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(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.
(04/11/14 6:51pm)
Forgive me, psych majors, if I am wrong in this, but I seem to recall learning in my Psych Disorders class two years ago about several studies which proved that the life-outlook of individuals suffering from Depression is, in fact, not overly pessimistic, but rather fairly realistic compared to the realities of probability. Psychologically “healthy” individuals, by contrast, tend to be overly optimistic in their predictions for the future. That is, if depressed individuals and not-depressed individuals were asked to predict whether or not they would get a job in the first year out of college, according to these studies, the depressed individuals would be more likely to be correct.
Whether or not this is, in fact, true, we could certainly make a case for all the terrible things happening across the world everyday which we choose to ignore, as well as the terrifying existential questions which we usually put out of our minds, and say that on the whole, day to day, most of us are choosing to live in blissful ignorance. We could, of course, make the case in the other direction—that on the whole, day to day, we ignore most of the beauty and the miracles of life (I mean, I am not a science major, so the fact that our brains can heal from trauma and that plants know to grow upwards out of the soil and not downwards into the soil and that the universe is expanding and folding in on itself at the same time— all of that feels like a miracle to me, but call it what you will).
However, Ben Marcus, author of the new short-story collection Leaving the Sea released this January by Knopf Publishing, is most certainly of the former opinion. A narrator in his story “Watching Mysteries with My Mother” notices that the families of individuals with terminal illness insist that their loved one is “a fighter”; she will be the one to “beat the odds.” But “odds should be odds, and they should never be beaten,” he writes, “If they are, then the odds are incorrect and should be changed.” Later he recognizes that his mother’s odds of dying are increasing at every moment as she ages. “Right now, sleeping in her bed, she has never in her entire life been in greater danger of dying.”
The moral, I guess, would be that life is often more arbitrary and unpleasant than we would like to think, which is possibly the only certitude standing behind the characters of Marcus’s stories, fifteen middle-aged male protagonists who seem painfully aware of the fact that their lives are not at all turning out as they would have hoped. Marcus, the author of three novels including The Flame Alphabet and the winner of three Pushcart Prizes, finds his own place among such bleakly sardonic storytellers as Kafka, Beckett, and the Coen brothers. His characters are often pathetic, utterly failing to communicate, and disgusted with the shortcomings of language and of their own bodies. If they happen to fall in love, it is “through several mutual misunderstandings.”
The stories begin in a familiar and disappointing modern world—a divorced dad finds his cubicle at work overtaken by interns, a middle-aged son watches British mystery-dramas on PBS and cannot forget about his mother’s mortality. Marcus’s voice feels grippingly vivid and current; he doesn’t try anything fancy with his sentences (save for one sentence which goes on for six pages—and yet miraculously manages not to be annoying). Here and there, Marcus points out small sensations of daily existence which we might never before have noticed.
As his stories progress, the recognizable world and the forms of language themselves begin to dissolve, and the characters waver between struggling to survive and wishing to disappear. The reader is left alone without sign posts, only grounded in the recurrent rhythms of the stories, and in the glimpses of suggestion which make these wildly violent dystopias seem strangely similar to the reality we swim in every day. “We know nothing about the future,” the characters of one story remember from a sort of gymnasium cum bomb-shelter—we know very little for sure at all.
The reader is as lost as the characters, and often frustrated and exhausted by the tediums of the everyday and by the devastating awareness that human life might be nothing more than a mistake. “I would have gills,” thinks one of the narrators, “if I were something better that had never tried to leave the sea.” But one keeps reading, I think, because every so often, even as Thomas inches for what feels like a thousand years worth of over-wrought anxiety down the office hallway towards the beautiful, indifferent colleague at the coffee cart—every so often, one miraculously finds a moment of peace.
(04/09/14 11:20pm)
Following the recent restructuring of the Board of Trustees, July 1 will mark a wide-sweeping change in faculty governance. These changes come at a pivotal transition point for the College, as the new President will assume his position in 2015.
President Ronald D. Liebowitz wrote in an all school email, “The transitional nature of the amended responsibilities is intended to provide continuity for the College’s new leader, and also to allow for important coordination with the Board and its new committee and governance structures.”
The Board of Trustees is now organized into three boards of overseers. There is a one board of overseers for the College as well as two different boards for its affiliate programs.
Shirley Collado, Dean of the College, will also become the Vice President for Student Affairs. Steve Trombulak, Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies, will take on the role of Director of Sciences. Stephen Snyder, Professor of Japanese studies, will become the first ever Dean of the Language Schools.
Liebowitz wrote in his email, “[Snyder’s] new position reflects the growth of our language schools, the likely increased collaborations between the Schools and other parts of Middlebury, and the current leave taken by Associate Vice President Aline Germain-Rutherford to serve as Chief Learning Officer at Middlebury Interactive Languages.”
Andi Lloyd, the current Dean of the Faculty, will assume the newly created role of Senior Administrative Officer for the College Board of Overseers. She will also take on the role of Vice President for Academic Affairs.
“I will work with the chair and vice-chair of the College Board of Overseers to set the agenda for the year and provide materials for meetings,” Lloyd said. “Probably the best way to think about it is that I am a liaison to the Trustees serving on the College Board of Overseers.”
Tim Spears, the current Vice President for Academic Affairs, will become the Vice President for Academic Development. Spears sees his new role as bringing the needs of initiatives that might be bubbling up between faculty as well as different new and already existing programs to the college advancement and grant offices.
“It makes sense, I think, from the President’s perspective to have an administrator who is familiar with the academic program to work with his office, College Advancement, the academic administration and the faculty to develop new initiatives,” Spears said.
Suzanne Gurland, currently an Associate Professor of Psychology, will succeed Bob Cluss as the Dean of the Curriculum. Gurland has an extensive background that will prepare her well for this new position.
“One of the first committees I was ever on when I came to Middlebury was the curriculum committee,” Gurland said. “And at that time Bob Cluss was the chair of the committee, so I feel that I learned from him and got a broad perspective on the College curriculum from that experience.”
Gurland has also served on the Educational Affairs Committee and the Governance Working Group.
“Serving on the educational affairs committee has given me a broad view of the college and an appreciation for the similarities and differences among departments and programs and how things work in various parts of the curriculum,” Gurland said.
All of the new roles will have a year to adjust under the leadership of Liebowitz before the new President assumes his position in 2015.
“The administrative transitions were timed so that President Liebowitz will still be in office when the changes occur,” Lloyd said. “This gives all of us a year to get up to speed on both the new positions and the new governance structure, so when the new president comes in we should all be comfortable in our new roles.”
(04/09/14 4:50pm)
The next time you walk by a tree, and a dead branch does not come crashing down, knocking you off your feet, you can thank the College’s Facilities Services Maintenance and Operations. As spring thaw approaches, the College’s landscaping crew is busy pruning trees on campus before the snow melts and reveals quads of yellow grass and muddy shortcut eyesores that need to be dealt with.
At 8:30 a.m. on a crisp and sunny Thursday morning, I met with Horticulturist Tim Parsons, Crew Chief Jon Quelch and the rest of the landscaping crew to learn about tree pruning at the Emma Willard House. Walking from Atwater Dining Hall, the 45 degree temperature and sunny clear skies made athletic shorts and sneakers feel like a great life decision — much better than waddling around in sweatpants.
Fast forward another 30 minutes, shivering underneath the shade of trees in need of pruning and slip-n-sliding across the half-frozen lawn trying to keep up with Parsons, as he flitted from one tree to another, getting more and more excited about each one — now I understood why these men were all wearing jeans and winter jackets.
Meanwhile, Parsons was busy explaining to me why pruning is done mainly for safety and aesthetic reasons.
“In the wild, trees don’t need to be pruned,” he said. “I’m not saying a tree won’t be healthier because of pruning, but generally we don’t prune for the health of the tree, but for our own safety.”
Though pruning happens naturally in the wild, this can be dangerous in the “urban forest,” such as the College campus, if a dead branch could finally give and land on a pedestrian, though Parsons admits “the chance of this happening is very slim, but still.”
As he clipped off the lower branch of a young crab apple tree, Parsons explained the three D’s of pruning: “Dead, Diseased and Dumb. For example, these two branches growing on top of another, competing for the same sunlight? That’s dumb.”
Behind the Emma Willard House, Parsons noted how “cavernous” the backyard appeared with overgrown and overhanging branches. After pruning, the backyard felt more “spacious and welcoming” to visitors.
Late winter is an ideal time to prune trees because the branches are easier to examine and handle without leaves while the temperatures aren’t as cold and harsh. Some little critters also appreciate this timing.
“Because we prune in the winter for the most part, there are no birds in the nests,” said Parsons.
But not all little critters leave their nests empty.
“There was a subcontractor that was doing some tree work on a tree down at the Kitchel House, and a squirrel ran three feet above his head, and ran down into the limb he was on. It was a hollow limb and he couldn’t get the squirrel out to save his life. He didn’t want to work on the tree because he was scared he would hurt the squirrel. So, he was waiting for the longest time for that squirrel to leave because he didn’t want to hurt it.”
Parsons also showed me the three main tools used in pruning. For smaller trees, hand pruners are used. Parsons own several pruners, which he hand-sharpens at the end of every winter pruning season. For medium-sized to large trees, hand saws are used. For even larger trees, pole-saws are the tool of choice.
“The pole-saw”, he pointed out, “has a fitting name.” Picture a hand saw stuck on top of a long, re-tractable pole.
Hand saws are the most commonly used, especially in conjunction with the tree climbing method. Workers climb trees, secured by a special rope on a limb, and prune within the branches. According to Parsons, there haven’t been any accidents (knock on wood).
“As long as you go slow and think carefully about what you’re doing, climbing with a rope is a safe way to prune trees.”
For Buzz, a member of Facilities Services, who learned to climb trees just last winter, the shift to pruning as the days get warmer “breaks up the long cold winter, especially this year, when we did a lot of shoveling. From up there [in the tree], it’s a whole different view.”
Some crew members, like Groundsworker Steve Rheaume, have been climbing for over 10 years.
“You can probably learn to climb a tree [using the rope] in a day or so, but it could take you 12 years to get as good as Steve.”
Rheaume was busy climbing and pruning when we stopped by, but he shouted down at us, “It’s a good workout; you definitely break a sweat! The highest tree I’ve ever climbed was 25, maybe 30 feet.”
As a photographer tried to get Parsons to pose next to the tree being pruned, he pointed at Rheaume and said, “Well, he would be the star, here. Doesn’t that look like fun?”
During my Pruning 101 session, Parsons also pointed out some of his favorite trees on campus, including what he believes is the oldest tree, a huge sprawling 80-foot Bur Oak right by the CFA. Insisting it was worth seeing in person, Parsons offered to drive me down to take a look. I’ve always wanted to ride one of those green John Deere tractors and who wouldn’t want to see a tree that was alive at the same time as George Washington, so of course, I jumped at the chance.
“How fast does this thing go?” I asked as the motor hummed.
“A lot faster than I’m allowed to drive it.” He chuckled.
Parsons is not sure exactly how old the Bur Oak is.
“I’d say 200 years or more. The only real way to age a tree is to count the rings, and to do that, you have to use a special bore technique or cut down the tree and count the rings. I’m not willing to do either on this tree. But, this has been here at least as long as the school, if not more. It is spectacular.”
When asked about pruning an old specimen like this, he said, “You can see all the dead wood here, there’s a large piece of dead [wood] right there that would have to come off. But for the most part, when trees are this old, they don’t need anything.”
Parsons hopes the Bur Oak has another 200 years, but knows this might be far-fetched. Health-wise, though, the tree seems to be in good shape.
“There’s not a lot dead [branches], it has a lot of nice young shoots, new twigs, it’s still putting out a decent amount of growth this year,” he said. Though 200 might be unrealistically long, Parsons believes the tree sill stick around for a long time.
(04/09/14 4:29pm)
On April 2, a motley crew of professors, students and local denizens came together to share in a discussion titled “Acting Righteously in Times of Danger.”
The event sought to spark conversation regarding two key questions: “When others are threatened in times of danger, what is it that moves us to act courageously on their behalf and risk our own safety and those closest to us?” and “How do we foster tolerance, understanding, empathy and courage?”
To help guide the exploration of such nebulous — and fundamental — questions, the audience was first given an exceptional anecdote from the film “Two Who Dared,” whose chosen center is on Martha and Waitstill Sharp, two Americans “who played a vital role in saving hundreds from persecution during World War II.” As one might expect, any literal comparison between the Sharps’ life and that of most Middlebury students would be unfair.
However, when attention turned towards the values that guided the Sharps, an enlightening and applicable conclusion was reached. As one of the older participants said, “If Middlebury students want to spread the values they hold dear, they must first devote themselves to those ideals in the day-to-day, the mundane. This isn’t a new thought, but it is underappreciated.”
The Sharps’ lives were, above all else, defined by an unwavering devotion to virtue. In “Two Who Dared,” one of the main points of emphasis was that Waitstill and Martha Sharp were the 18th choice for relief volunteers. The 17 previous ministers declined for understandable reasons: young children, a job and a stable life. The Sharps were different. Waitstill often used the word “must” while describing why he and Martha made the decision to go on both of the two missions, the first to Prague and the second to Southern France during the German invasion. They had two young children, a stable job and a stable life, yet Waitstill continued to use that decisive word. The discussion group had some trouble with this — why must they leave their children? Why must they give up their lives when there were those who were better equipped?
One attendee saw the reasoning to be simple, remarking, “It’s a matter of holding true to your virtues. It seemed as though they — Waitstill especially — didn’t see a choice. If they didn’t live by the idea of absolute equality in every action then they just couldn’t be equipped to create equality.”
Although this sentiment did not hit home with some in the room — seeing as much of the space was filled with mothers and fathers — many believed it could very well be the Sharps’ perspective. In either case, Waitstill and Martha had an undeniable impact. During these two tours, the Sharps helped over one hundred refugees find safety and security, and were “recognized by the state of Israel as Righteous Among the Nations for risking their lives to save Jews and dissidents during the Holocaust.”
The Sharps’ story is an extreme one. Leaving one’s children in their most formative years for a potentially life-threatening mission is not something most parents feel they “must do.” It is certainly not something any student can fully appreciate at this point in their lives. As such, much of the conversation turned towards the realm of moral take-aways rather than literal ones. The take-away: it is the little choices we make every day that create real change, not implausible end goals.
Seeing as the College’s Board of Trustees have outwardly lauded the College as the first global liberal arts institution, it seems as though its students would be some of the best at enacting sweeping change.
But one student solemnly asked, “How can we consider ourselves to be the best equipped if many of us don’t stand by the virtues of equality and fairness when we don’t respect something as small as peer proctoring?”
For a student, one of the most common “little choices” is to respect the tradition of peer proctoring. Although it may not seem comparable to the idea of gender equality, for example, it is less a matter of the topic and more about the fundamental value driving any sort of change.
As Lecturer in Religion and GSFS Maria Hatjigeorgiou stated after the discussion, “Even at a school like Middlebury, the most important class is that of the students ‘walking the walk.’”
That is to say, it is not enough to learn what equality is; it must also practice such virtues on a day-to-day and moment-to-moment basis. To this sentiment, Adrian Leong ’16 added, “Being virtuous does not have to be known all the time: we delude ourselves to think that until a grand goal is reached, our efforts are without worth.”
By the conclusion of the discussion and event as a whole, a consensus of sorts was reached. Students at the College, like all students, teachers and human beings, are shaped by our daily interactions with the world. Although something as uncelebrated as taking peer proctoring seriously is not “acting righteously in a time of danger,” it equips students to spark just as much change as any class or peer-proctored exam.
(04/04/14 1:20am)
It was a one-in-a-million chance or a message from God. In Nov. 2008, Sierra Stites ’14 was standing on the sidelines watching her high school soccer team play. Then, a ball kicked from an adjacent field slammed into her head, whipping her skull forward and forever changing her life.
“My original thought was ‘what did I do wrong?’ But that got me into religion and sinning, and I never felt comfortable with that thought because once you start thinking like that it can lead you down a very dangerous path, and I was already in a precarious position,” she told me, reflecting five years after the concussion.
On that day, she was not playing specifically to avoid worsening the “standard” concussion she sustained after butting heads with an opponent for a jump ball two weeks earlier in a tournament in St. Louis, Mo. The second concussion could not have come at a worse time. In the midst of the junior year rat race to get into top colleges, her test scores plummeted from the 90th percentile to the 30th percentile. Stites was forced to complete speech cognitive therapy to help her regain understanding of what was happening in class.
“I never took that much time off of school, because I defined myself as a student-athlete, and I already had the athlete part taken away,” Stites said. “I ended up having autonomic injuries as well, which meant that any change of planes – getting up, lying down – would make me really dizzy with black spots in vision.”
Stites had battled back from two torn ACLs – rehab she now calls “easy” in comparison – but that second concussion became an immovable obstacle, strapping her with physical and emotional baggage she was forced to carry with her to Middlebury.
The step from high school to college was especially challenging because Stites lost the direct support from her family. One of the biggest challenges for victims of head injuries is that there are no physical manifestations. Without a cast or crutches, a blinding headache is easily seen as lethargy or even laziness by the outside world.
“I had a friend tell me ‘you were moping there for a while’. Are you serious? I couldn’t think. That was always disappointing to hear but it tells you who your real friends are. But comments like that are why I retreated into my family because my parents were both doctors and knew, at least medically, what I was going through. The stigma is definitely there, but I stopped caring what people thought.”
While the College’s administration and counseling services gave her constant support, Stites struggled to overcome what at times seemed an unwinnable war. During the fall of her sophomore year, Stites’ recovery hit a plateau, her symptoms neither improving or worsening and the constant headache hurting her ability to concentrate. Running out of options, Stites and her father found themselves at the Famed Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. More physical therapy and a semester later, she returned to the College.
During her junior year, the physical symptoms subsided enough that she could stay up past 10 p.m. and drink in moderation, things most students take for granted. But that was only half the battle.
“Part of post-concussion syndrome is the emotional side affects. I struggled with depression and anxiety junior year because I had a lot of trouble finding the support that I needed. I was never someone to tell everyone what I was feeling, and so I had a lot of trouble re-adjusting junior year and by the end I was almost ready to leave Middlebury.”
Even thought she has lived a quarter of her life with a concussion and cannot remember most of high school, Stites still plans on becoming a doctor after graduation and even gives her head injury credit.
“It’s made me a better person and made me more self-aware. People come to college saying they are going to find themselves, and I think I came in knowing who I was and what I’m about. It forced me to grow up quickly and take a hard look at things. I don’t think I would even be at Middlebury if I didn’t have a head injury. It’s been a part of my life for so long that I can’t imagine what it would be like without it.”
A Three Month Headache
Possibly the cruelest part of concussions for athletes is the recovery. People who shape their lives around movement in sport are forced into static solitude, something they are wholly unaccustomed to.
With five minutes left in a weekday lacrosse practice on April 17, 2013, John Montgomery ’14 scooped up a ground ball in front of the net and ran up the field. But a teammates’ stick jarred it loose, and as he jumped to retrieve it, the two players’ heads collided. He blacked-out on contact and blacked-in when he hit the ground, beginning a dizzying five-month journey of doctors, darkness, and frustration.
Montgomery had sustained a concussion playing high school football at St. Mark’s School in Dallas, Texas. While he was “so mentally out-of-it it wasn’t even funny” at the time of the hit, he went back to class within four days of being hit and simply sat out a few weeks. But this one was different.
“I heard horror stories about it, and I’d seen other people get concussions, but I had sustained one, I knew what that’s like, they must have been doing something wrong.”
The day after the initial hit on Youngman Field at Alumni Stadium, Montgomery didn’t feel any of the telltale signs of a concussion – blinding headaches or nausea – only a self-described “foggy-headedness.” After consulting with Associate Director of Sports Medicine Kelly Cray, he suited up for practice the next day. While it was supposed to be a non-contact practice, Montgomery ran into a pick from another teammate, hitting the same side of his head for a second time in as many days.
Montgomery was hindered by the fact that the second concussion was not cut and dry. In those crucial five days between the initial hit and the following Monday when he finally shut everything down – now known to be the most important in dictating recovery time – Montgomery most likely exacerbated the concussion.
“When I tell this story, I feel like an idiot because I kept going and going and going. Part of it was that I didn’t know I was hurt, and I had so much schoolwork I needed to do. I couldn’t just sit there and be like, ‘oh well, I got hit in lacrosse, so that’s why I can’t write your paper, Professor.’ Doing work was probably the thing that pushed me over the edge. You wouldn’t ask someone who just broke their leg to go run a marathon. So translating that comparison to a concussion, you wouldn’t ask that person to run a marathon mentally, doing a bunch of schoolwork and writing a bunch of papers. And that’s exactly what I did. It was stupid.”
As the warmer months crept onto the College, Montgomery was bed-ridden, spending 16 hours a day staring at the dark ceiling. All stimulation was forbidden, which in essence, is almost everything. The only contact he had with the outside world was texting friends to bring him meals. After three weeks of darkness in Starr 311 and little progress, Montgomery decided to take incompletes in all four of his classes and fly home to Dallas with the help of his mother. Once home, he went through an array of doctors from a chiropractor to a neurosurgeon, even spending hours in a hyperbaric chamber.
It took the headache and accompanying symptoms three months to fully subside, after which he finished his class work and completed a truncated internship in Houston, Texas.
The bravest, or most foolhardy, part of the story is that Montgomery plans to play lacrosse this coming year.
“It’s a large gamble. I already have a job after I graduate and I would hate to have that taken away from me because of my decision, but at the same time, when you fall off a horse, you always get back on to show yourself and the horse that you can do it, and I don’t see how this situation is any different.”
A Concussion Speaks
If you talk to enough athletes who have sustained concussions, you start to notice a common trend. While few can remember the crucial moments – many black out – every one I talked to can remember the exact date and time of day they were concussed, even years later. The odd paradox speaks to the unintended consequences and importance a concussion has.
For ex-skier Emma Kitchen ’14.5, that was just after dark on Dec. 1, 2010. On her bike, bombing down the hill on College Street below St. Mary’s Church, Kitchen collided head on with another student at the intersection with Shannon Street. The impact left her in the intensive care unit for three days with a fractured skull, hemorrhaging, and cerebral contusions that kept her bed-ridden with no screens for six months.
Kitchen’s recovery came in meager steps. At six months, she was able to get her heart rate above 150 beats per minute. At eight months, she started drinking with her friends. Finally, after nine months and 11 doctors, she made a full recovery.
The unending days of confined darkness became some of the hardest in her life.
“You’re locked in a prison, and if someone tells you otherwise, then they haven’t done it. Recognizing that it hurts to live, that’s terrible. The problem I had was that I felt like I was lying there for someone else. Everyone from a neurosurgeon to a psychotherapist told me the same thing: ‘go lie in a dark room. You’ll recover slowly, but we don’t know when.’ It was really frustrating in that regard. There was nothing else out there. It made me feel like an addict who had done something wrong.”
But necessity became the mother of invention. Frustrated with the lack of alternative therapies, Kitchen and Kait Surdoval ’12 founded Concussions Speak in Jan. 2012.
“The idea came from me not being able to talk about my concussion. It was just a matter of finding more people like myself, who had gotten their sport taken away from them,” Kitchen said.
After Director of Athletics Erin Quinn sent an email petitioning athletes to share their concussion stories, the group received ten stories.
“The similarities between the stories were uncanny. Everyone has a similar story of the denial stage, the depression stage, and then the very slow recovery stage. It is really painful and difficult. I found that I didn’t trust anyone who hadn’t been through it because it impacts every second of your life. Everyone has the same experience of not feeling 100 percent there. We realized that it was fine to tell these stories, but what we really needed was a way for people to connect, talk about it, and answer questions.”
Today, Kitchen said she speaks to a different concussion survivor about once a week. Concussions Speak has grown from a modest Facebook page to full-fledged non-profit, traveling to speaking engagements far beyond the College. Most recently, Kitchen, Stites and Surdoval spoke to a group of kindergarten through 12th grade students Hammond School in South Carolina on Nov. 22.
Reflecting back on her years at the College, Kitchen may be the only athlete who calls her concussion “the best day of my life.”
“The ski culture is very insular. You are required to spend so much time with the team because it’s such a demanding sport. They are always on the hill, or preparing to be on the hill. On a time perspective, I would not have had the opportunities to do what I’ve done since. If I had gotten through half my Middlebury career and then decided I didn’t want to ski, there would have been a lot of emotional detachment for letting the team down. I was brought here to ski, and I found them to be a family-oriented bunch, and to let them down like that would be hard on me. I didn’t have to go through any of that. The decision was made for me.”
Challenging Traditional Treatments
The high-intensity community that the College is praised for makes treating concussions often a fool’s errand. The first five days are the most critical in determining the severity and length of recovery. While the College has a four-step diagnostic process, asking students at the College to push pause on their entire lives is often a task many fine impossible to embrace.
“Another challenge is getting concussed students to slow down and allow their brain to recover. The pressure to keep up with academic work is one of the most significant and detrimental factors impairing recovery from concussion,” wrote Medical Director, College Physician and Team Physician Dr. Mark Peluso in an email. “Students that try to push through symptoms to keep up with their academic work tend to require a longer recovery times than students who rest and follow our symptom-based recovery process.
In light of the imperfect treatments and challenging atmosphere for recovery at the College, concussions are not going anywhere. Peluso said that between Parton Health Center and Sports Medicine, he treats between 15 and 30 concussions a year, which is rising nationwide because of better patient reporting.
During the five-day period after Montgomery was initially hit, he did anything but rest, attending class, practicing multiple times, and taking numerous tests. After weeks of bed rest at the College, he decided to go home early, which he called the “best decision” he made over the course of the whole ordeal.
When asked what advice they would give to students who have recently sustained concussions, both Kitchen and Montgomery were critical of the bed rest treatment program.
“Past a certain point it actually works against you. I told my parents that I didn’t think I would ever have this much time to sit and think unless I went to prison in solitary confinement. You just sit there and think, ‘do I have a headache? Do I have a headache?’ Eventually, you are going to give yourself a headache. I felt like I was starting to go crazy by the end of it,” Montgomery said.
Peluso wrote that to a certain extent, prevailing medical methods of treating concussions are starting to change.
“More recent expert opinion suggests that lying down in a dark room fir several days may not be helpful. The concept is known as sub-symptom threshold recovery, and allows concussed students to gradually increase class attendance and school work activities in small graduated intervals based on symptoms.”
Kitchen encouraged people to take recovery into their own hands.
“The part that hurts the most is when you are lying there because someone told you so, in your own prison. Don’t let someone tell you cannot go outside,” she said.
(03/19/14 5:41pm)
As students, we live our lives in proximity to our peers, and thus have the opportunity to see them not only in an intellectual environment, but also in the social sphere. We see our friends on dining hall dates, at Atwater parties, on long walks to the organic farm, and “studying” in the library — our curiosity is satiated by observation and gossip. But faculty and staff remain an enigma: though we may get to know our faculty and staff we hardly ever see their personal lives. The Campus sat down with many of these couples individually this week to find out if they know each other as well as they know their subject matter.
Director of Sciences Support Services Tim Wickland and Director of Student Fellowships & Health Arlinda Wickland by Emilie Munson
Middlebury Campus (MC): How did you meet?
Tim Wickland (TW): We went to high school together in Chicago, but moved in different circles. Arlinda was a socialite and I was a nerd. (Our high school actually had more students than Middlebury College does.)
MC: What was your first date?
TW: Arlinda sought me out when she was part of a group planning our 10th year high school reunion. We went out to a little creperie in Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago, and after that, we pretty much never looked back.
MC: How long have you been married?
Arlinda Wickland (AC): A lot of good years -- who’s counting!
MC: What is one of your spouses quirks?
AW: Tim likes sugar: brown sugar on Greek yogurt; chocolate Quick (powder) on vanilla ice cream; a packet of raw sugar in a pinch.
TW: After so many years, quirks become such a part of the normal fabric of things that you hardly notice them anymore. I guess one thing would be that she can’t tolerate any red decor in the house after the end of February.
MC: What is your favorite quality of your spouse?
AW: Tim is incredibly intelligent and well-read, but at the same time is handy around the house; for example, he services all our cars, built personalized bookcases for each of our sons, and rewired the electrical system in our house by reading a manual.
TW: Arlinda has just about the perfect blend of caring and feistiness. That, and she is an absolutely fabulous culinary artist.
MC: What is their most annoying habit?
TW: Cutting the time too close for my comfort when we have a performance to go to. That being said, we’ve never missed an opening curtain that I can recall (though I don’t always get a chance to read the program before the lights go down).
AW: He often is doing something else (crosswords, sudoku, reading magazines) when I am talking to him! Then when I ask him what I just said, he tries to fake his way through, but it’s clear he wasn’t listening.
MC: What is your spouse’s favorite book?
AW: The Taylor Branch Series on Civil Rights is probably his all time favorite, but he just read Don Mitchell’s new book and had great things to say about it. I just re-read a trilogy that was incredible, but I would never admit what it is.
TW: I think her favorite author has been Rosamunde Pilcher, particularly The Shell Seekers. I think probably the most memorable and compelling at this point in my life would be Taylor Branch’s great trilogy on Dr. King and the civil rights movement.
Professor of Mathematics Steve Abbott and Dean of Students/Professor of The History of Art & Architecture Katy Smith Abbott by Isabelle Stillman
MC: How did you meet?
Steve Abbott (SA): We met at New Faculty Orientation at St. Olaf College. I think we were the only two single people in the room, so it felt like a trick.
Katy Abbott (KA): Steve was wearing rag wool socks and Tevas, so that was the sign that he hadn’t needed to care what he looked like in a while.
MC: What was your first date?
SA: Some early weekend that fall, we ended up downtown. They had a town celebration to honor the defeat of Jesse James at a bank in town. They have a midway carnival.
KA: With fried food on a stick.
SA: Very Midwestern carnival, and we were there with a bunch of faculty.
KA: We rode the tilt-a-whirl together, and Steve almost threw up. [laughs]
SA: And we got to the end of the evening, and Katie’s house was on one side of town, and everybody else lived somewhere else, and she was going to walk home. So I offered to give her a ride on my bike.
KA: Your Harley.
SA: My bicycle. And she accepted. And she got on the back of my mountain bike.
KA: I sat down on the seat, and he stood up on the pedals.
SA: I was stuck, because I didn’t take any art history in college, so I didn’t have any tools. But that summer I was working in D.C., and [in the National Gallery] there was a specific exhibit about one painting. And I said I saw this exhibit this summer with this painting. And Katie said, “I saw that exhibit too, I love that painting.”
MC: How long have you been married?
KA: Eighteen?
SA: Nineteen?
KA: Nineteen, yeah.
MC: What is one of your spouse’s quirks?
KA: There are so many! So much material to work with…Hmm…Steve has never worn a watch and never kept a calendar.
SA: She has probably fifteen different mechanisms for making coffee. And they’re all perfect for about four days. And then it’s not quite right. The French press, the drip thing, the foamer that doesn’t foam, it just spins it really fast. We haven’t done the thousand dollar espresso machine.
KA: That’s the destiny.
MC: One thing you love about your spouse.
SA: Just one, sweetie, you can only do one.
KA: Steve is an incredible parent. He’s always one hundred percent all in, so it’s always been fifty-fifty.
SA: If somebody comes up with an idea, you need Katie around to make it happen. She’s an instigator. The wall between concept and implementation is very thin. Like, “we should get a dog”—she was afraid of dogs when we first met. I went away for a week, and I came back, and we had a dog. We didn’t even have plans to get a dog.
MC: What is it like working at the same college?
SA: Well. When we were Commons Heads, for six years—that was the first time we collaborated. Saying yes to the job was partly inspired by the desire to do something together.
KA: Spending six years together thinking about connecting intellectual life outside the classroom, that was such a rich time for both of us. But in general, I can’t think of any downsides we’ve ever felt.
SA: It’s always funny when students figure it out.
KA: One of the things that’s great about it, is we definitely have a lot of interest in the institution as an institution, and what we’re doing for students here.
John G. McCullough Professor of Chemistry Sunhee Choi and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Chemistry Jim Larrabee by Emilie Munson
MC: How did you meet?
Sunhee Choi (SC): In the chemistry research lab at Princeton Grad School.
MC: What was your first date?
Jim Larrabee (JL): Sunhee cooked a Korean dinner for me and we watched the Academy Awards ceremony on TV (it was early 1978).
MC: How long have you been married?
SC: 33 years.
MC: What is one of your spouses quirks?
JL: She is very demanding and does not tolerate any effort other than your best effort.
SC: Be[ing] ready for everything 1000 hours ahead.
MC: What is your favorite quality of your spouse?
JL: She is very demanding and does not tolerate any effort other than your best effort.
SC: Devotion.
MC: What is their most annoying habit?
JL: She is very demanding and does not tolerate any effort other than your best effort.
SC: Seeing and questioning unnecessary details to my amazing ideas.
MC: How do you take your coffee?
SC: [I take mine] Black and strong. [He takes his] Black and stronger.
JL: [We] Both take it black, no sugar.
Fulton Professor of Humanities Stephen Donadio and Associate Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Art Emmie Donadio by Emilie Munson
MC: How did you meet?
Stephen Donadio (SD): Emmie and I met at a party in New York (Upper West Side).
MC: What was your first date?
Emmie Donadio (ED): After the party we went to the West End Cafe, near Columbia University, and talked about everything.
MC: How long have you been married?
ED: Since before our children were born.
SD: We have been married since before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
MC: What is one of your spouse’s quirks?
SD: Unusual enthusiasm for foreign travel (i.e., to places beyond Middlebury town limits).
ED: Just one?
MC: What is your favorite quality of your spouse?
ED: Sense of humor!
SD: Capacity for lasting friendship with others, near and far.
MC: What is their most annoying habit?
ED: Resistance to time away from work.
SD: See above.
MC: What is your favorite movie?
ED: [I] couldn’t say [mine]. [His is] Citizen Kane, without a doubt.
SD: My favorite movie: Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), an old French film. Her favorite: Dirty Harry (starring Clint Eastwood).
Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies Deb Evans and Professor of American Studies and English & American Literature Will Nash by Emilie Munson
MC: How did you meet?
Will Nash (WN): We met in an Emerson seminar in graduate school.
Deb Evans (DE): But we really met in the mailroom of our grad school program; I was working in the office and we started up a conversation. He had recently shaved a full Grizzly Adams-esque beard, so I had no idea it was the same guy from class I was talking to. It kept rolling after that.
MC: What was your first date?
DE: For our first date, he came to my house for dinner. One of the most memorable parts of the evening was that after we brought dinner out to the porch, I sat down and the wicker chair collapsed – completely! – underneath me. I cracked up; so did he. I think that was when we knew we had a future.
MC: How long have we been married?
WN: It will be 21 years in August.
MC: What is your favorite quality of your spouse?
DE: Will is a very genuine person. When he cares about something – an issue, a person – it is for keeps. And it may be a cliche, but he is a tremendous father, and I love to see him with our three kids.
WN: She is very compassionate and very thoughtful. And she is smart and funny.
MC: What is their favorite color?
DE: His: Red, maybe blue. Mine: green, maybe turquoise.
WN: Her favorite color is blue. That’s my favorite color.
Associate Chaplain Rabbi Ira Schiffer and Commons Coordinator Linda Schiffer by Jiya Pandya
Middlebury Campus (MC): How did you meet?
Ira Schiffer (IS): Our common friends Hank and Roxanne lived in Wilmington, Delaware, and we met at their housewarming party. As we sat talking at the party, I asked her how she knew them. I found out that she had worked on a political campaign with them, and we hit it off ever since. Our friends still claim that they are responsible for introducing us.
Linda Schiffer (LS): Oh that’s a fun story! We met at a party in Wilmington, Delaware, that friends of ours were throwing as a sort of housewarming occasion. I asked him how he knew them. “I married them,” he said. I was taken aback for a moment, and then I realized he was a Rabbi, but I didn’t want to ask outright. We spoke for a bit, and then I broke my cardinal rule of meeting men, letting him have a cup of coffee and driving me home the first time we met each other. I didn’t hear from him for over a month after that, but then he called, a month later, and we started dating!
MC: What was your first date?
IS: It was Christmas Eve, and we went to the restaurant open on Christmas Eve: a Chinese place, with our friends ‘who introduced us’, Hank and Roxanne. After that, we went to Midnight Mass together at the Episcopal Cathedral of Wilmington. We both found it fascinating.
MC: How long have you been married?
LS: We got married in November 1981. He proposed 3 months after we started dating, but we decided to keep the whole thing quiet until he finished his degree. We announced our marriage at his ordination.
MC: What’s one of your spouse’s quirks?
IS: She always makes sure I wipe up all the water around the sink in the bathroom, keep it clean and dry. She’s very particular about things like that.
LS: He’ll do things like feed the cat, which is lovely, but then he’ll leave the empty can of food on the counter. He’ll start something, finish it, but then leave things behind.
MC: What you love about him/her?
IS: Her energy. She just embraces life. She has a motorcycle, she built a sports car when our daughter was a baby, almost 25 years ago, and she still uses it. She ski races on Fridays (we spend a lot of time outdoors), and she ice fishes, one of the activities I don’t join her for.
LS: We lived in Israel for 5 years. We loved everything about our life there. But I had an Uncle in Philadelphia who I was very close with. He was ailing, and I wanted to be with him. I decided to shift back for a little while, to be closer to him, and told Ira I would travel back and forth. Even though he really loved Israel and we were very happy, he decided to move back to the US with me. He said, “No, we’re family and that’s not the way to do it. If one of us goes, we all go.” That’s what I love about him. He understands the importance of family.
MC: What annoys you about him/her?
IS: I don’t hate anything about her. We’ve made life a fun adventure together.
LS: Sometimes he nags. It drives me crazy. I’m like, I get it Ira. But after 33 years of being together, you get used to it.
Associate Professor of English and American Literatures Antonia Losano and Associate Professor of English and American Literatures Daniel Brayton by Julia John
MC: How did you meet?
Daniel Brayton (DB): We met in my first class at graduate school, in her second year.
Antonio Losano (AL): Dan and I met in a grad school class – Victorian Non-Fiction Literature – in August 1992 at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill where we were getting our M.A.s. We moved from Chapel Hill two years later to Ithaca, NY to get our Ph.D.s at Cornell University.
MC: When was and where did you go on your first date?
DB: We went to a Halloween party together. She was Nefertiti and I was a mendicant friar.
AL: We were friends for a while before we started dating, so I can’t really remember a “first” date.
MC: How long have you been married?
DB: We’ve been married since May of 2001.
AL: We got married in 2001, at Mead Chapel on campus.
MC: What is one of your spouse’s quirks?
DB: Antonia is a great disco dancer, but she likes to lead.
AL: Dan has no quirks. He’s perfect!
MC: What do you love about him/her?
DB: I love absolutely everything about her, including all her foibles, neuroses, quirks, and bad habits.
AL: See above.
Chair of the Math Department Frank Swenton and Assistant Professor of German Florence Feireisen by Emma MacDonald
MC: How did you meet?
Frank Swenton (FS): We met when Florence moved into the apartment beneath mine when she started at Middlebury—I think our first actual meeting was when she came up to ask about paying something since she was using my wireless (I told her not to worry about it).
Florence Feireisen (FF): We met “through the internet”, but not online. When I moved from Western Mass to Vermont, I moved into the apartment underneath Frank’s and used his wireless connection for a few days until I decided to go upstairs, introduce myself and offer to chip in for the wireless connection.
MC: What was your first date?
FS: It’s hard to identify a first date as such. She invited me to watch the whole series Six Feet Under through Netflix (actual DVD’s, not online)...I think that initially she was looking for a group, but it ended up being just the two of us watching the series from start to finish over the course of some number of months.
FF: Never really had a first date. We were friends and all of a sudden realized that we had been living in both apartments together for a while. I’d say it’s pretty typical for Germans to be friends and then have that develop into something more.
MC: How long have you been married?
FS: It’ll be five years in August.
FF: 4.5 years.
MC: What is one of your spouse’s quirks?
FS: Well, being German, the strangest thing about her is that she really doesn’t have a German accent (most people ask her if she’s Canadian or something, just because she tends to over-enunciate relative to an American).
FF: Frank has a schizophrenic palate: he loves kids’ things like orange Kraft’s mac and cheese and fruit snacks, but he also appreciates elaborate fancy dinners with grown up ingredients. When we eat out, he often takes risks by trying something completely new. But then he also eats pop tarts.
MC: What is one thing you love about your spouse?
FS: That she’s smart and nice are a little trite, so I’ll say I’m impressed with her hockey skills.
FF: Obviously many things, but you asked about one thing? Ok. I love that this semester Frank is taking an unpaid leave from teaching to be [our son] Max’s primary care giver (Max is 5 months old). He still has chair duties and some advising to do, so he just scoops up Max and takes him to Warner Hall. Max has been called the co-chair of math! He has his own travel bed in Frank’s office. Anyways, I love this about Frank: he did not have to do this, Max could have easily gone to daycare once my maternity leave was over, but it was really important to him to be with both of his boys when they were little.
MC: What is one thing you don’t particularly like about your spouse?
FS: Related to the above, she sort of plays down when she plays hockey, rather than pushing herself and playing with groups that are nearer her potential skill level...she’s just not that competitive in hockey, which is sort of a shame!
FF: Not a big fan of Frank competing in programming contests when we are on vacation.
Associate Professor of Spanish Juana Gamero de Coca and Visiting Lecturer in Spanish Ricardo Chavez-Castenada by Emilie Munson
MC: How did you meet?
Juana Gamero de Coca (JG): In New Mexico State University.
MC: What was your first date?
Ricardo Chavez-Castenada (RC): We never really had a first date.
JG: Many years after we first met, in Mexico City.
MC: What is one of your spouses quirks?
JG: He lives out of this world. Always inside the worlds in his novels.
RC: Her extreme empathy with everything around her.
MC: What is your favorite quality of your spouse?
RC: The world that comes out of her eyes, her mouth, her heart. It is really the world in which I live.
JG: He is a very good person.
MC: What is their most annoying habit?
JG: He does not know how to stop working.
RC: She takes too, too long cleaning her teeth before going to bed.
MC: What is your spouse’s favorite food?
JG: He loves rice and beans. I love shrimps and all kinds of seafood.
RC: Her favorite food is seafood. For me [it] is earth food.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Andrew Smith and Visiting Lecturer in Theater Lisa Velten-Smith by Emilie Munson.
MC: How did you meet?
Andrew Smith (AS): We first met as we entered an MFA Acting Program at the University of California, San Diego in 2002. It was my first night in San Diego, having arrived with my Uhaul that day with my girlfriend at the time. Lisa knocked on my door because she was meeting my roommate to go see a show at the La Jolla Playhouse. We all met and introduced ourselves as members of the same acting class. I remember thinking: “Cool! She seems great.” But my girlfriend at the time, once Lisa left the room, immediately turned to me and said: “Wow. Good luck with that one.”
MC: What was your first date?
Lisa Velten-Smith (LV): Thinking. Thinking. Yep, no idea.
AS: As members of the same acting class of nine in a very intensive program, neither Lisa nor I came to graduate school to date our classmates. We came there for the work and to learn. So, we denied for a bit the mutual attraction that was developing, even though the directors in the program saw the chemistry, and immediately began casting us together in classwork and productions. We have played opposite each other on stage many, many times. Eventually it became more of a distraction to deny what was so evident to all around us, so we started dating. We didn’t have the normal “let’s go on a date” kind of start.
MC: How long have you been married?
AS: We got married on July 3, 2006.
MC: What is one of your spouse's quirks?
LV: He is really obsessed with making sure the keys are put back on the key holder.
AS: When Lisa gets really excited about something, especially an intellectual idea, her diction becomes pronounced.
MC: What is your favorite quality of your spouse?
AS: She is relentless in pursuit of truth. It is inspiring.
LV: His humility and generosity. Sorry that’s two but he has a lot of favorable qualities. S’why I married the guy.
MC: What is their most annoying habit?
AS: I get annoyed at myself when I get annoyed at her. She is free to have her habits without me judging her.
LV: Leaving the wet bath towel on the bed. Though, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen it happen so perhaps we are experiencing a breakthrough.
MC: What is your spouse’s favorite local restaurant?
AS: My favorite local restaurant: the grill on my front porch. If not that, then maybe Fire and Ice? She likes Fire and Ice too. Any place that has a boat for a salad bar deserves our business.
LV: I don’t necessarily favor one restaurant over another, but I will say the salmon from Costello’s or the chicken from Misty Knoll’s on the grill is outstanding. He might say Fire and Ice because we always seem to have a good time there, but when he sees my answer, he’ll go “oh, yeah, no —what Lisa said.”
(03/13/14 1:40am)
A Brainerd Commons policy of fining students for leaving items in the hallways of residence halls has led to Brainerd’s levying fines of hundreds of dollars on students.
Each Commons attempts to discourage students from leaving items in the hall, and when contacted for comment, representatives from each Commons responded that the primary issue at hand was fire safety.
Cook Commons Dean Ian Sutherland wrote in an email, “There is no hard and fast rule for how Cook Commons responds to possessions left in halls, corridors, stairways and landings, etc. But in general, the problem created is related to ‘blocking the egress’ and falls under general violations of the fire code and are subject to a fine of $50.00.” Cook Commons has not fined any students this year.
Representatives of Wonnacott, Ross and Atwater Commons confirmed that their Commons have similar policies. Neither Wonnacott nor Atwater Commons have fined any students this year, but Ross Commons has fined students who failed to remove items from hallways after being asked to do so.
Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature and Dean of Brainerd Commons Natasha Chang said that Brainerd Commons policy is to fine students 100 dollars for each item left in the hallways of first-year and sophomore residence halls affiliated with Brainerd, that is Stewart Hall and Hepburn Hall. She strives to be “clear in communication, consistent in enforcement” with regard to the policy, and emailed residents of Stewart during J-term saying said the policy would be strictly enforced.
Chang said that there are several reasons for imposing such fines on students for violation of the rules regarding hallways in residence halls.
“First of all [items left in the hallway are] a fire safety violation — things that are in the hallway are considered to be blocking the means of egress,” she said. “That’s why we take it seriously. The policy is also meant to support custodial staff as well as the community in the dorm — it’s not nice to come home to a dorm with a hallway full of stuff.”
Environmental, Health and Safety Coordinator Jen Kazmierczak confirmed that, per College policy written in the Student Handbook, any items in the hallway might constitute obstacles for fire safety purposes. Custodial Services is responsible for correcting and reporting fire safety issues, but Commons Deans enforce fire safety policies.
Custodial Team Leader Liza Rheaume agreed that items in the hall pose a fire hazard, noting that in the event of a fire in a residence hall, smoke may obscure items left in the hallway which might cause students to trip. Therefore, she said, students who leave items in the hall may not only endanger themselves but also their neighbors.
Brainerd student Linley Shaw ’17 was fined during J-term for leaving her ski boots in the hallway of Stewart. A member of the Alpine Ski Team, Shaw missed an email about enforcement of the policy. Shaw returned from practice at about 11 one morning and left her wet ski boot liners next to her ski boots, with her mittens tucked inside the boots.
Thirty minutes later, Shaw was told that although technically there were six items — two boots, two liners and two mittens — she would only be fined 300 dollars instead of the possible 600. She met with her Commons Coordinator and came away with the fine lowered to 200 dollars, which will be added to her tuition bill.
Linley said that she understands the ramifications of crowded hallways for fire safety, but “200 dollars is a lot of money for 30 minutes outside my door without receiving a warning and without even having seen the email.”
Chang noted that this year, five students in Hepburn or Stewart had been fined, out of approximately 300 living in those two residence halls.
“The vast majority of people are extremely respectful of the rules and follow them, a small percentage don’t listen to them and don’t follow, and those are the ones who get in trouble,” Chang said.
According to Chang, the money from the fines goes into the Commons account, which funds community events such as the recent Bite of Brainerd.
“I’m aware as a Commons Dean that students have different economic capacities. If it’s taxing for students to pay that fine I work with them to come up with a creative solution that works for them.” Chang said.
She suggested that a student could work at several Brainerd Commons dinners over the course of their four years at the College in order to pay their fines, or their roommate or somebody else could pay their fines for them.
Lottie Hedden ’14 was fined 300 dollars for leaving her shoes in the hallway during her first year at the College.
“I thought 300 dollars was excessive, and that the policy sends the wrong message about how much cash Middlebury students have access to,” Hedden said.
(03/06/14 2:24pm)
On Wednesday March 5, the Christian holiday of Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent, a six-week long period of discipline and devotion. Ash Wednesday emphasizes human mortality and Lent traditionally asks observers to take up a specific discipline. Many students describe this period as a specially reflective and humbling experience, one that can both connect students with their faithful traditions from home or add unique challenges and significance in a college environment.
In honor of the holiday, Chaplain Laurie Jordan ran a service at Mead Chapel that required her to respect the varied styles of worship within the Christian tradition, unlike most church services that cater to a specific denomination.
“I try to use the basics, prior to all the splits in Christianity,” said Jordan. “So it’s not really dealing with the tender breaking points.”
The service included a Psalm of Confession, when the congregation asks God to absolve their sins, A Litany of Penitence, when sins are detailed with greater specificity, a Great Thanksgiving, when the congregation thanks the lord for his gifts, the Breaking of Bred, a communion, and an organ postlude.
Jordan expressed particular enthusiasm for one defining ceremonial practices of Ash Wednesday — the imposition of Ashes — when the chaplain draws a cross with ashes over one’s forehead and recites, “Remember that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return.” According to Jordan, this reminder can be particularly important for students.
“The ashes represents that you may feel young and vital and invincible. But every one of us is going to die one day and our bodies are either going to be burned or decayed,” said Jordan.
Blake Harper ’15, whose father is a priest and is involved in numerous religious life organizations on campus, echoes a similar sentiment.
“Sometimes you can feel like on the college on the hill you are on top of the world,” said Harper. “It is a humbling experience [on] Ash Wednesday just to know how small we are.” He added that this notion uplifts not discourages him.
After the service, many students leave the ashes on their forehead for the remainder of the day.
Blake reports seeing many people he did not know were observant Christians with the ashes.
“It’s just a time when people are not afraid to express their religious identity,” said Harper.
Matthew Blake ’16.5 claims many people who are not familiar with Christianity ask him questions about Lent.
“I’ve had to do a lot of translating,” said Blake. “I’ve had to express what it means to be a Christian to other people and that has made me more reflective on what it means to be a Christian.”
After Ash Wednesday, Christians enter Lent, a time when many observers fast, deny themselves a particular luxury and involve themselves with various religious practices.
Shannon Reinert ’15, who leads the Newman Catholic Student Organization, cited desserts and makeup as examples of indulgences she gave up.
Gregory Markowitz ’15 said that he was not raised religious but has became a more involved Christian while on campus and was officially accepted into the catholic church last summer. Last year, he did not attend Ash Wednesday service but fasted every Wednesday and Friday, ate exclusively vegetarian foods, and tried to meet someone new every day during Lent.
“I was constantly asking myself ‘why am I doing this...to please God,” Marowitz said. “So when you’re hungry, it’s a constant reminder.”
Some do not give something up but add another ritual into their routine.
According to Faith Whang ’15, the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship plans to practice a daily fifteen minute pray period but she expresses concerns over maintaining this routine on campus.
“When you’re at Middlebury, you’re in this bubble where everything is about you,” said Whang, “I’ve noticed that even trying to take a little piece of the day away from me is hard.”
She refers to a popular axiom while referring to the struggles of maintaining her faith at school.
“Someone told me freshman year that college is three things: sleep, study, and social life and you can only do two. Adding faith is like a fourth thing,” Whang said.
Like Whang, Harper does not give up a specific luxury but adds a new ritual to his day: devotional readings with friends.
“It is a time to think about the way we spend our time, think about the way we use our resources, think about the way we treat each other,” Harper said.
