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(09/25/14 1:00am)
“Panda hat kid just dropped the top scoop of ice cream off his cone, caught it, and put it on #likeaboss.”
“Panda hat kid talked to the tour group!”
“Beginning to question whether Midd’s mascot is the panther or panda hat kid.”
“I nominate Panda hat kid as Liebowitz’s replacement #VotePHK.”
I was initially unimpressed by the size and style of junior Ruben Guzman’s panda hat. It just seemed like any other fleece hat with a panda face. It seemed out of proportion to the attention he’s drawn on campus in the last couple weeks. Frankly, I had pictured a fluffy panda ski mask with large mitten paws as tassels, a full-on face mask disguise for the robber who eats shoots and leaves.
Sitting in Crossroads on a Friday afternoon with a whole sweet potato pie to share between us, Guzman ’16, however, did not fail to impress me with tales of personal significance behind his hat that went viral with social media app Yik Yak.
Though the panda hat was probably made in China, Guzman is a native of Sanger, California, a town he described as very different from Middlebury, which made adjusting to his first year of college difficult.
“You know how people fall back on certain things that are comfortable to them? For me, I fell back on hats and childhood,” he said. “Pokemon, Digimon, cute little animals. That was a way for me to cope with being uncomfortable. The hat became a natural way for me to do that.”
Though Guzman’s panda hat is hands-down his most famous hat, he has a collection of 10 other animal hats, including a chicken, an owl and a fox. He wears his panda hat the most often for pragmatic reasons.
“My panda hat is the best-made one. It’s the one in the best shape and protected me from the cold the best,” he said.
Guzman purchased the hat in San Francisco at a meet-up for prospective Georgetown University students.
“This is supposed to be Giants [baseball] fan-wear. After I bought the hat, the morning after, I got the acceptance letter from Middlebury. I was like, ‘Oh wow, it’s a sign!’
“Middlebury is so different from where I’m from. In my city, there are drive-by [shootings] that happen every week or so. Someone dies. And then people talk about that stuff. That was so normal to me. The openness. The whole showing vulnerability. The fact that a lot of people from where I’m from look very much like me: Hispanic.
“I came from that to Middlebury, where everything is calm,” he said. “There’s not a lot of craziness happening here. The craziness here is just academic, or somebody overdrank, and that wasn’t relatable to me. I don’t know what to tell you, I don’t know how to approach people, I don’t know how to understand why it is such a big deal. Why is it that getting a B on a test is a big deal? It’s just a B.
“I understand pain and suffering is, to people, relative. But, when you’re a first-year, you’re like, ‘People are so … I don’t understand that.’ That’s where the panda hat came in,” Guzman said.
“The hat is very representative of how I am. Very silly, very goofy, like life is so short. Middlebury is such a privileged place in good and bad ways. I feel like we all get caught up in the little bad stuff.” He smiles. “What’s the problem? Let’s just have some fun.”
Guzman, currently a First-Year Counselor in Battell, attributes his rise to Yik Yak fame to the first-years on his hall, Battell second floor center.
“The first person who showed the Yik Yaks to me was a first-year. I feel like Yik Yak is a big thing with the first-years. It was perfect timing. The incoming first-years came in, and, as an FYC, I was one of the first people they saw on campus and could attach some sort of significance to.”
“My nickname [as Panda Hat Kid] is chill. It’s definitely a thing,” he said, laughing. “[As for the Yik Yaks], it’s super hard to offend me. The closest one to being offensive was, ‘Panda hat kid makes me want to interbreed.’ I was cracking up. This is just hilarious!”
Guzman believes the campus’s infatuation with “Panda Hat Kid” along with his “five minutes of fame” will eventually die down.
“And I’m totally okay with that. As long as I’m perceived as someone that people feel comfortable around, that’s what really matters to me,” he said. “[As an FYC], whenever I see first-years, I like to ask them how they’re doing, and how they’re adapting to life at Midd. I feel like I’ve made a lot of connections with first-years who aren’t in my hall because of that.”
He tugged on the baseball tassels. “It’s only five minutes, and you should do the best you can with the five minutes you got.”
(09/18/14 1:08am)
The fall semester is a time of transition for Middlebury’s Dance Program, as three new faculty members begin to make their mark in the wake of the retirement of longtime Professor of Dance Penny Campbell and the imminent retirement of Professor of Dance Andrea Olsen, who is on sabbatical leave this year. Assisstant Professor of Dance Christal Brown envisions a revamping of the dance curriculum, which will aid students in becoming embodied scholars with critical lenses for the creative outlet of the medium.
Brown expressed the hope that the program’s image to the greater campus is one of clarity and accessibility.
“We want to make it clear that dance is just as rigorous an academic discipline as others,” she said. “It can be easy to dismiss a field of study one knows little about, especially those in the arts, as not as academically serious as, say, physics or economics, but each area of study holds it own challenges and rewards, and no one discipline is greater than another.”
As the dance program evolves, the three new faculty members will bring their varying perspectives and visions to Middlebury this year.
Tzveta Kassabova is joining the long-term faculty as an Assistant Professor of Dance. Originally from Bulgaria, she came to the United States in 1999 with the intention of studying meteorology at the University of Maryland.
“I knew my secret mission was to dance, and so I ran away to New York,” she said.
With her Masters in meteorology in hand, in New York City she danced with the David Dorfman Dance Company and in other choreographers’ works. After a few years, Kassabova returned to the University of Maryland to pursue her MFA in dance, expand her views on art and build a body of original dance works. She then began showing her own choreography in the Washington, D.C. area and teaching at the University of Maryland and George Washington University. Before coming to the College, Kassabova taught for two years as a full time guest artist at the University of Florida, where she was involved in shaping the dance program and curriculum, as she hopes to do at the College as part of the core dance faculty.
During the summer Kassabova attended a workshop led by Olsen, where she experienced firsthand the teaching of a professor who has been a guiding force in the dance program for so long.
“It was wonderful to get a sense of continuation ... of exchange,” Kassabova said.
This semester Kassabova is teaching Introduction to Dance and Advanced Beginning Dance, in which she strives to create a welcoming experience to students just beginning or continuing their journey with dance, and to encourage them to explore and expand their capabilities.
Trebien Pollard is the new Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance and the Artistic Director of Dance Company of Middlebury (DCM) this year. A gymnast in early life, Pollard was introduced to dance in high school, and after studying mathematics education at Florida A&M University, he moved to New York City to train at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. He then joined the Martha Graham Ensemble and continued dance professionally for 12 years in various other companies, including Pascal Rioult Dance Theater, Erick Hawkins Dance Co., and the MET (Metropolitan Opera Ballet). In 2004 he received his MFA in Dance from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and began teaching and choreographing for the University of Southern Mississippi, Adelphi University, Queens College and Goucher College before arriving at the College.
Pollard’s work as a choreographer often explores themes of identity and our perception of it. By integrating costumes, poetry and music with performance, his work challenges audiences to explore different ways of seeing. In directing DCM this year, he expressed his hope that students will be open to collaborative inquiry and discovery.
“When you come in with too many of your own ideas based on where you’ve come from, it doesn’t leave room for exploring, for experimenting,” he said.
Pollard is teaching Dance History in the fall, as well as an open ballet class.
In the Artist-in-Residence position this year is Scotty Hardwig. After growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of Southern Virginia, he double majored in English and Dance at the University of Virginia. Hardwig chose to be a professional dancer precisely because it was one of the hardest things he could have done, and because of the honesty of dance as a form of self-expression.
“Whenever I’m performing in my work or whenever I make a piece, I’m creating something that’s the most me that I could express, in the most full and intense way possible,” he said.
Hardwig’s work in choreography is deeply engaged with digital media, and he explores how technology can help us make connections rather than alienating us from ourselves and our environment. By creating dance works for film in natural locations, Hardwig is able to bring his audience, via the language of the body and the medium of the camera, to places and experiences not possible in the traditional setting of a dance theater. In his spring Movement and Media course, Hardwig hopes to share the myriad possibilities for integrating the potential for digital technology into the art form of dance while maintaining a strong focus on technique, particularly in contact improvisation.
This fall Hardwig is teaching Anatomy and Kinesiology and will be choreographing works for the Fall Dance Concert, the Faculty Concert and the DCM.
The fall, the Dance Program is overflowing with the fresh experience of these new faculty, who are all three excited to share their perspectives on the study of dance and to shape the development of dance at the College.
(09/17/14 9:14pm)
Jolted out of bed at 2 a.m. by the wailing of the fire alarm, I flail around in my dark room to find some resemblance of an outfit. After what seems like an eternity, I reluctantly go outside to join the other Battell residents huddled together in the cold, experiencing what has become a rite of passage for Middlebury students.
Imagine that the alarm went off a couple times a day, instead of a handful of times a year. Imagine being awakened by an alarm signaling that you have 90 seconds to get dressed and get to the nearest bomb shelter. Imagine rockets with 100 kg. warheads landing near your home. Imagine going to work every day and proceeding with life as normal despite the rockets. That was my summer.
On the May 30, I departed my home in Los Angeles and traveled halfway across the world to Tel Aviv, Israel. Birthright Israel sponsored 40 North American college students for a very unique program. We lived together in a youth hostel and worked in various internships. Evenings included special programming or a speaker. We were paired with 40 Israeli peers that studied at an Israeli University or served in the army.
The first month of the trip was exactly as I had expected. I learned a lot at my job at Giza Venture Capital, I learned about Israel’s miraculous economy from high-profile speakers, I experienced a traditional Shabbat dinner with my Israeli peer Shay and I explored Tel Aviv’s nightlife with my new friends.
Between June 30 and July 2, the IDF found the bodies of three Israeli teens murdered by Hamas, and a Palestinian teen was murdered by far-right Jewish extremists in retaliation. On July 8, the first rocket siren in Tel Aviv went off. The relative quiet that I had enjoyed for my first month in Israel was over.
During the final five weeks I was in Israel, the sirens became a routine. 90 seconds to get to the shelter, nervously praying to hear the dull boom of the Iron Dome — a missile interception system — indicating the rocket was intercepted, while texting loved ones back in the U.S. that I was safe. Then I would go on with my day, or back to sleep if it was in the middle of the night.
At first, the routine was a novelty. The first dozen sirens were not only terrifying, but also exciting. Running from the rockets to the bomb shelters was an adrenaline rush. Living in the U.S., I had never feared for my life before.
After a week or two, the excitement began to fade and a new reality set in. When I walked into a restaurant, I asked for the menu and for the location of the nearest bomb shelter. I was also incredibly fortunate to live in Tel Aviv. Less than 40 miles south, Israelis had only 15 seconds to get to the shelters. Thousands of rockets were fired on the South during the month of July, and residents also lived in fear of Hamas militants emerging from their complex network of terror tunnels from Gaza into Israel’s South.
Many of my Israeli peers, just a couple years out of their mandatory service, were called up for reserve duty. Every day, I followed the news from Gaza religiously and worried for my Israeli peers. I knew the people fighting, and that made it personal. Towards the end of the summer, one of my Israeli Peers was injured in combat. He has since recovered after surgery, but the fear of losing someone I cared about remained.
The civilian deaths in Gaza and subsequent media backlash also weighed on Israeli society. There was no rejoicing in death tolls out of Gaza — simply frustration at the reality of the Middle East and the desire to live without fear of rockets.
Living in Tel Aviv for the summer was an unforgettable experience. I made lifelong friends, learned professional skills and gained a deeper appreciation for how good we have it in the United States. My Israeli peers and my co-workers at Giza were incredibly supportive and were a big reason that I never seriously considered leaving early. Back home, I live without fear of rocket fire, and I can be proud of my Jewish identity without fear of backlash. It is something that I cannot do in much of the world, including some European countries following the most recent outbreak of anti-Semitism.
I wanted to avoid writing another polarizing op-ed on the Middle East and rather tell the story of someone who lived in Israel the past few months. If you do feel strongly about this issue, I am happy to discuss it in more depth. Feel free to email me at adetoledo@middlebury.edu.
AARON DE TOLEDO '16 is from Los Angeles, Calif.
(09/10/14 8:32pm)
Come January, Middlebury College will lose an invaluable member of its community. Shirley M. Collado, Vice President for Student Affairs, Dean of the College, Chief Diversity Officer and the College’s Title IX Coordinator, accepted a new position as Executive Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives and Executive Vice Provost at Rutgers University – Newark in Newark, NJ.
Collado began at the College in late 2006 as the Vice President for Institutional Planning and Diversity. In July 2010, she moved to her position as Dean of the College.
In her time at the College, Collado has played an instrumental role in a number of initiatives that aim to expand the student experience beyond the classroom. She has been a leader at the College and in higher education in programs for access and student and faculty diversity.
Collado’s decision to take the position at Rutgers did not come easily. However, the opportunity to work at a large, public university with an enormously diverse student body prevailed.
“I was really excited about the opportunity to think about going to another mission driven place that would stretch me in ways that would be pretty significant and allow me to continue to address some of the critical issues that I feel strongly about in higher education. Like access, college persistance, and affordability for all students. What it really means to educate the future student demographics that we’re seeing emerge in high schools,” she said.
At Rutgers, Collado will be working closely with Chancellor Nancy Cantor, another leader in higher education who shares Collado’s values in access and diversity.
Although very different institutions, Collado will be able to continue her work focusing on these core values.
“Making sure that you are creating an environment where all students can thrive is what I will carry with me in terms of our deep commitment here to serving students once you’re a student at Middlebury,” she said. “One of the major initiatives that I’ll be working on there will be overseeing the development of a very dynamic and innovative honors living and learning community which will have a very strong liberal arts, and civically oriented residential component.”
In her transition out of the College, Collado will leave behind a legacy of innovation and commitment to the student body. Her work on the Center for Social Entrepreneurship, MiddCORE, the Center for Careers and Internships, MiddView, the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, and the grant for the Creating Connections Consortium will help to enhance student life at the College long after her departure.
Jon Isham, Director of Center for Social Entrepreneurship and a professor of Economics said of Collado and her time at the College, “Thanks to her, we are a more diverse community, and collectively we are more attuned to the complexities of being a young person in this confounding era. To continue to thrive, our community must lead with empathy and - dare I say - love for each other. Shirley has laid the foundation for such a transformation.”
Collado also worked to diversify the faculty of the College in an effort to offer students a wider range of learning opportunities. Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty Andrea Lloyd said that “[Collado] thinks about diversity institutionally, trying to understand how the institution has to evolve in order to achieve our goals. The work of diversifying the faculty, seen from that kind of institutional perspective, becomes woven into the fabric of the place, rather than being seen as somehow separate from the day to day work that we do.”
Although leaving behind a range of programs, Collado professed her faith in the College to resume the work that she did. She was a leader and a role model for the students and faculty, but the administration that will work to continue what she brought to the College.
“Her candid demeanor, constructive criticism, and support helped me immensely over the course of the year. Her commitment to her job and this campus inspired me,” said Rachel Liddell ’15, President of the Student Government for the 2013-2014 school year. “It’s impressive to see someone work so hard but do it with commitment and joy.”
Erin Quinn, Director of Athletics said of Collado, “She has brought an inclusive and collaborative leadership style which has brought the many diverse elements of the division of Student Life together to greatly enhance the student experience at Middlebury.”
Separate interim officers will succeed Collado to fill the three leadership roles that she carries. President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz will announce these interim officers this fall but will not appoint new people to fill the positions permanently in an effort to allow a new President to play a role in the process.
In her time at the College, Collado has laid the foundations for an innovative and rich campus experience.
“The ethos of this place, the sense of community, the appetite that this environment has to always be better, to play a role in this world as a leader, its really not rhetoric, I feel it, and I’ve seen it in practice,” she said. “So that for me will be one of the greatest gifts that I got from this place. And I hope to be connected to Middlebury in all kinds of ways in the future… I could not feel as prepared and excited as I am if it wasn’t for the kind of experience I’ve gained here and what students have given me here.”
(09/10/14 8:19pm)
With the start of every school year comes inevitable change as a new wave of students and faculty arrive, setting the tone for the coming year. This fall, however, the College is set up for even more momentous change than usual. With President Liebowitz and Dean Collado leaving at the end of the year and the end of J-term, respectively, we are hiring into positions that will dictate what Middlebury will look like when we come back for our 10th reunion. The future of Middlebury is further in flux due to the Board restructuring and the conversations we are having about identity.
In an all school email on Sept. 4, President Liebowitz announced a new identity system for Middlebury, bringing all programs — the College, Monterey, Breadloaf, the School for the Environment, the Language Schools and the study abroad programs — under the same umbrella by adding “Middlebury” to their official names.
President Liebowitz and the administration have repeatedly emphasized the importance of preserving the undergraduate program — the flagship of the Middlebury brand — as the community undergoes these changes. We strongly agree that the College must be the heart and soul of the Middlebury brand.
In this vein, we must find innovative ways to extend these opportunities to Middlebury College students. Continuing J-term courses in Monterey and scholarships to Breadloaf are just a few ways. As all of Middlebury’s programs grow and solidify, they should also grow in cohesion and access so we start to think of them seamlessly as an extension of the programs we already have access to on campus. These programs could be another selling point for Admissions and expand what a Middlebury education could look like.
As we learned last year with the linguistic errors in the grandfathered-in Latin courses of Middlebury Interactive Languages, we must tread carefully to ensure that the Middlebury brand retains its strength. As we expand, all of Middlebury-branded ventures must continue to be held up to the same high standards we have for the College, for the value of our diplomas depends on Middlebury’s reputation. One example of this is our commitment to inclusion and diversity. The College is need-blind for most students in the admissions process, and we want to be sure that these other programs, which often carry a similarly high price tag, are held to the same financial aid standards. We want all of Middlebury to be accessible, not just the part that is easily advertised.
Thus far, the programs have increased the value of our education. Often when we tell people we go to Middlebury, they comment on our strong language programs or leadership in environmental initiatives. Continuing to leverage this brand is a smart business decision and will impact us far past commencement as we add a BA to our resumes.
As we restructure the Board of Trustees and hire a new President and Dean of the College, we must further reflect on the values that matter most to us as a community and the values we would like to be perpetuated in the coming decades. For many of us, this includes our commitment to diversity of all kinds, internationalism, environmentalism, and the future of liberal arts education.
For example, in hiring Dean Collado’s replacement, we must remember that as a member of the inaugural Posse class and as a woman in higher education, she has brought a wealth of experience to the position of Dean, championing diversity and inclusion initiatives and anti-discrimination policies for both students and faculty. Continuing her legacy is imperative as we hire our next round of leaders, insofar as attracting a wider range of students is a priority in our branding discussions. Recruiting diverse talent in our students, faculty and administrators must be a priority.
In President Liebowitz, we had a President who was not only a great fundraiser, but also kept abreast of issues on campus by inviting students over for lunch or dinner and commenting on the Campus online. We want the next President to listen to the student voice as well.
We at the Campus will come out swinging this year to bring up-to-date coverage on all of these changes and lend our voices to the campus dialogue. But while we try to encompass a range of opinions on campus, ultimately we are only 30 voices on issues where everyone has their own ideas. We will do our best to facilitate this discussion, but we are all responsible for impactful discussions on the kind of education we would like to receive and the community we would like to foster. Do you want internships for credit and other opportunities for applied education? A return to the strict liberal arts education? Do you want to change the AAL credit, build a multicultural center, or extend Thanksgiving Break?
We challenge everyone to lead us into this new era at the College. The Campus works for you, after all. Stay informed by reading the Campus, MiddBeat, beyond the green and other campus news sources. Participate in the discussion by submitting op-eds or talking with your classmates about their opinions. We are responsible for future generations of Middlebury students, and this year more than any other, we must speak out.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(05/08/14 12:32am)
On Tuesday, May 13 the faculty will vote on a motion to sever the College’s ties with K12, Inc., the corporation that the College has partnered with to create Middlebury Interactive Languages (MIL), a foreign language education program for K-12 students. While the motion carries no weight — only the Board of Trustees has the power to sever ties with K12 — it is the most salient push back to one of President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz’s efforts.
“The business practices of K12, Inc. are at odds with the integrity, reputation, and educational mission of the College,” said the motion, which was obtained by the Campus. French Professor Paula Schwartz submitted the motion.
In an email to the entire faculty on May 2 — also obtained by the Campus — Schwartz summarized the accusations into three categories, urging her colleagues to vote in favor of the motion.
The first was that K12, Inc. had been sued by a number of states for false claims and dubious practices. Secondly, that MIL’s product had been censored by K12, removing reference to same-sex relationships and unmarried couples in order to conform to Texas Board of Education standards. Thirdly, the email noted that K12, Inc. had come under fire for factual errors that were recently discovered in MIL’s Latin program.
Vice President for Communications Bill Burger and Vice President for Pedagogical Development for MIL Aline Germain-Rutherford both denied any allegations that MIL censored content.
“We have never been asked to censor, change edit or delete any material from any of our courses by a state or locality as part of some political agenda,” Germain-Rutherford said. “K12 Inc. has never tried to influence our course content. MIL has always been in charge of the content.”
Burger echoed Germain-Rutherford, calling Schwartz’s censorship claims a “total falsehood.”
“I want to emphasize what I believe is the central narrative of this story: a group of faculty are seeking to end our relationship with MIL. They have made some very serious accusations. We categorically deny those assertions and to my knowledge they have no evidence to support them.”
However, Burger did acknowledge that the Latin department did experience issues with MIL.
“It was brought to the attention of a faculty member at Middlebury College earlier this year that there were a number of errors in one of the Latin language course marketed and sold by MIL,” he said. “This course was created prior to the joint venture with Middlebury and MIL. An investigation into these course materials confirmed that there were, indeed, a number of errors.”
But Burger said that the errors were “quickly corrected,” and that the Latin courses will no longer be marketed as MIL courses.
The College first went into partnership with K12 in 2010 and has since created videos for the K-12 market in five languages: Spanish, French, Chinese, German and Arabic. Liebowitz has championed MIL since its creation as an important investment for the College’s brand.
“We pursued the initiative for three reasons,” Liebowitz told the faculty at its meeting on April 28. “First, we wanted to retain out leadership in the languages. Our reputation as leaders in teaching languages began 100 years ago with the intensive, immersion Language schools, which introduced a totally new way to teach languages ... The second reason was and is to expand access to language courses for pre-college students. And third, we recognized, especially during the recession, that in order for the College to protect what it valued so much about its residential liberal arts offerings here on campus … we need, eventually, to find ways to increase overall revenue,” concluded Liebowitz.
But many faculty members do not buy the College’s explanations. Associate Professor of Education Studies Jonathan Miller-Lane said that he was originally supportive of the College leveraging its language expertise to open new revenue streams.
“Why should we not try and leverage our strengths?” he said. “However, given what we now know is happening it turns out to be a poorly executed plan. By far, this is the most appalling thing that I have heard regarding MIL and K-12 Inc. and it leads me to now support the effort to sever all connections with K-12, Inc.”
According to Burger, one of the root issues is the reluctance of some faculty to accept that MIL should have a role in Middlebury’s future.
But Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies Laurie Essig said that she was indeed worried about MIL’s relationship with K-12, Inc.
“It is not in Middlebury’s interest as an institution of higher learning to be so closely allied with a business that is far less interested in education than it is the replacement of face to face learning with online ‘learning,’” she said. “Their unproved record as educators, their for profit motive and their highly politicized agenda ought to give us pause — but because it hurts learning. And Middlebury is dedicated to just that.”
Miller-Lane called the idea that we need to “face the facts” of K-12 market “specious.”
“We are doing this to make a buck, period. We are choosing to enter this market and we can choose to leave. We must now make clear what our standards are.”
(05/07/14 7:58pm)
What would have been our last week of training was instead spent recovering in bed and wallowing in Adam Levine’s new hair color. Reminders of the upcoming race proved to be overwhelming throughout the week. A walk into town meant passing a screaming neon sign announcing road closures on Sunday, May 4, a check of Maddie’s e-mail meant receiving a reminder of final logistics from the Maple Run coordinators (seeing as how Maddie splurged on the $40 registration fee after the adrenaline rush following her first ever two-mile run back in week 2), and entering our dorm rooms meant seeing the training calendar without X’s on the last few days. We attempted to make the best out of a poor situation and hoped to karaoke our sadness away. After several dozen renditions of Seasons of Love, we felt better and put the microphone aside (also because Maddie took two too many puffs of her inhaler in the hopes of reaching the big note at the end, and practically fainted).
Before we knew it Sunday had arrived. We headed to the starting line and were a little surprised at what we saw. Believe it or not, people seemed calm and casual considering that in a NARP’s eyes, they were about to run across the country. We had our night-before and race day agenda planned since day one of training, and had begun preparing to wake up early for the first time on a Sunday months in advance. Saturday would include a relaxing session of chatarunga — not chimichanga yoga — and a feast of carbs that Maddie would cook in the privacy of Izzy’s Middlebury home. Sunday would include a simple, yet filling meal with Gu packets in our sports bras and pre-race screenings include all of the following videos: US vs. U.S.S.R. hockey halftime speech by Kurt Russell, Will Smith’s emotional plea at the end of The Pursuit of Happiness and a montage of the Dillon Panthers saying “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” from Friday Night Lights (Tim Riggins, we love you).
We watched the runners bound into the distance and then headed back to Maddie’s room in Battell to watch them run from the window at mile seven. We were shocked to hear a bulk of the runners approaching the Chateau before ten o’clock. We really don’t even want to mention how far behind we would have been considering our steady 11 minute mile time.
We made our way to the finish line, and as everyone received their medals Izzy and Maddie’s eyes watered just a bit. We were both imagining our would-be triumphant finish. And no doubt we were both imagining flowers hitting our feet from cheering bystanders. Although we did not have those special moments, we have had a lot of other successes since February.
Despite our newly acquired partial athleticism, Izzy and Maddie are still NARPs through and through. These last twelve weeks have seen us entering the dining halls in athletic gear more often and increasing our gym attendance (by a grand total of three whopping times), but we have remained NARPs at heart. We felt closer than ever to all the unathletic people on campus who would emerge from the shadows of an Atwater party or approach us as we binged at Ross Mexican dinner to tell us that our athletic struggles are entertaining but also very relatable. Afterall, we aren’t the only ones who couldn’t go up two flights of Bi-Hall stairs without collapsing. Although our new athletic endurance didn’t leave us confident enough to sit at a circular Ross table during prime dinner hours, we have felt significantly better and healthier than ever. When either of us are in a funk, we have genuinely learned to utilize running as a therapy. Removing ourselves from the bustling atmosphere of the College gives us an hour to just breathe (albeit laboriously for Maddie) and contemplate the realisticness of our most recent Buzzfeed quiz results. This is the end of the road for The Secret Life of NARPs, but the one thing we want you to take away is that Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) is infinitely better than 2013’s Dark Horse (we’re talking to you, the one anonymous person who commented on our article online).
(05/07/14 3:56pm)
It has been over three and a half years since the day when the women’s swimming and diving team was told that due to hazing allegations, the 2010-2011 season would be cancelled for all upper-classmen girls. We were two weeks from championships.
I was sitting in the stands as Coach Solomon delivered the information. I was a first-year. I had been hazed. I had been interrogated by public safety. And now I had to decide with the 12 other first-year girls whether we were going to continue on with our season despite the upperclassmen ban.
I’ll never forget the frustration, the tears and the overall strength it took our class to come to a decision. If we didn’t go, the rumors would spread like wildfire, Middlebury’s absence at the NESCAC championship would leave a huge gap, a hole that we would have to work to fill for the rest of our time at Middlebury. If we decided to go, all of the upperclassmen would have to look on from the sidelines, even those that were not actively engaged in the hazing events.
Needless to say the events of my first winter here defined my time at Middlebury. While I was not personally offended by the hazing, members of the team were. And no matter what anyone says, it was hazing. Period.
We ended up going to the meet, and the thirteen first-year grew extremely close. While some of the other grades were strained by the stress of it all, our class grew closer and we remain close today.
My best friends are swimmers and leading the team this year along with all of my fellow seniors has been an honor. I love the sport of swimming, despite the hazing, despite losing the coach that recruited me and despite the drama of the situation. Part of the reason I kept going was because I was always with my best friends and felt pride and responsibility for the underclassmen. I would never wish on them the type of experience we went through in the weeks after the hazing incident, and have worked to ensure that the women on the team are aware of the consequences of our actions, and to be aware not only of your friends’ feelings, but every single person on the team.
This year we placed third in the NESCAC championships for the first time since I’ve been here. It was one of the proudest moments of my time at Middlebury. It signaled the strength of our athleticism and the hard training we put in. More than that though, NESCACs was really fun. I personally swam badly. Normally this would mean that the meet would drag on and I couldn’t wait to get on the bus to go home. However, with each good swim of a teammate, I had fun and experienced joy and pride that made the meet so enjoyable — I didn’t want it to end.
I realized at the end of the meet that this is what it meant to be a team. A team is not brought together by hazing or traditions. A team is brought together through hard work, through friendships and through a general pride in oneself and ones teammates.
When the class of 2014 graduates, the memory of the hazing graduates with us. The emotions and events that took place now leave the college. However, in our wake, I only hope that the spirit of what it means to be a team is what is left behind. The lessons of our experience should not be forgotten, but even more than that the lessons from this season, the lessons of what it really means to be competitive athletes and amazing friends should be remembered.
In my final column for the Campus, I leave everyone here at the College with the following advice. It’s quite simple. Don’t haze; build trust through friendship and understanding. It is more rewarding and meaningful. The bonds I have built through friendship and understanding made my time at Middlebury amazing and will continue to grow even after I leave this place.
To my team; thank you for the most incredible years. To everyone else; remember what is most important in life – trust, understanding and respect – and I’m sure you can also build friendships that will last a lifetime.
(04/30/14 11:12pm)
From April 30-May 3, the Middlebury College Departments of Theatre and Dance are presenting Sarah Ruhl’s Tony Award-nominated play “In the Next Room” (or The Vibrator Play). Associate Professor of Theatre Claudio Medeiros ’90 will direct the work, which stars seven students and serves as the final campus production for theater majors Mari Vial-Golden ’14 and Matt Ball ’14.
True to its title, the play explores the use of electric vibrators in treating women for “hysteria” in 19th century Saratoga Springs, N. Y. It also sheds light on doctors’ long-standing, limited understanding of human sexuality and, in particular, the female orgasm. After all, the hysteria diagnosis — which is no longer recognized as medically sound — was regularly applied to women exhibiting symptoms ranging from nervousness to fatigue to irritability to general “troublemaking.”
It was these themes of female sexuality and desire that drove Vial-Golden to audition for the role of Catherine Billings, one of the leading characters in the play.
“It is a period piece that takes place in the late 1800s, but the themes are so timeless,” Vial-Golden said.
Indeed, the play points to just how far we have come but also how much we still don’t know about human sexuality.
“To me, it’s mind boggling that it’s so recent that we have actually come to understand the female orgasm,” Medeiros said.
Although “In the Next Room” presents serious topics, it does so with humor and lightheartedness. This rich balance appealed to Medeiros but has also challenged him and the cast.
“Tonally, it’s a tricky piece because it’s funny and serious often at the same time,” Medeiros said. “The challenge becomes how to navigate that. The director has to guide the actors to find a truthful connection with both the comedy and the drama. At the same time, one wants the audience to laugh at the situations but not the characters.”
Katie Weatherseed ’16, who plays Sabrina, a patient treated for hysteria, notes that the play draws some of its humor from characters’ genuine innocence, especially in contrast to that of a 21st century audience.
“The characters bring a charming naiveté that’s just really fun to play and also fun to watch,” she said. “I hope that the show can make the audience laugh while also giving them a little food for thought.”
In order to prepare for the show, the cast researched sex and intimacy in the Victorian Era, read the book that inspired the play, Rachel P. Maines’ 2001 text Technology of Orgasm, took a historical walking tour of Saratoga Springs and watched the 2011 movie Hysteria, which stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and explores similar topics to “In the Next Room.” In order to gain a better understanding of the “hysteria” diagnosis, Weatherseed also read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s popular short story, “The Yellow Wall Paper. “
“[It] was probably the piece I looked to most, as it guides the reader through the consciousness of a woman who is stifled by gender roles and encouraged to suppress her emotions,” she said.
Blocking scenes was particularly important to the rehearsal process because the play takes place in two adjacent rooms. Action moves between both and sometimes occurs in each simultaneously.
“It’s almost like in film — whoever is in the foreground is in focus, but then the focus can shift to the background,” Medeiros said. “Finding a way to do that in the theater has been a really interesting challenge.”
Because the play will be her last at Middlebury, Vial-Golden is particularly grateful that “In the Next Room” has presented challenges like this unconventional blocking.
“It’s nice to end on a challenge and to end with a friend — Matt Ball — who I’ve been working with since freshman year, as well as a phenomenal cast of mainly underclassmen,” Vial-Golden said.
Medeiros hopes that “In the Next Room” will push audience members just as it has the cast. Hopefully, viewers will leave the play with not only a deeper understanding of the evolution of medicine, sexuality and gender, but also a revised definition of intimacy.
“I think the play ultimately proposes a return to a kind of radical intimacy, one that is not just sexual but erotic in the larger sense of the word: a true physical, emotional and spiritual connection...I find that quite beautiful,” Medeiros said.
“In the Next Room” (or The Vibrator Play) opened at The Seeler Studio Theater on Wednesday, Apr. 30 and will run through Saturday, May 3 at 7:30 p.m. each night. Tickets are $6 for Middlebury College students and available at go/boxoffice.
(04/30/14 6:37pm)
Here in idyllic rural Vermont, Middlebury College is a bastion of beauty, tradition, stewardship, and of course — safety. In order to foster elite learning, we have a multitude of mechanisms to protect us from any possible interference from danger outside our marble walls. But according to the Community Council, surveillance cameras may be an added necessity to campus security. As one member of the council said, “While we live in a tight-knit community, we are part of a larger scary world.” Apart from this, there has been no explanation about how surveillance cameras might keep us safer. Many of us are left questioning, are we a tight-knit community? What is implied by “larger scary world?” In the conversation around surveillance on campus, many “common sense’ ideologies and markers of race, class, gender and sexuality are being evoked. We want to both deconstruct this logic and name the assumptions used to justify new cameras.
The construction of an internal Middlebury community — with its highly selected members — as being safe, and those in the larger world being scary, creates a fallacy that violence is enacted by “strangers,” and we are not complicit in it. Moreover, fear of criminal strangers has notoriously been mobilized at a cultural level to increase control over certain people. In other words, at Middlebury and in the larger world, we are not all surveilled equally. Cameras aren’t neutral. Adding new ones will not keep us safer. Certain bodies are already marked as scary and criminal before they have been “caught” committing a crime: black and Latino bodies have historically been watched on this campus, mirroring how they are hyper-policed in the “outside” world. This is also true for gender non-conforming, trans and visibly queer people. The following are a few examples of the discriminatory results of surveillance and policing on this campus.
Recently, a non-white, non-gender conforming individual was confronted by public safety primarily for breaking the overnight guest rule. An anonymous author, writing for beyond the green, argued that her girlfriend was watched, confronted and treated more harshly because of her marginalized identity: she was viewed as having “something to hide,” while other violators of the guest rule are regularly treated with more leniency and given the benefit of the doubt. Surveillance reinforces normative identities by making deviance ever visible. Given that Middlebury has historically regulated and stigmatized non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality — permitting threats of violence against gay and lesbian identifying students to go unchallenged — widespread visibility is not associated with safety for marginalized identities.
Three years ago, a guest that an FYC brought to campus was forcibly removed by public safety. The details of this event are complicated; however, arguments were made then that still hold up now that factors such as the age, race and radical identity of this man likely had something to do with making the students feel “unsafe” and causing public safety to not just ask him to leave, but to (effectively) arrest him. Language of unsafe, stranger and scary is not neutral; rather, these terms are code words for certain bodies and certain practices; and in our society — as well as in the starkly white community of Middlebury — the black (male) body is marked as the most unwanted and unsafe stranger, continuously hyper-criminalized.
In questioning the politics of putting even more power into the hands of the administration, we should ask, why the panic? Middlebury already has multiple systems of surveillance and control: key cards track who has entered into buildings at what time, Public Safety reads our emails, and we have two surveillance cameras (one outside of Parton and one in the MCA). So far — again highlighting how surveillance is not neutral — these technologies have been used to punish acts of civil disobedience on this campus. Through surveillance, Middlebury’s administration arrogates power to itself by gaining exclusive access to the personal information of all who inhabit its campus, disciplining people by rendering deviance constantly visible, and normalizing punitive measures for handling conflict. For instance, just a year ago, one student — notably, a trans student with radical politics — was punished for her protest against anti-gay Red Cross policies. She was found out via key card technology and then suspended for a year. This instance represents a practice of discriminatory surveillance that seeks out acts of deviance and then reinforces punitive frameworks.
Looking beyond our campus we can also find examples of how surveillance has different effects on different people, depending on whether their communities have historically been deemed necessary to criminalize or to protect. Expanding on the notion about “which crimes will be punished,” and the idea that surveillance will only increase existing power structures, we turn to the case of Oscar Grant, a black man shot and killed by a police officer in 2009. The murder of Grant was caught on camera and the prosecutor attempted to use the footage to convict the white officer. However, the footage must have been disregarded as evidence, since the officer was not convicted of first degree murder and only served two years in jail before being released. Within a justice system in which carceral punishment is our only mechanism for dealing with this type of crime, this inconsistent sentencing, upheld by systemic racism, completely devalues the life of Oscar Grant. The use of video footage to solve crimes must be considered within the racism that still haunts our criminal justice system. Which “crimes” do cameras call attention to, or have the ability to see? The guise of neutrality, so clearly not in evidence, has contributed to a long history of devaluing certain identities. This type of evidence is used when it holds up current power systems, disregarded when it does not.
You might be asking, “I’m not doing anything wrong, so why should I care?” The NYPD’s stop and frisk policy shows us why this should matter to all of us. While it didn’t use surveillance cameras per se, it was a widespread surveillance program that had a devastating effect on thousands of people. Out of over 4 million stops in ten years, only one tenth of percent yielded illegal firearms — the purported reason for this policy. 90 percent of the stops yielded no evidence of criminal activity but the idea that people can be stopped for no reason has far-reaching consequences for all of us. Similarly, surveillance cameras assume guilt and require one to “prove” their innocence. Do you want to trade your rights for such low returns?
Surveillance has an acute effect on the way crime or rule breaking is dealt with on campus, favoring punitive over transformative justice. This can be illustrated in another interview with Director of Public Safety Lisa Bouchard, who states that the surveillance cameras’ purpose is “to keep people safe and solve crimes,” (The Middlebury Campus, 2008). The masculinist logic of objective technological evidence encourages punitive measures and works to obscure the social context underlying an incident on campus through its guise of objectivity. Although the watching claims to be neutral, it is not; the results of surveillance (who is caught, who is punished) are up to those doing the surveilling. We don’t view visual images neutrally, so when exclusive access to video footage is in the hands of administration, it can be employed as “neutral evidence” despite the continued functioning of power.
These technologies cannot be objective because they take on and reflect values from the context of their use, reproducing the unequal social orders in which they are grounded. They do not represent an opportunity for community-based transformation. That surveillance cameras can supposedly solve crimes makes assumptions about what kinds of crimes are committed and where. For instance, we could never hope to “solve” the crime of sexual assault, when the vast majority of this violence occurs behind dorm room doors.
This week a few renowned scholar-activists discussed these issues in light of the larger state-sponsored violence embedded in the prison industrial complex at a panel: Critical Queer Perspectives on the Carceral State. They argued that Middlebury’s surveillance cameras cannot be seen outside of the overall neoliberal state (the U.S.), which repeatedly criminalizes the survival strategies of marginalized people. Therefore, integrating the transformative critiques of these panelists, we must see how surveillance becomes complicit in oppression and find better methods of security. The panelists invited us to consider alternative ways of creating justice and building communities that truly transform our current social conditions; this may enable us to actually become “tight-knit.” One idea is to work on building community and mutual accountability, while developing restorative justice frameworks.
Just like the Prison Industrial Complex and systems of policing and criminalization, surveillance cameras do not make us safe. Rather, they centralize power, strengthen punitive frameworks, criminalize already marked, marginalized, “deviant” bodies and politics. They perpetuate myths of “neutrality” and “objective” technology, which actually stems from patriarchal logics and modes of being and acts unequally on a diverse social body. We should endeavour to be critical of the supposed beneficial effects of expanded surveillance, as it has primarily served to silence resistance, strengthen punishment and target those individuals already marginalized. For more information, visit beyond the green’s blog at go/btg.
MOLLY STUART ’15.5 is from Santa Cruz, Calif. LILY ANDREWS ’14 is from Minneapolis, Minn. ALLY YANSON ’14 is from Naples, Fla. KATIE WILLIS ’12 is from Birmingham, Ala. JACKIE PARK ’15 is from Los Angeles, Calif. ALEX STROTT ’14.5 is from Baltimore, Md. and ALEXANDER CHABALLIER ’16.5 is from Paris, France. Artwork by JENA RITCHEY.
(04/24/14 3:33am)
The Amherst Lord Jeffs prevailed over the Middlebury Panthers in a three-game series sweep this weekend at Forbes Field. The double-header on Friday, April 18 featured a 3-0 shutout win for Amherst and a 2-1 thriller that Amherst snatched in the tenth inning. Saturday’s contest slipped away from Middlebury and Amherst clubbed its way to an 11-3 win.
Despite the losses, Alex Kelly ’14 (6-13, two runs, RBI), Max Araya ’16 (3-8, 2 RBI, 2 BB, HBP) and Joe MacDonald ’16 (3-10, RBI) swung proficiently at the plate and hurlers Eric Truss ’15 and Cooper Byrne ’15 threw heat from the hill.
In the first game, the Panthers outhit the Lord Jeffs 9-4 but missed key opportunities to knock runners home. Middlebury was able to load the bases in the second and third innings, but undefeated Amherst slinger Dylan Driscoll wriggled out of the early trouble.
Wild pitches and throwing errors in the second and fifth inning led directly to all three runs for Amherst, but otherwise the defense was tight.
In the sixth inning, Garrett Werner ’16 bunted for a single and Matt Leach ’15 singled to right, but from that point on the offense puttered. At the end of the day, Middlebury would leave 12 runners on base but could bring none all the way around.
“We have been working on becoming a complete team,” Coach Bob Smith said. “Our defense is playing well now, and giving us a chance to win games if we can just score some runs.”
To improve the offense, Coach Smith wants smart situational hitting.
“Our emphasis this week will be on hitting, of course, and doing the basic things right like bunting people over and scoring people from third base when there are less than two outs.”
Hungry for revenge in the second game, Truss and the Panthers kept the Lord Jeffs knotted 0-0 until the fifth inning. An unfortunate bobble gave Amherst a sudden baserunner, who would eventually score on a two-out zinger down the right field line.
In the bottom of the seventh, Jason Lock ’17 legged out a leadoff double, then moved to third base on a bunt play. Lock scurried home on a wild pitch to tie the score.
The tenth-inning heroics ultimately belonged to Amherst, whose Tyler Jacobs lifted a ball over the leftfield fence for the deciding home run.
On Saturday, the weather warmed up but so did the Amherst bats, buoyed by an outgoing wind.
Taiki Kasuga of Amherst stepped up with the bases loaded and pinged a ball three-hundred and ninety feet to the centerfield fence that scored three, capping a five-run second inning.
Kelly was 4-4 at the plate for Middlebury, scoring two runs with his own legs and knocking one more home with an RBI double.
“Kelly has been awesome. He comes every day ready to play and I respect him a lot for that,” Smith said. “He puts a lot of the burden on his shoulders, and it is tough for him, but he has kept us in a lot of games.”
This Saturday, April 26, the Panthers will welcome fans to Forbes field for another double-header against Trinity College, followed by a doubleheader with Castleston St. on the road on Sunday. Middlebury also has a handful of weekday games next week, playing back-to-back doubleheaders on Tuesday, April 29 at Skidmore and Wednesday, April 30 at Plymouth St.
“We’ve made drastic improvements over the season and a lot of our more recent games could have gone either way with more timely hitting,” Byrne said. “I think we have many reasons to be confident going into next season if we can take some games over these next two weeks against good teams and prove to ourselves that we can do much better going forward.”
(04/24/14 3:02am)
Last Monday evening, sitting in the small and stuffy newspaper office in the Hepburn basement, I found myself surrounded by lounging editors, writers and photographers listening to a steady stream of bluesy, jazzy soul played by Innocent Tswamuno ’15 and Mohan Fitzgerald ’14 of the student super-band, Milk Chocolate.
The duo opened with a rendition of the Wood Brother’s “Luckiest Man” followed by Bill Withers’ emotive song, “Grandma’s Hands.” Fitzgerald played the acoustic guitar while Tswamuno simultaneously worked the drum, melodica and a tambourine he admitted to “borrowing” for the night from an unaware friend.
The pair, who met during Tswamuno’s audition for Stuck in the Middle, an acappella group at the College, hit it off immediately.
Fitzgerald recalls, “I don’t want to embarrass him because we tell this story all the time, but basically the room went crazy when he auditioned because he just had this beautiful voice.”
It is a happy miracle that the two came together at all. Tswamuno grew up in Zimbabwe, a preacher’s son, playing keyboard for his church from the age of twelve. Fitzgerald, from Canada, briefly sang in a boy’s choir and tried the alto saxophone before finally learning to play the guitar after high school.
Fitzgerald and Tswamuno began playing together (their first cover: Rocking Chair, by Eric Clapton), and soon debuted their band at 51 Main in May 2013, with help from contributing members of the “Milk Chocolate Project,” Caroline Joyner ’15 (vocals), Max Eingorn ’14 (drums) and Tito Heiderer ’14.5 (bass). This was followed by later shows in Atwater suite BCG and events in McCullough Social Space such as the 200 Days Party.
A typical Milk Chocolate show includes a medley of covers of songs by Eric Clapton, the Wood Brothers and Bill Withers. Think R&B, blues, jazz, soul and reggae. Between schoolwork and extracurriculars, Tswamuno and Fitzgerald have co-written one song called “Never Gonna Call”.
Recently, they revisited 51 Main, this time taking center stage.
“The difference could really not be more stark. I remember distinctly that after that first time we were super bummed out because we’d prepared all this stuff to play, and we thought everyone would to stop and listen to us, and no one listened to us at all! But,” said Fitzgerald, who recalled one man’s praise at the end of the night. “It was the first time anyone had given us any kind of validation.”
At the start of their collaboration, neither musician was concerned with getting attention. Only once they realized their potential and craved a bigger musical outlet did they seek performance space.
“Now that people want to listen to us, it’s a completely added bonus,” said Fitzgerald. “We didn’t care about that, but now that it’s happening, it’s amazing. It’s so much fun. He even got the attention of his own parents, who drove to Middlebury from Toronto to see him and Tswamuno play.
“My parents haven’t stayed up past 9:30 p.m., I think, since the nineties,” said Fitzgerald. “And they were there until the bitter end of that show, still cheesing. And that made me so happy.”
Milk Chocolate has come a long way from that first disappointing night at 51 Main. Two weekends ago they hit the McCullough Social Space stage with the Milk Chocolate Project, for which Fitzgerald, Tswamuno and their contributing members teamed up with rapper Dwayne Scott ’17.
Shelby Redfield ’16, who attended the show, described the band’s effect, “When I first got there, it seemed like everyone was just interested in the chocolate fountain. But as soon as the band started playing everyone just flocked to the front, near the stage, and the dance turned into a concert.”
“That show was very much intrinsically gratifying because we had the best time. I’ve never seen all of us as giddy as after that show,” Fitzgerald said.
While Tswamuno and Fitzgerald study Environmental Studies and Math respectively, they are taking their musical pursuits seriously.
“Next year [following Fitzgerald’s graduation], I’m going to be at a real loss. Mohan plays guitar and sings really well, and we’ve practiced so much, and our voices go together. At this point, we have such good rapport that when he leaves I just won’t have a band,” Tswamuno said. “Being in a band, for you to enjoy it you have to be with the right crew and they have to just click.”
While Tswamuno will continue to study and perform with Stuck in the Middle, Fitzgerald plans to attend music school after graduating. They hope to reunite Milk Chocolate once Tswamuno has graduated.
(04/24/14 12:56am)
Teams of up to ten people can compete in a relay event to generate the most watts on a stationary bike in the Spring 2014 Watt-a-Thon on Friday April 25 in the Freeman International Center. Organizers have split the event into two sessions, one from 1-3 P.M. and the other from 3:30-5:30 P.M.
According to Teddy Kuo ’15, one of the organizers, the Campus Sustainability Coordinators were looking for a fun and meaningful event for Earth Week. He said that working with YouPower provided an opportunity to attract a broader base of students. They saw spinning as an activity with broad appeal because it tapped into the College’s passion for fitness.
Kuo said that he hopes the event will lead people to become more energy conscious and adjust their usage day to day.
S.J. Fossett ’17 echoed Kuo’s emphasis on energy consciousness.
“If there’s anything biking on the energy-generating bikes at the Youpower studio teach you, it’s that things as simple as running a 60 watt light bulb for an hour actually takes a lot of energy. We’re hoping that this event will be a great way to advertise turning off the lights when you leave the room and to attract new riders to an alternative, upbeat way to work out on campus,” said Fossett.
Director of Sustainability Integration Jack Byrne also supports the event, “The Watt-a-Thon is such a novel kind of race - not the fastest time but the most electricity generated by human sweat. It’s a great way to end a week’s worth of great events to celebrate our earth and keep the lights burning bright.”
The Watt-a-Thon was first held two years ago with the introduction of the YouPower studio through MiddSTART funding. Kuo, who participated in the event the first time it was held, recalled that in previous years the bikes were full with participants from a variety of groups. He recalled the swim team and hockey team being involved and an atmosphere of friendly competition.
Student excitement for the Watt-a-Thon is growing, “As a big fan of everything Youpower, I am so excited for the Spring Watt-a-thon. What’s not to love about a great work out, good music, and some friendly competition – all for an awesome cause?” said Fia Green ’14.5, a regular instructor at YouPower who plans to participate on Friday.
(04/24/14 12:54am)
On Thursday, May 1st at 7:30 P.M., Joyce P. Jacobsen, Andrew Professor of Economics and Dean of Social Sciences & Director of Global Initiatives at Wesleyan University, will speak to the Middlebury College community about the economics of gender inequality.
David K. Smith Chair in Applied Economics Phanindra V. Wunnava invited Jacobsen, an authority on gender economics, to speak on campus as part of the D.K. Smith ’42 Lecture Series. Jacobsen has an A.B. in economics from Harvard/Radcliffe College, a M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.
She is the author and co-editor of many books and articles, including, “Labor Force Participation” in the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, “The Effects of Child-Bearing on Married Women’s Labor Supply and Earnings: Using Twin Births as a Natural Experiment” in Journal of Human Resources, Labor Markets and Employment Relationships, and The Economics of Gender.
Discussing her work, Professor Wunnava said, “The Economics of Gender is a masterpiece in providing a comprehensive, and up-to-date introduction to the contemporary research being conducted on the differences between women’s and men’s economic opportunities, activities, and rewards.”
Jacobsen will focus on this topic during her May 1 lecture. The talk will discuss how gender inequality pervades the world, using the workforce as a case in point.
Jacobsen will point to the fact that women are less likely to participate in the formal work sector than men, that women are more likely to live in poverty than men, and that more women work in the household sector than men. The takeaway, which Jacobsen will discuss, is that these gender structures hold women back, prohibiting them from developing their absolute potential in the workforce and thereby capping national productivity at a level lower than it would otherwise be with full female participation.
The lecture will discuss how to quantify this gendered opportunity cost by studying high GDP growth scenarios. Professor Jacobsen has estimated that world GDP lost 17-37 percent in 1900, 7-16 percent in 2010 and will lose 4-9 percent in 2050 if trends continue.
Jacobsen will pose hypotheticals of what a gender-neutral world could have produced 110 years ago, or what it could produce 40 years into the future. She will look at factors like son-favoring and the many girls who were not born as a result, the cost of educating women, and the lost household output from a female move into the formal work sector. These points will generate a key question in her lecture — How much is society willing to lose by excluding women from the workforce and how much is society willing to invest to reap the potential gains from reducing gender inequality?
Wunnava spoke to the event and its pertinence to the College community.
“I am so excited that Professor Jacobsen will be sharing her research on the ill effects of gender inequality at Middlebury. Her work is indeed timely given the recent push by President Obama about gender equality pay structure and ‘The Equal Pay Act’.” Jacobsen, one of a few prominent economists who paved Dr. Janet Yellen’s way to be the next Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, will share her experience with the politics of gender economics.
Joyce Jacobsen has visited Middlebury before when she delivered a C.A. Johnson Lecture in 2001. As a leading authority in her field, she will bring a powerful voice back to the community during her lecture on May 1. She will leave those who choose to attend with a greater sense of the economics of inequality, poverty, and gender discrimination.
(04/23/14 2:58pm)
Exactly a week ago, PALANA house hosted PALANA Uncensored: “Multicultural Center or nah?,” a discussion in the Hillcrest Orchard. (This event is related to and in communication with other initiatives happening around the creation of a multicultural center). At the event, PALANA house members and attendees split the large audience into four groups, each of which was tasked with answering one of four questions: envisioning a multicultural center assuming we have access to unlimited resources; imagining how a multicultural center could be formed strictly from the re-purposing of existing resources; coming up with what the multicultural center should not be; and imagining why getting a multicultural center would be a bad idea. In the discussion that ensued, a number of interesting ideas were exchanged.
One person spoke about resources and how we distribute them; she argued against the idea that resources are scarce at Middlebury College and that a multicultural center must be formed strictly from the repurposing of existing resources. Clearly, she argued, Middlebury has certain priorities and is willing to spend the money to live out its values. The best example of this is environmental diversity: Middlebury has thoroughly invested in being the “best” when it comes to carbon neutrality and sustainability (even as Divestment continues to call the college out on investing in fossil fuels). What if Middlebury invested equivalent resources in supporting and fostering the “diversity” that it brings to its campus? This student made a case for the importance of the multicultural center, as she has seen too many friends of color quietly leave the campus, and one has to wonder about the toxicity of this environment and the resources that we don’t offer for certain students.
Another preson warned us against assuming that “multicultural center” naturally means exclusivity, or that white and/or non-marginalized students are not “allowed” to make use of such resources; rather, while keeping the needs of the most marginalized at its center, the multicultural center can serve a diverse body of students. As it was imagined with unlimited resources, it would be a centrally located, spacious center with various programming, services and amenities such as a kitchen, a space for arts and media, a lecture hall for speakers brought to campus, offices for the various staff, programming around cultural appropriation for Halloween and reminders to avoid “culturally” themed costumes and parties. Students agreed that the center would conduct outreach, working with all other departments and offices on campus, would push the teachers to develop more inclusive curriculum and pedagogy, would continuously advocate for diversity measures in recruiting students, faculty, speakers and performers to campus, and in this way, would remain dynamic.
Many talked about the importance of comfort and safety, and creating a space that can be home-like for students who do not already have other means of feeling comfortable on this campus. We entertained the idea that the center would be open 24 hours to students who have applied for access. We realized that in terms of repurposing resources, it would be impossible not to hire new, highly trained and well-supported staff for the center, and that taking any faculty away from their current job would simply be to overstretch them and disrupt their ability to serve what they are already serving. Moreover, one student argued that it should not be the job of certain faculty, often faculty of color, to emotionally care for students; and it should not be the job of upperclassman students to be the primary mentor for younger students.
One student whom I corresponded with stated that for her, a multicultural center would be really important in both tangible and symbolic ways. It would provide more comprehensive resources and a safe, physical space for people of marginalized identities in particular. But it would also speak to Middlebury’s values and show that this institution responds to the needs of all students. She imagines that having a multicultural center, as long as it was designed and carried out in an effective way, would create a safer and more inclusive community here.
In hearing about the possibility of a multicultural center, discussing this possibility and imagining what it might look like, it is important to keep in mind how this need is symptomatic of an ongoing struggle to practice progressive racial politics and cultural inclusivity, waged in various ways such as AAL to ALL (Midd Included). It is also important to respect that some students on this campus have already given this Center an enormous amount of thought, while other students are just becoming aware of the initiative. I became involved in this initiative only a month or two ago, but am in full support of the Center. As a white woman, I argue that we all have a stake in creating a multicultural center. I support the construction of this Center because I realize that Middlebury is set up as a white space, familiar to some, but uncomfortable and unsafe to many; I recognize that Middlebury has not committed to progressive racial politics, as it is resistant to making its curriculum culturally inclusive. Middlebury continues to recruit primarily from extremely prestigious, predominantly white private schools and stands idly by as some students of color take leave or suffer from the toxicity of this place; I realize that racial microaggressions continuously occur and that there needs to be a larger, more structural way to address these daily ignorances and assaults. As power is institutionalized, fixed in structures and systems, it might be helpful for some to ask, how might a multicultural center disrupt the whiteness and upperclass-ness (exclusion) inscribed in the institution of Middlebury College? I would really like to see structural change that both creates infrastructure to addres racism on this campus (and would make extensive use of this infrastructure) and also invests in the well-being of my peers.
As a white woman engaging in this discussion, I must always remember from where I speak and consider what experiences or lack of experiences are influencing my opinion. This especially applies for those of us who make up any kind of majority on this campus: white, upper-class, straight, cis-gendered or gender-conforming, fit-bodied, etc. Listening and creatively imagining are crucial to engaging in dialogue, and what I have learned from listening is that creating a multicultural center would be a significant step in the right direction for Middlebury. As we continue to support initiatives to maintain diversity in the student body or increase that diversity, we must be set up to support students who do not fit the outdated “norm” of a student that Middlebury is designed to serve.
LILY ANDREWS '14 is from Minneapolis, Minn. and was helped by many others involved in BEYOND THE GREEN
(04/16/14 5:06pm)
Bill McKibben
Schumann Distinguished Scholar
It's never been a huge problem for me. I grew up writing for newspapers, and that tends to cure you of perfectionism: you know that half the job is to get it done on time. I think sometimes you have to say: I'm going to write as well as I can right now, and when I wake up I'm going to go over it again to make sure it's good. Making sure the first time through can be a little daunting.
Marion Wells
Associate Professor of English and American Literatures
When I hit a roadblock in writing I have a few techniques:
1. Make a cup of tea. This can take a while, done properly and gives the mind a chance to mull things over.
2. Just start writing – even if the structure and organization of the piece as a whole are still elusive, writing a "core" piece of it can be very helpful
3. Leave the writing alone and think about teaching instead! Using a different part of the brain can help unlock the issues causing the block.
Christopher Klyza
Stafford Professor of Public Policy, Political Science and Environmental Studies
My writing in the years since I've been at Middlebury (I arrived in 1990) has primarily been aimed at an academic audience. I've written and edited several books as well as articles, book reviews and book chapters. In general, I don't get writer's block. But I do sometimes have a hard time getting started on a new project. When that is the case I make myself start writing — it could be something from the middle of the paper (such as a case study) or a description of the theoretical framework I will use rather than the introduction. I also don't worry so much about the quality of the writing, knowing that I will go back and revise it. At the end of the day, having 4-5 pages of text often primes the writing pump for future productivity. I also tend to think about the overall project better when I have done some writing.
Kathryn Kramer
Visiting Assistant Professor of English and American Literatures
Have a baby. There’s nothing like knowing you have only two hours of child care to focus the attention. (A descriptive, not a prescriptive, remedy.)
There are many devices and prompts, like imagining that the world is coming to an end in twenty minutes and what you write will be the sole remaining record, or writing without ever using the letter e, for example. But as it’s generally construed, writer’s block (which Gilbert Sorrentino calls inspiration’s “idiot brother”) has probably most to do with not wanting to write what you think you want to write, like a term paper or a letter of recommendation. There’s some dishonesty, either of intent or execution. So it’s interesting to figure out what that’s about.
Michael Sheridan
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College
I think that the key to overcoming writer's block is to start writing and let yourself write junk. Now that you've gotten started, you can keep going and later go back and either fix or delete the junk. The other trick I often use is that I make myself explain whatever it is that I'm supposed to be writing about in ordinary non-specialist language, as if I was giving an overview of what I'm trying to write about to a patient, sympathetic and wholly ignorant friend. That sketch becomes the first paragraph (which may be junk, and that's OK). The second strategy for curing writer's block is to make your writing something that you need to do for other people, not just for yourself or the text itself. For example, I often propose a paper for an academic conference on a topic that I haven't written about yet, and then the conference becomes both a deadline and group of people depending on me to deliver. Finally, chocolate never fails to motivate me. One page done means I can have one piece, no exceptions.
Julia Alvarez
Writer-in-Residence
When the writer William Stafford was asked the same question, he replied that he never suffered from writer's block, all he had to do was lower his standards. I don't think he really meant that he would settle for schlock, just that part of the block is that the writer is getting in the way of the writing by worrying too much about performance, and measuring up. At that point, just forget about achievement and write to limber up, write as finger exercises, write in a journal, write a letter. (Whoever does that anymore? I do!) The point is to keep up the agility, the flexibility, the practice of the craft. Writing, all creativity, I think, should have an element of play, self-forgetfulness, fun.
On the other hand, times when I'm forcing it, I realize that the balance is off. I need to get out, get involved in the things I care deeply about, issues in my community and beyond. We are writers in a context, storytellers in a tribe. To quote another great, Charlie Parker, the jazz musician, said, "If you don't live it, it ain't going to come out of your horn."
So there are a few prescriptions for writer's block, courtesy of Dr. Alvarez, via Drs Stafford and Parker: Keep Doing the Writing but forget about the performance/measurement, and when all else fails: go out there and get involved in life itself – fall in love, plant a garden, save a forest, work in a soup kitchen, teach kids to make balloon animals and then take them over to the local assisted living facility.
Christopher Shaw
Visiting Lecturer, English and American Literatures; Associate Director, Program in Environmental Journalism
“Work every day without fear or expectation.” (Somebody said that.) Always show up at the desk or notebook, or, god help us, computer screen. In fact, if you are stuck I suggest returning to the basic and essential physical act of making words on paper with a pen – or maybe a piece of burned charcoal from a fire. Don't judge, at least for a while. Keep going. Put it aside. Then go back and see what you have, if a structure or a point seem to be emerging that you can begin building on. Some days it works and some days it doesn't. Don't judge. Go back and work again.
It's different for school work and creative work, of course. Deadlines are useful even without an assignment. Desperation often breaks the log jam.
Stop fighting, stop judging, stop comparing yourself to the great. The writing NEVER turns out the way it gleams and beckons in your mind. In the draft stage you need to accept being terrible. As an editor, I have worked with some of the best full-time deadline writers and I can tell you their first stabs are gobbledygook. But you need to start. Don't wait.
Timothy Billings
Professor of English and American Literatures
I asked that question of William Stafford once when he came to give a reading at Pomona College many years ago when I was an undergraduate there, and his immediate answer was: ‘Lower your standards and keep writing.’ What I love about that advice is that it recognizes that “writer’s block” is nothing but your internal editor harrying you, saying that what you are about to write is not good enough – and that what you most need to do is to trust yourself. The downside is that Stafford’s many wonderful books contain not a few mediocre poems written no doubt when he would otherwise have had writer’s block. And yet without those poems – which many people have enjoyed, I’m sure, even if they didn’t do much for me – he might never have written the truly extraordinary poems that knock my socks off. Stafford certainly wrote more books than I ever will. For a certain kind of person, I think that’s still probably the best advice there is, but I’m just not that kind of person. What works best for me is to stand up and start talking. Whenever I find myself paralyzed because my sentences are becoming tangled and intractable, I stand up and start talking to myself. I pace back and forth and gesture with my hands (probably looking a bit loony, to be honest) exactly as though I were explaining the issues to an interested group of fellow scholars or students. Somehow the language comes to me that way because if I imagine an audience sitting in front of me I can’t just stand there – I’ve got to say something – and the exercise gives me focus. I then lean over my desk and type in what I have just said, sentence by sentence, and keep pacing. (It helps to be a good talker, but one becomes that by writing.) So my alternative advice is: when the words on the page feel intractable, return to your voice; when the ideas in your head feel tangled, remember your audience.
Vendela Vida
Keynote Speaker (April) and Class of '93
If a scene’s not working or giving you trouble, it can help to think about how you’d approach it if you were telling the story in a different medium. That is, if you can’t figure out how a scene works in prose from, how would you write the scene if it was a film, or a play? I find this technique can help me a lot when I’m stuck.
Another remedy: try writing first thing when you get up in the morning. Before e-mail, before anything. If you write right away, before your doubts or second thoughts awaken, you can keep them at bay.
(04/16/14 4:03pm)
The college announced this week that it is going to be investing $50 million in a responsible investment fund. This is an amazing thing. Why? Because $50 million can make a big difference if it’s invested in companies with good environmental, social and governance practices. Because the college is recognizing that its endowment can be a tool for positive change and that it should reflect the mission of the school. And finally because it shows that student organizing is working! The school created this fund as a consolation prize for a hard fought divestment campaign.
We are really excited about this, but we are not the kind of people who settle for the goldfish in a plastic bag. Desmond Tutu endorsed divestment this week, recognizing that climate change is not an issue to trifle with. Pitzer College divested from fossil fuels this week and we are going to follow suit. Wash U students continue a sit-in demanding their school cut ties with Peabody Coal, and over 100 Harvard Professors endorsed divestment in an open letter that made it to the Guardian and Bloomberg. Harvard Professors y’all! They are so smart.
We are going for the gigantic, purple teddy bear you only get after you’ve practiced shooting baskets into a moving, flaming hoop that is divestment all summer, because we think it’s worth all the sweat, the tears and the missed shots. We like our goldfish, $50 million is no joke, but we are not leaving this carnival without getting what we came for. It is the time to take serious action on climate change, and we have the opportunity to do so by divesting our endowment from fossil fuels. There is no reason why we can’t make this basket.
Written on Behalf of DIVEST MIDDLEBURY
(04/16/14 4:00pm)
We hope that you are enjoying your visit to Middlebury, and that you can take some time out to educate yourselves about activism happening on campus and how you can support it. In presenting the following demands (which are in response to major issues students have identified), we ask you to use your buying power to change the structural policies of this college.
Before presenting our demands and asking you to sign on to them, we want to tell you who we are. We are a coalition of students who have come together to build sustained political community on our campus. As members of this community engaged in multiple initiatives for institutional change, we seek to challenge systems of marginalization and oppression that are currently operating at Middlebury. We are committed to working for a more just, inclusive, safe, and supportive environment. Part of this work requires drawing attention to structural issues that negatively impact our academic pursuits, well-being, and safety in our time here. We are committed to combining critique with action to ensure that the administration is accountable to the broader community, and that students are active participants in shaping this institution. We make all decisions in a democratic process, and our demands are dynamic and responsive to the current conditions. The following are our current demands (for more details and citations see beyondthegreenmidd.wordpress.org):
1. AAL TO ALL:
The Coalition demands that the College change its Culture and Civilizations requirements to reflect a more inclusive and less eurocentric approach to studying the world (as proposed by Midd Included).
Under the current requirements, the college seems to place an emphasis on the study of Western cultures and civilizations, while minimizing the importance of all other cultures and civilizations of the world by lumping them together into one category. Not only are these requirements failing to reflect our college’s belief about the importance of the study of different cultures and civilizations, but they are also limiting educational opportunities for students.
Under the new requirements, students would be required to take:
1. Two courses, each of which focuses on the cultures and civilization of: a. AFR: Africa; b. ASI: Asia; c. LAC: Latin America and the Caribbean; d. MDE: Middle East; e. EUR: Europe; f. OCE: Oceania
2. NOR: one course that focus on some aspect of the cultures and civilizations of northern America (United States, Canada and Mexico)
3. CMP: one course that focuses on the process of comparison between and among cultures and civilizations, or a course that focus on the identity and experience of separable groups within cultures and civilizations.
Making the EUR credit an option rather than a requirement does not mean that students will never be exposed to European thought. Rather, even in classes that are not explicitly region focused, such as literature, science, theater, and economics, the material taught usually comes from the European tradition. Changing the EUR credit into an option only means that students who wish to study other regions of the world will have a greater opportunity to do so, while students who wish to pursue the study of Europe can still do so. We therefore demand that this change be made by no later than fall semester of 2016.
2. CREATION OF A MULTICULTURAL CENTER:
The Coalition demands that the administration provide funding and other necessary support for a Multicultural Center. We, as MANY students before us have, demand a space that visually represents the students it seeks to serve, that is equipped with qualified staff to serve students seeking multicultural resources and services otherwise unavailable on campus, and that educates the entire campus community on issues of identity and privilege.
While the college has invested in initiatives to attract students from diverse backgrounds, such as Discover Middlebury, it lacks initiatives to support the students that it brings here. It is time that the College create a center that supports the students it uses to bolster its diversity statistics.
Some might argue that such spaces already exist in the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) and PALANA, but these spaces do not and cannot play the role that a Multicultural Center would. The CCSRE serves as an academic resource, which has an ambiguous role on campus seeing as how having a center that studies race and ethnicity without any racial or ethnic studies programs is akin to having a basketball gym with no basketball team or basketballs. PALANA only serves as an informal residential house.
Others might argue that Dean Collado as Chief Diversity Officer exists to provide the support that we speak of. However, we find it unethical to diminish the attention diversity and multicultural affairs require by boiling it down to simply one of the many hats that Dean Collado must wear. CDO is a title that requires at least one person to allot their entire schedule to, working daily to support underrepresented students. Most other esteemed NESCACs already have CDO’s who do just that, including Williams, Amherst, Tufts and Colby, just to name a few.
Seeing that PALANA, the CCSRE, and the Chief Diversity Officer do not provide the support and resources that a Multicultural Center would, we demand the creation of such space no later than the fall of 2016.
3. BAN SODEXO:
The Coalition demands that Middlebury College puts in writing that it will not work with Sodexo Inc. because its history of violating human rights, infringing upon labor laws, and stripping away workers’ benefits threaten the livelihoods of the College’s dining hall staff and do not reflect the values of the college. Furthermore, we demand that the administration make public its current relationship and terms of contract, if any, with Sodexo.
Representatives from Sodexo Inc., a European multinational corporation that specializes in food services, were brought to campus in early October to do a two-day observation and assessment of the college’s Dining Services and Retail Food Operation. Sodexo has a long-history of workers’ right abuses. In the fall, the Vermont Fair Food Campaign wrote an open letter about Sodexo’s slash of workers’ benefits — reductions in retirement packages and healthcare, as well as elimination of paid sick leave and vacation time, a practice they have implemented at the University of Vermont with considerable faculty and student resistance. Its union-busting techniques were detailed in a 2010 Human Rights Watch report, and it has been found guilty of National Labor Relations Board violations multiple times. In 2005, thousands of African-American employees of Sodexo accused the company of racist practices for not offering promotions to people of color and segregating the work environment. Ultimately, Sodexo settled in an $80 million racial bias suit. The Sodexo Alliance is also the leading investor in private prison profiteering. It has a seventeen-percent share in Corrections Corporation of America and a nine-percent share in CCA’s sister company Prison Realty Trust, meaning the corporation is profiting off of mass incarceration. We demand that Middlebury College puts in writing that it will not work with Sodexo Inc. and that it make public its current relationship/terms of contract, if any, with Sodexo.
Preview Days and the presence of hundreds of prospective students on campus presents a unique opportunity to make effective demands to the administration and bring about institutional change. As a Coalition of Students, we ask you – prospective students – to support us (and ultimately yourselves) in the pursuit of the above goals. Please send an email, entitled “Fulfill Coalition Demands” to liebowit@middlebury.edu; please include your name as well as a note that you would like to see these changes. We thank you for your support.
Signed by the following STUDENTS: Gaby Fuentes ’16, Debanjan Roychoudhury ’16, Alex Strott ’14.5, Alice Oshima ’15, Alex Macmillan ’15, Fernando Sandoval ’15, Ally Yanson ’14, Daniela Barajas ’14.5, Kate McCreary ’15, Jackie Flores ’16, David Pesqueira ’17, Jackie Park ’15, Francys Veras ’17, Maya Doig-Acuna ’16, Nicolas Guadalupe Mendia ’16, India Huff ’15, Clair Beltran ’16, Victor Filpo ’16, Octavio Hingle-Webster ’17, Matthew Spitzer ’16.5, Lee Schlenker ’16, Molly Stuart ’15.5, Reem Rosenhaj ’16.5, Rebecca Coates-Finke ’16.5, Janiya Hubbard ’16, Angelica Segura ’16, Adriana Ortiz-Burnham ’17, Cindy Esparza ’17, Kristina Johansson ’14, Anu Biswas ’16.5, Afi Yellow-Duke ’15, Kate Hamilton ’15.5, Molly McShane ’16.5, Jenny Marks ’14, Anna Mullen ’15, Eric Hass ’15, Philip Williams ’15, Lily Andrews ’14, Levi Westerveld ’15.5, Jiya Pandya ’17, Robert Zarate-Morales ’17, Keenia Shinagawa ’17, Jeremy Stratton-Smith ’17, Klaudia Wojciechowska ’17, Greta Neubauer ’14.5, Adrian Leong ’15, Feliz Baca ’14, Josh Swartz ’14.5, Tim Garcia ’14; signed by the following ALUMNI: Adina Marx Arpadi ’13.5, Hanna Mahon ’13.5, Ashley Guzman ’13, Elma Burnham ’13, Kya Adetoro ’13, Chris De La Cruz ’13, Katie Willis ’12, Jacob Udell ’12; signed by the following ORGANIZATIONS: Alianza, Midd Included, Feminist Action at Middlebury, Juntos Migrant Outreach, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Women of Color, Umoja, JusTalks, Middlebury Student Quakers
(04/16/14 2:48pm)
If you wanted to get an Adderall prescription written for you while at the College, you would need to go through a person like Dr. John Young, who works at the Counseling Service of Addison County. He is the consulting psychiatrist for the College and is on the front lines of the complex issue of prescribing psychostimulants.
“It is one of the more complex assessments diagnostically,” he said. “The problem is that sometimes it is a diagnosis of desire — ‘I read a book, I tried someone’s Adderall and it worked for me, I think I have ADHD.’”
The problem with diagnosing ADHD is that there are few black and white cases and no blood test to confirm lack of focus. As a result, Dr. Young tries to get to know the patients and looks for red flags.
“You want a good reason, not just performance enhancement. When I meet with someone, I’m trying to get an idea of what they’re looking for, if they’re looking for treatment more broadly, and whether they’re willing to accept that there are a lot of different ways their problem might be addressed. The more they focus on this medicine, that’s a red flag for me.”
Young said he sees on average 10 Middlebury students a year looking for psychostimulants. Less than half he believed actually needed the medication.
“I once had a Middlebury student in my office stand up and slam the door because he didn’t get the medicine that he thought he needed,” Young said. “It’s a tricky thing because usually they’re suggesting it, and it’s very hard to talk people out of that because it is a simple answer, it’s something that works now.”
But for every student he declines to prescribe, there may be a doctor back in their hometown more than willing to prescribe them enough Adderall for them and their friends.
“There’s too much of it around, and people are being pressured by their friends to give it out. I guess it’s just part of things now, but I don’t have to like it,” Young said.
But for Oliver ’13, who graduated last spring with an economics degree, easy access psychostimulants were a common convenience during his time at the College, similar to coffee.
“I really use it for midterms and finals. There’s pretty much no work that can’t be helped by Adderall or any other stimulant.”
Oliver readily admitted that he showed none of the symptoms of ADHD and saw Adderall as a vehicle to get him where he needed to go.
“It’s just another tool that people use and will continue to use no matter how difficult you make it,” Oliver explained. “It’s the cost of doing business. You can’t breed this go-getter culture and not expect students to take advantage of their resources, whether it be coffee or Adderall. To me, they are both performance-enhancing supplements. Coffee is legal, but at the end of the day, it helps you get the paper done.”
Conventionally, Adderall and other psychostimulants are meant to level the playing field for students who are not able to focus and need the medicine. But Oliver does not buy that argument.
“I’m sure those people [with serious ADHD] exist, but I’m skeptical that the majority of people prescribed here actually qualify as people who would need the medication to level the playing field,” he said. “If we’re talking about my rationalization process, I’m thinking of me with it and me without it, and at the end of the day, I’m not going to feel bad because I know how many other kids do it. I don’t mind being on an unfair playing field and I’m not going to leave an advantage on the table.”
Oliver’s views on Adderall usage were seen as “worrisome and sad” to Dean of the College Shirley Collado. To her, psychostimulant abuse is a symptom of a larger problem.
“A major concern is the culture where students feel they need to take a drug like Adderall inappropriately,” Collado said. “It signals an inability as a person to press pause, slow down and make mistakes. I wonder what the long-term cost will be when I think about a Middlebury student if you fast-forward 25 years, what the impact of that thinking and rationalization is.”
With a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duke University and over 12 years working as a higher education administrator, Collado has a unique understanding about psychostimulant usage and the larger trends it suggests.
“We are all contributing to creating a high-intensity situation here. But Middlebury is only one version of a high-impact environment, and my worry is that for students who are learning to cope by taking a drug, what the trend is going to be for the long term.”
While most students the Campus talked to began their psychostimulant usage at the College, Collado pointed to a new wave of applicants who are being stimulated and pushed to their maximum from young ages.
“There’s a lot of evidence of how readily these medications have become,” she said. “Parents who are fine with getting their kids on medication when they are in middle school, trying to make their kids as focused as possible so they can get into a place like Middlebury.”
“Behind the story is the context of a new pharmaceutical reality that a lot of psychologists worry about. The drugs are legitimate ways of coping for students who really need it, but I’m worried about the culture that we are currently in where there is an abundance of these drugs,” she continued.
Every expert the Campus talked to was asked to respond to Oliver’s assertion that Adderall use was the cost of doing business at a place like Middlebury. Reactions were overwhelmingly of concern and alarm, except for one.
“I think that is very insightful,” said Assistant Professor of Sociology Rebecca Tiger. “Adderall helps you be better at what we are asking you to do. We ask you to do a ton of work, have a fit body, fit mind, do all sort of extra-curricular activities, engage in community service, and have a good social life. Adderall can help you with that, so what is so wrong with it?”
Tiger, who has taught classes on the sociology of drugs and deviance and social control, refused to weigh in on whether drugs like Adderall are good or bad, but was quick to note what she sees as hypocrisy in what is considered “bad.”
“What I find really interesting is that students would never compare Adderall to crystal meth,” Tiger explained. “For the students I’ve talked to, they always say: ‘well, it’s not crystal meth.’ But actually, yes it is. This isn’t about drugs, we’re talking about people. If I am a good, high functioning person, and I occasionally take Adderall, who cares? But if I am a poor, rural person who is out of work, then we really care if I am taking amphetamines and criminalize it. You guys are rarely criminalized for your drugs use.”
...
For Tyler ’14, it was a slow, seamless transition from taking Adderall as a study drug once during his first-year to regularly taking it to study and party starting junior year. At first he just got a pill here and there from a friend, but as his use increased he transitioned to buying from a campus drug dealer. If he buys smaller quick-release Adderall, it is $1 for 2mg. Extended-release XR pills are discounted, but not by much.
“Before, it was only when my friends had some, a crime of opportunity. Now, there’s a person I buy from. It’s expensive, but worth it to me.”
The numbers of students at the College using psychostimulants recreationally is unknown, and the estimates vary greatly depending on the anecdotal source. Tyler estimated that 50 percent of students who take it orally eventually try it recreationally.
“You can justify it as a study enhancer by arguing that it’s for work,” he said. “A lot of people get into the drug by justifying it that way, but the recreational use doesn’t have that safety net. Usually people don’t start snorting it until they have done it a couple times orally. It comes on slowly. You try it, you like it, then move on.”
Tyler said snorting Adderall makes him more attentive in conversations, allowing him to live up to social expectations. But despite his best efforts to keep the pills he buys for studying, Tyler said he ends up snorting more than he intends every month. The dealer he buys from usually sells out, so he has to go at the beginning of the month. In the beginning of March, he bought $60 worth — 120mg — but only used 50mg to study with.
“I’m like a goddamn child when I have it,” he said. “I can’t keep my hands off of it. Especially if it’s a night when we’re going out, I’ll just bust out the Adderall. I have to be strategic or I’ll pop them like candy.”
One of the biggest frustrations is that Tyler rarely snorts it all himself.
“It’s annoying to me when my friends just don’t want to go through the process of buying Adderall. I can’t fault them for it, because I am much better friends with the guys who sell it, so I’ll just go kick it with them and buy Adderall.”
Tyler’s monthly sojourns to his drug dealer put him in the minority of illicit users. Over 73 percent of the respondents obtained Adderall and other psychostimulants from either “Close friend/Sibling” or “Friend,” according to the 2013 report on psychostimulants by Ben Tabah ’13.
As his thesis has come to a head mid-way through the spring, Tyler continues to buy Adderall on the first and the fifteenth when needed. While he said he has come to terms with his own usage, he was unsure when asked whether he would let his kids be prescribed Adderall.
“If I had a child who showed symptoms of ADHD and was in a position to be prescribed Adderall, I would think long and hard about it. Not to say that I would or would not, but I would do a lot of research because an Adderall prescription is something that fundamentally affects your day-to-day interactions.”
...
When you follow a group of students over the course of a semester, there are always nascent trends that do not have data to support and cannot be definitively proved. But among long-term prescribed students, there is a subset that has had enough, and decided that the side affects just are not worth the rewards.
Going into his senior year this fall, Ben ’14 was juggling a long-term relationship with prescription stimulants. His brother and sister were both prescribed growing up, and he began taking psychostimulants in ninth grade. He was given Focalin and Adderall and brought it with him to the College, taking it regularly.
Insomnia and loss of appetite hit Ben particularly hard. He arrived at the College 5’10 and 150 lbs. and left at the end of his first year a skeletal 135 lbs. When he finally finished all his work, the battle to find a few hours of a sleep began.
“Nyquil was the only thing that could knock me out. I would write a stream of consciousness during those sleepless nights, writing things like ‘wow this Adderall won’t go away.’ Pages and pages. You get to the point where you just ask yourself what the hell your doing,” he said.
“People would always joke, ‘you like working, Adderall makes work fun.’ Try taking it for two days, then leaving the library wanting only to sleep and not being able to because your mind is racing and won’t stop.”
Ben would take a pill, enter the library, and exit ten hours later feeling as if his head was in a cloud.
“I felt at times like I was a guinea pig, and no one could really understand where I was coming from,” he recounted. “I started thinking when I turned in papers coming off my Adderall high, ‘who was doing that work? Me or the drugs? Am I really in control?’”
The long days and longer nights brought him to a moment of crises.
“I haven’t been able to get a handle on it,” he said late in the fall. “When my parents came up this past weekend, I told them not to ship me another bottle.”
As he progressed through his senior year, Ben began to learn how to cope without the drug. It was harder to do work, but he said the benefits far outweighed the cost, from smoking less weed to a reinvigorated sex life. But it remains a constant battle.
“My brain keeps telling me to call my mom, hop in the library, and just start knocking work out,” he said. “But I don’t want to do that right now. I’m at the point of deciding what I want to do with my life and what role Adderall is going to play in that life.”
During spring break, Ben took it sparingly to try and push through his thesis. He said it helped immensely, but the side affects were especially severe because he had no tolerance. Returning after break, Ben continued to lay off psychostimulants.
Ben is not alone in taking a hard look at long-term psychostimulant usage.
“They’re not miracle drugs,” said John Young, the Middlebury-based psychiatrist. “A lot of people find that in the long run, after the initial excitement wears off, it might not be more helpful than a cup of coffee.”
After graduating, Oliver went to work at an investment bank. While he used Adderall for his junior summer internship, he too has decided against taking psychostimulants.
“You want to be seen highly at work, but you can only do so much in one day, while one test in a math or economics test could be worth 40 percent of my final grade,” he said. “There’s no six-hour period of time at work where it will be worth 40 percent of my evaluation.”
But even if there are students re-evaluating the long-term worth psychostimulants, there will always be a project or midterm beckoning on the horizon, tempting students across campus.
“I’m the Dean of the College coming in and saying, ‘take a chill pill’ (no pun intended),” Collado said. “This is the time to invest in yourself away from your parents and have it be messy some of the time. It’s normal for students to explore drugs and all kinds of things in college, but if that is the normative culture that a student is walking into, that is highly problematic. My biggest concern is that you are equipped with the right tools, confidence and reflection so that you are not creating behaviors here that will be detrimental to your future as a person.”
The problem with living in the Adderall Generation is that you cannot just divorce yourself from these drugs altogether. As Ben learned, there is no such thing as cold turkey for students taking psychostimulants at the College. But you can learn to use the drugs responsibly and come to terms with their role here. For better or worse, from 30mg extended-release Adderall pills with breakfast to Saturday nights driven by neon blue and orange lines, we are living in the Adderall Generation.
“If you walked up to any random person on campus and offered them Adderall, not many of them would say no,” said Ben. “But I’m trying to find a way to live my life in a way that nobody understands. Kids who take Adderall regularly never talk … [but] we need to start talking and reflecting.”
Listen to Kyle Finck discuss this series on Vermont Public Radio.
Additional Reporting by ALEX EDEL, Layout Assistance by HANNAH BRISTOL, Graphics by EVAN GALLAGHER, and Photos by ANTHEA VIRAGH
(04/11/14 7:09pm)
Following the highly anticipated J-term production of Les Miserables, members of the College community will have another opportunity to enjoy a popular piece of musical theater when The Middlebury College Musical Players (MCMP) presents their Spring Term musical, RENT, at the Town Hall Theatre on Apr. 17-19.
As a contrast to the faculty-assisted J-term show, MCMP is in their eighteenth year of presenting completely student designed, directed, acted and produced musical theater, and currently puts on two musicals each academic year. Recent shows have included City of Angels, Midd-Life Crisis and Man of La Mancha, and this spring production employs the talents of fifteen student actors, five orchestra musicians, and a production team comprised of Assistant Director Sally Seitz ’17 , Music Director York Kitajima ’15 and Director Jack DesBois ’15.
DesBois joined MCMP in the fall of 2012 when he acted and assisted in the lighting design of City of Angels, and the student of music and theater so enjoyed the experience that he returned to direct the spring 2014 show.
DesBois and MCMP President Erica Furgiuele ’15, Vice President Hannah Johnston ’15.5 and Treasurer Annie MacPherson ’16 collaborated to decide which musical to stage.
“While City of Angels was a really great show, it was relatively unknown, and because of that we did have trouble finding people to get involved with it,” DesBois said. “So, this year we decided that we would choose a popular show, and we decided on RENT, partially because this is my first time directing and I wanted to do a show that I was already familiar with. As it turns out, that’s been quite helpful.”
Additionally, RENT’s even distribution of male to female roles proved helpful in combating the typical scarcity of female roles in musical theater.
Eight main characters comprise composer and lyricist Jonathan Larson’s rock musical adaptation of Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La bohème, following a group of impoverished young artists and musicians as they struggle to live and create in New York City’s Lower East Side under the shadow of the 1980’s and ‘90’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.
RENT experienced a meteoric rise to fame after premiering at the New York Theatre Workshop in 1994, eventually moving off-Broadway where it was a massive hit, especially with younger generations, and won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1996. In that year, the show debuted on Broadway and catapulted into national attention, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical and eventually becoming the tenth-longest running Broadway show in history at the time of the production’s closing in 2008. RENT also includes the classic Broadway anthem “Seasons of Love,” which crossed over to enjoy success on pop and rock charts.
The original Broadway production served as the launching pad for many now legendary Broadway performers, including Taye Diggs, Adam Pascal and Wicked and Frozen star Idina Menzel. These individual successes are just snapshots of the greater legacy of the musical, which lives on in a 2005 film version featuring most of the original cast, a live taping of the final 2008 performance and national tours and subsequent productions in 46 countries around the world in 24 languages.
DesBois’ history with RENT includes a viewing on Broadway and creative participation in multiple productions. This familiarity has allowed DesBois an ease with the material that inspires original interpretation.
“One of the ways I’ve tried to put my stamp on the show is by giving it a kind of rough-cut feel by having no curtains,” he said. “This is typical for the show, but usually when there are curtains, the actors will be hanging out behind watching what is going on onstage, and we’re still going to have those actors hanging out there in complete view.”
The breathtaking, refreshing rock melodies and complex characters of RENT have allowed the musical to endure almost 20 years after its New York premier, and the themes of community and friendship amidst hardship make the show accessible even to those who usually do not identify as fans of the musical theater genre.
“We recently had our first music rehearsal integrating the band and the cast, and when they came to ‘Goodbye Love,’ there was this really great moment when all the voices were singing, and I realized that this really is going to happen. These surreal moments are happening more and more,” DesBois said.
Health struggles threatened to set the production back after DesBois was forced to take J-term off for sick leave, but Kitajima ran music rehearsals to avoid losing time, priming the cast for upcoming blocking sessions when DesBois returned in the spring. Further health events caused more cancellations just before spring break, but the musical has managed to stay on schedule with only a week left until show time.
DesBois’ passion for the material that has consumed his life in recent months is palpable.
“RENT is one of those shows that is very close to my heart, and the themes are so universal and uplifting that I feel that you can’t come away from this show not smiling,” he said. “The cast is great, the music is going to be amazing, and it’s going to be a really good quality show.”
Tickets are available through the Box Office and at go.middlebury.edu/measureinlove, and are selling fast. Each of the three performances on Apr. 17-19 will be presented at 8 p.m. at The Town Hall Theater.
