on women to modify their body hair for ‘beauty’ and Jenne Meneses Montiel ’19’s Spanish-infused interpretation of “My Angry Vagina,” a condemnation of female medical treatment and the proliferation of consumer products implicitly shaming female bodies — Coates-Finke incorporated outside speeches and materials to shatter the limitations of the original text.
Early in the show, an audio-recording of transgender writer, speaker and activist Julia Serano’s piece “Cocky” played over the loudspeaker as American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter Julia Desmarais ’18 offered an emotive translation on a darkened stage. As a transwoman who did not have genital reassignment surgery grappling with her position outside of traditional gender definitions and the constant threat of physical violence, the juxtaposition of Serano’s candid voice to the quietly gripping visual translation left the audience momentarily stunned by the interplay of raw emotion and articulate narrative in the piece.
“One of the main criticisms of The Vagina Monologues is that it’s biologically essentialist, so what it does is it uses the vagina to talk about the experience of being a woman, which ends up leaving a lot of people out in terms of conversations about sexism and devaluing the feminine,” Coates-Finke said. “I wanted to complicate that because there are many trans women who have not undergone surgery. I wanted to use the audio of Serano’s piece to recognize the fact that there was nobody in my cast who identified as a trans woman and to acknowledge that there are some people not in the room whose voices still need to be heard.”
The inclusion of ASL interpretations of each piece, as well as an increased commitment to physical performance and a greater incorporation of multimedia, augmented the thematic changes to contribute to an overall tonal shift toward inclusivity, innovation and open discussion.
Each audience member was asked to write their own definition of femininity on a piece of paper upon entering the theater, and the responses encapsulated a shifting view of femininity as a measure of power, self-esteem or choice rather than a static biological assignment or reinforced social construct. Coates-Finke discussed the reflection that three years of engagement with The Vagina Monologues has prompted.
“I have learned so much more about femininity and what my gender means from people who are a-gender or gender queer or trans women because there is something very powerful about acknowledging in some ways that there is a little bit of choice involved in how you get to identify your gender and how you can change and enact that every day,” Coates-Finke said.
Another striking addition to the show was Stella Boye-Doe ’19’s nuanced rendition of “Respect,” written by critical race theorist and founder of intersectionality Kimberlé Crenshaw for the V-Day production A Memory, A Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer. The piece confronts the history of America’s simultaneous capitalization and oppression of the black vagina. Asserting that the United States was built on the backs — and through the wombs — of slave women, the piece offers startling statistics about a continued lack of progress and respect, including the fact that rapists of black victims receive, on average, one-fifth of the sentence of the rapists of white victims.
Though only a week has passed since this reinvention of The Vagina Monologues premiered, Coates-Finke and the cast have received some positive feedback.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been thanked so much for doing a show before, and other members of the cast have had similar experiences,” Coates-Finke said. “It has been really powerful to hear about people who were skeptical of the show because of previous criticisms and decided to see it for themselves. I think I was worried about not having gained the trust of the people I really wanted to be in the room, so I was glad to see that people were trying it out even if in the past it hadn’t been what they wanted it to be.”
In its ambition to expand its scope and explore shifting conversations on femininity and gender, Beyond the Vagina (Monologues) undermined many of the contradictions inherent in its original form, incorporating deft artistic decisions to present a piece unique to its time and place. Coates-Finke’s presentation is a vision of what The Vagina Monologues could be, and it is my hope that the play can continue to push its own boundaries in years to come.
On Friday, March 4, Coates-Finke will be discussing her process in writing, producing, and directing Beyond the Vagina (Monologues) at 12:15 p.m. in the Abernathy Room.
(02/25/16 3:32am)
Harper Lee’s beloved classic To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The zeitgeist novel depicted in bare terms racism in America and reaffirmed the values of equality and unity. The book has sold more than 40 million copies globally and has become a staple of high school curriculums. But despite the book’s acclaim and instant success, Lee repeatedly vowed never to publish a novel again. For the next 56 years, she lived a private life in small-town Alabama and an anonymous one in New York City, her career a single gem.
Not long before she went dark to the public — just four years after the publication of Mockingbird and two years after the film version — Lee recast her literary objectives in a 1964 interview with Roy Newquist, the editor of a book titled Counterpoint. Perhaps because of the rarity of such encounters with Lee, the Newquist interview has become one of the few sources of material that illuminate her mystery. In it, Ms. Lee clearly stated her literary ambition: “to describe a disappearing way of small town, middle class Southern life. In other words, all I want is to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”
Less often quoted than this statement is her explanation of it. She wanted to “leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world. She hoped to do this “in several novels, to chronicle something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain.”
Lee said she was always fascinated with the “very definite, rich social pattern” that makes up the tiny towns of the South. “I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.”
Beyond Harper Lee’s crowning achievement of Mockingbird and her lone interview with Newquist, the front-page obituary of Lee in Saturday’s New York Times recalled the literary world’s biggest story of 2015: the publishing of her second novel, Go Set a Watchman. The book, in all its controversy, is crucial to considering Lee’s legacy, which had been fixated for more than half a century on one work. Watchman was met with a considerable amount of backlash, with some accusing Ms. Lee’s publisher of taking advantage of her in her old age.
They raised eyebrows at the timing of the manuscript’s discovery and the announcement that it would be published, which was only weeks after the death of her sister, Alice Lee, who had long been Harper’s confidante and whom many considered to have been her protector. Skeptics use reports of Lee’s deteriorating state at the time the manuscript was discovered as evidence that she could have easily been coerced into agreeing to something she had not wanted for 56 years. “It would be very difficult to prove this one way or another,” Bertolini said.
In a New York Times column, Joe Nocera called the book a “fraud” and “one of the epic money grabs in the modern history of American publishing.” Jonathan Sturgeon wrote in Flavorwire that Watchman is not Mockingbird’s sequel or prequel, but rather its prototype. Lee herself described the book as her first book’s “parent.” Sturgeon points to wholesale passages in Watchman that were later reworked for Mockingbird.
Pieces of literature have been published against some authors’ wishes, noted John Bertolini, Ellis Professor of English and Liberal Arts. He noted Vergil and Franz Kafka as examples. “Of course the same thing happened with Kafka: he ordered that all his works be destroyed, but they weren’t. Fortunately for all of us, Vergil’s orders orders on his manuscript of the Aeneid weren’t followed either.”
With all the debate over the origins of Watchman, the biggest bombshell turned out to be an explosive plot twist that no one saw coming. Atticus Finch, the crusading lawyer of To Kill a Mockingbird, whose principled fight against racism and inequality inspired generations of readers, is depicted in Watchman as an aging racist who has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, holds negative views about African-Americans and denounces desegregation efforts. “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” Atticus asks his daughter, Jean Louise — the adult Scout.
Bertolini said he was astonished by the reaction to the book. “It involved one of the most colossal misreadings of a book that I’ve seen. It was said that it turns out Atticus is a racist after all, and that’s not, I believe, the point Harper Lee was making in that book. She was demonstrating that Atticus was continuing to educate Scout, and that he thought it was a flaw in her that she idealized him so much. He did that precisely to provoke her to think about his having a flaw, about his not being a perfect man.”
The very fact that the manuscript exists, he said, means a lot. “The book makes an important statement that should be read — about not blindly idealizing somebody, not expecting perfection from all human beings under all circumstances. Atticus may have done that deliberately to help to Scout grow up, to become a mature, understanding, forgiving human being. This is, after all, what he spent his whole life doing.”
Claire Borre ’18, an English major, said that Watchman complicates the emphatic depiction of Atticus as a hero and exposes his flaws to modern readers. “I read Go Set a Watchman as a completion of Scout’s coming-of-age that was started in To Kill a Mockingbird,” she said. “Having read Mockingbird as a young girl and then reading Watchman this past summer, I connected to both in very different ways. Scout’s first attempts at understanding the world, like my own, were heavily influenced by those around her, whereas Jean Louise, and myself as a college student, must learn to look inward for her own value.”
Borre continued: “The more adult perception world presented is not as strictly good or evil as in Mockingbird, and Lee reveals a more nuanced worldview that makes people reevaluate their perception of the hero Atticus. It is a shattering of the hero image of Atticus.”
Bertolini pointed to the strength of her first novel as a lasting part of her legacy. “To Kill a Mockingbird, both the book and the film, had an influence in the Civil Rights Movement that was analogous to the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in persuading people to be against slavery. I first encountered it when I was in high school, first the book and then the film, which had a big influence on me. I will never forget that.”
The general consensus among book critics is that Go Set a Watchman is not as well written as the masterpiece of Mockingbird is. “Isn’t that true of all the secondary books by great authors?” said Bertolini. “They’re usually much better than the best of the ones being published today, because true artistic talent and genius is a rare thing.”
For all the excitement, confusion, surprise, drama and controversy, the world nevertheless has another Harper Lee work.
(02/25/16 2:58am)
The Middlebury women’s club Water Polo team successfully opened their season at the Natatorium last weekend, Feb. 20-21, where they hosted the first tournament of the season for the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA)’s Women’s New England Club Division. The Panthers, who ranked 11th out of the 16 teams competing for the 2015 National Collegiate Club Championship, emerged from the weekend in a tie for first place with their 3-1 record.
Middlebury went 2-0 with consecutive wins over Boston College and Dartmouth on day one of the tournament, followed by their convincing 11-point victory over Northeastern and hard-fought loss to Boston University on Sunday, Feb. 21.
After just four days of official team practices, the Panthers opened the season with a one-point victory over Boston College in a nail-biter on Saturday, Feb. 20. Middlebury got on the board in a hurry against the Eagles, as first-year Kate Claman ’19 scored the first two goals of her career at Middlebury in the first two minutes. Claman went on to sink three of the Panthers’ six goals in the first half, en route to a team-high of four goals.
Hannah Grotzinger ’16, one of the four senior team captains, explained why Claman’s performance was integral to the Panthers’ success.
“I play the set position — in front of the center of the goal on offense — and Boston College decided to double or triple-team me, so the shots on goal had to come from players at other positions,” Grotzinger said.
Following Claman’s initial 2-0 lead, Grotzinger traded goals with Boston College (BC), who brought the score to 5-3 by the end of the first quarter.
Co-Captain Alex Spencer-Wong ’16 then broke the Eagles momentum with a counterattack goal to open the second quarter, and Grotzinger tied the game at five goals apiece three minutes later. BC proceeded with a goal of their own before Claman shot from the outside to knot up the game at six apiece.
It looked like the teams would head into the halftime break tied at 6, but Boston College managed to score its seventh goal in the waning seconds, taking a 7-6 lead into halftime.
Emily Bustard ’17.5 led the charge for the Panthers after her stint as goalie in the second quarter, and added two goals in quick succession to put Middlebury on top 8-7.
Boston College would score with 13 seconds remaining in the third, leaving the fans on the edge of their seats with the game tied at eight as they awaited the final quarter.
The Panthers looked to continue putting pressure on the Eagles.
“Our goalie [Anna Lueck ’18.5] hasn’t been able to play recently, so some of our starters were playing in goal for the entirety of the tournament,” Grotzinger said.
“Because of [Lueck’s absence], our strategy against Boston College (and all teams) was to put a lot of pressure on their offense and guard them tightly to make passing difficult [and minimize their shots on goal].”
The game was in the balance until the very end, as Boston College went up 10-9 with 2:29 remaining on the power-play. One minute later, Claman found the back of the net for the Middlebury equalizer. Then, just as the game seemed destined for overtime, a five-meter penalty shot was awarded to the Panthers with 10 seconds left; Grotzinger’s five meter shot found the back of the net, allowing the Panthers to pull off an 11-10 victory.
The Panthers took on the Big Green of Dartmouth that same evening, coming through with a 9-6 victory.
“We were really excited before the game,” Grotzinger said. “Dartmouth has been our biggest rival for many, many years so we had a very strong desire to win before the game even started. This mentality definitely helped us during the game.”
It only took Grotzinger 20 seconds to get the Panthers on the board.
“In all the games we won this weekend, we scored the first goal of the game,” Grotzinger said. “The first team to score a goal in a game gets a very positive surge of adrenaline, and a lot of the sport is based on mental strength, not only physical strength.”
The Dartmouth game was all but over at the half, which began with a score of 6-1. “I think the most decisive point in the Dartmouth game came at the end of the second quarter after four different players on the Middlebury team had scored goals and we had prevented Dartmouth from scoring.”
“We had great momentum coming out of the second quarter, and one of our goals for the season is to be able to keep that going, even against a high-pressure defense like the one we faced from Dartmouth in the second half,” said Bustard, who scored her second goal of the game in the second half.
The Panthers held on in the second half for a 9-6 win. In addition to two-goal contributions from Bustard and Grotzinger, Co-Captain Christina Denbow ’16 scored 3, while co-Captainn Sam Horn ’16 put away one goal.
The Panthers hit the pool early on Sunday, Feb. 21 at 9 a.m. to commence a 13-2 rout of Northeastern. Middlebury jumped out to a 7-0 lead, going into the half up 8-1 over the Huskies.
“[The] Northeastern game was great because our newer players got to see a lot of game-time [where they could] practice the skills we’d been working on in practice,” said Grotzinger, who found the back of the net five times against the Huskies.
Other goals against Northeastern came from Bustard (4), Spencer-Wong (2), Julie Ehrlich ’17.5 (1) and Amanda Geller ’16 (1), while Denbow won three of the four sprints to start each quarter.
“Our team is naturally fast, so we were able to score on many counter-attacks against Northeastern — despite the fact that we’d only been training for four days before the tournament, compared to the other teams who had been practicing since mid-January,” Grotzinger said.
A few hours later, the Panthers took to the pool for the last time of the weekend against conference newcomer Boston University. The Panthers fell 7-4 but played the Terriers closely.
The Terriers jumped out to a 1-0 lead when they scored just under five minutes into the game. Grotzinger quickly answered with a backhand goal assisted by Horn.
Denbow began the Panthers’ second-quarter scoring as she netted an assist from Bustard off of the counter-attack. But every time the Panthers scored the Terriers had an answer, and then another when they scored just a minute later. Nevertheless, Bustard rounded out the quarter by sailing in a lob shot from the set position.
The third quarter began with another Grotzinger backhand goal, but again Boston responded with a quick goal to break a 4-4 tie. The Terriers followed with another three goals in the final half of play.
Despite ending the weekend with a loss, the Panthers had a successful first weekend and are in good position in the conference standings.
“I’m proud of the way we played this weekend, especially with it being so early in the season,” Bustard said. “I can’t wait to see what we can do in our next home tournament in April,” Grotzinger said.
(02/24/16 8:57pm)
We are writing directly in response to the op-ed from the last issue, “I’m Only Human.” The op-ed has upset a lot of people and has hurt a lot more. As demonstrated by the polarized comment section online, it unfortunately represents the views of a sizable portion of the student body. And while censoring their views would not be productive, we must explain why they are misguided.
Cultural appropriation and microaggressions may appear trivial compared to the experiences of people like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Sandra Bland. At Middlebury, people of color are not getting shot. But racism on this campus is very real.
Middlebury College, despite the wonderful education it provides, can be a painful and isolating place for many black students.
“You’re kinda an Oreo. Black on the outside and white on the inside!”
“I don’t really see you as a black person.”
These comments can shape how students of color perceive themselves at Middlebury. We might feel weak or inferior when people use the n word; as “ghetto” when people appropriate the ghetto; or as unintelligent when people joke about the way we speak.
True, a white student saying the n-word is not an international crisis like Syria or Boko Haram, which the author cited as “more important things to worry about.” But the accumulation of microaggressions is a macroaggression. They shape how minorities are treated in the real world. Seeing black people as “aggressive” can trigger police brutality, and seeing them as “stupid” could inhibit their ability to get hired. This prejudice is just the top layer of a worldview that systematically exploits people of color, and a litany of others, so it is crucial that we challenge it here at Middlebury.
In an effort to ignore this reality, some advocate a form of perverted humanism – the idea that we can all get along with each other on the understanding that we are all human beings, not as “black, white, gay or straight.” Some may think, “We all are human, and ought not worry about differences like gender, sexuality or race. Progress is sloppy, and we shouldn’t be monitoring our own speech or behavior. Make mistakes, think big and don’t take anything personally!”
This is callous. Like it or not, we do not live in a post-racial society. Even children, from a very early age, begin distinguishing between different races. We should acknowledge the reality we live in, instead of inventing another, even if it does make life more complicated.
And one final point: As students, we are not as removed from the real world as we would like to think. When we leave Middlebury we will become law-enforcement, teachers and parents. At that time, the argument over ‘micro’ or ‘macro’ issues parodies itself: Inequality is inequality, and prejudice is prejudice. And respecting the dignity of all people should not be a chore.
Harry Cramer ’16.5 is a Local Editor from Wellesley, MA and Kahari Blue ’19 is from New Haven, CT.
(02/24/16 4:58pm)
On Feb. 5, Don Kjelleren resigned as Director of Professional and Career Development for the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI). He ended his 17 years at the College to become the Director of the Williams College Career Center.
Kjelleren will be replaced by Ursula Olender, Associate Dean of Students and Director of the Career Center at Amherst College, who will start on March 21. She has further experience as the Director of Career Services at Colgate University and the Associate Director of Career Services at Dartmouth College. In the interim, students looking for advising in finance, consulting and business can schedule appointments with Susan Walker, associate director at the CCI.
While at Middlebury, Kjelleren specialized in guiding students interested in finance, consulting and business. Sarah Sicular ’16, a peer career advisor in the CCI, said, “So many students come in for finance and he had a huge personal network and always had all of the interests of his students at heart. I think a lot of students are really missing out that they don’t get to have Don as their advisor. He helped build up the Middlebury pipeline to careers in finance.”
During his career at the College, Kjelleren built up a large web of connections by networking with alumni, parents and companies visiting campus. Peggy Burns, Director of the CCI, reassures students that Ursula will be coming with that exact same network from her previous work, particularly at Colgate and Amherst. “We could not have asked for a more seamless transition,” she said.
Besides spending time advising students, Kjelleren trains as a triathlete with world ranking. He also has enjoyed biking to work on warm summer days and swimming in the freezing cold of Lake Champlain.
About her colleague Burns said, “It was fun having someone in the office with this incredible athletic prowess and experience with extreme sports. He has a good sense of humor and he cared very much about the staff and the students.”
Although Kjelleren says he will miss those bike rides, his colleagues and the students, he very much looks forward to in his new job. He is excited for the challenge of a tremendous growth opportunity. He said, “The culture and feel of the Williams Career Center is very different than Middlebury’s, in part because the Center is housed in College Advancement and so there are about 90 professional staff running around at high speed doing great things.”
While Kjelleren’s colleagues are certainly sad to lose him to Williams, they are excited about the great opportunity ahead of him. Furthermore, he leaves an excellent finance and consulting program behind him, which according to Burns is a strong foundation that the CCI expects to build upon in the future.
Burns believes this foundation will only benefit from the new perspective Olender brings.
“Ursula is coming from a campus that has a strong commitment to diversity and it is something she is particularly passionate about,” Burns said. “Her feet are firmly planted in the idea that these four years are a developmental process and she really wants to meet students where they are. She’s very committed to making the career exploration process a little less scary for students.”
Kjelleren leaves some parting words of advice, “Students, shift your focus from ‘What do you want to do?’ to ‘Who do you want to be?’ Be confident, dream big and don’t settle for less.”
(02/24/16 4:57pm)
Karen L. Miller will join the College in April 2016 as the new Vice President for Human Resources and Risk. In her new position, Miller will act as a strategic leader for the Office of Human Resources and the Office of Risk and Compliance, both of which serve all of Middlebury’s schools and programs.
Miller will be the first person to hold both the vice presidency of the Office of Human Resources and the vice presidency of the Office of Risk and Compliance. As Vice President for Human Resources, Miller will strategize about staff structure, hiring and compensation policies for Middlebury faculty, staff and student employees. In her role as chief risk officer, Miller will succeed Dr. Michael Geisler, who will leave Middlebury to become the new president of Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.
According to Geisler, the main function of the Office of Risk and Compliance is “to enable and support the hundreds of initiatives and individual activities and programs that Middlebury faculty and students embark upon each year.” The office identifies and tries to contain the risks associated with those programs “without stifling the academic creativity and entrepreneurial spirit that so distinguish the Middlebury community,” Geisler said.
Miller will join the College’s senior administration, working closely with President Laurie L. Patton and other administrators.
“Managing a large and increasingly complex institution effectively and efficiently means bringing best practices to the table, and Karen’s broad experience will be invaluable to us,” President Patton said.
Currently, Miller is a special advisor to the president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she has previously served as vice president and general counsel, vice president of administrative services, senior vice president of administration, chief of staff and chief operating officer. Before beginning her time at Morehouse College, Miller worked in several other higher education administration positions, including academic dean of John Marshall Law School.
Miller holds a BA from Emory University and a JD from Harvard University. She is also a candidate at the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education, researching the process of improving organizational capacity and leadership capacity at higher education institutions.
“At a time when many institutions talk about being global or entrepreneurial or sustainable, Middlebury actually lives up to those aspirations and many more. That’s a credit to the faculty, staff and students at Middlebury, and I look forward to working with all of them,” Miller said.
(02/18/16 3:31am)
What’s the weirdest thing about the first year of college? If you answered “having a roommate,” then you agree with me, (sorry to the other contenders, such as eating in dining halls, partying on weeknights and being in class only 30 percent as often as you were in high school). Sure, some first years live in singles, but they’re the exception that proves the rule: Only in college is having your own room suddenly unusual.
Many of my classmates have always had their own room at home, while others still share a bedroom with a sibling or two. I shared with my older brother until late elementary school, when we went our separate ways. Each night, when the lights went out, we would discuss our Neopets (characters in an online game) and wage imaginary battles (“I use a fire spell!” “But my ice wall counters that!” “Nuh uh!”) between our bunk beds. I have yet to hear of a pair of college roommates that interact like that.
My roommate and I are, in many ways, polar opposites. I’m the sensitive type, ready to open up my heart at a moment’s notice. He’d usually rather open up a beer, and has the same number of emotions in a week that I might have in an hour. But when a J. Cole song comes on or we pass out for our afternoon naps, you might swear we’re the same person.
I always have a quick blurb about my roommate holstered in the back of my mind, because “How’s your roommate?” is by far the most common question I get from friends and relatives back home. The freshman year roommate is a cultural icon, and I can see why. Your relationship with your roommate has more power to define your experience than almost anything else, and the range of possibilities is vast: From best friendship at first sight to outright disaster.
“My roommate and I are both gay latinos who love Lady Gaga,” said a sophomore friend of mine. “Long story short it worked out pretty well.” Even so, he lives in a single now and says he values the increased space and privacy.
Many of the students who live on my floor have been equally lucky with their roommates. “We have each other’s backs and we both respect each other in an important way,” my friend said. “We don’t infringe on each other’s space. I trust him as much as anyone, [and] he’s so f*cking reliable.”
Commonalities seem to contribute to friendship between roommates, but factors that people pointed to even more were trust and comfort level. When one or both of those are lacking, the relationship suffers.
One first-year girl, for instance, said she likes her roommate and considers her a friend, but doesn’t always feel comfortable in their room. “We talk a lot at night, but sometimes I’m really tired,” she said. Her roommate will drone on, unaware that her captive audience would really rather go to bed or leave the room through the door she’s been inching toward for the past 20 minutes. Sometimes her roommate realizes she isn’t in the mood to talk, but she said that actually leads to more discomfort and hurt feelings.
When trust and comfort are absent entirely, communication becomes hard, too. And that’s when you get outright disaster. One of my friends did not see eye to eye with his roommate about using illegal substances in their room, and they no longer live together. “[We] just did not communicate enough about what we each wanted from the room,” he told me in a message. “His mood would always be off when I would be around … and he just wasn’t really open to talking about it.”
As I write this, my roommate just sexiled me. Maybe I deserve the revenge for snoozing my alarm clock multiple times each morning. College, man…
(02/18/16 1:54am)
For most students, group projects are a source of dread, when unfairly divided workloads and conflicting schedules among group members contribute to a less-than-enjoyable college experience.
This was not the case for nine students in Professor Christopher Andrews’s fall section of Software Development, an advanced course in the computer science department that is targeted towards upperclassmen. Those students, Rob Bracken ’15.5, Joey Button ’17, Andrew Hwang ’15.5, David Cromwell ’16, Max White ’16, Hanna Nowicki ’16, Marisa Dreher ’16, Mohamed Houtti ’16 and Jack Desmarais ’16, not only enjoyed a successful working relationship throughout the semester, but kept working together throughout J-Term in order to finish what they started. Their final product, website Carpanion.org, seeks to fill what Bracken described as an opening the group saw on campus.
“What we set out to do was to solve the need for a ride that so many Middlebury students experience every weekend,” Bracken said.
The group estimated that there are around 15-20 trips undertaken by Middlebury students to popular destinations like Burlington, Boston or New York City on any given weekend, with a huge surge coming at the beginning and end of semester breaks. With the common knowledge that many of those rides often have empty seats, however, Bracken and his classmates decided to create a network that could better coordinate the supply of rides with the demand.
“Right now, if you want to go somewhere off campus, you have two choices: beg a friend, or pay a ton,” Bracken said. “There’s no marketplace for getting off campus.”
Carpanion allows drivers planning an off-campus trip to post their ride online, where potential fellow trip-goers can then view what is available on a given weekend. Riders can then bid on the ride, with the driver ultimately having the final say in accepting bids and who he or she takes for the weekend. All participants will need to have a middlebury.edu email address in order to register.
While the app is currently driver-centric, the next step Bracken and the group intend to take is to allow a rider to post a desired ride in order to attract any drivers thinking of making a trip but who may be hesitant over variables such as the cost of gas. Bracken and the group see the app as both a functional way to solve an existing problem, and as providing other benefits.
“There are a few places people do this already, but everyone in the group felt that the other services were inadequate and incomplete,” Button said. “The cumulative goal was to create a site for members of the Middlebury community to find cheap solutions for rides off-campus, and maybe meet someone awesome in the process.”
“We’re trying to make it easier to see what’s out there, rather than just having to post in a Facebook group and hope someone responds,” Bracken added. Bracken stressed that the rides will also provide a social aspect, as there’s “no better way to get to know someone than on a long car ride.”
Although Carpanion originally started as a class project last fall, the group found themselves unprepared to launch the app at the class’s conclusion in December. They also found themselves unwilling to simply write the app off as a project of a now-past class and forget about it. Thus, they took advantage of a lax J-Term schedule to buckle down and finish the website. The group met three times each week, and started each meeting with the members detailing what they each had accomplished since they had last met.
This system of group accountability was ultimately quite successful with the group putting the last touches on the site and launching it in the final week of the term. Now, as the group advertises the app they have created, they are waiting to see how the student body will react.
“If people see this as we do, as a real need within the student body, then it could easily take off,” Bracken said.
Should the app find success, Bracken and the group face a difficult path forward, with Bracken and another group member graduating with the class of 2015.5 and leaving campus. Right now, the plan for the group is to see how the app fares now that it is open for Middlebury students to use and judge.
Regardless of whether Middlebury students take up the app, Bracken emphasized that the whole experience has been an entirely worthwhile one.
“What is great about it is that we built it all the way through. All the front-end and back-end stuff, the coding, all of us contributed,” Bracken said. “It’s very satisfying to see the finished product.”
(02/17/16 11:50pm)
If you made plans to leave campus this weekend, cancel them. Don’t have any? You do now. First, you will witness one of the most captivating trumpet prodigies of our time, Bria Skonberg, on Friday at 8 p.m. in the Mahaney Center for the Arts (MCA). What’s that, you don’t like Jazz? You will.
The next evening, Saturday at 8 p.m., you will be sitting in Wright Theater, enthralled by Tina Packer’s ‘Women of Will’ as she artfully deconstructs Shakespeare’s most famous female characters in world-class performances that will make you laugh out loud while also considering the Bard from an entirely fresh perspective. After watching Part One of the show, not even this weather will stop you from going to Part Two on Sunday at 7 p.m.
If Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were one person, that person would be Bria Skonberg. Seriously, after going to her performance, put on “Dream a Little Dream of Me” — the resemblance is uncanny. The Wall Street Journal calls her “one of the most versatile and imposing musicians of her generation.” And although Skonberg may not be Louis reincarnate, she is pretty close.
According to All About Jazz Magazine, “It’s a rare talent that can straddle — and dare request membership in — the trumpet artist continuum emanating from Louis Armstrong ... However, with her bravura performance on ‘So is the Day,’ Bria Skonberg confirms that she is not only indeed a triple threat musician — player, vocalist, and composer — but also that that esteemed lineage, consummate entertainers all, would heartily approve her membership.”
But Skonberg is not just a powerful vocalist, musician and songwriter: she is also a consummate entertainer. She is a young, hip woman who wields a trumpet like Thor wields a hammer.
On Friday, Skonberg will lead her quintet in a dynamic program that includes an ode to Satchmo himself as well as mix of jazz standards and her own original works that explore worldly rhythms and modern jazz variance.
Speaking of powerful women, the incredible scholar and actor, Tina Packer, will perform “Women of Will,” her masterful summation of over forty years spent investigating all things Shakespeare. Through a combination of riveting scenes and trenchant analysis, Packer draws upon her astonishing wealth of knowledge to explore themes of love, loss, freedom, control, violence and power in the heroines of Shakespeare’s texts.
The two consecutive performances, “Force and Heat: The Early Plays” and, “Chaos and Redemption: The Later Plays” will open at 8 and 7 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday nights, respectively, in Wright Memorial Theatre. The New York Times call this performance by Packer and her costar, Nigel Gore, “Marvelous!” while the Associated Press hails it as “Boundless and irresistible!”
Packer is the founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company. She has directed almost every single Shakespeare play, acted in several and taught the whole canon at over 30 colleges in the U.S., including Harvard, MIT, Columbia and NYU.
Packer began her career in England, where she trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Soon after winning their Ronson Award for Most Outstanding Actor, she became an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company and has since risen to become an authority on everything Shakespeare. She has also proven her acting chops on BBC Television, where she played Dora to Ian McKellen’s “David Copperfield” and was a love interest for Patrick Troughton’s “Doctor Who.”
Packer came to the U.S. in 1974 on a Ford Foundation-funded project to research the visceral roots of Elizabethan theater. Ford Foundation awarded her two subsequent grants to travel the world, looking at the relationship of mind, body, sacred texts, stand-up comedy, voice and actor–audience relationship in her studies. Based on this work, she founded Shakespeare & Company in 1978 at Edith Wharton’s derelict mansion in Lenox, Massachusetts.
“Women of Will” promises to deliver a deeply thought-provoking but accessible performance that delves into our favorite playwright’s feminine side, tracing the developmental arc of his female characters along his own personal journey.
The Bria Skonberg Quintet concert will take place on Friday, Feb. 19, at 8 p.m. in the MCA. “Women of Will” will open at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 20 and 7 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 21 at Wright Theater.
Tickets for either event are only $6 for students (first-years and Febs, watch your email for a free ticket offer). To find more information or purchase tickets, stop by either of the box offices in McCullough or the MCA or visit go/boxoffice.
(02/17/16 8:59pm)
You may notice 100 new faces walking around Campus this week: the new Febs. We know what you’re thinking and, yes, this is another editorial on how to improve the Feb program. The Campus welcomes the Class of 2019.5 and would like to wish them luck in fielding the inevitable small-talk staple, “What did you do on your Febmester?”
Middlebury promotes the Febmester as a time for educational enrichment, advertising students studying at the Sorbonne, trekking through the Himalayas or interning near home. The time is open and totally theirs: there are no requirements, no credits to fulfill, no Feb bonding programs to go on. While we applaud the freedom that the program allows, we think that some are left overwhelmed by options or without funding to do what they want to do. Programs abroad are expensive and internships require connections. We do not buy into the stereotype of a “good Feb experience,” one all too frequently characterized by an exotic trip abroad instead of a local job near home. All Febs should spend their semesters as they wish, without pressure to live up to a particular ideal. Valuable experiences are not marked by extravagance. We do, however, want all Febs to spend their semesters intentionally, aware of the options available to them and with increased resources available to accomplish whatever they wish to do.
There are easy and inexpensive ways for the College to improve the Febmester experience. Many Febs on our Editorial Board recall being sent an uninformative pamphlet and then being set free for the longest unstructured period of their cognitive lives. The expanse of empty months before them was daunting – even paralyzing – as they attempted to decide what to do. The Campus proposes a mentorship program connecting incoming Febs to older Febs. The College could distribute a list that profiles Febs from older grades, including where they are from, their majors and how they spent their time before Middlebury. Incoming Febs could then contact older Febs to chat about their similar interests or to ask questions about an internship. These mentor-mentee relationships would help those who don’t know what to do with their time off, as well as facilitate friendships that will continue when they get to campus.
This is particularly important when considering that not all Febs wanted the semester off. On the Middlebury application, there are three options: Preferred regular admit, preferred feb admit, or either. All three choices leave open the possibility of being deferred a semester. As a result, 6 percent of students admitted for February during regular decision were not originally open to taking time off. More structure — or at least clearer and more comprehensive options — may ease the apprehension of students who did not anticipate February admission.
The College could also go a step further, though at a greater expense, and provide resources for student travel. For example, there could be funds set aside to support Febs on pricey abroad programs that provide students an educational and structured travel experience across the globe. Many students have the resources to go on these trips, while others who may desire to do the same lack opportunity. Middlebury could even go as far to host its own Middlebury-sponsored abroad programs, possibly run through select schools abroad, at a reduced price. We can learn from peer institutions like Colby and Hamilton, who have similar “Jan” programs that offer their students the chance to spend their first semester studying abroad while earning college credit. Colby and Hamilton’s programs are designed to keep Jans on track to graduate in the Spring, which is a different cultural institution than Middlebury’s Feb program. However, the idea of being able to spend the semester with fellow Febs provides a structured option to those without a clear idea of what they want to do, as well as eases the transition to campus.
Travel is certainly not the only productive way to spend a Febmester. The Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) could utilize its infrastructure to reserve internships with alums for students on their Febmesters, or at least provide students with opportunities to interview. In addition, the CCI could allocate some of its internship grant money to support unpaid fall internships.
For those who prefer to stay home and get a paying job or volunteer at a local non-profit, we applaud you. We believe that there should be more opportunities for students to opt into if they desire to do so, though students should also have the freedom to do what they wish with their time off. Our hope is that all Febs have the adequate information and resources to spend their semesters with intention. There is no right or wrong answer to “how did you spend your Febmester?”
Like September admission, matriculating as a February admit comes with its advantages and disadvantages. While some first-year Febs enjoy living in upperclassmen dorms their first term, others feel they miss out on the quintessential freshman hall experience. Febs who want to study abroad often feel pressed for time to fulfill language requirements. Others thrive in their close-knit community of 100 peers. Clearly, the February admission program is unique and beloved by many who have done it. While ups and downs are inevitable, the Campus believes that offering pen-pal mentoring, as well as considering subsidized Febmester programs or formalized internships, will help incoming Febs make the most of their gap semester. All Febs should be equipped with the resources to have the Febmester they desire — whatever it may be — and Middlebury can do more to help these plans come to fruition.
(02/17/16 4:18pm)
The annual off-campus housing lottery was conducted on Tuesday, Feb. 16 in Crossroads Café as a part of the 2016-17 Housing Process. The lottery brought the total number of students approved to live-off campus next fall to 75, marking a nearly 25 percent drop from last year’s 95 and the preceding year’s 106.
According to Associate Dean of Students for Residential and Student Life Doug Adams, the ongoing construction of the new Ridgeline Residence Complex served as the greatest factor in the decision to lower the off-campus approval number for the upcoming academic year. Upon completion, the complex — which will consist of four buildings with townhouse and suite-style apartments — is set to provide new housing for 158 upperclassmen students.
“In the spring of 2015, the College announced that the new construction would serve three purposes: the removal of the Mods, the return of residential lounges currently used as rooms and the reduction in the number of students living off-campus,” said Adams. “The new housing is on track to open this fall and we anticipate continuing with all of these plans.”
Concerns regarding town-gown relations and off-campus incidents with partying were not responsible for the upcoming school year’s approval drop.
“The reduction in the number of students living off-campus has been our plan since the announcement [of the new residence complex] last year,” Adams said.
The lottery was a random selection process that permitted students to apply as individuals or groups of up to eight peers. 28 students currently living off campus extended their status to the fall semester, leaving 47 spots available to be included in this year’s lottery. In total, 119 students applied for these remaining spots and were invited to observe the process, which was intentionally made transparent to mitigate concerns of tampering.
Controversy rose last year when several students accused the administration of rigging the lottery against varsity athletes who may have been likely to throw off-campus parties. 37 varsity athletes applied and only eight were accepted. A study conducted by the Paige-Wright Professor of Economics Paul Somers reported the probability of this outcome occuring was .0035 percent. However, Adams maintained the lottery was and continues to be completely random and noted it has always been an open process that permits students to observe the proceedings.
The only change to this year’s lottery was the creation of a “reserve list” that included students who were not selected to live off campus. Applicants in this list will be contacted in the event there is an emergency need for students to live off campus. However, Adams does not anticipate such a need for the upcoming year, remaining optimistic the Ridgeline Housing Complex will be ready by its projected September 2016 completion date.
In an article released following the announcement of the construction project, Adams said, “The design of these buildings will allow students to live near their academic and social centers while continuing the small-community feel they’ve enjoyed in the ‘mods’ or off campus.”
(01/26/16 2:52am)
This week we talk to Middlebury students who are engaging in exciting internships across the country and abroad. Read more about their adventures below:
Annie Taylor ’16 and Casey Harlow ’16
Santa Cruz Island, California
Annie Taylor ’16 and Casey Harlow ’16 are spending their Winter term hiking all over Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, religiously searching the remote island for one species in particular: the Bishop pine tree. Taylor, a Biology major and a California native, is spending her year long thesis investigating the spatial pattern of Bishop pine mortality on Santa Cruz Island; in other words, she aims to understand where and why the pine is dying and to map its future distribution, especially in the light of California’s recent devastating droughts.
Harlow, an International Politics and Economics major, accompanied Taylor to Santa Cruz Island, after the Nature Conservancy, which owns the majority of the unpopulated island, suggested it would be unsafe for Taylor to conduct her research alone. While on the island, Harlow is personally investigating how the Bishop pine tree is surviving depending on fence lines.
Together, both women spend their days driving the skinny, dirt island roads, hiking to reach secluded stands of pine trees, marking trees with their GPS units and collecting data. They are staying on a small ranch, leftover from the days when the island was covered in sheep and managed by cowboys. In the evenings, they help Jay, the ranch manager and the only other person currently on the island, with small chores around the ranch.
“I feel very lucky to be able to spend time in this beautiful place, especially because I am not a scientist or a big donor for the Nature Conservancy,” said Harlow. “This project has really allowed me to study something new and take advantage of a liberal arts education.”
Joanna Balla ’18
Columbia Heights, D.C.
An aspiring teacher, literary studies major Joanna Balla ’18 has been spending her days surrounded by three and four-year-olds at the AppleTree Institute, a Public Charter Pre-school located in Columbia Heights, D.C.
Even though the classroom can quickly become hectic and difficult to manage, Balla says she loves the challenge. “I’ve had a passion for education from an early age and it has been so rewarding to start putting these dreams into action by actually spending time working in the classroom. I’m learning so much about classroom control and behavior management from the awesome team of teachers they have.”
Apart from leading activities for the children, Balla notes that one of the most difficult – yet fulfilling – parts of her internship has been working alongside kids with learning disabilities.
For Balla, the greatest joy comes from seeing the small glimmers of progress in her students. “Some of the students that I work with are struggling especially with basic skills such as letter recognition and [simple] tasks such as counting to 10. It is really rewarding to get that rare one-on-one time with the kids and start to see progress even in the short whole that I have been here.”
Christopher Diak ’18.5
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Amidst the lab benches of the Rapoport Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, neuroscience major Christopher Diak ’18.5 is hard at work purifying an “endoplasmic reticulum associated” protein that has been linked to multiple neurodegenerative diseases. The end goal of the Rapoport Team’s research is to discern the precise chemical structure of the protein and to make hypotheses to “see how its pathway works.”
As most of his work takes place at the microscopic level, Diak still marvels at the way in which the smallest of molecules can have such great physiological effects. “I love this work because I am learning to see neurodegenerative disease in terms of the tiniest movements of molecules. It is amazing to think that if we can just make some proteins better at the jobs, we could prevent immense suffering.”
Although the scientific method works on the premise of a strictly defined set of controlled conditions, Diak says that each day in the lab is anything but predictable. Interestingly enough, a crucial part of scientific research consists of eliminating the ways in which things do not work in order to figure out how the actual mechanism functions.
“A typical day involves lots of optimizations – experiments never run the way you want them to the first or second (or [even] eighth) time, so we look at the data from the last experiment and use what we know to tweak our approach.”
Diak, however, is not disappointed when experiments fail. “Even on days when the proteins crash I leave the lab having learned or accomplished something important. The value of an experience like that can’t be overestimated.”
Jiya Pandya ’17
Washington, D.C.
Along with a cohort of three other Middlebury College students, Jiya Pandya ’17 is in midst of completing a four-week long internship in Washington, D.C. A history major at the College, Pandya notes that the internship is a perfect complement to her age-long love for “working with old artifacts and documents.”
“The Smithsonian itself is a incredible institution, and being a part of it, even for a month, seemed not only like a great way to connect with history, but also to see how public history organizations work in the real world.”
Besides being able to access the brimming archives of a world-class institution, Pandya says that her experience at the museum also sheds light upon the incredibly powerful social impact that the organizations such as the Smithsonian have on the public.
By “thinking critically about [issues of] public history, power, control, privilege, and identity,” Pandya says that her internship has given her the invaluable opportunity to engage firsthand in the behind-the-scenes conversations that collectively determine which particular artifacts museum-goers see when they make a trip to the Smithsonian.
“Our supervisor at the museum – who works with disability history – really pushes us to question and think about the reasons why certain histories are displayed, while others are not. She has been encouraging and teaches me how to be a better activist in a field where having an impact is very much about [finding ways to engage] with an audience to educate them about alternative ideas and affirm their own emotions.”
Kate Bauman ’16
Prince Edward Island, Canada
Ever wonder how new medicines and antibiotics are discovered? These days scientists mostly find new drugs by analyzing microbes from remote corners of the planet, like secluded caves and the bottom of the ocean. For Winter Term, Kate Bauman ’16 is joining this hunt for novel antibiotics by analyzing microbic samples from Antarctica in a laboratory at the University of Prince Edward Island in Prince Edward Island, Canada. She will be accompanied by Assistant Professor of Chemistry/Biochemistry Lesley-Ann Giddings. Bauman’s findings will be part of her thesis, the subject of which is “Exploiting cryptic gene clusters for the discovery of bioactive secondary metabolites.”
Bauman is traveling to Prince Edward Island so that she can collaborate with Dr. Russell Kerr. Kerr has the Arctic counterparts to Bauman’s Antarctic samples so collaboration between them will allow a comprehensive look at extremophilic microorganisms—tiny organisms that live in the most extreme environments on earth—from both poles. 50 percent of drugs approved by the FDA in the last thirty years have been from natural products like extremophilic microorganisms.
Bauman, who will be in PEI for two weeks, hopes to hike in the Prince Edward Island National Park when she is not working on her research.
(01/21/16 4:15am)
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia University and UCLA, filled Mead Chapel last Friday night as the keynote speaker for the grand opening of the Anderson Freeman Resource Center (AFC). Crenshaw’s speech was one of many events held over the weekend to celebrate the opening of the new intercultural center on Saturday, Jan. 16.
The opening of the AFC is the culmination of more than a year’s worth of effort by students and former Vice President of Affairs and Dean of the College Shirley Collado. The grand opening coincided with the College’s second Alumni of Color weekend.
Crenshaw is known for coining the term “intersectionality.” Her talk, titled “Intersectionality Matters: Why We Can’t Wait for a Racial Justice Agenda That Centers Us All” highlighted the multiple avenues through which racial and gender oppressions are experienced.
Crenshaw spoke to changes happening on college campuses nationwide. She said: “We are at a moment to transform our society. In some ways, racial discourse has reached a new low with the presidential candidates. But at the same time, we have new forms of social justice agitation that have sprung the conversation back to life.”
She also talked about the defenders of Justice Scalia’s recent comments on black students’ incompetency at elite institutions. “If it is not institutional factors, structural factors, historical factors, that explain inequality, then we are talking about racial differences without talking about racial power, creating a formula for individual and cultural responsibility,” she said. “Individuals in their social groups are responsible for their lack of participation in higher education, for the lack of access.”
Crenshaw then turned her focus to injustice for women and girls in society. She discussed how critical it is to reverse the cycle of invisibility for women and girls with initiatives such as President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” which excludes girls and young women of color.
She asked the audience to identify the names of victims of police brutality, revealing that females were mostly unknown. “We don’t know who these girls are, because the media doesn’t tell you; our leaders don’t tell you,” she said.
Crenshaw concluded her speech with a plea for racial justice and inclusion. “I can’t think of a better time than now to create a new inheritance and a better legacy to foster creating inclusion for everyone. I hope we all lift up in our hearts the possibility of creating racial justice that fulfills the desperate needs of everyone and unfolds to embrace all of us,” she said.
The AFC will function as a center for the College community to come together to foster inclusion and education in support of students who have been “historically underrepresented or marginalized in U.S. higher education.”
“Meeting alumni who are doing amazing things makes me ask them how they survived. There was a joke at the keynote where Crenshaw was amazed that alumni of color actually came back, because I don’t know if I’d come back. But with the alumni here, and the center here, there is a sense of victory,” Jenn Ortega ’18 said.
The celebration continued on Saturday afternoon with a panel discussion titled “History of Diversity and Student Activism at Middlebury College.” Participants included Collado, Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernandez ’85, Leroy Nesbitt ’82, Alumni of Color and current students.
One of the first discussions addressed themes of collaboration. Nesbitt noted that student activism at the College has been important throughout its history. He said, “Every growth around issues of diversity have come from student activists. It was activism that created the Chellis House, the Jewish Center, Palana House and Coltrane. The spirit of collaboration also speaks to those faculty and administrators who were excited to see the student activism over the years so they could find ways to join in and support.
In 2010 Collado became the first ever woman of color to join the College’s administration. Last Jan. Collado left the College to work at Rutgers University- Newark but she has remained dedicated to efforts of diversity. She said, “We wanted to dream up what would it mean to move the work of diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice to the center of a place rather than leaving it at the margins of a campus. Harder questions of policy, are we really talking about all students?”
Some of Collado’s turning points included leading a working group of faculty who made the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity possible.
“We felt that we needed a space for something as simple as, but as loaded as, using the word race in the name of a building, in the name of a place at the institution in 2007,” Collado said. “The issue of intersectionality was a great concern because if we focused on race, some assumed everything else would get lost gender, class, ability. But we worked hard to have race in the title.”
Collado also spoke about inclusion programs on campus led by students such as the First Generation Peer Mentoring Program.
“What also emerged were white students who cared, vocal about their curriculum and faculty not being as diverse as the student body, alongside, and sometimes separate, from students of color,” she said.
“There was amazing visibility in that the administration realized this is no longer an issue for just students of color, and this is going to hit us in the face repeatedly because the demographics of this nation are changing,” she added.
The dedication was followed by a ribbon cutting by President Laurie Patton. Associate Professor of History William Hart then gave a talk titled “To ‘engraven her [Middlebury College] an imperishable name ... with honor’: Martin Henry Freeman 1849, Mary Annette Anderson 1899, and the Challenges of Early Diversity at Middlebury College” Anderson was the first woman of color to graduate from the College and Freeman was the first African American college president in U.S. history.
Fernandez finds the AFC playing an essential part in talking, processing and making a plan of action. “Some people say we shouldn’t have a multicultural center because it separates. But collaboration is possible in that center. We live in a racist society and we need to think of our institutions. Students who felt they had no space on campus opened our eyes.”
Roberto Lint Sagarena, director of the AFC, called it a day of celebration, and a day of awareness. “The center is only as powerful as the community,” he said.
(01/21/16 1:14am)
As campaign season rolls around, this column decided to look back at the talk on campus during the famous 1960 election between Kennedy and Nixon. Such issues of concern were Kennedy’s Catholicism, his plans for a welfare state and the newfound presidential television debate.
The March 31, 1960 article reported on polling results showing the faculty’s strong support for Kennedy but a divide between student independents.
“Kennedy Beats Nixon Among Independents As Faculty Strongly Opposes Republican”
By Edward S. Rothchild
Overall results of the presidential preference poll conducted last month by the Middlebury Political Council showed that … the first choice of 99 Democrats is Senator John Kennedy, while the 330 Republicans pick Vice President Richard Nixon. Kennedy beats Nixon as the favorite … among independents. This last figure is largely due to the violently anti-Nixon sentiments expressed by the faculty and administration personnel who replied. Limiting the results to students, Nixon beats Kennedy by a very slim margin among Independents.
On April 28, 1960, a columnist addressed the impact of Kennedy’s religion on his ability to be an effective president.
By Guest Columnist, assistant to the chaplain, F. Dale Branum
A storm of controversy has recently arisen as to whether a Roman Catholic (John F. Kennedy) can or should be elected president. In spite of the fact that all candidates have stated that religious affiliation should not be considered at all by the voter, it is a question that should be given careful thought by every citizen. It cannot be simply ignored ... I see no reason why Kennedy’s Catholicism should be counted for or against him. Indeed, if elected, it is likely that Kennedy will be more resistant to Catholic pressure than a non-Catholic.
But now we come to the question: Can a Catholic be elected? There is no intrinsic reason why he could not, but the prospect is doubtful … His religious affiliation should not affect the votes – but it will.
The November 3, 1960 issue reported on a mock presidential debate on campus, the national television debate and plans for the actual election night.
“Nixon Victorious in Mock Election”
A mock presidential election, conducted by the Middlebury Political Council last Friday between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. showed Nixon to be victorious by a 216-118 margin.
Donald Rubin ’61, president of the Young Republicans commented on the outcome of the poll: “This victory indicates the independent thinking and optimistic outlook of college youth who will not tolerate the welfarism inherent in Kennedy’s program.”
“Nixon-Kennedy Debates Leave Three Questions Unanswered”
By Gordon Henderson
The future of a TV debate must remain very much in doubt. Much will depend on who is elected next Tuesday, on what effect the ‘political analyists’ decide the debates had on the election’s outcome and finally on how much public demand there is for this type of thing in 1964.
Also, Nixon’s performance on the fourth debate undoubtedly solidified hatred of the Vice President always latent in the hearts of many Democrats. The Vice President’s statements may have been welcomed by Republicans, but may they not have done him great harm in the end by driving Democrats into the Kennedy-Democrats’ arms?
“Election Night”
Proctor Hall’s lounge will remain open until 2 a.m. Tuesday night, according to Lyn Hinman, social director. Coffee and donuts will be served from 11 a.m. until 2 for late election – return watchers.
(01/20/16 6:54pm)
Last Friday, the Middlebury faculty voted to indefinitely renew the Pass/D/Fail program. The program permits students to take two courses for college credit, receivng a “Pass,” D or “Fail” in lieu of a traditional grade. The faculty also extended the deadline to invoke the Pass/D/Fail option — students now have four weeks to decide instead of two. This gives students more time to experience a class and complete more graded assignments before making their choice.
The editorial board commends the faculty for taking student input into consideration and voting in favor of the Pass/D/Fail program. Middlebury students, generally speaking, are risk averse. Many students are planning on attending graduate school, applying for fellowships and seeking jobs that value high GPAs. Even without these incentives, Middlebury students are typically high achievers and are naturally compelled to seek high grades, with no purpose beyond the pride of achieving Magna Cum Laude come graduation day. The Pass/D/Fail option encourages students to leave their comfort zones and incentivizes academic risk-taking, giving students the chance to explore a topic they are unfamiliar or un- comfortable with. The liberal arts education is characterized by both depth and breadth, and the Pass/D/Fail option allows students to broaden their horizons without fear of falling below their own standards.
Some faculty members expressed concerned about the program. Many professors are worried that students will use Pass/D/ Fail to “game the system” in order to protect their high GPAs without having to do as much work. The most frequent grade for students who invoked Pass/D/Fail is a B, demonstrating that the performance of Pass/D/ Fail students is typically average. We under- stand the weariness amongst some faculty over a GPA-driven student body. However, given that we attend a competitive institution of higher education where risk-aversion is both inherent and rewarded, we do not see how the presence or absence of Pass/D/Fail will change the culture. Students gravitate toward academic environments where they are comfortable and feel successful. Pass/D/ Fail allows students to feel a similar level of comfort in an unfamiliar discipline. Two Pass/D/Fail classes taken outside of one’s major and distribution requirements will not significantly affect a student’s ability to graduate with honors. Two of the 36 credits needed to graduate from Middlebury should permissibly become an opportunity for risk and exploration.
Our time is both valuable and finite. Taking a course Pass/D/Fail allows students to test out a new interest without taking on too much additional stress or compromising their focus on their major. If he or she has the time, a student may be able to do perfectly well in a course outside of his or her major or area of interest. But rarely do overscheduled, overcommitted Middlebury students have that extra time and energy. The Pass/D/Fail option gives students the chance to pursue a subject that would normally require a disproportionate percentage of their attention. This is not laziness; rather, it is time management, a critical skill that college does and ought to teach us. We concede that perhaps some students are “gaming the system” by putting less effort into a class that they would ordinarily take for a grade. However, this does not diminish the importance of having the option for students to take advantage of opportunities they would not otherwise seek out. The benefits, in our opinion, outweigh the possible costs to academic rigor.
While extending Pass/D/Fail is a progressive step in encouraging exploration and reducing stress, we can continue to look to our peer institutions for inspiration. Other colleges and universities have taken a more lenient approach to Pass/D/Fail. Students at Williams College, often ranked the most academically rigorous of the NESCAC schools, may take up to three courses on a Pass/Fail basis and have up to the tenth week of the semester to decide. Bowdoin allows students to take up to four Pass/D/Fail courses and have up to the sixth week of classes. Harvard University does not place a specific limit on the number of pass/fail classes students can take, though they cannot be used to satisfy any requirements. Yale has a similar policy to Harvard, and even allows students who invoked Pass/Fail to switch back to a letter grade until shortly after midterms if they find themselves doing better than anticipated. These examples should quell any fears that expanding Pass/Fail comes at the expense of academic integrity.
We the students must challenge ourselves by fully and authentically using the Pass/D/ Fail option. A Political Science major who uses Pass/D/Fail to take a difficult History course has, perhaps, not fully utilized this opportunity. We encourage students to step outside their comfort zones and take courses that will push them to think differently. Pass/D/Fail is an opportunity for English students to study Computer Science and Biology majors to study Classics. We ought to use the Pass/D/Fail option as productively as we can. There are 34 other chances to play it safe at Middlebury. Let’s take this one risk and use it to add unforeseen value to our education.
(12/10/15 2:18am)
Planet X is in the early stages of human development. Should it adopt communism or capitalism?
This motion was debated in the final round of the 2015 Oxford Inter-Varsity Debating Competition. On the weekend of Nov. 13, the Middlebury Debate Society sent its three most experienced debaters to compete in this prestigious event. The society is a student-run organization that brings together students who love to argue for and think about both sides of a polarizing issue.
This fall, the Society sent students to England to compete at the Oxford Tournament, Cambridge Tournament and Cambridge Women’s Tournament. These three events are among the most esteemed debate competitions in the world, bringing together debaters from many different countries.
The competitions are held in the British Parliamentary Style, a common form of academic debate. In this format, debaters are presented with the topic, called a “motion,” and assigned a stance only fifteen minutes before the debate. They fulfill one of four roles, the “opening government,” “opening opposition,” “closing government,” or “closing opposition.” In this short period of time, each student prepares a seven-minute speech that they will use to try and sway the judges. Debaters need to be ready to argue for or against any motion that is thrown their way.
Elizabeth Lee ’17 is president of the Middlebury Debate Society and attended all three of the international competitions. “What you really have to do is learn a lot about what’s going on in the world right now and understand the most prominent theories in philosophy,” she explained. Staying up to date with current events is key when preparing for a competition. “The Economist is the debater’s favorite news source,” Lee added.
The motions that were considered at these events spanned such diverse topics as the feminist movement, climate engineering and whether or not Western democracies should abandon an Olympics hosted by Russia.
“One idea that I really liked [debating] was a right to emigration,” Lee recalled. Students discussed whether a government should pay for people to immigrate to a different country if they can’t afford it themselves. The central question became whether or not the failure to fund such a trip would be comparable to forcing someone to stay somewhere they don’t want to be. “If you have a fundamental disagreement with the country you’re living in, presumably you should be able to leave that society,” Lee reflected.
From Dec. 27 to Jan. 4, the Middlebury Debate Society will be sending students to the World Universities Debating Championship. This is the largest debate tournament in the world and some of the best debaters from every continent will compete. Every year it is held in a different country. Last year it was hosted in Selangor, Malaysia and this winter it will be in the historical port city of Thessaloniki, Greece. Over 70 different nations will be represented.
“Getting to know people from all over the world that share your passion for debate is great,” Lee added. There are some clear differences in the way that teams prepare for the competition, of course. At several universities in England, for example, a debate society comes with it’s own exclusive union, grand chamber, and library. The benefit of the international tournaments is that societies like these will encounter groups that are less formal in their approach. There is more than one way to argue persuasively. “Staying in the U.S., you don’t realize that there are so many different styles of debate, and that they are all very effective,” Lee explained.
The Middlebury Debate Society also participates in events closer to home. About once a week the students attend a domestic debate tournament. And during J-term, Middlebury will be hosting it’s own event. The 2016 Middlebury Debate Invitational will take place the weekend of Jan. 16 and will include college teams from all over the East Coast.
No previous debating experience is needed to join the Middlebury Debate Society. Getting involved with the organization can be a rewarding experience for those who want to think about today’s biggest questions as well as those who are more interested in the competitive aspect. Lee explained, “It’s a lot of work, but it’s really worth it. We have a really great community. We put on social events and are trying to find ways to foster dialogue.” The Debate Society is currently working with President Laurie Patton to plan a joint event that would encourage controversial conversations.
If you are someone looking forward to debating today’s most pressing questions around the dinner table this holiday season, the Middlebury Debate Society might be just the place for you.
(12/09/15 8:05pm)
Middlebury men’s and women’s swimming and diving traveled to Amherst College’s Pratt Pool last Saturday, Dec. 5 to race against the Lord Jeffs in their first dual meet of the season. Both the Panther men and women fell to their hosts, emerging from the meet with very similar scores of 173.5-111 and 177.5-111.5, respectively.
“Dual meets are always a great opportunity to get up and race while we’re in the middle of our training,” women’s co-Captain Lily Sawyer ’16 said.
Isabel Wyer ’18, Liza MacCowatt ’19, Megan Griffin ’16 and Morgan Burke ’17 were some of Middlebury’s first off the blocks for the 200 medley relay, and their time of 1:50.50 secured second place for the Panthers.
In the next race, Lucy Scott ’16 finished less than three seconds behind Amherst’s Marie Maxwell (first) to take third in the 1000 free.
Burke placed third in the 100 free (54.12), touching the wall just 0.12 and 0.07 seconds behind the top two Amherst swimmers, while Alaina Pribis ’19 finished the 500 free a heartbreaking 0.16 seconds behind Lord Jeff Charlotte Chudy to notch another third place finish for the Panthers.
Wyer left her competitors in the 200 free in her wake with a time of 1:55.45, and first-year Grace Stimson ’19 took first in the 200 IM (2:14.77).
Stimson touched the wall just 1.10 seconds before Pierce (2:15.87), and Katie Aman ’19 captured third in the IM event with her 2:18.48-second swim.
“We beat Amherst for the first time in a long time last year, so they came back with a vengeance,” said Maddie Pierce ’16, Sawyer’s co-captain. “[However,] we came off a tough week of training, and the team performed really well given that.”
Burke, Griffin, Stephanie Andrews ’18 and Wyer later won the 400 free relay in a combined time of 3:41.96.
Sawyer’s other co-captain, Griffin, explained that “Coach Rueppel sees meets as extensions of training, so our goal was to race hard, have fun and not worry about times.”
On the men’s side, the Panthers’ ‘A’ entry — made up of Paul Lagasse ’16, Jack McLaughlin ’18, Brendan Leech ’19 and Bryan Cheuk ’16 — won the 400 free relay with a time of 3:14.04.
Individually, Michael McGean ’17 tied Lord Jeff Connor Haley to win the 1000 free (9:54.51).
Later, McGean (first) and Andrew Rosenthal ’16 (third) swept two of the top three spots in the men’s 500 free. McGean sealed his win by 7.45 seconds with a time of 4:50.94, while Rosenthal rounded out the podium with a 5:00.90.
Connor McCormick ’18 won the 200 IM with a time of 2:04.03.
Cheuk’s 21.86 in the 50 free earned him a third place finish as he came in just 0.74 seconds after the winner, and his 48.84 in the 100 free secured him second in that race.
Leech and Andy Grant ’17 earned overall points for Middlebury, swimming a 2:02.84 in the 200 backstroke and a 2:05.66 in the 200 IM respectively to place second in each of those events.
In the diving portion of the meet, both Will Greene ’19 (209.25) and Elissa DeNunzio ’18 (188.63) placed second on the 1-meter board to earn points for the Panthers, while DeNunzio led the competition in the 3-meter event (198.00).
“Overall, both the women’s and men’s teams had great swims this past weekend,” Griffin said. “It’s always fun to race against a NESCAC rival.”
When the teams began their official practices a few weeks ago, Head Coach Bob Rueppel pointed out that, “Not looking too far ahead is the key with such a long season.”
“Right now, [we] are focused on putting in the work for the last few weeks on campus before we head off to Florida for training camp [in late December and early January],” Pierce said.
Before the teams leave campus for their short winter break, the Panthers will host Springfield for their second dual meet of the season this Saturday, Dec. 12 at 1 p.m.
(12/09/15 3:44pm)
On Wednesday, Nov. 2, in Wilson Hall, three administrators — Katy Smith Abbott, Andi Lloyd and Miguel Fernández — unveiled a plan they developed over the summer to remedy student stress. This was the first time that the plan, which they termed “The Grid,” was available to the student body. About seventy students and faculty were in attendance at the forum.
At their May meeting the Board of Trustees charged the administration with addressing stress and inclusivity on campus. The resulting plan outlines short-term and long-term solutions that are broken down into three categories: building community and resilience, promoting mind–body well-being and fostering diversity and inclusivity. Each objective has its own chart and associated time agenda.
“It seems to me like the administration is very desperate for some kind of concrete action,” Prasanna Vankina ’18 said. “It is clear that the administration cares a lot, but a lot of the proposals they suggested seemed reactive.”
During the presentation, Smith Abbott described intensive brainstorming sessions over the summer between herself, Lloyd, and Fernández, in a room on the second floor of Old Chapel, with a white board, “a great deal of snacks,” and diagrams and buzz-words of stressors for today’s college students.
“I don’t know how much interaction there actually was with students,” Vankina said.
SGA President Ilana Gratch ’16 said that the SGA’s main goal in holding this stress forum was to create an opportunity for students to enter the conversation. Last week, the Campus editorial board called for administrators to base their solutions on student input rather than on their anecdotal or outdated perceptions of student stress.
“I am encouraged that three senior level administrators spent the entire summer addressing issues relating to stress in the student body,” Gratch said.
At the forum, Gratch gathered responses and suggestions from student attendees, which she will compile in a briefing and send to Smith Abbott, Lloyd and Fernández. She said the SGA will also conduct a survey during winter term asking about perspectives and experiences related to stress at Middlebury.
“I look forward to compiling the student input we received at the forum for administrators so the proposals can incorporate students’ ideas, too,” she continued.
Some commented on the low number of student attendees at the forum. One student suggested that students were too stressed about their academic work to show up. When the attendees broke into small groups to reflect on the presentation, many were dismayed that few solutions in the plan dealt with academics.
“Almost everyone in my small group was frustrated that ‘slow learning’ came up once in the presentation,” Vankina said. “The other prevalent issues of diversity and inclusivity and health are piled onto an already existing issue in the classroom, this rapid form of learning. No one is internalizing anything they learn.”
During a question-and-answer period, one student stood up and said that if he received one extension on a paper, “that would do more to solve his stress than any of these proposals combined.”
Marie Vasitas ’18 said that stress is largely self-imposed by students.
“We need to learn how to deal with the stresses of the real world, because the world is not going to adapt to us,” she said. “Once we leave Middlebury, there won’t be opportunities to have conversations about how we can make the world less stressful. I think that’s something that you have to do on your own, and that’s part of the learning experience.”
One student suggested that students and faculty “take breaks for what they are,” specifically fall and Thanksgiving breaks. “Not having work over break, not piling up work before and after break, and actually reevaluating what a break means would help so much.”
Another student lamented the lack of traditions on campus.
“There are traditions within certain groups on campus, but there’s no one unifying tradition,” she said. “Even a homecoming dance. How many people actually go to Winter Carnival?”
Kathryn Morse, chair of the history department, said the conversation that occurred at the stress forum was thoughtful and showcased multiple points of view.
“The overall bottom line seemed to be that there is too much to do with too little time,” she said. “Students have been saying there’s too much academic work here for years. In response, faculty often suggest that students might be overcommitting themselves beyond the classroom. The question might be, How does our culture pressure students to want to do so many things at once?”
Morse also said that there are too many talks offered each day.
“Perhaps limiting the number of talks across the institution to one per day would reduce stress. Students and faculty seem to have too many talks and obligations to go to — there’s just too much going on.”
Tiffany Chang ’17.5, co-chair of Community Council, expressed excitement for Gratch’s work with the forum and with the upcoming survey. “It will be beneficial to the conversation to hear the opinions of students en masse.” she said. “I would also like to see the solutions focus more on faculty and staff stress, which Community Council has been discussed this semester. All of us — students, faculty, and staff — live and work on campus together, and all our stresses affect one another.”
Matthew Gillis ’18 expressed concern about the way Middlebury markets itself.
“People feel deceived about having come here when they see institutional and social forms of racism and classism” he said. “It is disheartening to realize how many students are accepted from similarly privileged areas each year and how the way you present yourself in admissions can, in many cases, immediately divide, shape and burden your experience. When the college annually boasts how each class is more brilliant, more diverse, and ultimately more ‘perfect’ each year, you internalize the surrounding imperfections you see—and begin to doubt the ability to be perfect yourself.”
“I think being honest, sharing why you feel a certain way, why you hold a certain view or why you’re having a tough time is so important. Many times I stay silent instead of admitting ignorance or slap on a smile when I’m feeling down. We can’t be afraid of making mistakes, appearing vulnerable, revealing ignorance, or showing that we aren’t perfect people, because this is how will eventually help us learn and reform ourselves and our stress,” he concluded.
(12/03/15 2:06am)
I am tired of the empty, easy-come-easy-go gratification of most of the things I watch these days. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes all I want is two hours of slack-jawed vegetation, but recently I have been thirsting for more.
Middlebury’s event listing describes Clickshare as a play about “a group of employees at a popular news website who live and die by the viral content of their pieces. But when they break a story that’s bigger than anything they’ve ever seen before, their lives hang in the balance.” I am here to promise you that it is so much less melodramatic and so much more gratifying than such a description would suggest. Rather than hiding out in your room this weekend and putting on a unfulfilling movie that you will forget as you shuffle back from your post-credits bathroom visit, come down to the MCA and immerse yourself in a play that will leave you both stimulated and satisfied.
The playwright, Lucas Kavner ’06.5, is a Brooklyn-based writer, performer and comedian from Plano, Texas who possesses an incredible gift for what New York Magazine describes as “artfully underwritten, unaffectedly colloquial and often uproarious dialogue.” Since graduating from Middlebury, Kavner has been filling newspapers, televisions, stages and websites with his evocative and critically acclaimed works.
Like the best of Kavner’s writing, both his major 2011 play, Fish Eye (a critic’s pick in Time Out and a featured work in New York Magazine’s Best Theatre of the Year list) and his 2013 play, Carnival Kids (a critic’s pick of The New York Times), approach intimately pertinent topics with brilliant ingenuity and humor.
According to one critic, Fish Eye “explodes the traditional chronology of romance and offers a modern take on the impossible exhilaration of love — when nothing means everything and everything means nothing — and the entire world shrinks down to a single moment.” Meanwhile, Carnival Kids was hailed by The New Yorker as “a hilariously funny ode to slightly immoral and irresponsible losers.”
When asked what motivates his writing, Kavner stated that he likes “writing that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be smarter than everyone else in the world” and loves “when even the most serious of plays with the most serious of topics manage to be hilariously funny.”
Most people would agree with Kavner’s sentiment that he wants “more messy plays that don’t wrap up in a nice little package and you forget about five seconds later.” Clickshare is certainly one such play.
Onscreen, he has acted in or written for projects with Comedy Central, ESPN, VH1, ABC, Netflix and Dreamworks. His comedy videos have garnered millions of views online, and have been featured on the BBC, MSNBC, NPR and online in The New York Times, Huffpost, Time, Gawker, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic, among other places.
When not writing for the stage and screen or acting, Kavner composes essays for The Washington Post, The Believer, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Slate, Dallas Morning News, The Billfold, Flavorwire and McSweeney’s. Along the way, he also spent three years as a staff reporter and videographer at The Huffington Post.
Scrolling through his hundreds of articles and projects, I was most captured by The Days of Yore, a website Kavner co-founded in 2013 to host interviews with some of the most celebrated artists and writers in the country about their pre-fame years.
When asked what kind of theater he finds most inspiring, Kavner responded, “I love plays that don’t go where you think they will. I hate things that are too clean or overwritten or plot-heavy. Any time I see the writer’s writing onstage, when a character is too consciously well spoken, I immediately tune out. Early on, I tried really hard to always write to the left of what the characters really wanted to say, so when they say exactly what they’re thinking, it becomes startling, rather than some over-eloquent norm. I also tend to love things I’d never think of writing myself … I like seeing plays about underdogs, about people whose stories aren’t getting told anywhere else.”
Although Kavner has not said where the vision for this particular work originated, Clickshare was first developed at the Middlebury Summer Play Labs. Taking place in August, the labs offer students the opportunity to flourish creatively in a non-academic setting. Current students are paired with experienced alumni to develop ideas, generate art pieces and learn valuable career skills related to the theatre and film industries.
Kavner absolutely loves what he does, but if he could change one thing about theatre, it would be the cost of attendance.
“We all say it,” he said, “but affordability is just the biggest thing. If the people who actually love theater, who are active members of the community, can’t afford to see it, that’s such a profound problem. The affordability thing ends up playing into so many other things, too. Because when only old, rich, white people can afford to see new plays, then the plays have to cater to the old, rich, white people. And that often leads to very boring plays.”
Luckily, the College has adressed the affordability problem. Tickets to Clickshare are only $6 for students, so show your support by walking down to the MCA this Thursday, Friday or Saturday (Dec. 3-5) at 7:30 p.m. or Saturday at 2:00 p.m. Friday’s performance will also feature a talk with Kavner, Theatre Professor and Director Alexander Draper and the cast. You will not want to miss this hilarious and evocative play as it offers a dark satire of Internet culture in the age of viruses, both real and imagined. It was written by a Midd kid and directed by a Midd kid – it is only right for it to be attended by Midd kids. Visit go/boxoffice or stop by either of the box offices in McCullough or the MCA for tickets.
