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(11/12/14 7:15pm)
I am a little late on the uptake, but it appears our campus has taken a renewed interest in our social, or lack thereof, lives. Or perhaps long-simmering tensions have boiled over and all our angst and frustration is being made known. Or maybe we just had an opportunity to complain. No matter what perspective you have, President Liebowitz’s discussion on social life has revealed a lot on the administration and, more importantly, us as a campus.
Yes, I admit it. We do not have the most “college” of social lives. This is not a large school, this is not a school that still has Greek affiliations (with maybe the exception of KDR), so what are we really to expect? It’s Middlebury for God’s sake. We enjoy beer from independent breweries, long sunsets, and complaining about our workload. Getting belligerent in a toga on a Tuesday was never part of the equation. Though that does sound like fun.
We have a tremendous amount of trouble admitting who and what we are. There is an identity crisis somewhere in between loving a drinking culture and going out a couple times a semester. Do we want a more robust social life on campus? The answer seems to be generally yes. How do we get it? That’s the real question.
Well, who is responsible for taking all our fun?! Clearly, we are just a ton of fun on our own if only the administration and the long arm of the law, Public Safety, would just leave us alone! We’ve all heard that argument, and we’re all bored of it. I could tell you our Public Safety officers are doing their job, I could say to the kid chanting “F*%* Pub Safe!” to get over yourself. Most importantly, I could tell anyone that anywhere in the world there is no police officer that is nicer than one of our Public Safety officers.
In many ways we have come to this frustrating logical end by way of default. We need someone to blame for our stifled social culture, and Public Safety is the easy target of authority. I understand that. I have had Public Safety knock on my door at 8:45 p.m. on a Friday in an upperclassman dorm. I have had Public Safety lecture me about the placement of chips at a party. However, I would gladly suffer all these inconveniences in return for just any one of the times I have needed Public Safety officers and they have responded. Officers Paul, Bryan and Amy I immediately think of as people who have responded with professionalism and genuine concern to situations that I could no longer control. My only true regret is that I’ve only gotten to know these people from those situations. Wouldn’t it be better if student organizations took them out to dinner? Developed professional, working relationships rather than antagonistic ones? If we can’t control what the administration does, then that is on us as students. If we want a better social experience, changing the way we interact with Pub Safe on a regular basis could go a long way.
What about us though? Are all our misbegotten social woes really the fault of an administration or policy? Or is it something to do with us? Before you answer, think about the last time you threw some kind of event yourself, be it registered or un-registered. When was the last time you were on the contributing rather than receiving end of the Middlebury social experience? To the small number of you out there who have hosted large events you know that they are rather expensive, rather stressful at times, and can often be received by a student body that is plainly ambivalent. Let alone the risks of dorm damage, angry drunks and sexual assault. If everyone contributes, these responsibilities tend to even out. However, when it consistently falls upon a few select student organizations, it becomes burdensome, and frankly unappealing, to keep throwing those types of events.
Our social lives are not simply going to be handed to us — nothing in life ever is. The larger “Middlebury” experience is not going to simply be given to you. It has to be made, and that takes more than a little effort. The biggest misconception we have as a student body is that words alone will create change, be that selfish change or larger social change. Before we start demanding policy changes, let’s start living the changes we want seen. I guarantee we will have better luck. If you want a certain social experience, go out there and get it. Get your host training or your TIPS training or crowd manager training. Get to know Public Safety as genuine people. Let’s work on it ourselves; maybe everyone will have a little more fun.
(11/06/14 3:58am)
On Tuesday, Nov. 4, Calvin McEathron ’16 concluded his bid for the two-seat Addison-1 district in the Vermont House of Representatives. When the votes were tallied Tuesday night, Amy Sheldon and incumbent Betty Nuovo took first and second and will represent Middlebury in the legislature. McEathron was close behind Nuovo’s 1,163 votes, with 1,034. At just 20 years old, the Middlebury junior would have been the youngest state representative in the nation.
McEathron grew up on a small farm in East Montpelier, VT, just 15 minutes from the state capital. “I was able to spend some time in the state house in high school,” McEathron recalled in an interview, “which really piqued my interest in politics.”
The impetus for McEathron’s campaign occured during his freshman year at Middlebury College, when he heard that his representative in East Montpelier might step down. Instead, the resignation of Middlebury incumbent Paul Ralston (D) “opened the door for a potential run,” and McEathron seized the opportunity.
In an interview, McEathron explained his stance on economic development, property tax reform, higher education, opiates, health care, and environmental preservation – the cornerstones of his campaign.
“First off, we need to make sure the job market is inviting for young people,” McEathron explained. “Vermont is still super beautiful, there’s no sprawl, there’s small communities and farmland, and it’s very sustainable. But at the same time you don’t see a lot of growth.”
The major reason for Vermont’s economic stagnation, according to McEathron, is the prohibitively high cost of living. “People are now leaving the state, because they can’t afford to live here.”
For a rural state like Vermont, McEathron sees e-commerce, internet connectivity, and cell-phone coverage as potential catalysts for entrepreneurship and economic growth.
“I think that the internet and cell phone coverage in general provide tremendous opportunities,” McEathron explained, “because people don’t necessarily need to start up a new business and get a big brick and mortar building. What they need is internet access and their living room. Middlebury has done a decent job in bringing these people in – telecommuters – but there’s a lot more we can do toward incentivizing entrepreneurs and providing capital to get them off the ground.”
McEathron also suggested consolidating smaller schools into a larger and more flexible school system. The problems that Vermont schools face, he explained, are often logistical.
“There are still towns in Vermont that are graduating five or six kids a year. You can’t have someone taking an AP class and someone else on an entirely different track both being able to succeed. Instead you have both those kids in the same class, where one kid is way over his head and the other is bored.”
Attracting and developing human capital is one concern, but retaining this skilled workforce is another. McEathron explained that families move to Vermont to provide their children with a quality education, only to leave the state after graduation day.
“You can raise your kids in a very safe area, with good public schools,” McEathron admitted, “but at the same time the property taxes are some of the highest in the country here in Addison County, and really across Vermont.”
“You’ve got to provide a quality education,” McEathron emphasized, pausing for a moment before continuing. “But now you have people who are afraid to come here because they think it will cost too much.”
One program that might help, Homeshare Vermont, connects newcomers with cheap housing in exhange for everyday chores like “raking the leaves or mowing the lawn,” McEathron explained. “It’s a really good program, but it’s in a small part of the state. If it were spread throughout [Vermont] I think it could do a lot to lower rent costs, especially for those who are interested in coming here but couldn’t afford to previously.”
Another roadblock is Vermont’s healthcare system, a thorny issue that McEathron discussed frequently with Middlebury residents.
“Right now the system is broken in Vermont,” McEathron said, leaning forward in his chair. “You go to sign up for healthcare and the website is down. We spent a ton of money, we tried to put in our own exchange, as opposed to taking the federal one, which has come at a tremendous cost to us.”
Although McEathron doesn’t fault Governor Shumlin, or even oppose a single-payer system in principle, he is wary blindly supporting any initiative without assessing its costs.
“When we’re looking at single-payer, there is a group of people that are unequivocally for it,” McEathron said. “I think that single-payer could be a good possibility. But, I think it’s really reckless to take that step without knowing the costs.”
The reform is expected to cost around two billion dollars.
“Right now Vermont raises around 2.7 billion dollars in tax revenue. You’re looking at almost doubling your tax burden ... even finding two billion dollars in a small state is really tough. To say, ‘I unequivocally support it,’ I think is a little unfair to Vermonters.”
McEathron also criticized Governor Peter Shumlin for failing to release his financial plan for the reform.
“Governor Shumlin has pushed off and pushed off the release of the plan,” McEathron said. “It’s gotten to the point where he’s playing political games with it.”
Throughout his campaign, which lasted throughout the summer and fall, health care was one issue that McEathron encountered with regularity. On the campaign, McEathron hosted discussions with local residents, appeared on local media, and went from door to door throughout Middlebury.
Close interaction with the electorate quickly taught McEathron to develop a thick skin.
“The Addison Independent controls the political sphere in Middlebury,” McEathron explained, “and pretty much across Addison. People are always going back and forth with letters to the editor, so you have to make sure your side is well represented, and see what other people are saying about you. That’s a thing you don’t see in the rest of the country.”
This constant self-reflection – and self-promotion – can be exhausting.
“There are days that you come back thinking, ‘Everyone hates me,’” McEathron said, sighing. “Then there are days where you come back and think, ‘I’m the perfect candidate!’”
Before his campaign, McEathron worked on an independent study of ‘rural politicking techniques’ with former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas. In addition to political expertise, McEathron quickly recognized the importance of an open mind.
“I think people are looking for, to some extent, just someone to listen,” McEathron explained. “You don’t want to come in with too big of an agenda. ‘This is what I’m going to do, this is what I’m going to do.’ That can turn people off pretty quickly.”
Coping with situations like that can be daunting.
“I still remember the first door that I knocked on,” McEathron recalled, chuckling. “I remember getting to my first door and seeing a big sign on the door that said “No Political Solicitors.” It was the only one I saw all summer, but it was the first door. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what do I do!’ I didn’t have a spiel yet, I wasn’t comfortable, and I was so nervous. I think I ended up just putting a business card in and leaving.”
These types of hiccups were the anomalies in an otherwise fantastic learning experience, according to McEathron.
“Overall it’s been incredibly positive and broadened my comfort zone in terms of meeting people, in terms of really listening, and both being able to objectively take in someone else’s opinion and then form my own.”
McEathron was also thankful for all of the Vermonters he met on the trail.
“There’s a lot of neat people in Vermont, and when you run a race like that you get the chance to see the perspectives of so many of them.”
When asked about adjusting back to college life at Middlebury, McEathron smiled.
“I think it will take a little adjusting, to get back into the swing of things. The difference between running a campaign and doing schoolwork is night and day.”
(10/30/14 2:53am)
Ever wondered about the mysterious “steam” coming out of the in-ground grate near the Mahaney Center for the Arts? (Hint: it has to do with something that Google headquarters and Middlebury College have in common).
“I have no idea,” Emma Hamilton ’17 said. “Is it a snow melter?”
“Well, it doesn’t smell,” Daniel Plunkett ’16 guessed. “I would assume its steam from the biomass plant. I don’t think there’s anything happening in the CFA that requires exhaust.”
“It’s steam, right?” Maya Woser ’18 echoed Plunkett’s prediction. “I don’t think it can be hot air. That just sounds dangerous.” But it is!
“It’s not steam (that’s being emitted from the grate),” supervisor of the College’s Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning system (HVAC) Raymond Gale said. “If you walked on there [the grate], you’d see it’s just hot air, only about 110 degrees or so.”
I walked on, and felt I had stepped into a sauna.
“When the air is cool, like this time of year, it just saturates the (surrounding)air with moisture, which makes fog,” Gale said, as I quickly wiped my sweat (fog?) ‘stache.
The whole underground contraption is part of the CFA’s air-conditioning system.
“Inside the building is what’s called a chiller,” explained Gale, and that hot air is what comes out of the grate. “It pumps chilled water around to different areas and it picks up heat as it goes through the building. The pipes take the water back into the chiller, and the chiller transfers the heat into the cooling tower. There’s a fan that blows hot air up through the water so it takes the heat out.”
Built in 1989, the chiller air-conditioning system runs almost year-round, from March to December, in order to maintain the humidity and temperature in the Museum’s galleries.
“Even when it’s fifty degrees outdoors, you need the chilled water to remove moisture from the building,” Gale said.
Most of the air-conditioned buildings on campus are not water-based but Freon-based and use DX coils and gas compressors. The cooling tower system is preferred for larger buildings because it is more efficient and more effective in cooling (measured in tonnage), than the Freon system, which is also a larger structure.
However, the water-based system uses more chemicals.
“The cooling tower needs a lot of maintenance, a lot of water treatment,” Gale said. “The water is warm and at a good temperature to grow bacteria, so you have to treat it daily with chemicals. The other [Freon-based] system is all internal, it’s all locked in. There’s no treatment.”
The chemicals used to treat the water are a microbiocide, A-202, and bromine. The microbiocide is biodegradable, according to Gale.
“We’ve switched [the chemicals] up from when I came 20 years ago,” he said. “We used to have chemicals that, when they went into the sewer to the treatment plant, messed up the [sewer treatment plant’s] bacteria. So we switched to biodegradable chemicals that don’t mess with the bacteria.”
There are also chiller systems installed in the Johnson Memorial Building and in BiHall.
“At certain times, if you look at the top of McCardell Bicentennial Hall you’ll see a plume coming up from there,” Gale said. “The CFA’s cooling tower is underground for aesthetic reasons, according to Gale. “There’s no place to put the cooling tower on top of the roof due to its shape and structure.”
In the near future, the chiller system in Johnson might be renovated into a new HVAC system that uses geo-thermal energy.
“The College is really going towards efficiency. Over by Battell Hall, they would drill all kinds of wells and use the local town water,” Gale said.
Although Gale is optimistic about the College’s commitment to sustainability, he has a few qualms about the 500 individual window air-conditioners they install each year for the summer language school students.
“It doesn’t seem very green to me,” Gale said. “Students often turn on their air conditioners and leave their windows open. They like to keep their room 70 degrees, rather than 75.”
The campus set points for cooling are 75 degrees and for heating 70 degrees. “We’re working towards a standardized AC system for some dorms,” he said.
And so, as another Vermont winter approaches, if you ever need to defrost your nose at the end of the long trek from BiHall to the CFA, this “foggy” grate is arguably the biggest hot spot on campus.
(10/29/14 10:02pm)
On Wednesday, Oct. 22 an impromptu meeting was held between a group of Middlebury town residents and the administration after off-campus parties on Weybridge Street over Homecoming Weekend and throughout the semester left many neighbors frustrated.
“We feel a commitment to responding to the concerns of neighbors. We of course want to believe that our students have a genuine respect for what it means to live in a close-knit community in a small town neighborhood. During the first meeting with neighbors (Wednesday, October 22), many of the concerns raised by participants were with respect … people said things such as ‘I just want to have someone look me in the eye’ and ‘I want to know that I’m being seen by my neighbors.’ I think that’s very much a small town expectation. People don’t live anonymously here and I think it’s bewildering to them to think that students don’t want to step into a friendly, neighborhood relationship,” said Dean of Students Katy Smith Abbott.
The meeting involved 17 people, including Associate Dean of Students Doug Adams, Abbott, Special Assistant to the President Dave Donahue, Director of Public Safety Lisa Burchard, Middlebury Chief of Police Tom Haley, and nine local residents — one a landlord and the rest neighbors who were concerned about student off-campus living.
The main concerns brought up by the neighbors were a lack of respect and communication between students living off-campus and town residents. However, concerns about respect went beyond just being disruptive during parties, but also day-to-day interactions from not saying hello to not making eye contact.
Though a very small percentage of College students live off campus, they are widespread enough to have contact with many residents (see graphic for details). The College currently has a lottery system that allows a finite number of students to live off campus each year. The number fluctuates between 90-120 and this year it is the full 120 students. However, off-campus partying is not new, but some neighbors perceive it to be worse in the recent years.
“I can tell you now that we have owned the house on Weybridge Street for around 20 years. It used to be a fairly quiet neighborhood. Our children grew up there since the youngest was in fourth grade,” town resident Stephanie Smith said.
“But in the last four years the problems have gotten increasingly worse. Noise, rude and inconsiderate people, drinking parties lasting all night long — even when police come to help,” she continued.
Another neighbor who wished to remain anonymous told the Campus Voice her experience during Homecoming weekend:
“Thursday we were woken up multiple times throughout the night by people just howling on the streets, slamming closed doors, and just being generally loud and rude so we didn’t get much sleep. So when Friday came and the party was growing more and more out of control, I decided to sleep at my mother in-laws’ house because I had to work in the morning. When I went to leave I couldn’t pull out of my driveway because it was so full of people. I had to inch my car along to get people to move and then what really made me mad was that there was one guy who just kind of turned and saw me and moved just an inch to the left and gave someone the finger across the street. Its just infuriating to have to sleep somewhere else so that I can be well rested for work and then to get this attitude when I’m trying to leave my own driveway and not be able to,” she said.
However, though the meeting called for by town residents and announced by Head of College Communications Bill Burger on a local town forum, The Front Porch Forum, did not include students, many students living off campus have expressed their concern for how the neighbors feel and want to work towards a solution.
“The relationship between students and the town is damaged right now and I think the town’s complaints are legitimate,” said Emily Alper ’15. “As much as they don’t want parties with a hundred students, we don’t want 100 students coming to our house, but because of the school’s short-sighted, tyrannical policies there aren’t on-campus party options. My freshman year, I would have so many different parties away from the town to choose from, and now when I talk to underclassmen, they think off-campus houses are central party space and that has never been the case.”
One major component of this dialogue has been the need for on-campus party spaces, specifically since of the closing of Prescott House and that DKE House was not opened during Homecoming weekend, as it was in past years.
“I understand that our neighbors have the right to go about their days peacefully,” said Nic Strain ’15. “And it is not our intention to disrupt them, but at the same time we are just trying to enjoy our college experience. I don’t think the administration is being transparent enough with the Middlebury community; there is a direct correlation between the actions of the administration [banning tailgates/not opening DKE] and the events that transpired over Homecoming Weekend. We didn’t want to have people over, especially not at that volume, but there was nowhere else for students to go, and that is an issue that is falling on the shoulders of those who live off campus, which needs to be addressed,” he continued.
However, though the meeting did focus on the particularly tense relationship that has transpired between students and neighbors, the exchanges were not all negative. Peter Jette, town resident and landlord to over 20 students expressed his genuine appreciation for college students during an interview with the Campus Voice.
“I have enough experience with the students as tenants to make a judgment and they’ve been terrific. I can count on one hand the number of problems I’ve had. I didn’t even know what that Front Porch Forum was until someone sent me a clip from it so I joined it because it kind of annoyed me that the only comments pertaining to Middlebury off-campus housing were negative,” Jette said.
“I can just tell you that the tenants have been great; they pay rent on time, they take care of places for the most part, and I chat with them when they pay rent because my office is near by and they’re terrific tenants and most of them are terrific people,” he concluded.
These conversations coincide with other conversations that have been happening on Community Council and throughout the College about the implementation of a social honor code that would hold students accountable, with written documentation, for their actions. Although only a discussion as of now, the College is beginning to look at what a social honor code could mean.
“I would like students to hold each other accountable, to be willing to accept responsibility when things go off the rails (and to ask for help when they see this happening). Whether a social honor code (which has been the subject of many conversations in the past several years) is required to make this possible is an open question,” Abbott said.
(10/29/14 8:44pm)
On Friday, Oct. 24, the Middlebury MothUP hosted the second annual Cocoon in the Mahaney Center for the Arts. Featuring six storytellers from wildly different backgrounds each tackling the theme of blood, Cocoon was an intimate and singular experiment in narration and audience engagement.
For the uninitiated, Cocoon is fundamentally inspired by The Moth, which was originally created in 1997 by George Dawes Green as a live storytelling event in New York City. Since then, it has been adapted for radio by NPR contributor and six-time Peabody Award recipient Jay Allison as The Moth Radio Hour, in addition to countless variations across the country.
While the College has hosted its own incarnation of The Moth since 2010, Cocoon aimed to bring the popular storytelling format to a larger audience while featuring an expanded cast of storytellers. The event, now in its second year, was completely sold-out and boasted a waitlist of about 40 people, one of the largest crowds ever to express interest in a MCA Concert Hall performance.
Produced by Veronica Rodriguez ’16.5 and coordinated by Luke Greenway ’14.5 and Rachel Liddell ’15 and Director of the MCA Liza Sacheli, Cocoon was a startling and captivating experience. Each storyteller offered something at once entertaining and uninhibited. From Kathryn Blume, an Oregonian reconciling with her far-flung New York relatives, to Bill Torrey, a Vermont native recounting a tale of teenage rebellion, the storytellers offered glimpses into dynamic and complex life experiences. Often fantastic pacing and a natural ability to balance comedy and sobriety enabled the speakers to easily endear themselves to the audience, drawing us in while managing to retain a wholly singular voice.
The beauty of the storytelling format in particular, bare of any script or visual aid, was that each storyteller managed to conjure up entire backdrops with just a few words, allowing the imaginations of the audience members to fill in the gaps. Over the course of a single evening, the audience was transported to the backwoods of midcentury Vermont through Torrey, the swamps of Jacksonville, Florida through Assistant Professor of Dance Christal Brown, and a darkly comical funeral in a Jewish cemetery through Kathryn Blume, as well as Chris de la Cruz ’13 and Melissa Surrette ’16. Each storyteller offered not only a sense of self, but also a sense of place. Through this we can begin to sense the purpose of traditional storytelling. Why have oral traditions existed throughout history, but to bring people to places they may never have the chance to see and to allow them to vicariously live through experiences they otherwise can’t?
The live setting only enhanced the strength of the storytelling format. While radio broadcasts may reach a broader audience, they lack not only the physical shared space of a live show, but also cannot possibly recreate the sense of intimacy that is generated both among members of the audience and between the storytellers and the audience.
In his story, Otto Pierce ’13.5 used blood in multiple contexts, underlying his relationships with three other young men and exploring the social and political forces that have led them, since their initial meeting, to live very different lives than him. Be it an HIV infection, spilt blood or near-death experiences, blood and race have become defining signifiers of distinctions between young men who otherwise share common ground. Pierce mixed the personal and profound adeptly, using his personal experiences to consider the social forces that in many ways determine our futures, and invited the audience to do the same. We came away not only delighted by a story of brotherhood and youthful misadventures, but also sobered by the realization that there still exists such stark injustice in a country that has yet to fully resolve long-established racial disparities.
“Each format has its own kind of beauty,” Allison, who acted as emcee of the event, said. “Just listening is lovely, but going and sitting in a room with an audience and being able to watch people’s faces is also beautiful.”
Yet despite the myriad formats The Moth can take, it has maintained its essential core since its inception.
“It doesn’t change or grow in any fundamental way,” Allison said. “The concept of it has stayed true since the beginning; you just sit there and listen to your fellow man say something honest about their lives, take it or leave it.”
It is this honesty that gives an event like Cocoon its potency. Not only was each story well crafted and interesting, but they all also came from a willingness to share some meaningful experience with virtual strangers, despite the potential for failure or embarrassment. While every story offered something valuable, Brown’s story in particular was able to skillfully marry deft pacing with a raw and resonant subject. While carefully plotted and articulated in a simple and straightforward manner, her exploration of her relationship with her late father still seemed to burst with moments of spontaneous passion. The mark of truly transformative storytelling, Brown seemed to make new discoveries in a story she had likely rehearsed and told many times before. As a result, the audience was left feeling they had witnessed something both deeply personal and massively momentous. The event became not only a shared experience, but also a willful exchange between speaker and audience member. A speaker offered their story, and in exchange, the audience members were left to assess its meaning and perhaps see their own lives a little differently.
In this sense, Cocoon, though high-concept and distinctive, boiled down to the essence of conversation, something that is easy to lose in a world that often seems driven by competing distractions. Yet Cocoon, like all other incarnations of The Moth, suggests there is a craving for this type of extended and unornamented engagement.
“The lovely thing is that people are happily willing to sit there and listen to a single voice for an extended period of time,” Allison said. “It’s an affirming thing to me. We will still pay attention to each other without taking a phone call or needing special effects.”
(10/29/14 8:30pm)
No one but Jonathan Safran Foer – who spoke at the Middlebury College Commencement in 2013 – could have written Everything Is Illuminated. Of course, this is true to a degree of any piece of writing, but one can imagine that if another author was, for example, given the outline of an Agatha Christie novel and asked to write it, the story would remain intact. Not so with Everything Is Illuminated. Foer’s unique, extraordinary style is integral to the novel at every level, clear in the plot, the characterization, the emotional investment and the terribly beautiful series of climaxes. Foer’s writing shapes them all.
It is not a comfortable novel to read. If you are new to Foer, I would recommend possibly starting with his other famous novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Although the writing in the latter is not by any means conventional, the plot and the general sense of the novel are far more straightforward. In Everything Is Illuminated, Foer never lets you rest. It stretches across time, from the crash of a wagon in a tiny unnamed town in the middle of Ukraine in 1791 to the troubled family life of a teenage boy in modern-day Odessa. The novel will jump ahead of itself, flashback, flash forward, scrounge up scraps of the past and leave you dizzy wondering what year it is, or if it even really matters. That which is comic Foer turns poignant, and that which is odd Foer makes comic, with moments of drama appearing when you least expect them. The reader careens from one emotion to the next, never entirely sure what the experience is or should be and eventually coming out the other side confused but not untouched. The semi-memoir, semi-fictional quality of the book, too, leaves one unsteady. Was it real? Was it fiction? Or both? Or perhaps it is fiction, but what is important is the greater literary truth that it expresses.
On the surface, the story does not seem all that complicated. A young American man named, coincidentally, Jonathan Safran Foer, comes to the Ukraine with an old photograph searching for the woman he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s. It has the potential for a satisfying and moving tale, laced with the humor of the difficulty of finding vegetarian meals in Eastern Europe and the slightly inept translator coping with his cranky grandfather as chauffeur and the clueless American client. Foer, however, makes this story far, far more.
No sooner do you open the book than you are greeted with “An Overture to the Commencement of a Very Rigid Journey,” an introductory chapter that begins with “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” Roughly half of the novel is told from the perspective of Alex, who is the occasionally incompetent translator mentioned above. All of his sections are similar to those first few lines. His English is awkward at best, at times downright wrong and confusing at its worst. Yet Foer’s genius shines through as he uses his narrator’s language to communicate tone and feeling in a way not possible with traditional, proper English. Alex’s stilted repetition of the translations between Ukrainians and the “hero,” Jonathan Safran Foer, conveys the confusion and awkwardness of the back-and-forth better than any description could do. His gradual loss of punctuation, paragraph breaks, and even indications of who is speaking catches the reader in the stream of action so that one is as much in the moment as the characters. Foer’s use of language transcends its normal confinements to communicate in ways we encounter when speaking in everyday life, but do not expect to find in a novel.
Alternating with Alex’s chapters are those written in Foer’s voice. In these, he does use proper grammar and vocabulary, but his style is still far from traditional. His story ranges from the mundane to the almost fantastical, from passages of farcical characterization to strange and beautiful descriptions of love and painted hands and sex and dreams and death. Through it all, the novel maintains the ability to surprise. The present and recent and distant pasts interweave in ways one does not expect, but Foer is not one to tie everything together with a neat bow. The ending does not leave everything resolved or even trace each character succinctly back to his or her roots. Instead, I think Foer captures something much more truthful, beautiful and sad about the past. There are connections where one does not expect them, and there are none where one hopes to find them. The resolutions the “hero” wanted to find are not there, but other ones are.
Everything Is Illuminated is, above everything, hard to pin down. It is difficult to know what is truth or fiction, whether to laugh or cry, what is past or present and even who the characters are. Its title is misleading. Yet it is precisely because of its ambiguity that this novel can capture you, whisk you away to Ukraine, and leave you moved by its passion and beauty.
(10/29/14 5:52pm)
Student behavior over Homecoming weekend struck a nerve for many townspeople in Middlebury who were affected by the large and rowdy party on Weybridge St. Angry responses flooded in via Front Porch Forum — an email-based community bulletin — causing Bill Burger, the College’s Vice President for Communications and Marketing, to plan a meeting between local residents and the administration to discuss this relationship.
As we heard in this week’s Campus Voice, some of this behavior is completely appalling. Complaints included anything from lighting fires next to neighbors’ cars to public urination to a general lack of respect for the residents of the town. While many students peacefully coexist with their neighbors, a few notable incidents have come to define the town’s perception of all off-campus residents, and even of all Middlebury students.
The desire to live off-campus is a natural one. After three years of Proctor paninis, linoleum floors, and industrial paper towel dispensers, many seniors want more ownership of their living spaces. The little things like candles and tapestries that are banned in dorms make a room feel more like home. Moreover, living off-campus teaches valuable life skills — how to find an internet provider, how to pay bills, how to navigate the tricky finances of group living when everyone has their own budget, even simply how to buy toilet paper. It’s a chance to take on the freedom of adulthood, while also shouldering the responsibility that comes with it.
But as Homecoming weekend showed us, we have been neglecting that responsibility to our community.
To be fair, there has a significant rise in demand for off-campus parties as the College continues to crack down on on-campus social spaces. This follows a number of changes in our alcohol policy. The recent tailgating ban, the disbanding of ADP and Palmer’s probation are a few examples that stick out in our minds. Following these changes, it is only logical that students would react by moving their drinking and larger gatherings to spaces that are beyond College authority.
While the College is obviously beholden to local and federal law and students should not have free reign to destroy public spaces, parties are part of college life and cannot be fully extinguished. Suppressing parties that are unsafe and inclined towards property damage is one thing — micromanaging student social life through registrations and excessive surveillance is entirely another. Old Chapel and the student body must work together to create safe and manageable parties, and the meeting in Wilson Hall on Sunday Nov. 2 is a great place to start.
One way forward is to create more options for upperclassmen housing and more communal underclassmen housing.
For upperclassmen, despite high demand for stand-alone houses, there are only a handful of options that usually go to the best numbers. This leaves suite-style housing in Ross and Atwater as the main option for group living — or blocks of singles in Chateau, Starr and Painter where students have minimal control or common space. By building or buying more communal housing, the College could concentrate student living into specific areas, and Public Safety could respond to parties rather than the Police. It is true that students have abused these large block spaces in the past, but giving up on them is not the right way to solve the problem. It merely pushes the parties elsewhere, and often to places Old Chapel doesn’t want them to go.
For underclassmen, this means creating more viable communal spaces that are not aggressively regulated by Public Safety. We have historically had more spaces like these in our dorms, but have seen a significant decline due to increasing enrollment as they have been converted into doubles and singles. Common space means more than just the Pearson’s Lounge. More suite-style living gives underclassmen a place to hang out that feels private so they do not have to seek random Atwater parties. There’s a delicate line between allowing students to engage in illegal activities and giving them enough leeway to feel like they have comfortable social spaces available to them.
But at the end of the day, the responsibility to be a good neighbor rests with the students living off-campus, and they have a lot of work to do. Members of our community in town have voiced reasonable concerns — not only about the party on Homecoming weekend, but also about the day-to-day experience of living next to students who rotate through every year.
It’s more than just bringing baked goods the day you move in as a way of apologizing in advance for the parties you’re going to throw. It takes regular engagement, exchanging phone numbers, and creating pathways for dialogue that don’t have to involve law enforcement. Trust has been broken and it will take a long time to repair, but we are the only ones who can do it. Let’s try being good neighbors seven days a week — not just five.
Artwork by SARAH LAKE
(10/22/14 11:22pm)
Two weeks ago, seven candidates running for governor of Vermont, including incumbent Governor Peter Shumlin, gathered at Vermont PBS for a 90 minute debate on issues including healthcare, the heroin epidemic and the rising cost of college tuition. The moderator, PBS viewers and the exclusively student audience all provided questions.
Stewart Ledbetter, host of the TV program “Vermont This Week,” moderated the debate. Each candidate had one minute to answer the given question, a rebuttal phase directed by the moderator, and a one minute closing statement. Ledbetter opened the debate by asking each candidate to introduce him or herself and to explain “how you have prepared for the top political office in the land.”
Pete Diamondstone of Brattleboro, a Vermont resident for about 50 years and a representative of the Liberty Union Party, was the first to introduce himself. Diamondstone has run for governor every time since 1970. “I am a revolutionary, nonviolent socialist, and I am a secessionist … As a revolutionary socialist, I have to tell you that most of what we will discuss tonight will not be relevant for me, because most of what I will talk about is how we overturn what is destroying our society and our environment, which is capitalism,” Diamondstone said.
Cris Ericson, an Independent who is also running for US Senate as the nominee of the Marijuana Party, spoke next. Ericson opened her introduction by harkening back to the days of her childhood when Vermont was “the garden of Eden.”
“We’ve got to stop the F-35 strike fighter jets from being based here, and we’ve got to stop the natural gas pipeline from being built underneath Lake Champlain,” Ericson said.
Dan Feliciano, running as a member of the Libertarian Party, introduced himself next. “I’m a father, I’m a husband, and I’m a veteran. I have three children, I live here in Essex,” Feliciano said.
Feliciano spoke of why he chose to run, after his wife told him that: “‘Now that our son is 16, we need to start thinking about what we’re going to do differently, because he will be leaving and never coming back.’” He decided that he needed “to do something about this and couldn’t stand idly by,” said Feliciano, who has a background in healthcare and turning around big businesses and government organizations. Feliciano emphasized his desire to make the state more affordable for families, provide better healthcare, reduce property taxes and offer school of choice.
Republican candidate Scott Milne, Governor Shumlin’s biggest competitor, introduced himself next. Milne grew up in Vermont and moved back in the late ’80s to take a family business that was located in New Hampshire.
However, “What I saw over the past 30 years was a continuing difference between New Hampshire and Vermont and the effect of tax policies and government on people to prosper, and that has drawn me into this race,” Milne said. He promised to offer a “great voice” for those who choose to support him.
Bernard (Bernie) Peters is running as an Independent. Peters is a retiree from the Agency of Transportation where he worked for 36 years. “I’ve been watching politics for quite some time … from what I see, whichever party is in power is not working for the Vermonter. Neither party seems to realize, that when they say they’re working for the party, they’re not working for the party. They’re working for the tax payer and the voter. They are the people who are the boss, not the other way around,” Peters said. “All it takes it a lot of good common sense and hard work from everybody,” Peters said.
Emily Peyton, an Independent from Putney, introduced herself as “an earth activist.” She entered the race “to bring forth the very exciting solutions, and the hopeful solutions that you have to help make the earth a livable place, a place that you can thrive.” Peyton explained that she came to talk about “Economic systems that can allow us to laterally grow the economy, and things that we can do to honor the earth, and live in harmony with each other and our natural world.”
Finally, incumbent Peter Shumlin, the nominee of the Democratic Party, spoke. Shumlin has served two consecutive two-year terms as governor and is seeking re-election for a third. “I love Vermont more than anything. And I ran for governor four years ago, because after building two businesses, successful businesses, in Vermont employing Vermonters, I felt that I wanted more students, more young people, to have the same opportunity that I’ve had in this state,” Shumlin said. Shumlin has and will continue to prioritize building a state “where our young people can stay, and work, and thrive.” He concluded by citing the many successes of his past two terms and asking for two more years.
The candidates debated healthcare first. Six months after winning the 2010 election, Shumlin passed a law creating a single-payer healthcare system in Vermont, making Vermont the first state in the nation to do so. However, a recent poll showed that Vermonters are deeply divided over the issue of healthcare, as are the candidates.
“Healthcare has a heavily IT-based solution, and I think that going to a single payer system really doesn’t do anything to drive down the cost of healthcare,” Feliciano said, citing the technology problems of
Vermont Health Connect and the national healthcare marketplace website. Feliciano advocated for free market solutions by opening up the market and letting more insurers into the state to drive down premiums through competition. “You pick your doctor, you pick your hospital, you pick your insurer,” he said.
Shumlin said that to address the rising cost of healthcare, Vermont must continue to follow through with the single payer system.
“First of all, I’d disagree with Peter Shumlin,” Milne said when asked about healthcare. He referred to Shumlin’s healthcare reforms as “a reckless march toward single-payer.” Milne mentioned the failure of the single-payer system after four years.
Some candidates offered novel ideas, such as Peters who suggested giving to issue of healthcare reform as a school project to students in Vermont, which has “some of the nicest schools on the East Coast.”
Hussain Al-Mahr, a student in the audience, asked how the candidates would lower the cost of college tuition and attract more students to Vermont colleges. Views on education costs were as diverse as those on healthcare. Shumlin spoke of the challenge of getting Vermont students from high school into college, an issue he has already addressed as governor by implementing the early college, dual enrollment programs and Vermont Scholars programs. Milne dismissed Shumlin’s programs as ineffective over the last two year, but did acknowledge that the cost of college has risen above what most Vermonters can pay. By lowering the cost of kindergarten through twelfth grade education, Milne hopes to be more generous with scholarships for Vermont students going to college in Vermont.
“This issue of paying to go to school begins with an absurdity and if you accept it, you’ve accepted the absurd,” Diamondstone said. “We should be paying people to go to school. School is work … If a student goes to school and learns two and two is four, that student has contributed to the wealth of the society and should be paid,” said Diamondstone. Diamondstone continued to explain the flawed relationship between citizens and capital, and how a socialist society would change that.
“University of Vermont is a private for-profit college,” Ericson said. She was outraged at the amount of money it was receiving from the state and suggested that that money be redirected to the state colleges and to free, online education.
“There are debt-free methods of education. If you want to learn anything, you can go learn it, then we need a system of accrediting that learning,” Peyton said, referencing one called the People’s Free University. As another solution to the rising cost of college, Peyton suggested “increasing our food independence by giving people of your age land in order to make our state food secure.”
The moderator then asked what the governor would do to improve wages in the state. Milne would solve this problem by making Vermont more business-friendly through tax incentives and improving the education system. Shumlin would grow wages and employment primarily through education and job training at every level.
“We need to completely convert to a socialist system of manufacturing,” Diamondstone said. According to Diamondstone, this is the only way people can ensure that they are not getting ripped off by employers.
“How can we create a monetary system so that the economy spurts up from the ground?” is the central question around improving wages, Peyton said. She is not a supporter of “trickle-down” economics.
“They’re going to go by us like roadkill on the interstate,” Peters said, explaining how businesses will not choose to locate in Vermont because the state is not business friendly. His solution would be to keep more of the well-educated Vermont students in the state. Feliciano focused primarily on cutting costs, reducing taxes and eliminating laws that prevent businesses from expanding.
J.T. Lukens of 350 Vermont submitted the next question online: “Do you support divesting Vermont’s pension funds from fossil fuel companies?” Shumlin responded first, noting Vermont’s commitment to green energy through the increase in solar and wind power over the last several years. In terms of divestment, “it’s not the sharpest tool that we have in the drawer,” Shumlin said, but that he would be willing to look into it.
“One good reason to have fossil fuels in our portfolio is … to hedge against a bet we’re doing, rushing toward this renewable energy program,” Milne said. He would not support divestment, citing other, more pressing issues. Neither Peters nor Feliciano would not support divestiture of the pension portfolio either.
“We need to make our earth a priority,” said Peyton, a strong supporter of divestment. She also spoke of the need to stop using oil and start using things like hydro-power. She suggested creating more buildings out of agricultural hemp, using the quarter of the energy needed for normal buildings.
“Capitalism not only rips off works, it rips off the planet,” Diamondstone said. Diamondstone supports divesting all capital investments and opening a state bank.
Ericson would begin her term as governor with a “complete forensic examination of the pension fund” to eliminate fraud. She did not mention divestment.
Student audience member Beatrice Woodruff asked the next question concerning the drug problem and new measures to combat it.
“This is the one area that can really destroy Vermont ... are we doing enough? No,” Shumlin said. He referenced his increase in penalties for dealers and his new approach, looking at opiate addiction as not just a law enforcement problem, but a healthcare problem. He emphasized the need for more prevention. Feliciano thinks that Shumlin has “a good approach” and “wouldn’t change anything.”
“This is something I applaud Peter for,” Milne said.
Peters spoke of the importance of keeping kids from getting into drugs, or “it won’t be long until they can’t tie their shoes or anything,” said Peters, who supports harsh penalties for drug dealers.
“Notice, there was no heroin in the United States when the Taliban were in control in Afghanistan,” said Diamondstone, also a supporter of harsh penalties for dealers.
Peyton wants to “reign back” pain medication prescriptions and look toward alternate methods to control pain, such as marijuana or hypnosis.
Ericson began by questioning Shumlin’s alleged choice to give $5 million to a ski resort for a new snow blower, rather than toward a new drug treatment facility. “Peter, did you do that?” Ericson said.From the issue of opiates, the moderator segued into the need to fix Department of Children and Families (DCF), which has been under more stress with the rise of the heroin epidemic.
Peyton suggested a family mentoring system for families who need help making good choices.
Shumlin said that the number of case workers have increased and the policy for returning children to their parents has become more stringent, but there is still more to do to improve the department and keep Vermont’s children safe.
Peters pointed out that many of the people who get their children back often have them taken away again for a repeat offense, which puts the children in more danger. “If they’ve got a criminal record that bad, something bad’s going to happen,” Peters said. He believes that social workers “have their hands tied” by rules, but should instead be working more off their intuition.
Each candidate was given the opportunity to make a closing statement.
“If you could have all the money in the world, or you could have all the love in the world, which has more value?” Peyton said. She urged Vermonters to “improve the quality of loving in your life.”
Diamondstone emphasized the need to reallocate resources away from violence toward workers and the planet so as to benefit everyone on the planet
Ericson said she will do everything in her power to stop the pipeline and to get the F-35 fighter jets out of Vermont.
Feliciano reiterated his platform of cutting spending, getting rid of single-payer, providing school choice, cutting property tax and growing businesses.
“I’m a candidate who’s about as grassroots as you can get. I don’t have big business behind me, I don’t have corporations behind me, I don’t have nobody from out of state behind me,” said Peters, who is running as the Vermonter candidate with Common Sense for Vermont People.
“I want to make this state a place where more young people can succeed,” Shumlin said, asking for two more years to continue to improve Vermont. He thanked Vermont for the four previous years as governor.
Milne concluded by speaking of his mother, who was involved in Vermont politics 20 years ago.
Following the debate, the seven candidates made their way through the audience of students, shaking hands, taking pictures with students and meeting the future members of Vermont’s electorate.
(10/22/14 10:47pm)
Nobel laureate and Columbia University Professor of Biological Sciences Martin Chalfie visited the College last Thursday, Oct. 16 to give two lectures. One talk focused on his research on the green fluorescent protein (GFP), which earned him the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the other on his current work on the molecular basis of the sense of touch.
In his first lecture, “GFP: Lighting Up Light,” Chalfie recounted the story of GFP’s discovery with humor, humility, and advice for aspiring scientists. Chalfie described GFP as a biochemical lantern and homing beacon that enables molecular biologists to watch the movement of proteins in living cells and organisms. Chalfie gave several specific examples of GFP’s use, including how scientists had used it to track the movement of viruses from cell to cell, the metastasis of cancer and the division of cells during embryonic development. There have been close to 160,000 published papers citing GFP.
The story of GFP began with the life of Chalfie’s Nobel co-laureate Osamu Shimomura. Shimomura, who was the first scientist to isolate GFP, followed an unconventional path to his life in science. When Shimomura was sixteen years old he dropped out of school to work in a paint factory to support his family. He moved from Nagasaki, Japan to a valley close to the city in 1945, fortuitously avoiding the blast of the atomic bomb. Shimomura decided to matriculate into the first college rebuilt in Nagasaki, which happened to be a pharmaceutical school.
Shimomura successfully isolated GFP in a marine biology lab, but when he attempted to illuminate the isolated GFP, it wouldn’t light up.
Chalfie explained, “This is where we depart from the scientific method and the standard story about science, because the experiment failed every single time he did it the entire summer. Nothing worked. One night near the end of the summer, he decided to go home because he’d failed once again. He took his prep, threw it in the sink and turned off the light. As he was about to leave the lab he looked back and found that it was glowing brightly. “I want to point out that in biochemistry throwing things in the sink or on the floor or the lab bench is often a very good procedure.”
It turns out that seawater has several important chemicals that enable GFP’s function.
Chalfie first heard about Shimomura’s work in 1989 at a lecture and immediately realized its potential importance. Chalfie worked on incorporating GFP into cells and fusing it to proteins, and in 1993 his work on GFP was on the cover of Science. Soon after, the scientific community embraced GFP as a powerful research tool.
Chalfie thought the story of GFP illustrated the cumulative, collaborative nature of science.
“Scientific progress isn’t something made by one great genius, but a cumulative effort, we as scientists take up ideas of others, modify them by our own experiments, and give them off to others,” he said. “What made GFP Nobel-worthy was not the work of the three of us, but the work of the thousands of people who made it a useful tool.”
Chalfie ended the talk by emphasizing the importance of funding basic research.
“Columbia gave me the freedom to do the experiments I wanted to do. I didn’t have to ask for permission or write a grant to do work on GFP. People outside of science misunderstand when we talk about the grant system. Grants are different from contract. They give you the freedom to go where the science leads you and not be tied up to a contractual obligation. I have found this to be very important, and it was really the only reason we were able to do the work on GFP that ended up working.”
Chalfie’s current work is focused largely on the sense of touch. Scientists largely understand the senses that are prompted by light, like sight, and chemical signaling, like taste and smell, but don’t understand how mechanical signals translate into touch sensation. Chalfie discovered that there are 17 important genes in the mechanosensory system and mapped their relationships with one another. He used them to investigate important questions in the field, including how we habituate touch and how we sense touch so rapidly.
When asked how the winning the Nobel Prize had changed his life, he said, “The first thing is that I get invited to give more talks like this. Before the Nobel, I never had the chance to give a general talk about science and how I thought GFP fit into it. This has given me a platform for me to do that. I’ve been able to interact much more with students. Eight months after the Nobel my niece’s daughter took me into class for show and tell, which was quite nice.”
(10/22/14 7:33pm)
Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, will visit the College on Oct. 25 to deliver a lecture. Robinson, the seventh and first female President of Ireland, held the office from 1990 to 1997. After leaving office, she became the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, traveling to war-torn regions. Robinson is a member of the group of world leaders known as The Elders, many of them former heads of state who no longer hold public office and work as advocates for peace and human rights. The group was brought together by Nelson Mandela and is chaired by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Robinson has made combating climate change a centerpiece of her international advocacy.
Robinson’s lecture is the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB)’s fall speaker. It is a public lecture that will take place at 7 p.m. at Mead Chapel. Robinson will speak for approximately an hour and will take questions afterward.
MCAB President Zoe Kaslow ’15 said the Board wanted a speaker that could talk about women’s rights and topics that would apply to a community larger than Middlebury. “Mary Robinson was definitely the number one choice, I think especially because she speaks on so many topics that are relevant to the College,” Kaslow said. Last spring, Kaslow was the co-chair of the Speakers Committee along with Robbie LaCroix ’16 and initiated the plan that would ultimately bring Robinson to campus.
Kaslow said when reading the College’s Mission Statement, the values listed lined up with what Robinson focuses on in her work. “I think she is going to be fantastic, she really has a presence and I think her credentials really speak for themselves,” Kaslow said.
Robinson’s endeavors are similar to the College’s efforts to attain carbon-neutrality by 2016 and embark on other projects in sustainability. In a June 2014 speech to the Freedom and Solidarity Forum, she said, “To put it starkly, the physical world faces potential catastrophe because of climate change and we are running out of time to take the necessary corrective action. We need rapidly and equitably to make the transition to a carbon-neutral world.”
In July of 2014, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed Robinson as Special Envoy for Climate Change. She is now the President of the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, an organization that focuses on raising awareness of the consequences of climate change for the world’s poor.
Nicholas Orr ’15 is a co-chair of the MCAB Speakers Committee, along with Izzy Kannegieser ’17. “Students are very excited,” Orr said. “I think it’s a very relevant topic and it’s one of the highest-profile speakers we’ve had in the last few years.” The most recent former head of state to visit the College was President Bill Clinton, who delivered the Commencement address in 2007.
The lecture by Robinson also takes place during Fall Family Weekend. “I think it’s a nice thing to take your parents to as well,” Orr said.
(10/22/14 7:32pm)
We have all seen them: the placards on every table in our dining halls hawking EatReal, a student-run organization seeking to advocate for more socially and environmentally responsible food at the College. The idea is to move toward a food system that is local/community-based, humane, fair and ecologically sound. This is in keeping with the socially and environmentally conscious student body we are fortunate to have here at Middlebury. As someone who cares about the health and wellness of our food system, I applaud the students raising awareness of where the College’s food comes from, how it is grown/raised, etc. However, I do not believe that the EatReal movement captures all that is necessary when it comes to what is important about dining hall food. The sources of our food and the methods used to get it to our plates are certainly very important, but what EatReal has thus far failed to address is what is actually IN the food we eat.
On a number of occasions while at Middlebury, I have walked into the dining halls and looked at the ingredient list for items on the menu, only to be disappointed in what I saw: ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, cornstarch and corn paste, as well as compounds that utilize seemingly every letter of the alphabet, and require several read-throughs to pronounce. Even items whose ingredient lists are not made available, but which you can tell just by noticing their color, are comprised of unnatural ingredients: things like brightly colored ice cream, nacho cheese, neon desserts, fruit juices (especially that fluorescent Passion Orange Guava juice), sodas and sports drinks. Now, I enjoy sipping an ice cold Gatorade as much as the next guy, but is ingesting the color additives it contains (Blue 1, Red 40 and Yellow 5 are the color additives in the two flavors served in our dining halls, according to Gatorade’s website) really worth it, when their effects on our health are unknown?
Of course, a logical solution to what I have said thus far is to simply not eat anything that contains artificial ingredients: avoid ice cream, desserts, nacho cheese, fruit juices, sports drinks, and the like. But upon closer examination, eliminating everything in the dining halls with artificial dyes/colors and corn-derived additives would leave a scarce selection. While a healthy diet is of the utmost importance, a diet that has variety is important if for no other reason than keeping one’s sanity.
So, why is it even important that we make an effort to eliminate ingredients such as corn-derived additives from the College dining halls? According to Michael Pollan, acclaimed food activist and author of the award winning book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, artificial sugars such as high fructose corn syrup contribute heavily to type II diabetes, obesity, heart disease and diet-related cancers, all growing problems in America. The average American gets one fifth of their daily caloric intake from high fructose corn syrup. According to the CDC, one in three Americans born after the year 2000 will have type II diabetes. Not only do these additives impose serious health risks, they also quietly contribute substantially to climate change. Ten calories of fossil fuel energy are required for every single calorie of food energy when producing foods whose bases are comprised of corn and soy. Eliminating highly processed, artificial foods from the dining halls will not only benefit the health of the College community, but also will further our cause of combating climate change.
I am not calling for a paradigm shift in how the College selects what foods to present in the dining halls. Rather, I am advocating for a subtle, but significant, change of thought, from “local” to “simple.” Changing our dining hall menus to eliminate artificial dyes/colors, artificial sweeteners, and nutritionally devoid additives like high fructose corn syrup and corn starch need not involve extensive campaigns, placards on tables, or go-slash webpages. On the contrary, all it would take to eliminate these fake foods from the Middlebury diet is a quick check by the folks at Food Services to see if these substances exist in what we currently buy, and if they do, simply buy other products that do not contain them. My hope is that some day, Middlebury students will be able to walk into our dining halls and peruse the ingredient lists for any menu item without seeing “high fructose” this, or “artificial” that, or any additive whose composition only a Chemistry major would understand. And let’s face it: if you can’t pronounce it, you probably don’t want it on your plate.
Artwork by JENA RITCHEY
ETHAN SIVULICH '16 is from New Gloucester, Maine.
(10/22/14 7:28pm)
The Middlebury Campus sat down with College President Ronald D. Liebowitz to discuss his time at the College. The conversation ranged from when he first became President to some of the changes he has seen at the College in the past years. Liebowitz will depart the College at the conclusion of the school year.
Middlebury Campus (MC): What was it like moving from a role as a Professor at the College to an administrator (specifically Provost and Executive Vice President), and then to the College President? What was it like, as someone within the College, stepping up to become College President?
Ronald D. Liebowitz (RL): Like many things, it had its advantages and disadvantages. In my particular case, I was a tenured member of the faculty, which means I went through the tenure process and then I served in two major academic positions before becoming president — the dean of the faculty and then provost. Having had these opportunities, I was able to learn a lot about the institution, seeing things from many angles, and working with major committees along the way, all of which was so very valuable and a real advantage for me.
The disadvantage coming “from inside” the institution is that, having had to make some tough decisions, sore feelings sometimes linger. When you come into the presidency with a history, you face some additional challenges when trying to move the institution forward. So, there are pluses and minuses to both, but I feel very fortunate to have known the institution as well as I did when I began my term as president.
MC: And I think a lot of people forget that it has only happened three times in the College’s history.
RL: Yes, I like to remind people who are not knowledgeable of Middlebury’s history that the college has had a president from within three times in 214 years – once in the 19th century with Ezra Brainerd, once in the 20th century with John McCardell and me in the 21st century, so maybe that means we can expect outside presidents for the next 85 years!
MC: Do you think your background as a specialist in political geography influenced the projects that you have embarked on during your time as President? Examples include new schools abroad, new language programs, and Monterey.
RL: I have never given this much thought. I think my background as a Russianist and also as a political geographer had some impact but I would like to think that most academics today, regardless of one’s discipline, would see the changing world in which we live and how that relates to the type of education that our students need and by which they would be best served. I would hope that most academics would see the direction we’ve taken as complementary rather than in competition with a traditional liberal arts education and reflects the changes external to Middlebury and higher education in a smart and beneficial (to our students) way.
MC: Where do you hope to see Middlebury’s relationship with Monterey go in the next decade or so?
RL: I’ve been fairly consistent about this since 2005 – I don’t believe that programmatic (academic) integration can and should be forced where it does not make sense. The great attraction of Monterey was that, while Middlebury and Monterey shared an underlying commitment to linguistic and cultural competency, it was such a different institution from our undergraduate liberal arts college. The differences open up many opportunities for students to engage in courses and programs, plus meaningful engagement with MIIS faculty, whose philosophy about cultural competency is similar to our faculty’s, but whose curricular content and pedagogy are so different from what our students have here on campus. We are not a professional, graduate school – we’re not even a pre-professional undergraduate school! We are a liberal arts college – and the juxtaposition and the complementarity of these two is powerful for those students interested in international careers.
That said, Monterey and its programs are not for everyone. They are intended to be for those students who want to pursue international-related careers. But beyond the obvious complementary curricular opportunities, there is another benefit that comes from the collaboration: the strengthening of the “Middlebury” network. About 30-35 percent of Monterey students are international students (the majority from Asia), and most graduates go on to work all over the world. By expanding our alumni network to include Monterey alumni, faculty, and staff, we strengthen the Middlebury network, which helps current students and recent graduates by opening doors to internships, employment opportunities, and meaningful connections across the globe. This is an often overlooked benefit of our relationship with Monterey. My hope, then, would be that students take advantage of the opportunities to combine a professional international education offered at Monterey with their undergraduate traditional liberal arts experience to the benefit of their post-college plans; that they would use the resources that Monterey offers for both advanced degrees and a robust, international-oriented network.
MC: On the topic of the undergraduate experience, in the time that you’ve been here, how do you think the student body has changed? Have you seen changes in the typical Middlebury student?
RL: The student body has changed over thirty years, yet the influence of the institution itself on each generation of students remains stronger than any specific change I might highlight. One example: a characteristic of the student body that I noticed immediately upon arriving at the College is that students are incredibly civil towards one another. We have disagreements, altercations, and skirmishes for sure. Yet, the culture here is very forgiving to individuals who in other environments would face far greater challenges. I suspect this is because the student body as a whole recognizes that over their four years here each member of the larger community is going to rely primarily on the 2,450 other undergraduates for one’s intellectual, social, and cultural sustenance. On campuses in urban areas or at institutions with a graduate population, this might not be the case; the environment is different. Here, though, the undergraduate experience is not diluted, it’s a close-knit community, and this cultural aspect has remained a constant and has been present for a very long time. It is something that first-years learn early on so by the time they are sophomores, juniors, and seniors, they themselves pass this on to incoming first-years.
There’s a flipside to this characteristic of the Middlebury culture. Although ours is a very smart student body, many faculty see less “mixing it up” intellectually in class than one might find at a Columbia, a Harvard, a Yale, or a Wesleyan – places located in more urban environments. If this is true, I believe it’s a fair trade-off. I think without the cultural characteristic of students being civil toward one another, less competitive, more supportive, and more collaborative, a lot would be lost here in terms of the overall quality of the educational experience for students.
But to your question, what has changed? The student body has become a lot more socioeconomically, culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse. Though we strive for greater diversity still, those of us who have been here a long time see great changes on this front. When I first got here, about 1 in 20 students were American students of color or international; now, that ratio is greater than 1 in 3. That’s a huge change. We know that a more diverse student body translates into a richer educational experience as a result of students sharing different perspectives and life experiences both inside and outside the classroom.
Other changes: students today are obviously more conversant with technology. They are more apt to volunteer not only in town, but across the country (alternative break service trips) and across the globe. And many of my colleagues report students are more visibly focused on jobs and employment, which is understandable given the changed financial circumstances they face at graduation than 30 years ago. So there has been change, yet the overall dynamic of the student body – being supportive of one another, collaborative, and open-minded – remains and still is the general feel one gets here.
MC: I want to talk a little bit about the carbon neutrality initiative, the Franklin Environmental Center and the Solar Decathlon entries as examples of how Middlebury has become an environmental leader in the past 10 years. Is there one achievement that stands out to you from all those?
RL: No, not really. In the last 10 or 11 years during my time as president, a number of notable things have occurred and the spotlight should be on the students; in almost every case the students have been at the center of these initiatives.
The whole idea of carbon neutrality at Middlebury didn’t start with the administration and it didn’t start with the Board of Trustees; it started with a student back in the 1990s who shared his work from a senior seminar and passed it on to younger students interested in climate change and environmental stewardship. About a decade later, when the Sunday Night Group formed, students in that group were the ones who brought forward the proposal for the institution to reduce its carbon footprint and eventually to pursue carbon neutrality. Some Middlebury faculty worked with students to fine-tune their pitch to the administration and eventually to the Board of Trustees. Their presentation was excellent: they admitted when they couldn’t answer a question and pledged to get the answer to the Trustees later (and they did); they had a deep command of the issues; and succeeded in getting the trustees to adopt their resolution, which was never a foregone conclusion. Seven years later, with the coming implementation of our bio-methane initiative, we are almost there – becoming carbon neutral without purchasing any offsets.
For the Solar Decathlon, the idea was first proposed by my wife, Jessica, and with the guidance of faculty and staff in the sciences and environmental studies, the students more or less took over the project. The institutional commitment was significant to support the effort, though the rest was on the students, and they showed remarkable maturity in overcoming some real challenges that they had never encountered in their traditional liberal arts education. It was not just about the academic challenge or learning about solar power, renewable energy, engineering, and more; it was also a huge challenge of working together as a team, respecting one another, accepting opposing views, and compromising on so much along the way. We don’t have a graduate program in engineering, or even an undergraduate engineering program. Nor do we have a graduate school of architecture, and so the students had to rise to the occasion to learn things on the fly and they did. Yes, they were mentored by faculty and staff in a significant way, but they needed to use their skills and knowledge gotten in the classroom to draw on the expertise from around the state of Vermont to help them as well.
If you go through almost every environmental initiative over the last 20 years – the start of recycling, the establishment of our composting program, sustainability initiatives, biomass gasification, carbon neutrality, real food, plus others – most have been student-led or the idea was student generated. I think that’s the key thing that we should take away and really applaud: that the institution is a leader in sustainability, but that wouldn’t be the case without the students.
MC: When you stepped into the role of College President in 2004, did you think about what you wanted your legacy to be when you eventually depart?
RL: I think almost every President probably steps in saying, “If I could leave the institution in a stronger position upon departing than when I began, I’ve done well.” All the more when one inherits an institution of the quality and stature of a Middlebury. I think what has made these last 10-11 years so interesting has been our need to recognize, for really the first time in many decades, the external forces that have created some great challenges for higher education, including Middlebury. If I would have been told in 2004-05 that we would face the worst recession in a century just 3-4 years later, I would have said, “Wow, what are we going to do?” You don’t plan on such an occurrence – higher education financial models seem to show variables all moving in the positive direction, year after year, and fail to include stress tests or “worst case scenarios.” And, there is no blueprint or plan sitting in a desk drawer in the president’s office awaiting you when an issue of this magnitude arises.
It is easy to ignore the external pressures mounting on higher education and continue with a “business as usual” approach to operations, but such an approach will no longer do. I believe getting some tough issues on the table for discussion and action, no matter how much people wish to ignore them, is an important part of the past 10 years.
MC: On the subject of the recession in 2008, can you talk about what it meant to manage that crisis?
RL: The most challenging thing about the recession was that we didn’t know when it might end. We needed to judge and judge early, the level of cuts we would need to make in order to address what we had estimated would be $30 million 4-5 years out, yet it could also have been worse: we just did not know. Since compensation amounts to roughly half the institution’s budget, it was clear the only way to make real headway into a projected deficit would be to address staffing. But when you make a decision to reduce staffing through layoffs, it can be devastating to a small community if it is not handled well and with great sensitivity. Though we knew we needed to reduce staffing, we didn’t know how many jobs needed to be cut.
In the end, I thought the institution – faculty, staff, students, administrators, alumni, trustees – did a remarkable job because we were one of the first schools, if not the first school, to engage our community, letting them know that it was likely we would need to begin a process to determine how best to address the economic crisis. We didn’t have any specific answers or recommendations, of course, but we tried to prepare the community for a process that would result in significant cuts. The challenge at that early date was the unkown: how much would our endowment drop? How would our students’ families be affected? How many people’s financial situation would change? So the greatest issue was the unknown - not knowing when the crisis would end.
I think back to the changes the recession brought to other institutions and I am grateful we were able to preserve what our students, faculty, staff and alumni told us was most important to them for us to preserve. Though there were some differences among the priorities for each group, everyone emphasized that we needed to avoid involuntary layoffs: that was the biggest concern among all the groups. As a result, we offered voluntary and early retirement programs for staff and faculty through which medical coverage continued until age 65 and individuals received payments that provided security and were based on years of service. Between 2009 and 2011 about 110 staff positions were eliminated through these programs, and 12 faculty colleagues chose to retire early. We also reduced services at Atwater (no meal-plan dinners and only a continental breakfast); reduced significantly catering options for departments; reduced some budgets between 5 percent and 10 percent; froze salaries except for the lower end of the pay scale; and increased the size of our student body by 50 to provide more revenue to make up for the endowment decline.
However, the alternatives to our major cutbacks were severe. Some peer institutions ended need-blind admissions, others had to delay library and science center projects, and still others cut faculty positions. We didn’t freeze the size of the faculty and in fact added 11 new faculty positions as was planned, we had no involuntary layoffs. We did not sacrifice the excellence of our academic program.
Moving early and decisively, having feedback from so many constituencies through the extensive surveys, and being able to focus on what was most important to each of the groups helped us to come out of the recession as well as we could have hoped.
MC: Are there other difficult choices that you had to make in your time here that come to mind?
RL: There have been a number of challenging or difficult choices surrounding policies, but that is to be expected. The Monterey opportunity, allowing military recruitment on campus, accepting a gift to create the (Chief Justice) Rehnquist endowed professorship, and establishing Middlebury Interactive Languages stand out. All of these represented contested issues, and a lot of the differences in opinion, in my view, stemmed from the different time horizons that a president and board must take when considering opportunities and institutional direction. Students, faculty, and staff, if I can generalize, tend to view things in the shorter-term – those things relevant to a student’s four years here, or for faculty and staff what is related to the here and now or to one’s career. A president and Board must look beyond that time horizon to project what is in the best interest of the institution long term. Some disagreements are rooted in true philosophical differences (e.g., “what is the relationship between a liberal arts education and our students’ finding jobs after graduation?”), yet I would say there is greater agreement than there are difficult and contentious debates. The difficult issues, however, bring out passion and sometimes anger, and sometimes overshadow all that we do agree on as an institution.
(10/22/14 7:19pm)
On Oct. 17, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz announced several administrative changes in an all-campus email. Included was the news that Dean of Students and Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Architecture Katy Smith Abbott will serve as interim Dean of the College beginning in January. Smith Abbott is replacing Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College Shirley Collado, who is departing Middlebury to become Executive Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Executive Vice Provost at Rutgers University – Newark.
Collado wrote in an email to The Middlebury Campus that Smith Abbott is the right person for the position. “I am thrilled that Katy will assume this interim role,” Collado wrote. “She has been an incredible colleague and leader as the Dean of Students, and I am confident that she will bring strong vision, experience and a student-centered approach to her work with our Student Life team.”
In his email, Liebowitz also detailed several other administrative shifts that will occur through the 2015-2016 school year. The various changes are due in large part to Collado’s multiple responsibilities at the College, which include serving as the College’s Title IX Coordinator and Chief Diversity Officer. These roles are now being divided among several administrators. Liebowitz explained that the creation of these positions as interim roles and the division of Collado’s responsibilities are because of the broader changes underway at the College during the presidential search. In his email, he wrote, “This will provide important continuity for the community while giving the next president of Middlebury the opportunity to consider and make long-term administrative leadership decisions.”
Collado believes that the decision to separate these roles into different positions will ultimately leave the College in a strong position when a new College President takes the reins. “These recent appointments demonstrate the College’s serious investment in the critical areas of responsibility that I oversee. Given the leadership transitions at the institution, I think it is wise to appoint three outstanding individuals to oversee student life, diversity initiatives and Title IX responsibilities,” Collado wrote. “There are a variety of ways that this work can be structured, but what is most important is that Middlebury must remain deeply committed to these goals and areas. I have no doubt that dividing up the roles with three talented individuals is the best way to address our institutional needs and strategic goals at this time.”
Smith Abbott brings years of experience in student life to the Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College position. She, along with her husband, Professor of Mathematics Steve Abbott, served as co-heads of Ross Commons from 2002 to 2008. In 2011, Smith Abbott was appointed Dean of Students after four years as Associate Dean of the College. In his email, Liebowitz wrote that in Smith Abbott’s new role, “She will oversee residential life, student activities, athletics, public safety, new student orientation, judicial affairs, the Parton Center for Health and Wellness and the centers and programs related to innovation, entrepreneurship, career services, and internships.”
There is significant overlap between Smith Abbott’s current responsibilities as Dean of Students and her new responsibilities as Dean of the College. However, new areas that will fall under Smith Abbott’s purview starting in January include Athletics, the Department of Public Safety and the Parton Center for Health and Wellness. There are also new responsibilities for Smith Abbott in managing offices and programs such as the Project on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts, the Center for Social Entrepreneurship and MiddCORE.
As she prepares to step into the new role, Smith Abbott said, “I’m eager to support the initiatives already in play and to create real dialogue with students about the issues that matter most to them. I already work closely with all my colleagues in the office of the Dean of the College and I look forward to the collaborations across student life.”
Working with Smith Abbott in January will be Dean of Wonnacott Commons Matt Longman ’89, who will serve as Special Assistant to the Dean of the College.
“Matt Longman is taking part of the Dean of Students portfolio. He is taking on some, but not all, of the responsibilities of the Dean of Students role so he can preserve his commitment to the Dean of Wonnacott role,” Smith Abbott said.
Longman will continue to serve as Dean of Wonnacott Commons. A Middlebury graduate, he has worked as a dean at the College for the past 17 years.
Looking past the 2015-2016 school year, Smith Abbott said there will likely be a conversation with the new president regarding the structure for student life administration. “I think a lot depends on the vision the new President has for student life,” she said.
Professor of Spanish Miguel Fernández ’85 will be the Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) for the 2015-2016 school year. With Collado’s departure, starting in January the CDO will be its own position. Fernández, who has previously served as chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and director of Latin American Studies, will take on existing initiatives in diversity. Notably, Fernández will support the Creating Connections Consortium (C3). Collado was instrumental in securing this $4.7 million grant for the College, along with Connecticut College and Williams College, from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to increase diversity among faculty. Fernández will be stepping into the CDO role as C3 continues to grow and add other university partners to the program. He praised the program in an email to the Campus. “This is not simply a post-doc fellowship that brings underrepresented graduate students onto the faculty for a couple of years. It is a much more complex program with ambitious goals,” Fernández said. “I am attracted by the creative approach of C3 and how it goes to the root of a problem and seeks workable solutions that benefit not just our institution, but the whole academy.”
Additionally, as CDO, it is likely that Fernández will also be involved in the ongoing conversations around a proposed Intercultural Center. “I will pay close attention to the proposal this fall and get myself up to speed on the process,” Fernández wrote in an email to Campus. “My expectation is that the proposal will pass and that I will have an active role in the implementation of the Intercultural Center proposal.”
Finally, Liebowitz detailed an administrative change that ties into the new governance structure of the Board of Trustees. Vice President for Language Schools and Schools Abroad Michael Geisler will now also serve as the College’s Chief Risk Officer (CRO).
“The addition of CRO to Michael’s title and responsibilities is a reflection of the increasingly complex legal and regulatory environment in which Middlebury and all of higher education now operate,” Liebowitz wrote. “This complexity requires a designated senior-level administrator to manage risk and to articulate and implement best practices and appropriate policies.”
As Vice President for Language Schools and Schools Abroad, Geisler assessed risks when looking for new sites for programs abroad. “We spend a long time measuring the relative safety and how it is different from Middlebury and comparable cities in the United States,” he said.
Geisler will be the primary liaison to the risk management committee, one of the six functional standing committees that now exist within the Board of Trustees in its new governance structure. He will also oversee the work of the new Title IX Coordinator and Compliance Officer. Collado previously held the Title IX Officer position, and the individual who will fill this new role of Coordinator and Compliance Officer is unnamed as of yet. “Title IX and the Clery Act will be some of our responsibilities,” Geisler said, “as well as emerging threats like Ebola and new programs and what they mean in terms of the challenges on the financial side, on the safety side and on the side of managing staff and faculty resources.” Investment policy is also a part of the CRO’s responsibilities in risk management.
Geisler said the transition to the new governance structure in relation to his new role has been smooth. “There was thorough preparation done by the Trustees themselves and by the administration,” Geisler said. “By the time we had those meetings, everybody knew what their roles were and we were able to engage in much more focused and substantive discussions than under the former governance structure.”
Collado is still heavily invested in diversity and inclusion initiatives in her remaining time at Middlebury. “These include the approval of an intercultural center at Carr Hall, key faculty diversity initiatives, greater support for our first generation college students and community college transfer students, continued sexual violence education and prevention, further strengthening our MiddView new student orientation program and the successful launch of our new Posse STEM Program,” Collado wrote. “These are just some of the initiatives that I hope Katy, Miguel and the new Title IX Coordinator will continue to push forward through the 2015-2016 academic year.”
(10/08/14 6:21pm)
Over the last few weeks, a portion of the student body here has been upset about something. Not the kind of upset where they’re not being themselves for a while, and finally, a friend pulls them aside and says, “Hey, Chase, do you want to talk about anything? I’m here for you, man.” Rather, the kind of upset where every page of this publication is filled with columns expressing outrage, befuddlement, and threats of withheld donations that weren’t going to be made anyways.
Discontent regarding the issue in question has dominated campus (and Campus) discussion, and both the amount and vociferousness of opinions have been shocking. Alumni contacted administrative officials, panels were formed, and, again, columns were written. And the outcome of all that: Nothing! The policy is not changing in any way, and the people who formed the policy, chiefly an Athletic Director who was so unfamiliar to large portions of the student body that people were unclear as to whether the individual was male or female, essentially laughed off requests for greater transparency. At this point, people are so tired of the story that the new most popular opinion has become, enough of this, let’s go shotgun a beer.
Don’t worry, this is not a column about that policy. Feel free to shotgun regardless.
The question that occurred to me during all of this, especially as it became obvious that no changes would be made, was the following: if there were a policy implemented that actually mattered, one that was, say, intolerably discriminative in a way that this past one did not even approach, how could students force a change?
As the recent nouveau-activists will tell you, there are basically zero avenues to create change if the college really cares about the issue. That is because students have absolutely no leverage against the school. When the administration institutes a policy they know will be unpopular, they are banking, literally, on the reality that the only thing we can do to hurt them is transfer and take our business elsewhere. They realize that this would mean, for any individual student, a sizable time investment as well as leaving a familiar setting. And if you happened to see the acceptance rates this past year, you know that there is no end of checkbooks out there waiting to take our places. We are what is called, I believe, a captive market.
As a result, we are left with few options for student protest. Although mass gatherings can be symbolically powerful, the ceiling on their potential efficacy is pretty low when the protestors have no political voice. In this light, I would like to suggest to future outraged students a path that has not, to my knowledge, been explored here: a student employee strike.
The college employs 885 students, most of whom work between 10-20 hours a week. If we say the average is 12 hours a week, a campus wide strike by student workers would amount to a total of 3,450 lost hours of work over three days. How would the circulation desk, Midd Rides, Wilson Café, Admissions, or the CFA function without student employees? Who would grade all those Econ assignments?? When you consider all the jobs performed by students, it is clear that the college would seriously struggle to operate in the event of a strike.
There are flaws in this idea, the most obvious of which is the lost income it would mean for student workers. However, it is not implausible to think that other students could contribute to a compensatory fund of some kind as a means of distributing the burden. Another possible unwanted side effect would be the enormous demand placed on non-student college employees. They would certainly be called to make up for some of the lost labor, which would be pretty unfair. But the point of the strike would be to force the college into that kind of uncomfortable situation, and while any inconvenience to third parties would be regrettable, it would hopefully be minimal.
Again, this would have to be in response to a truly unacceptable administrative policy, the likes of which we haven’t recently seen. It would have to be to instigate the coordination and determination necessary to pull of a student employee strike. Ideally, a measure as drastic as this will never be necessary. In the meantime, it is useful, and perhaps empowering, to remember that we aren’t merely consumers of the product Middlebury offers: we are also vital elements of the machine that allows it to run.
Artwork by ZARAU ZARAGOZA
(10/08/14 6:17pm)
Shortly after the administration announced its controversial change to the tailgating policy, many students asked me why I, as the President of the SGA, had no knowledge of the impending change. Their concern highlights a question I imagine many of you have pondered at one point or another while at Middlebury: Why do we have SGA and Community Council? The fact that most students do not have a clear answer to that question highlights a major problem. Given my role in the SGA, I feel compelled to offer you an answer to at least the first part of that question.
In my view, the SGA fulfills three crucial roles on campus. First, it is responsible for managing and spending the Student Activities Fee (SAF) in a way that makes our non-academic lives here a little better. Second, it oversees all of the student organizations on campus. Third, it is supposed to be, in the words of the College Handbook, “the vehicle through which students can participate in the formulation of institutional policy.”
With respect to the first two roles, we actually do a good job. Most student organizations are funded well and run effectively, but of course there is always room for improvement. Ensuring that this continues to happen takes a significant amount of work by the members of both the SGA Finance Committee and the SGA Constitution Committee. In addition, the SGA operates a number of services for which it rarely receives credit. These include the free daily newspapers in the dining halls, the break bus program, and MiddCourses.
It is on the third count, I believe, where we have more work to do. Frankly, the SGA needs to serve as a better conduit between the student body and the administration. We currently fail to communicate sufficiently with both parties. First, let’s tackle the SGA’s relationship with the student body. Only a handful of students know what SGA does, and fewer still view it as the best way to “participate in the formulation of institutional policy.” The SGA tends to attract students primarily interested in changing policy, while MCAB and other student organizations tend to attract those interested in event planning and publicity. As a result, we as a group often fail to adequately communicate what it is we are doing. Having been in the SGA for two years now, I am personally guilty of not communicating my work well enough. Given recent events, though, it is clear we need to better publicize our work. To that end, we have taken a number of steps this year to better communicate with you. These initiatives include creating a new website, updating the SGA bulletin boards in McCullough, establishing a Director of Publicity position in my Cabinet, and setting up weekly office hours for each of our elected members. Hopefully, these small initial steps will serve as a solid foundation for a better level of communication between the SGA and the student body.
In terms of our relationship with the administration, most of our influence currently takes the form of me and other elected SGA members meeting with administrators to express students’ ideas and concerns. Although this system fosters trust, it lacks transparency and limits the flow of information. A better approach would be for the SGA to secure greater student representation on administrative and faculty committees. In this manner, we can more consistently convey our ideas during the early stages of the policy-making process. We may not get a vote, but we should get a voice. Progress in this area would increase the amount and transparency of communication between students, administrators, and faculty.
You may still be asking, why should SGA in particular do these things? Why not leave individual groups of students to push for change? We are, after all, a fairly small campus with easy access to administrators. I would respond that much of the value of the SGA stems from its institutional presence. The question is not one of existence, but one of strength. It is in the best interest of the student body to have a consistent advocate voicing the student body’s ideas to administrators. As a source of institutional memory, the SGA can protect the progress we make each year. Although change may come more slowly than we would like and perhaps not at all on some issues, a more effective SGA could, at the very least, secure us a consistent voice at the table.
From reforming the trustees’ governance structure to hiring a new president, change is in the air at Middlebury. I have tried to articulate how the SGA needs to change as well as the ways in which it can enhance student life on campus. Regardless of whether you find my argument convincing, it is important that you make your voice heard on this issue. I look forward to hearing your ideas, and would be happy to discuss them with you in person or over e-mail. You can reach me at sga@middlebury.edu.
TAYLOR CUSTER '15 is the SGA President and is from West Brookfield, Mass.
(10/08/14 6:04pm)
Editor’s Note: The following text contains vulgarity.
It seems innocuous. An app where you can post something witty, watch it get up-voted and monitor your karma score changing as people respond. But this seemingly harmless “fun” often comes at the expense of members of our community.
When Jordan Seman ’16 submitted her op-ed about her experience being targeted on Yik Yak, found on page seven, it hit close to home for many of us on the Editorial Board. As a news organization, we grapple with anonymity constantly between our policies on anonymous op-eds and sources and the steady stream of sometimes hurtful and often unproductive anonymous comments posted on our website. We also grapple with issues of censorship, and, in our staunch shared belief in freedom of speech, we are hesitant to endorse any policies that threaten it. But Jordan sent us a powerful reminder that there are real people behind the screen in these situations, and that anonymity can devastate individuals and communities.
Jordan is not alone. There are many students on this campus who have been victims of anonymous personal attacks or of attacks on the groups with which they identify. For example, one of the most popular threads on Middlebury Confessional at the time of writing this editorial is “Bitchiest Bitches On Campus,” on which students are actively naming people and discussing who among them is “the bitchiest.” Just a few weeks ago we ran a piece entitled “What Middlebury Should Never Forget,” reminding students of the sexually explicit, threatening and homophobic note that was left on a student’s door last fall. And last spring, Dean Shirley Collado sent the student body an email in which she expressed concern over numerous examples of misogynistic behavior on Yik Yak and one particularly abominable instance of homophobia on another mobile app, Grindr, in which a posted message read, “None are safe, none are free,” and included a photograph of a lynching.
These disturbing comments are not unique to the Middlebury community. A few weeks ago, Norwich University became the first college or university to ban Yik Yak, carrying high symbolic weight but little actual import. Though they blocked Yik Yak from their wireless network, students can still access it with a data plan, as many already do, making it nearly impossible to block this app. Oberlin faced the same dilemmas with Oberlin Confessional, the original Confessional site, which crashed in 2009 and was promptly replaced by ObieTalks, which was equally popular and equally nasty. These two case studies show that an outright ban of these forums do not solve the problem. Moreover, there are still myriad ways to anonymously engage outside of these forums — be it on our website, on Middbeat or even in person as seen with last fall’s note — meaning that banning these sites would be merely a bandaid on a larger problem.
Dean Collado echoed this sentiment in her email last spring, writing that “blocking these sites is not the ultimate answer for our larger community.” But just because we do not believe banning these sites will solve the problem does not mean we can sweep them under the rug.
Particularly as mental wellness becomes a topic of conversation, in part due to brave honesty and openness found both in Jordan’s op-ed and in Hannah Quinn ’16’s widely read blog post about depression, we must think critically about the way our online actions affect this community. When posting, we must imagine the person sitting at their computer in the dorm room next to ours the same way we would if we were having a conversation in the hallway. Even when no face is attached, cyberbullying leaves lingering damage, though the veil of anonymity often makes that easy to forget.
The question then remains, how do we maintain a community where people feel safe and supported while also acknowledging that anonymous forums are inevitable in the digital age? The answers are not easy.
Both the Campus and Middbeat are moderated websites, and both Yik Yak and Middlebury Confessional offer tools to self-moderate, be it through downvoting or through reporting a comment. We must take responsibility for the hateful words that pervade our community and report these comments rather than scroll past after 10 seconds of outrage. It is up to each of us to make these digital spaces safe for all members of our community and to encourage online accountability — there is no one else who is going to do it.
To clamp down on damaging online dialogue, we must provide resources and education to incoming students. In the same way that we promote sexual assault awareness and prevention, we should educate the community about the dangers of online harassment. Bystander intervention means looking out for each other, both online and off. Technological literacy extends beyond clicking “I agree” on the terms of use whenever we update our password. We must reintroduce the term cyberbullying into our vocabularies, because it is not an issue that magically disappears when we graduate from high school.
Being attacked online has direct consequences that result in serious harm. We have all seen news stories of people who hurt themselves or others because of online harassment. We have had countless examples for hateful online comments on this campus — we should not have to wait for Middlebury to become the public face of this problem for us to take it seriously.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(10/08/14 12:58pm)
From Oct. 2 to 4, the Theatre Program sponsored the 19th Annual First Years Production: A Cautionary Tale and Others. Directed by alum Bill Army ’07 and composed entirely of first-years, sophomores, and sophomore Febs. A Cautionary Tale and Others was staged in The Hepburn Zoo to a sold out crowd.
A Cautionary Tale and Others unfolded as a set of interconnected scenes from various recently produced plays, each taking a glimpse at the social and technological changes that have developed over our lifetimes and the new challenges they may pose. A monologue on the deceptive nature of media and fiction opened the performance, prompting the audience to question the very premise of the show itself. This opener left the audience with the complex question: if fiction is misleading, and leads us to create damaging expectations for ourselves, what are the merits of the fiction presented before our very eyes?
This ambiguity carries through the bulk of the play. As we observe how dating, gossiping, flirting and mourning have all changed through the proliferation of new digital media, the audience laughed and cringed in equal measure. While at times serious and certainly tackling serious topics, the play was frequently comic and lighthearted. Ben Borgmann-Winter ’18, who played the role of Derek, touched on the binary nature of the show.
“Personally, I felt like it stretched me a little bit in the comedic sense,” he said. “I’ve done more of the dramatic things, but this gave me a couple of different tones to play with.”
Being something of a medley production, the ultimate form of the show was not finalized until somewhat late in the production cycle.
“[Army] didn’t really finish constructing it until after it had been cast,” Borgmann-Winter said. “For example, he added the ending scene partway through our rehearsals. In general, it was a very malleable production, so we had a lot of room to work.”
Being a production for first-years, the show was aimed at students unable to audition for the fall faculty productions, since auditions for such shows are in the spring of the preceding year. This means that the first-year show is on a much tighter production cycle, with three weeks between the first rehearsal and the performances, and it also draws in students with highly disparate experience levels.
“Some people hadn’t been in shows before, while some had been in professional productions, so there was a really wide range of experience,” Borgmann-Winter said. “Overall, it was a friendly, well-rounded group of folks.”
Jesusdaniel Barba ’18 was the Assistant to the Director for the production. Prior to his involvement in A Cautionary Tale and Others, Barba had never participated in theatre.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever done anything theatre-related, so it was really cool to work with Bill, who has done such a great amount of acting and theatre,” Barba said. “It was really interesting to get to know the theatre world and be a part of that niche.”
The production also managed to give more substantial roles to actors who, in the future, may face more competition from upperclassmen.
“It gives us an opportunity to get our feet wet in a lower-key setting with a little less competition,” Borgmann-Winter said. “It has been set up to give everyone a fair amount to work with.”
Tucked away above the Hepburn lounge, the Zoo was an ideal site for the staging of A Cautionary Tale and Others. The sparse set design and digital effects were enhanced by the modest setting, while the scenes themselves were strengthened by the intimacy of the venue. Characters who existed onstage for only minutes at a time could more easily connect with an audience that sat only a few feet away.
The play’s preoccupations with technology manifested physically in the use of innovative digital effects. In a memorable scene, the text-message exchange between a couple was projected visually to the audience while the characters sat in their respective rooms. Some scenes used digital projections to act as backdrops, such as the skyline of a city. Other scenes eschewed the use of digital effects altogether and could almost exist in any sitcom or theatre production of the last twenty or thirty years.
One scene in particular stood out as a powerful contrast to many of the more pronounced references to technology and social media. Coming in somewhere towards the middle of the play, Derek (Borgmann-Winter) and his girlfriend, Vivienne (Isabella Alonzo ’18), sat on a bench overlooking the water in New York City, discussing future plans and the potential challenges they may face as a long-distance couple attending schools on opposite ends of the country.
Both Borgmann-Winter and Barba felt this scene paralleled the experiences of many of the college-aged members of the audience and incorporated an added dimension to the play, making it less about technology in a strict sense and more about the conflict between tradition and the new, where we have been and where we are headed.
“I’ve been there,” Borgmann-Winter said. “It’s quite a conversation. I think a lot of people have probably been there, and recently.”
The production frequently forced the audience to confront their own relationship with technology through a biting and frequently comical satire of modern social behaviors. Yet beneath this farce lay empathetic and complex characters, involved in situations that seemed to be deeply rooted in traditional storytelling. Despite social media and new technologies, we still obsess over the minutiae of budding relationships, confide in friends, butt-heads with siblings and roommates and struggle to come to terms with death and mortality. The ways in which we communicate may have changed, but have we as people changed all that much?
The play’s message is ultimately ambiguous, leaving individual audience members to parse out its deeper implications.
“More than anything it’s a warning to be conscious of how you present yourself,” Borgmann-Winter said. “Like they say in the last scene, it’ll follow you forever. It’s not so much saying that technology is terrible, it’s more suggesting we be smart, sensible, responsible, respectful.”
Barba also recognized the complicated answers and questions we are left with.
“The ending is ambiguous, but I feel what the play is really suggesting is that we change our habits,” Barba said. “I don’t think it was saying we should get rid of [technology] completely because it is a part of who we are and what we do now. We just have to make sure it’s not our first priority.”
(10/01/14 8:40pm)
The men’s soccer team lost their first game of the season on Saturday, falling 3-0 to Colby in Waterville. With their midweek victory over Colby-Sawyer, the Panthers move to 5-1-1 on the season, and 2-1-1 in the NESCAC.
On Wednesday, Sept. 24, Middlebury traveled to New London, N.H., to face the Chargers in a non-conference fixture. The Panthers won 3-0 after a flurry of second half goals. Middlebury was unable to convert any of their 16 first half shots, and the game was scoreless until the 61st minute when Kirk Horton ’17 scored his second goal of the season. He found possession in the opposing penalty area, and slotted the ball home.
With the Panthers leading 1-0, Chargers midfielder Andrew Clothier was sent off for his second yellow card of the game, leaving the Panthers a man up for the final 25 minutes. Middlebury capitalized on the advantage with the first goal of the season for Noah Goss-Woliner ’15. The captain one-timed a ball from Adam Glaser ’17 which went in off the frame to double the Panther’s lead.
Goss-Woliner would service Horton’s second goal of the match two minutes later off of a corner kick.
Middlebury held a distinct shots advantage, with 31 in the game, and 16 on frame. Greg Sydor ’17 turned away a Colby-Sawyer free kick with four minutes left with a diving save. His late effort was all that was required to keep his fifth straight clean sheet.
On Saturday, Sept. 27, Middlebury visited Waterville to take on Colby College. The Mules sat at the bottom of the NESCAC table with no points in three conference games so far this season in comparison to Middlebury, who was third in the league entering the contest. The Panthers left Colby with no goals, the first time that they had failed to score this season. They lost the game 3-0, snapping a defensive streak in which they kept opponents from scoring for over eight hours of play.
In the first half, Middlebury had their chances, outshooting the Mules 7-3, but about 20 minutes into the contest, a cross from Colby ricocheted off of Middlebury resulting in an own goal. The goal meant that Middlebury trailed for the first time all season, and was the first allowed goal since the end of regulation against Amherst, before classes began.
“I wouldn’t say that the score totally reflected the game,” co-captain Harper Williams ’15 said. “They scored a fortunate own goal in the first half and then two more in after we made some attacking changes with 20 minutes left. That being said, they worked really hard and in the end deserved the win.”
While Middlebury searched for an equalizer and pressured forward, Colby was able to slip in behind the Panther back line and score their second goal with 12 minutes remaining.
Middlebury certainly had their chances, putting five shots on frame in the second half and taking seven corners to Colby’s five, but to no avail. With four minutes left Yinka Onayemi, the Colby forward, scored his second goal of the game, solidifying a Mule victory and handing Middlebury their first loss of the season.
“You have to learn from games like this,” Williams said. “Good teams take this experience and use it to prevent something like this from happening again. We are really excited that we play Williams on Wednesday. It gives us a great opportunity to rebound from the loss this weekend and get back to winning.”
Williams made his first appearance of the season in the game. The midfielder returned from a high ankle sprain sustained in the preseason and came off the bench to record four shots on the game.
Middlebury’s next home game comes on Saturday when they host Tufts. The Jumbos are undefeated in the NESCAC and ranked second to Amherst. Middlebury currently sits in fourth in the NESCAC.
(10/01/14 5:59pm)
Over the last 10 years, accessibility and diversity have become buzzwords in higher education. They are the benchmarks for admissions — signs that elite colleges and universities are doing more than simply securing a future for the already privileged in an era of diminishing social mobility and growing income inequality.
While the College has taken important steps towards attracting a student body that is more diverse on multiple levels and providing supportive spaces for them on campus once they arrive, it is clear that it has not done enough.
Currently, we have clubs and support available for first generation college students; we have the Queer Studies House as a safe space for LGBTQ students; we have PALANA to provide housing and programming for students with an interest in intercultural studies; we have cultural organizations like DMC, WOC, AAA and Alianza; and we continue to expand our Posse Scholars partnership. What we don’t have is a large, public and dynamic space for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds to feel welcome as a broader group, tying together the intersectional oppression that these members of our community experience.
To address this, students have pushed over the past year for the creation of an Intercultural Center — a place where those who have felt uncomfortable in other public spaces can receive the institutional support they need, have an opportunity to expand cultural literacy more broadly on campus and also have a place to just be, to form a community with social and academic foundations that is open and welcoming to people of all backgrounds.
We as an Editorial Board support this proposal and want to keep pressure on the administration to look to students for input every step of the way. Student-led initiatives on this campus tend to fall into the bureaucratic sinkhole once they are successful, turning them into administrative projects that become deprived of the student input that gave them energy in the first place. We have plenty of overly-formal, dead spaces on campus as it is, and this center cannot join that list. The Administration has been clear in its intent to include student input throughout this process, and thus far students have been involved, but we need to be sure all the students who want a voice in this process have a chance to contribute.
It is important to note that socio-economic background and racial or ethnic background are not synonymous when talking about diversity. That being said, average family income in the U.S. does break down along racial lines, reflecting endemic structural inequalities that continue to inform class and social mobility. This is our reality, and while we must work for system-level change to shift this paradigm, today it is up to the College to provide resources for students who come from or identify with historically underrepresented backgrounds. There is no reason for our student body to be substantially less racially and economically diverse than those of our peers. It is simply a matter of priorities.
Earlier last month The Upshot, a New York Times blog, took a deeper look at accessibility among “top colleges” using Pell Grant recipients as indicators of socio-economic diversity. Among peer institutions Middlebury ranked an abysmal 51st, with only 13 percent of our student body qualifying for federal assistance (compared to a college like Vassar with 23 percent).
Here’s another way to look at it: roughly 13 percent of our student body comes from the poorest 40 percent of American families, while over half of our students come from families who can afford Middlebury’s staggering $60k price tag without grant aid. To put this into perspective, this is half the annual income for the wealthiest 10 percent of American families. If Middlebury is committed to bringing a truly diverse student body to campus, changing this picture is the first place to start.
This is not to say that we have not made progress. We should celebrate the fact that within the class of 2018, 14 percent are first generation college students (a new record), 26 percent are students of color from the U.S. and 48 percent received financial aid. We are need-blind for domestic students, and we meet 100 percent of demonstrated need (as determined by the College).
These are impressive statistics, but they are falling behind the trend as other colleges and universities work to extend opportunities to communities with fewer resources. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have endowments that dwarf Middlebury’s and unsurprisingly are able to offer more financial aid and attract a broader range of students. Vassar, however, has an endowment and student body similar to Middlebury’s and has been able to make a much stronger commitment to diversity. Vassar’s class of 2018 has 10 percent more domestic students of color than Middlebury’s and roughly the same number of international students, yet Vassar as a whole ranks first on the New York Times accessibility index. Those are numbers worth striving for, not because they would make Middlebury look better statistically, but because they represent values of equality of access that we claim to have and need to uphold.
But this process does not end with an acceptance letter. Middlebury must support students who do not fit the “typical” profile throughout their four years here. A 2007 internal study found a 19-point gap in the graduation rate for students of color compared with the overall average. Without more recent data, we can only speculate that this significant margin has not been wholly ameliorated. The Intercultural Center is an important and highly visible step towards supporting diversity on this campus.
We as a community need to recognize that cutting the ribbon at Carr Hall and hiring a new staff member are just the first steps. Over time, one of the challenges a space like this can address is the current lack of cultural literacy on this campus by providing institutional support for this education and removing some of the burden from students who may just want to be students. We must push ourselves to think of innovative ways to make the most of the opportunity the Intercultural Center provides.
Creating a more inclusive campus will not happen overnight, and approving the Intercultural Center should not be a sign that we can let this issue rest. Ultimately, this center must signify an increased financial and social commitment to supporting all students on this campus on all fronts, not just attracting statistics and leaving them to sink or swim.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(09/25/14 3:04am)
What seems like a long time ago, I made a choice I proceeded to doubt. It was not until a few years had gone by that I understood why coming to Middlebury was one of the most important and best decisions I have made. However, I am sure by this point that sounds cliché. Lately it seems our institution has come under fire. We dropped in the US News & World Report College Rankings to seventh place, a new brand of activism seems intent on tearing down much of what Middlebury has built for itself, and more and more it seems our attitude is generally ambivalent towards the College. So who dare stands to champion our fair institution?
School spirit is not something that simply pops into existence. In fact, more often than not it is built over centuries. Well, we’ve had centuries. Where is our spirit? Sadly, it is non-existent in a lot of ways. Our traditions seem stale and two-dimensional. Whose fault is this, truly? Well, let’s take a look at the administration. If we took a broad sample of all the schools in the United States and compared administrations, I would say ours would end up in the top five percent. Yeah, they annoy us sometimes and we may not agree with everything they do, but they are pretty good. They show genuine interest in what we do, they take us seriously, they keep the lights on. To be honest, we should be thankful they even care at all. I am sure I do not need to point to examples of other schools’ administrations that simply do not care.
Our faculty is pretty great, too. We have the privilege of being students to really smart people. And when I say really smart, it is not a passing phrase. I mean, they are way smarter than you. Yes, freshman correcting the professor, we are talking about you. I do not know where we get these professors, but I would sure like to know. What kind of a professor asks about why I haven’t talked in class? Or invites me into their home for dinner? What kind of people even do that?!
So the administration is fine and the faculty is pretty great. Where does that leave us? Well, if you want to know where true responsibility lies we need only to look into the mirror. That’s right, I’m talking about you. Yeah, you, with the cynicism and the hands in your pockets, sipping a beer you got out of a social house basement fridge, wondering if the party next door is any better and if not you should probably just turn in. I’m talking about anyone who would rather rave about in college existentialism than make great memories. I’m talking about every person who complains about a lack of social scene and refuses to make any.
I was not surprised when Middlebury dropped down to seventh place. I am impressed we stayed at fourth for as long as we did. We’ve gotten, well, lame. We have become more concerned with what we can tear down instead of what we can build. The general consensus is to disavow ourselves of a struggling project rather than fix what is broken and make it something worth working on. Ask yourself, why do you love your school? If the answer is your friends, well, you would have those anywhere. Hopefully. What about this place, what is unique to Middlebury that gets you excited? Got nothing? Go find something.
We have often been referred to as the worst generation ever. I hate this term. Yet, looking around the student body, what do we stand for? Do we stand for ranting on the Internet instead of making substantial change? Do we stand for cynicism and vanity? For fear of getting our hands dirty or embarrassing ourselves? Jack Nicholson’s quote at the start of the The Departed is, “Nobody gives it to you, you have to take it.” He was, of course, referring to organized crime. The message is an important one, nonetheless! If we want to make a place that we reminisce about for the rest of our lives it is going to be some work. The majority of that work is going to come from the student body, because like it or not, we can be the true source of change around here if we find things worth changing.
To leave you with one last anecdote, my father told me when I entered into my first relationship that it was going to be hard work. Like everything else he said, you are always working on your relationship, always trying to make it better. This goes well beyond the realm of romance. Our experience is not going to be handed to us. College is not a rollercoaster we enjoy for four years and then politely exit. Our experience is ours, to make incredible, or merely mediocre.
