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(03/06/14 2:23pm)
Room 404 may not be the most recognizable student-run publication on campus, but its little-flaunted presence could be intentional. The publication’s distribution strategy, developed by the organization’s founders Moss Turpan ’14.5 and Dylan Redford ’14.5, does not rely on the typical grab-and-go allocation that other organizations utilize. For those who do not even know what Room 404 is, here is some background information on one of the College’s hidden gems.
The publication features poetry and prose with a purpose, creative graphics, comic quizzes and other ramblings that Turpan says “don’t have a place in any other campus publications.” All of the components are created, edited and designed by a team of contributors at meetings that occur “wheneverly.”
Although the idea for Room 404 sprouted during Turpan and Redford’s freshman year, the first publication did not come out until Winter 2013, but a Spring 2014 edition quickly followed, leading the club to run on a twice-a-year publishing basis. The Spring 2013 edition featured a Choose Your Own Friday Night Adventure at Middlebury, an erasure poem from a book by Freud, Unconventional Love Letters and a comedic Genealogy of Herbals (a family tree portraying personified and characterized herbs with Bay Laurel and Sage as the common ancestors). If the content itself did not make the publication unique enough, its distribution process is notable as well.
The members of Room 404 work hard to compile an email list of prospective contributors and interested readers to get their word out. Leading up to a new edition of Room 404, the staff organizes a non-exclusive release party. All attendees receive an issue of the most recent publication. However, that is not the only opportunity for students to get their hands on a copy. Posters are plastered around campus inciting people to request their own copy via email. A requester is entered into the email server and a personalized copy of the publication is delivered promptly to his or her mailbox.
This is a key feature that separates Room 404 from other student-run publications on campus like Blackbird, the literary magazine, or even the Campus issue you are reading right now. Publications can be as easy to leave behind or throw away as they are to obtain. Everybody has picked up a newspaper or magazine lying around and skimmed it during a spare minute, only to abandon it as quickly as they had found it. Turpan and his peers believe that requiring readers to order their copies, and then presonalizing each copy, increases the chances of students reading the publication thoroughly and also hanging onto it.
I experienced this myself during my interview with Turpan as he brought out the Spring 2013 edition of Room 404, and neatly wrote my name in block lettering along the black line that was preceded by “This Book Belongs To.” I immediately wanted to read every line and every post script and admire every drawing including a very well-constructed ring pop. And, indeed, I did just that as soon as I went back to my room.
The idea of receiving an aesthetically-pleasing and personalized gift in a mailbox that is more commonly designated for tutoring flyers and useless advertisements is tantalizing, and if nothing else, simply new. Although this tailored distribution of magazines is a factor in why Room 404 is less of a “big name” compared to Blackbird or the Campus, it arguably could produce a more dedicated and stronger readership.
(03/06/14 2:18am)
At 9 p.m. local time on March 1 in Kunming, China, a group of men dressed in black began stabbing people with long knives at random, aiming for the head, neck and shoulders, according to witnesses. The attack left 33 people dead, including four of the assailants, and another 130 were wounded. Four more terrorists were apprehended soon after the attack.
A group of Xinjiang separatists have been linked to the terror attack that took place at a train station in Kunming. All 25 students participating in the C.V. Starr-Middlebury School Abroad in Kunming are safe and have been accounted for.
“We have been in touch with our director there [in Kunming] and we are relieved to report that all students at the Kunming program are accounted for and our safe,” wrote President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz in an email to students, faculty and staff. “Our thoughts are with all the citizens of Kunming who are such welcome hosts to our students.”
The school in Kunming is one of three that the College operates in China, and the only one located in the western part of the country. Kunming is a notoriously multiethnic city and tends to attract students interested in anthropology and environmental sciences.
In the hours following the attack, students on the Middlebury program were instructed to remain in their dorms. A number of students were traveling outside of the city for the weekend and were instructed to “be in touch with … staff about the best way to return to Kunming,” according to Dean of International Programs and Edward C. Knox Professor of International Studies Jeff Cason. An all-student meeting was convened with the program’s staff in Kunming the day after the attack to discuss the incident and security measures students should take.
During the meeting, students were reported to be relatively calm and in good spirits, according to Cason. Students were advised not to leave their dormitories at night, to travel in small groups at all times and to avoid public transportation, at least for the next several days. Organized program outings were cancelled until further notice.
“These are all precautionary measures, to be sure; reports from staff indicate that life in Kunming is relatively normal, with local residents out and about as usual,” wrote Cason.
Karen Liu ’15 is currently studying in Kunming and was traveling outside of the city with two other students when the attack occurred. They learned of the incident when a parent of one of the students called to find out if they were safe.
“What I can say is that we are very lucky,” Liu wrote in an email. “Two other [students] and I had travel plans and were at the train station just three hours before. We will be arriving back to Kunming via train [on Saturday night] and have been directed by [Assistant Director of the C. V. Starr-Middlebury School Abroad in Kunming] Peter Robbins to stick with our original travel plans because security will have increased by then.”
That advice changed, however, as staff members ultimately chartered a bus to retrieve the students from outside of the city and bring them back to Kunming on Sunday evening, simply because of the increased risk.
“So far the attack has been isolated to just the train station, and staff members have not yet advised against [visiting] certain areas of Kunming,” Liu continued.
While tensions between the Muslim Uighur ethnic group in the west and China have been rising over the years, according to The Guardian, this is the “first time people from the north-western region have been accused of such a major and organized attack outside its borders.”
(03/05/14 4:58pm)
I had the unique opportunity of speaking at The Moth this past Thursday (the Moth, for those of you who don’t know, is a live story telling event held in the Gamut Room). The experience proved to be extraordinarily fun and exciting, yet I realized something as I stood up there recounting my tale. The loudest laughs, the greatest applauses, the most visible signs of excitement all came from a particular group. It was the latest batch of baby Febs who had shown up and beyond all logic seemed generally attentive to what I had to say.
Now I do not mean to judge Febs as stereotypically more enthusiastic. After all, we are all excited about being in college when we first get here. In truth, my fascination was less a product of them (sorry, Febs) than of an internal trouble. Here I was two years into college and what had happened to all my enthusiasm? My genuine optimism? My eagerness to participate? Had I even had any of that to begin with?
I am convinced the mid-Midd crisis is a thing. It happened to me slowly, quietly, and so subtly that I did not even notice it. No, it was my parents that noticed. They pulled me aside a couple times and asked vague questions like “How are things?” “Is anything bothering you?” and “You seem off?” With mental illness now getting the awareness it deserves, I am lucky to have such attentive parents. I had no clear answers for them though. Nothing seemed particularly wrong; my grades were good, my friends were good and everything was fine. Just fine. Nothing was bothering me and nothing was making me excited. The emotional plateau I hit mid-college was odd to experience and even odder to get away from.
We change as time goes by here, or at least I hope we do. We get smarter, more mature, and more confident. In theory we have more figured out, at least in terms of our academic interests. Yet there are dangerous pitfalls at this stage of the college experience just as there were at the beginning, and I am sure there will be towards the end. Enthusiasm wanes and Middlebury becomes, in a sense, disenchanting. Classes seem to blur together and academic life follows a predictable routine. Even weekends seem deeply scheduled procedures, pre-game, actual game, post-game, Grille, sleep, wake up at 1, rinse and repeat.
The trouble is that upon hitting the mid-Midd crisis, we cannot buy ourselves a Porsche and drive across America. Nope, we are still stuck here, going through the paces of a college experience that has stopped surprising us. The worst thing anyone can feel about college is that they are wasting their time. Apathy and boredom are our greatest enemies here, not alcohol or midterms. So what is left for us to do? We have to confront the age-old riddle of “Here I stand. What shall I do?” That is the only question that matters. What is to be done? We may love our routines, but even so, they should be broken at times. Can we change ourselves? Or must we rely on familiar faces, classes and experiences? Why not give something else a shot?
If I were to prescribe a remedy to this (and I am by no means out of my mid-Midd crisis) I would start with people. Yes, people. When we count our blessings here, it usually comes in the form of beautiful buildings, brilliant professors and a point free dining system. Rarely do we look to our peers as sources of inspiration or uniqueness. Expanding our social circles is never a bad thing and gives us new avenues to re-invention. There is nothing wrong with aspiring to be like our peers, whether it be trying to recapture underclassman enthusiasm or the reserved intellect of seniors in our classes. Often we hesitate, perhaps out of pride, to exemplify profoundly good qualities we see in other people.
Experience has to be the second component of escaping the mid-Midd crisis. Change for the sake of change is often thought of as bad, in terms of the college experience, however, I disagree. Sometimes change for the sake of change is necessary, even if it turns out for the worse. Better we make a mistake now, surrounded by great institutions and people, than later, no? Changing our everyday experience may be as simple as conscientiously making discussion sections about the group and not the individual, going out of your way to say hi to people you have just met or, in my case, telling a story about Glitter at the Moth.
The mid-Midd crisis can leave us jaded and apathetic if we let it run its course. If we see it and acknowledge it, then at least we have a chance to make our middle chapters at Middlebury just as profound, just as exciting as the first weeks we were here.
Artwork by CHARLOTTE FAIRLESS
(03/05/14 4:30pm)
For most of us the Mead Chapel bells are background noise to our daily activities, so when we hear them ringing our impulse is not to stop and listen. Accordingly, one might take for granted the immense skill of George Matthew Jr., the College’s carillon player.
The carillon, which is often mistaken for bells, is the largest type of percussion instrument in the world. The Middlebury College carillon sits at the top of a narrow 75-foot staircase in the steeple of Mead Chapel.
Each key is a rounded wooden lever that, when struck, pulls a wire that causes a clapper to strike a bell.
The resulting sound echoes across campus and beyond. For this reason, Matthew Jr. regards himself “as not only the college carillonneur, but the town carillonneur...it’s a town instrument.”
Matthew has been the carillonneur at Middlebury College for twenty-eight years, and also plays the carillon for Norwich Univeristy. He has been playing for 52 years, and has composed and made arrangements of over one hundred compositions for the massive instrument.
A graduate of Columbia University, the University of Bridgeport and Wesleyan University in different degrees, Matthew Jr. worked in chemical research for fifteen years after graduation.
This was before, “music kind of took over,” he recalled. “I decided, ‘I won’t fight this any longer,’ and I went into music full time.” He was 35 years old when he gave up his career in science and went back to school to earn a Masters in music.
Matthew’s passion for the carillon began at the age of four when his grandfather took him to the 1939 World’s Fair. Sitting atop his shoulders, Matthew Jr. remembers watching “what looked like to me an incredibly old man with a long white beard who was pounding away…and it made the most glorious racket. I thought ‘I want to do that some day.’”
His passion for the carillon continued during his education at Columbia. Riverside Church, just down the street from the University, housed the largest carillon in the world at the time.
The great Dutch carillonneur, Lefevre, was playing at Columbia at the time, so Matthew Jr. arranged his class schedule around hearing him play. Lefevre told a disappointed Matthew Jr. that he didn’t give lessons.
Undeterred, Matthews Jr. considers himself a ‘student’ of Lefevre. “I listened to him so much and studied his style ... I always tell people that I studied with Lefevre but he didn’t know it.”
Matthew Jr.’s relationship with Middlebury College began when the college’s choir director needed a carillon demonstration, and asked Matthew Jr. to perform. After the performance, Matthew Jr. met with the President of the Board of Trustees of the College, who agreed to finance Matthew Jr.’s dream: a four-octave carillon. He soon moved to Middlebury.
Watching him play in the intimate and drafty room at the top of the chapel steeple, it’s easy to forget the publicity his songs get. This is the paradox of the carillon: it is played in solitude but, as Matthew Jr. reminded me, “you never know when you’re playing, are there two people listening or two-hundred? You don’t know.”
The force required to play the instrument mandates that Matthew Jr. hit the wooden keys with his entire hand. He leans in slightly to compensate, and the clunking noises of the keys are as much a part of the music as the bells above.
Matthew Jr. was the first American to play carillon in Russia, and has toured numerous times throughout Europe and the United States. Still, he isn’t upset when I tell him that many students think the music they hear is automated or recorded.
“If you hear the bells a real live person is playing...it’s either me or one of my students,” he states.
For Matthews Jr., the carillon is “part of the acoustic environment of Middlebury.” He always leaves the door unlocked while he plays as an invitation to student visitors. Matthew performs tunes ranging from Samuel Barber and Menotti to ragtime music every week, always ending with Middlebury’s alma mater.
Although Matthew is 78, he is not quite ready to retire from his post as carillonneur for both Middlebury College and Norwich University.
“I’ve tried (to retire) several times and I’ve come back several times ... I’ve been playing this fifty-two years,” said Matthew, “… and I just love to play the carillon.”
(02/27/14 1:21am)
On Monday, Feb. 17, Community Council continued the ongoing discussion of hard alcohol policies with the Commons Deans. Dean of Brainerd Commons and Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Natasha Chang, Dean of Wonnacott Commons Matt Longman and Dean of Cook Commons Ian Sutherland were present at the meeting.
Hard alcohol has been a main topic for Community Council since last spring when President Ron Liebowitz asked the Council to examine the role of hard alcohol on campus as a condition of his approval of the Mill Hard Alcohol Exception. During its meetings in the fall semester about the issue, the Council met with Dean of Students Katy Smith-Abbott and Coach Bob Ritter, co-chairs of the 2011-2012 Task Force on Alcohol and Social Life, Gus Jordan, executive director of Health and Counseling Services, and Barbara McCall, director of health and wellness education. A number of members on the Council felt that it was necessary to continue the conversation surrounding hard alcohol with the Commons Deans.
The deans have a more personal understanding of this issue as they work directly with the students who struggle with substance abuse. The College emphasizes education over punishment for students who abuse alcohol, unlike many peer institutions. All students who have to meet with their deans to discuss their alcohol usage are required to go through the Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students (BASICS) program that focuses on educating the student to make better informed decisions about alcohol consumption.
“We work most closely around health and safety, ” explained Longman. “It’s very important to me that students feel that our approaches are reasonable. There are some on campus whose perception is […] that the administrators and the deans are not doing enough about [alcohol issues] and are not coming down hard enough. From my standpoint as someone who sits with students following up after these really tough weekends […], it is easier to see it that way [in a distance] but when you’re really with [these students] you realize that this is a human question […] about who we are as a community and how we treat each other.”
The Sober Friend System, which is one of many safety nets that the college implements, was discussed at the meeting. The Council also debated the idea of having the Parton Center for Health and Wellness open on Friday and Saturday nights.
“The same people are asked to be Sober Friends over and over again because they are usually people who are nondrinking, and it’s problematic to continue with the same people taking these caretaking positions,” said Chang about the Sober Friend System. “A second flaw is that at times the Sober Friend will leave the person, which is concerning. I don’t think there’s an easy solution to either of the two programs and I’m don’t feel that those are great enough problems to do away with the Sober Friend system I really feel that the system is part and parcel of the Good Samaritan policy.”
Ann Hanson, Posse Mentor, former Dean of Students and proxy for Dean of Ross Commons Janine Clookey, pointed out that safety nets, while making the campus generally safer, also encourage students to make irresponsible decisions:
“One of really big challenges in grappling with this issue is [to consider whether] you are hampering or enabling students to drink more by having [those] safety nets. In the real world, you can go to the hospital if you drink too much […] We at Middlebury have always struggled with what our philosophy is and I think we try really hard to keep people safe at a huge expense… [By having those safety nets] we are making it easier for students to drink and be irresponsible.”
This week, the Council continued the conversation about financial aid and heard a petition from the residents of Munford house to become an Interest House.
(02/26/14 8:55pm)
Following a weekend of excellent individual play at the D3 Singles Championship, the focus for the athletes in the Middlebury women’s squash program was once again on team play at Team Nationals from Friday, Feb. 21 to Sunday, Feb. 23.
Following a regular season in which the Panthers went 8-7 against some of the best competition in the country, the women found themselves this weekend at Princeton University ranked 14th nationally. This ranking translated to the Panthers’ earning the 6th seed in the B Division at Team Nationals, competing for the Kurtz Cup.
On Friday evening, the women’s squash team drew 11th ranked George Washington University in the first round of play.
The Colonials were no strangers to Middlebury, with the two sides having squared off at the Yale Round Robin a month ago. With George Washington having taken the first match 7-2, the Panthers were eager to balance the series.
Unfortunately, the Colonials showed their might and proved too much for Middlebury to handle. Play opened poorly for the Panthers, with the usually dominant trio at the top of Middlebury’s lineup, Abby Jenkins ’14, Charlotte Dewey ’15 and Annie Wymard ’15 falling to their counterparts from George Washington. Despite solid wins from the consistent Zoe Carey ’16 and Saskia Pownall-Gray ’16, the final score was not favorable to the Panthers, who fell 6-3 to George Washington.
Despite the early setback, the Panthers still had a full weekend of play ahead of them. While the possibility for a championship was gone, the women’s squash team had the opportunity to compete and improve its national ranking. In the consolation bracket, Middlebury once again faced a familiar foe in Williams College. Having dropped their previous matchup against the Ephs 5-4, Middlebury was aware of the challenges winning would entail, but were confident in its ability to compete with Williams.
Jenkins, after falling behind early, got Middlebury off to a fine start with a win in the first singles slot. However, Williams’ 2nd through 5th ranked players shut down Middlebury, who did not record a win until Carey and Amanda Chen ’14 both picked up their second wins of the weekend at the tail end of the match. After falling 6-3 to Williams, the women were left with only one matchup left to determine the 7th and 8th place finishers in the Kurtz Cup.
The Panthers then faced conference foe Hamilton, a matchup that presented the opportunity to exact some revenge on a team that scored an unexpected win over Middlebury in the Panthers’ first match of the season.
Middlebury took great measures to ensure the match against Hamilton would not be as dramatic this time around. With all around dominant performances, Middlebury won the first eight matches against Hamilton, leaving absolutely no doubt as to who the winner would be.
At the end of the tournament, Carey and Chen remained undefeated through this tough weekend of play.
In addition to the weekend’s play, a pair of women’s squash players were named to All-NESCAC teams over the weekend. Both Jenkins and Dewey represent Middlebury on the all-conference first team. This is Jenkins’ third time on the first team, and Dewey’s second.
With the win over Hamilton, the team finishes up the 2013-2014 campaign with an even record of 9-9, with their primary highlight coming in the form of a third-place finish at the NESCAC championships. Middlebury ends the season with the 15th ranking overall in the country.
(02/26/14 5:53pm)
The music scene here at the College is leaving its underground home for the center stage, as Middlebury Musicians United (also known as MMU) provides a new venue for campus performers.
MMU’s main goal is to bring student music to the Middlebury community. They currently manage a rehersal space in the facilities building and a recordining studio in the Stephen A. Freeman International Center.
In MMU’s latest initiative to promote campus musicians, they launched an event called Wednesday Night Open-Mic Night (WOMP) — taking place every week at the Gamut Room. Students sit on couches throughout the cozy space, eating warm crepes, making small talks as they wait in anticipation for performers to step onto the stage like Nellie Pierce ’16.5 — who wowed the crowd last Wednesday in WOMP’s inaugural night.
“When I first came to campus there wasn’t a music scene,” Mitchell Parrish ‘14, the head of MMU, said. “Three years ago, there were only a few student bands on campus.”
As a sophomore, Parrish formed Thank God For Mississippi, an Appalachian jam band, which has become a prominent group on campus the last few years. Over the past several semesters, the student run, underground music scene at the College has grown tremendously, with the formation of bands like Stoop Kid, Boat Taxi, Iron Eyes Cody, Will Cuneo’s Band and Alpenglow.
MMU is at the center of much of this recent activity, as a network for connecting student musicians.
“MMU is the Facebook for music,” Parrish said. “It puts bands together.”
MMU’s primary initiative is to unite students who play instruments and encourage them to make music. The group is responsible for coordinating the two band rooms on campus, as well as many student performances.
The practice room under the smokestack of the Biomass plant contains a drum set, a PA system, amplifiers for instruments and lockers for students to store their equipment. The room is almost always occupied on weekday nights. With a simple go-link click, (“go/practice”), students can schedule to play music whenever the room is free.
The second space, a recording studio under the Freeman International Center, has a more substantial amount of equipment, with a great drum-set, more microphones, amplifiers and a separate room with a computer for mastering music. This space (accessed through “go/record”) has been used to record and produce many student bands, such as Iron Eyes Cody and Thank God For Mississippi.
Though these two facilities, supervised and managed by MMU, are crucial spaces to bring student musicians together, more can be done to encourage and increase participation by all students in the musical activity that often goes under-recognized on campus. Students like Parrish see opportunities such as WOMP, which will be happening every Wednesday night this semester, as the next step – a way of bringing musicians and listeners together in an informal setting.
“People love the idea of getting together to watch live music,” Rob Shaw ’16 of Iron Eyes Cody said. “People are very quick to engage with that. People want to be in that communal setting where they can drop their boundaries and share in a musical experience.”
Clearly, the student music scene has grown in the last couple years on campus. With the growth of student bands and opportunities for listening that WOMP provides, in the next semester the College will hopefully begin to see more musicians like Pierce, who had never performed for an audience until last Wednesday.
(02/26/14 4:37pm)
I had noticed a couple of times a locked door in Bihall with pictures of octopuses and a sign “octopi wallstreet”, so when my friend Jacob Dixon ’16.5 mentioned he was going to feed the baby octopuses my curiosity was naturally raised and I offered to tag along. When I stepped inside the cephalapod room with its loudly humming pumps and filters and its strong stench of marine biology, I felt removed from Middlebury. Packed inside the room, originally a small janitor’s supply closet, were two 300-galllon tanks containing the octopuses (octopodes is also an acceptable plural, but not octopi). In the first tank one of the three adult California two-spot octopuses floated in sight. Its tentacles stretched nearly a foot and a half, and on its side was its characteristic bright blue dot, one of the two false eyes that give the octopuses their name. Jacob went about feeding small shrimp to the 48 thumb-nail sized babies floating in Tupperware containers on the top of the two tanks.
The College has intermittently kept octopuses for neurological and psychological research since 2008, when two students along with Biology Professor Tom Root opened the lab to study invertebrate intelligence. Researchers have found that octopuses have remarkably complex minds and have evolved emotions, individual personalities and intelligence. Students at the College have sought to build off these discoveries and delve into the workings of the octopus brain and the nature of the mind. In past experiments, students have tested the memories of octopuses by placing them in mazes. Jamie Hillas ’15 will begin a project this spring also investigating the learning capabilities of octopuses. But before Hillas is able to do research, the octopus babies will have to survive and mature.
Alexandra Spencer-Wong ’16 and Amity Calvin ’16 head a crew of volunteers including Jacob Dixon ’16.5, Lisa Wooldridge ’16, Michelle Irei ’15, Tiff Ting ’14, Max Anderson ’14, and Alix Bickson ’14 in charge of the daunting task of looking after and feeding the baby octopuses. Last year another team of caretakers ran into unfortunate problems while taking care of a different group of baby octopuses.
“They had them during the spring and they survived for 6 weeks,” Calvin said, “but they went off on a break and when they came back they found out there was a high spike in nitrate levels, and they all died.”
Dixon, a published aquarium enthusiast, also explained how maintaining good water quality and monitoring the levels of dangerous chemical byproducts is the most essential part of keeping an aquarium.
“Octopuses and invertebrates in general are very sensitive to nitrate,” he said, “and I think that was the reason for their deaths. For example in my aquarium at home I tried to keep the nitrate levels between zero and five parts per million (ppm). In here they spiked about forty.”
He described a number of ways he kept nitrate levels in check in his previous aquariums and how they are currently trying to do so with the octopus tanks.
“You can introduce live rock with resident nitrifying bacteria that convert nitrate into a more disposable form, or you can introduce macroalgae and they consume nitrates as they grow,” Dixon said. “One of the best ways is to cycle clean pure water through and remove the water with nitrates.”
The octopus eggs were laid in December, and they hatched during February break. Spencer-Wong recalled the excitement of that day.
“We were about to leave — it was just a routine feeding,” he said, “then I looked down and I said ‘Amity, what’s that there’. All of a sudden there were babies everywhere. They would hatch in waves of 15. We had literally made the Tupperware container the day before. I put up this really desperate Facebook status calling anyone on campus to come to the room and help, thankfully a couple of friends showed up. There was a frenzy to try and catch them and put them in the right place and make sure they didn’t slip through the cracks of the aquarium. That was a challenge.”
Since then they have been busy feeding and looking after the octopuses.
“We’ve been feeding them twice a day and we do one head count a day,” Calvin said. “It’s been difficult finding out how much we need to feed them to keep them from eating each other.”
Another difficulty is keeping them from escaping.
“They are the greatest escape artists that you have ever seen,” Wooldridge said. “I’ve opened the tank to catch one and I’ve seen one trying to climb out of the tank and I have to push them back down.” Reportedly 6-foot long octopuses can squeeze through a hole the size of an orange.
“We didn’t anticipate this continuing in the spring,” Spencer-Wong said. “We thought we would come by and maybe feed them once a week. But now we’re pretty much in charge of feeding the babies which is intense but it’s been a fun experience and we’ve learned a lot.”
After watching the creatures for a few minutes jet around and wrap their snarling tentacles around prey I could easily see how spending time with them was enticing.
“One of the best things about working with them is that you can see a personality,” Spencer-Wong said. “You can see for instance ‘oh, Reggies is grumpy today’ or when I wear a very intensely patterned sweater the octopus would put up these angry horns and run away so I stopped wearing that sweater around them.”
“Their color changing capabilities are just incredible,” Calvin added. “They can blend in so perfectly, and they change color a lot of the time. When you feed them, sometimes their blue spots will pulse very quickly. When they are relaxed they turn this calm, pale, white shade. “
The group hopes that at least 10 of the baby octopuses will survive into the spring. Currently they have 7 student volunteers.
“You can never have too many volunteers,” Calvin said. “If you know anyone whose interested send them over. We’re gonna work with the octopuses until there are no more left.”
(02/20/14 4:17am)
Middlebury College’s Office of Sustainability Integration declared the College to be on track towards its goal of carbon neutrality by 2016 in its most recent report citing the biomass plant, efforts by a variety of groups on campus, and the new biomethane initiative as critical to the progress.
In his Winter Term update, Director of Sustainability Jack Byrne wrote, “Our FY13 carbon emissions were 50 percent below our 2007 baseline year emissions due to the high performance of our biomass system AND the cumulative effects of the numerous energy efficiency projects the College has completed over the past several years.”
The poster child of the College’s push for carbon neutrality has been the biomass plant, which has cut the College’s use of #6 fuel oil from 2.1 million gallons to 634,000 gallons since 2009.
Despite its success, the biomass plant cannot always handle the College’s large energy demand. “The next big step will be the switch to using biomethane to displace the fuel oil we still burn when biomass is not enough to meet heating and cooling demands,” according to Byrne’s report.
The process of switching over to biomethane to supplement the biomass plant will not be quick and is reliant on the successful construction of the recently approved Vermont Gas Systems pipeline project. The pipeline will allow for cost-effective access to biogas when the biomass plant requires it to maintain operation. The Office of Sustainability Integration estimates the biomethane project will be online by early 2015 at the latest.
The success of the biomethane project is essential to the attainment of carbon neutrality as Byrne anticipates that it will reduce the College’s carbon emissions by 40 percent from the baseline emissions. This amounts to about a 90 percent reduction overall from the baseline year.
“Once this is achieved, [the] remainder of our carbon emissions will be from College related travel, electricity purchased, vehicle fleet and waste sent to the landfill,” Byrne wrote.
College-related travel will account for roughly half of the remaining 10 percent of carbon emissions. According to the 2008 Climate Action Implementation Plan, the current definition of travel includes exclusively College-funded travel, and excludes travel that is funded by student groups or is funded through grants.
However, Byrne reports, “We are in the process of revising the method for calculating emissions from travel as it represents more than half of the total that would remain to assure that we are using as accurate an estimate as feasible.” Other efforts to reduce emissions due to travel include converting some of the College’s vehicles to run on carbon-neutral fuel.
That leaves about five percent of emissions that need to be cut and much of that can be done with the involvement of College students.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize how easy it is to reduce their day to day energy use,” said Campus Sustainability Coordinators (CSC) President Ali Rotatori ’14. “Most of the students on this campus are very eager and willing to live greener, but the issue is they aren’t sure how.”
The CSCs are one of a handful of student groups on campus committed to educating the student body on responsible energy use.
Rotatori acknowledges that not everyone can commit the time to environmentally-focused groups.
“If people can’t be directly involved and commit time to helping Middlebury become a more environmentally friendly place, they can at least help out by changing their own habits,” she said.
Rotatori and her fellow Campus Sustainability Coordinators have many suggestions in their “Greening Your Dorm Room” pamphlet including turning off power strips, taking shorter showers, and walking instead of driving around campus.
With the deadline just two years away, the College is planning to reach its goal thanks to the efforts of many students, facilities and maintenance staff, faculty and administrators.
However, if Middlebury finds itself falling short of its carbon neutrality goal, there is a back-up plan in the form of “carbon credits” that can be purchased to offset our emissions. Colby College employed this tactic when it claimed its own carbon neutrality, sparking debate about the validity of using carbon credits to assert carbon neutrality.
For now though, the College is focusing on furthering what progress has been made in the effort to achieve its goal.
(02/19/14 9:38pm)
Let’s talk about vaginas. Or, rather, let’s talk about The Vagina Monologues, a student produced play performed on Valentine’s Day in the Hepburn Zoo.
Writer Eve Ensler ’75 wanted to start a taboo conversation about female genitalia, and she started interviewing women about their views on sex, relationships and violence, compiling a piece that is ultimately a celebration of vaginas and femininity as well as a movement to stop violence against women. The monologues themselves are endearing and whimsical, heartbreaking and powerful, enlightening and shocking. Inspired by interviews with over 200 women of varying ages, ethnicities, nationalities and sexual experience conducted over two decades, the play reveals tales of feminine oppression, liberation, discovery and shame by discussing that most elusive part of the female figure: the vagina.
Premiering in 1996 at the HERE Arts Center in New York City, The Vagina Monologues also enjoyed a limited run at the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts in the same year. Eventually gaining popularity through a word of mouth campaign, the play has been performed at Madison Square Garden and was featured in an HBO television adaptation.
Traditionally performed around the country on Valentine’s Day, the productions usually benefit rape crises centers and shelters for women. All of the proceeds from Middlebury’s production were donated to WomenSafe, an Addison County organization working toward the elimination of physical, sexual and emotional violence against women.
Director Rebecca Coates-Finke ’16.5 became involved in the production through discussions about staging the play with fellow Chellis House Monitors.
“I volunteered [to be director] kind of on a whim,” Coates-Finke said. “I’ve had a solid amount of experience working on shows in the Hepburn Zoo and I’ve worked closely with so many directors I wanted to try my hand at it. Also, I’d never seen The Vagina Monologues and that seemed so wrong.”
One of the first monologues, “Hair,” perhaps says it best. “Vagina” is not an enjoyable word. As the piece points out, it sounds more like a harsh medical instrument than a revered part of the body, and saying it in any context will undoubtedly provoke squirms and blushes of embarrassment from people of any age or gender. The Hepburn Zoo was packed with male and female audience members from ages 18 to 65, and Coates-Finke began the show by informing the crowd that hearing words like “vagina,” “pleasure” and “clitoris” throughout the night did not constitute an emergency. These are words that do not appear in everyday conversation, but The Vagina Monologues aimed to, at least for a few hours, create a forum for open dialogue about a part of the body that has so much effect on women, and indeed, men, but is rarely acknowledged or discussed.
“When Eve Ensler wrote the Vagina Monologues, she tore away the stigmatizing silence surrounding women’s vaginas,” wrote Coates-Finke in the Director’s Note of the program. “She gave a voice to thousands of stories and empowered thousands more to spread them. In this moment…we are adding ourselves and our stories to the many that have come before, and the many still to come.”
As Coates-Finke noted, the show began with a piece written and performed by Jiya Pandya ’17 based on interviews with every member of the cast. Aptly named “The Period Monologue,” Pandya breathlessly exclaimed her 12-year-old excitement at becoming a member of the exclusive ‘club’ of womanhood only to discover that the implications of this transition involved serious mental and physical pain, confusion and maturity. The choice to begin with an original, relatively relatable monologue successfully eased the audience into the rest of the play.
Four narrators, Katie Carlson ’15, Akhila Khanna ’17, Marium Sultan ’16 and Helen Wu ’16.5 provided contexts for each of the monologues, discussing the origin of each piece and adding statistical information when necessary.
Dana Tripp ’14 sat down as if she was about to get a haircut in “Hair,” but she wasn’t talking about the hair on her head. Looking pointedly at the audience, she explained her husband’s request for her to remove the hair around her vagina and her subsequent embarrassment and physical pain. The cheating husband insisted that it would save their relationship, and even a female marriage counselor agreed that everyone must make sacrifices, but in the end Tripp’s character decided that the hair was there for a reason and that it is a personal decision for each woman. The audience was nervous, shifting and looking around for other reactions, but Tripp’s captivating delivery of the monologue successfully captured the attention of the spectators, leaving everyone wondering what else to expect.
In each interview, Ensler asked, “What would your vagina wear?” and “If it could speak, what would it say?” and the responses are peppered throughout the piece.
Two ensemble presentations near the beginning of the play aimed to provide a sampling of responses to these questions. In the second, more memorable piece, the women paired up and formed – what else – visual vaginas, hands stretched up and together and bodies curving inward. As each pair recited a phrase that vaginas said, their bodies moved outward and inward, ‘lips’ opening and closing as the words were spoken. Nervous laughter and squirms were rampant throughout the audience.
Fourteen women comprised the cast of the production, all dressed in black with a few key red accessories. The play included students from many majors united by their interest in feminism and portrayals of the female body. Seven of the actors were international students, a much higher percentage than is usually present in theater productions on campus.
“I’m proud of the women I’ve worked with—or I guess inspired would be a better word,” Coates-Finke said. “They are amazing, brave and bold, and they took risks without hesitation, even though for many of them this type of theater and/or these kinds of conversations are new and can be kind of intimidating.”
Adara Wicaksono ’17 acted the story of a woman in her 60’s who had never experienced an orgasm and only referred to her vagina as her “down there.” In “The Flood,” she recounted with nuanced pain and regret an encounter with a handsome young man from her adolescence, haltingly revealing that she had unwillingly flooded the seat of his car after their first kiss, prompting his judgment and her decision never to enter into relationships again. She remembered with glee her dreams of ‘Marlon and I,” in which she and Marlon Brando went out for dinner dates only for the restaurant to be flooded with water, fish and Marlon’s good friend, Al Pacino, swimming by. The embarrassment and longing caused by her natural bodily reaction was heartbreaking, and raises questions about why women (and men) are so afraid of vaginas.
Lorena Neira ’17 sported pink pajama pants as the rest of the cast circled around her, enraptured by her tale “Because He Liked to Look At It.” The audience was equally enraptured by Neira’s subtle use of humor and insight as she described Bob, an ordinary man who was not smart, interesting, funny or handsome. He was the most ordinary man she’d ever met, she explained, until their chance meeting led to a revelatory bedroom experience. Bob, it turned out, was ordinary in every way except that he wanted to look at Neira’s character - not her face, she soon discovered, but to really look at the essence of her – her vagina. Initially uncomfortable, Neira eventually described her most powerful and connected sexual experience through acceptance of her vagina’s existence and appearance.
Sarah James ’17 recounted another story of empowerment in “The Vagina Workshop,” in which she described her experience at a class full of women as they lay back on mats with mirrors, looking at their vaginas and eventually finding their clitorises.
While this may sound like the most uncomfortable workshop ever invented, James delivered the monologue with a gentle seriousness that distracted from the awkward nature of the class. For James’ character, finding her clitoris (“I’ve lost it! I’ve lost my clitoris!”, she exclaimed at one point to her instructor) reconnected her to her femininity and allowed her to embrace her vagina.
In deciding to incorporate multiple players into a dramatized rendition of each of the monologues, Coates-Finke created a more visually engaging theatrical experience, capitalizing on the vivid textual material and individual talents of each involved student. They also broke the mold with these innovative staging decisions, as the play is traditionally presented as a series of “single-actor-on-stage” monologues.
“The play was a little hard to grapple with at first. It’s usually done very informally with women just sitting on chairs to deliver their monologues, ” Coates-Finke said. “I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t like that from an artistic or aesthetic standpoint, and I wanted the women in the cast to be a constant and active part of every moment in the show.”
In perhaps the most lighthearted monologue of the night, Maeve Grady ’16.5 portrayed “The Woman Who Liked to Make Vaginas Happy,” describing her transition from a corporate tax lawyer to female dominatrix, strutting across the stage in red heels as she described the feeling of empowerment stemming from making women moan. As she culminated her monologue, each of the cast members rested back on their hands, facing away from the audience, each demonstrating one of the many moans classified by Grady, prompting the biggest laughs of the night. A few of the linguistically describable include the Jewish Moan—Oy, oy—and the Irish Catholic moan—Forgive me, Father!.
Positioned as a stark juxtaposition, Sandra Markowitz ’16 recounted one girl’s traumatic experiences from ages 5 to 16 in “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could.” Markowitz described a familial rape that caused her to want to hide from her sexuality forever before detailing her “salvation” at age 16, when she was seduced by a powerful, 24-year-old woman who gave her such a positive sexual experience that she felt “healed,” though she never saw the woman again. This monologue originally included the line “If it was rape, it was good rape,” which was removed from later versions. Is it more heartbreaking that she was only able to start the healing process through another form of abuse, or is it a relief that she was able to again confront her sexuality? It is for the audience to decide.
Coates-Finke thinks that though the play is performed from a female perspective about the female body, people of any mature age can benefit from a viewing.
“Male-identified, male-bodied people do not belong in this play because it addresses oppression affecting female-identified people with vaginas,” Coates-Finke said. “But men should be feminists; men should support gender equality; men should seek solutions, and so this play is important in that it is educational and eye-opening for anyone to see. I love that this play is extremely sex-positive and body-positive. A lot of time is spent discussing the ways that our bodies do not function or look the way we want them to, and no time is spent talking about the awesome things they do for us—like sex!”
Celeste Allen ’16 burst onto the stage to confront a word with a mostly derogatory connation, “Cunt.” At the beginning of the performance, she unbuttoned her black dress shirt to reveal a tank top falling above “CUNT” spelled in red tape above the area it described. Bracing and cold, the word is almost more uncomfortable to say and hear than vagina, but Allen’s alternating rapid and slow patterns across the stage, fluid arm movements and smooth, relaxing voice worked to change that. By the end of the performance, the word did not sound as harsh or jarring. The monologue revealed that a word is only as embarrassing or crass as it is made out to be.
Jingyi Wu ’16.5 closed the show with a performance of “I Was There in the Room,” a monologue penned by writer Eve Ensler about watching her grandaughter’s birth. As Wu poetically described the opening and the motions of the vagina in childbirth, the rest of the cast formed a half-circle in front of her, each woman leaning against the cast member in front of her. As the birth progressed, the circle began to move, waving in and out until Pandya made her way, sitting on the floor, out of the middle. This piece of dance added a powerful layer to the monologue, prompting even more thought about what childbirth really means for the female body.
Talking about the vagina is uncomfortable. Actually, even writing this article was uncomfortable. The Vagina Monologues asks why society is so scared to talk about this part of the female figure and invites women to open up about their own relationships with their vaginas. In sharing their stories, they connect with audiences around the world while bringing attention to the abuse and pain suffered by so many. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable, but Coates-Finke and the cast and crew of the College’s production tackled the task with grace and depth by adding choreography and personal experience. The audience laughed, squirmed and was forced to think, at least for a little while, about a subject that is usually completely ignored, which, in my mind, is a recipe for a great night at the theater.
(02/19/14 9:21pm)
Though Sochi might be over 5,000 miles from our home here in Vermont, Middlebury’s connection to the home of this year’s Winter Olympics may not be as far as you think. Since the 1940s, the College’s Snow Bowl and Rikert Center have produced some of the nation’s most impressive nordic and alpine skiers. This year, the College has five alumni at the Olympics: Nordic ski racer Simeon “Simi” Hamilton ’08, men’s US Alpine Ski Team coach Forest Carey ’00, US Nordic Ski Team coach Matt Whitcomb ’01, women’s US Alpine Ski Team trainer Brie Pike Sprenger ’04, and US Alpine Ski Team strength and conditioning coach Bobby Poehler ’10. We even have an Olympian in our midst, alpine skier Yina Moe-Lange ’15 who went to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics! This week, the Campus caught up with some of these talented athletes and other former Olympians from the College to learn about their journeys from tiny Middlebury to the premier world stage of athletics.
Dorcas Wonsavage '87-- Nordic Skiing
Wonsavage ’87 has competed in three Olympic Games: Calgary in ’88, Albertville in ’92 and Lillehammer in ’94. From Hanover, New Hampshire, she began Cross-Country skiing in her senior year of high school. “Give the world your best that you have and the best will come back to you,” she recalled the quote she lived by. “I had parents who always told me ‘we don’t care what grades you get, we just want you to learn what you want to learn.’ It wasn’t about results or grades—and it was so liberating and that created a vacuum where I didn’t have huge expectations set upon me. But I wanted to prove them wrong.”
Even while directing her attention to passion rather than tallied victories, she delivers real results: She ranked 8 in Calgary ’88 women’s 4x5 kilometers relay race. Her best result was a 24th place in the women’s 20km skate race at Calgary—the top result of any U.S. or Canadian Cross-Country skier.
However, Wonsavage’s favorite Olympic Games by far was held in Lillehammer, Norway. “By the 1992 Olympic Games in [Albertville,] France, we were in a country where women, winter and sports like Cross-Country skiing were not highly valued. It was a tough two weeks!” she said. “But in Lillehammer (’94), where the entire country embraces winter sports. My husband would be leaving Storgatta at midnight to head to his house by the ski jumps and ski trails, and people were hiking up with huge backpacks to camp out and save a place by the trail so they could cheer on their country. In the middle of the trail system, fans had built a tent city where they stayed for the entire two weeks. We’d ski by during training and they’d invite us in for some aquavit! Families were completely at home outside in the snow. After the races, we’d see parents cut snow benches and tables, start a fire and roast hotdogs and marshmallows for their kids. We were from a country where our sport was overshadowed by the ball sports; but in Norway even when we finished in the second page of the results, they’d cheer us on by name.”
Wonsavage now lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Paul, and son, Max. Twenty years after the Lillehammer Olympics, she is still taking on new challenges, going back to school to get her masters in Education - Teaching of Writing. and never forgetting her Middlebury teammates, professors and coaches who constantly challenged her and made the journey fun. “I had my best results in my first Olympics, when I had no expectations and skied just to do my very best. I try to bring that same combination of humility and a sense of humor to everything I do. I love accomplishing something that no one expected me to do.”
Gordon Eaton '62-- Alpine Skiing
“I guess I just like going fast,” said Olympian Gordon Eaton ’62, of why he enjoyed competing in downhill alpine skiing, which is the fastest and therefore most dangerous alpine Olympic event. Eaton spent seven years as a student at Middlebury College because every other year he would take off to ski race on the world circuit. His experience skiing at the College was immensely defined by another Olympian: US Olympic Ski Team coach (Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy ’56) and Middlebury ski coach Robert “Bobo” Sheehan, whom Eaton describes as the best race day coach he ever had.
“We were always prepared, always eager, always fired up,” remembers Eaton, “and a lot of it had to do with Bobo’s character and personality. Everybody liked skiing for Bobo.”
Eaton’s hard work on and off the snow landed him a spot on the US Ski Team for the 1960 and 1964 Winter Olympics. In 1960 in Squaw Valley, Calif., he placed 17th in the downhill event, having the second best time of the American competitors. In 1964 in Innsbruck, Austria, he did not race due to injury. The experience of being unable to compete was disappointing to Eaton, but as he said, “You go into this understanding that there are gonna be bumps and bruises along the way, so it’s all part of the deal.”
Luckily, Eaton had the opportunity to return to the Olympics in 1968 in Grenoble, France; this time as a men’s coach of the US Ski Team. After his Olympic experience, Eaton coached the Alpine ski team at the College from 1975-1978. Today, he lives in Middlebury and owns a restaurant, sells ski clothing to ski vendors and participates in ski design with K2. In his free time, Eaton still likes to ski at his old training hill, the Middlebury College Snow Bowl, and will sometimes meet up with his college racing buddies. “Going to the Olympics was awesome,” said Eaton, “but it’s the journey and the people along the way that still have real meaning to you [years later].
John Bower '63-- Nordic Skiing
John Bower, a native of Auburn, Maine, graduated from Middlebury in 1963 and went on the following year to make the US team for the Nordic combined event (a combination of ski jumping and Cross-Country ski racing) for the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Bower said he was “awestruck” at the ’64 Olympics. The high pressure of the games interfered with his ability to ski at his greatest potential, and he placed 15th. Returning home, he put his “heart and soul into training” for the next three years. In 1968, he returned to Middlebury as the head ski coach, but was given the winter off to compete again in Nordic combined in the ’68 Olympics in Grenoble, FR. He hoped that his further experience at maintaining composure under pressure would help him perform better in his second Olympics, but he was still “trying too hard to win”, and placed 13th.
Only one month later, however, Bower competed in the King’s Cup in Norway against the same field of athletes. In this final competition of his career, he became the first non-European to win the cup. In Norway, Bower “figured out how to relax” and enjoy racing in a way that he had never managed to in the Olympics. As the champion, Bower met the king of Norway, who was “very congratulatory” and put Bower on his list of requested guests for a state dinner in the king’s honor at the White House. Bower described the black tie affair as “one of the most intimidating experiences of my athletic career. It’s a whole different level of social interaction.”
Bower returned to Middlebury to coach fall Cross-Country, winter Nordic skiing and spring Track for seven years. He saw several of his skiers go on to make Olympic teams, including Joe McNulty ’72. “There are a lot of distractions at Middlebury,” Bower admits, and it is the students that make sacrifices to stay focused and disciplined who are generally successful. Bower went on to serve as the Nordic team leader for the 1976, 1980, and 1992 Olympic Games, and to work as the Nordic program director for the US ski team in Park City, Utah. He is now retired and lives in Moab, Utah with his wife, Bonnie.
Yina Moe-Lange '15-- Alpine Skiing
From an early age, Yina Moe-Lange ’15 proved herself one of the best female skiers in Denmark, but she had not expected to meet the Danish Ski Federation’s qualifications. Her success in many competitions leading up to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics had distinguished her among her compatriots, and she was chosen to represent Denmark for the women’s alpine team.
“The Olympics were absolutely terrifying and exhilarating at the same time,” Moe-Lange said. The size and significance of the Games intimidated her, but did not affect her performance.
“While I probably could have skied a bit faster, I was extremely happy since I had made it down and had accomplished what most people only dream of doing,” she said. For her, the point was the surreality of the experience and the memories she made at the Games.
Now, Moe-Lange is competing for the Middlebury Alpine Ski Team, and the league in which the College competes “is about as competitive as you can get without becoming professional,” she said.
Balancing school and skiing is always a tricky maneuver, especially for Moe-Lange, who remains determined to devote one hundred percent into academics and athletics alike.
“The hardest part of it is having to complete everything you want to do while also doing a good job on everything, since both parts are so important,” she said.
But Moe-Lange is still thankful to be a Panther. She credits the College with teaching her the “magic of time management” and allowing her to converge the important things in her life. Her team, which she describes as a family, has allowed her to improve her skiing while simultaneously “bring[ing] out the best athlete in everyone.”
At this point, Moe-Lange has no concrete future plans beyond finishing her final year as a Panther and then taking a year off before “entering the real world to continue pursuing the dream.”
Simi Hamilton '08-- Nordic Skiing
Middlebury’s only athlete competing in the 2014 Winter Olympics is Nordic skier, Simi Hamilton ’08. A native of Aspen, CO, Hamilton began skiing at the young age of two and his current sport, Cross-Country skiing, at thirteen. Before coming to the College, Hamilton collected an impressive nine Junior National titles and three Colorado high school crowns. As a competitor on the College’s Nordic team, Simi added three All-American honors to his resume and went to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics during his senior year where he competed in the 4x10km Relay, Sprint Classic and 15km Free. Since 2010, Hamilton was been a consistent scorer on the World Cup circuit, placing as high as seventh and earning him a spot on the 2014 US Nordic Ski Team. In Sochi, Hamilton placed 21st in the Men’s Sprint Free on February 11 and 11th in Men’s 4x10km Relay on February 16.
“Everyone who’s reading this has probably had that experience at some point in their life of really wanting to do things over again,” commented Hamilton about his 11th place finish on his blog. “That’s pretty much where I’m at with how the sprint turned out. But what I’ve realized in the last few days since the race, is that I do get to do it over again, because there are going to be SO many more races—Olympic races, World Cup races, World Championship races—ahead of me in the future.”
For now, Simi gets to enjoy the privilege of being in the company of the best athletes in the world. He said on his blog of the experience, “to be part of a larger team—not just an American team but a World team—is the most awesome feeling that exists, I’m pretty sure.”
Chris Waddell '87-- Alpine Skiing
Waddell came to Middlebury in the winter of 1988 as a Feb and a promising member of the ski team. But on December 20 of the same year, Waddell suffered a skiing accident that paralyzed him from the waist down. After two months in the hospital, Waddell came back to campus. Though the College had never been home to anyone in a wheelchair, “they made everything wheelchair accessible,” Waddell said, lauding the community’s support and compassion.
Shortly after his accident, Waddell’s friends and teammates bought him his first Monoski, which is made up of a molded seat bound to an ordinary alpine ski. For the next three years, he stayed on the team, becoming captain as a senior.
“It was kind of like being a disembodied head,” Waddell said, laughing, of the transition from standing skis to the monoski. “My mind knew what I was supposed to do, and my body had no ability whatsoever to obey any of the instruction from my mind.”
But after just one week, Waddell was making it from mountaintop to the bottom without falling. His training mirrored that of the rest of the ski team, though he jokes, “Mine was more about trying not to kill myself, whereas they were trying to go fast…It really took me about three years to feel like I was actually good.”
But Waddell greatly underplays his achievements. In May of 1991, just two and a half years after his accident, Waddell made the US Olympic Disabled Team. After graduating in February of 1992, Waddell became a full-time athlete, competing in the Paralympics in Albertville, France.
Winning silver medals in both his events, Slalom and Giant Slalom, in Albertville, Waddell launched in on what he calls his “breakthrough year”. “Tthe year where I felt like I got good, and actually became the best Monoskier in the world, which was pretty cool,” he said nonchalantly.
In the 1994 Lillehammer, Norway Games, Waddell won all four races he entered – Slalom, Giant Slalom, Super G and Downhill.
Lillehammer remains the most significant Games in Waddell’s career because he beat all the other monoskiers–not just those at his level of sensation. Monoskiing is divided into levels based on what vertebrae the athlete has broken and the corresponding degrees of sensation retained. Waddell skies at a higher level of injury, with sensation starting at his belly button. He lacks a great amount of core strength compared to other monoskiers, some of whom still maintain walking abilities. Therefore, rising to the top of the monoskiing heap, in Lillehammer meant more to Waddell than his medal count.
But Waddell’s athleticism did not confine him to winter sports; his talent in wheelchair racing, a component of his dryland training, allowed him to compete in three summer Games as well. Waddell’s wheelhouse was massive, encompassing six events: the 100, 200, 400 and 800 meters, as well as the 4x100 and 4x400 relays. Waddell competed in the 1996 Atlanta Games, won the silver in the 200 meters in the 2000 Sydney Games, and appeared in the 2004 Games in Athens, Greece. His success in wheelchair racing has made Waddell one of the few athletes who have won World Championship competitions in winter and summer.
Since retiring his ski, Waddell has developed an organization called One Revolution, whose mission is to “turn perception of disability upside down,” he said.
“The definition of ‘disability’ is that you’re effectively something less,” Waddell said. In an attempt to overturn this conventional understanding of the term and to spread One Revolution’s message, Waddell climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in a hand cycle in 2009, aiming to become the first paraplegic to climb the peak.
But the trip went differently than he planned. Obstructed by one rocky outcropping, Waddell was disappointed that his team had to carry him 100 feet to a steadier place. Looking back, he believes the obstacle was rather a blessing, as it shattered the superheroic image that had shadowed him since leaving the hospital in Middlebury.
“A superhero never has a bad day, so [that image] didn’t allow me to be real,” Waddell said. “Not making it that hundred feet was actually the most liberating thing; in some ways, I failed, but it was also the greatest gift because it allowed me to distance myself from the superman doppelganger.”
(02/19/14 6:48pm)
Hey kidiots! Does that start us out on the wrong foot? These days I’ve been feeling like my social filter is made out of Swiss Cheese, holes punched through with the heavy artillery of being “totally over it.” I am frustrated with how seriously we take each other and bummed with how we casually we dismiss our own influence over each other. You are kidiots! And scummos! But also fragile Jenga towers of Babylon! And leavers of invisible legacies! And so am I. We are Taylor Swift-esque with the power to be a milli things at once. We are simultaneously gross and arrogant and insecure and great and isn’t that pretty cool?
I want to introduce you to this column about anything that loosely has to do with this ambiguous idea I’ve termed “fake science.” A boring example: I take my coffee with milk. The only reason I do it is because once my mother told me that I’d get an ulcer without a splash of milk to protect the lining of my stomach. Not true. I realize now that she said it because she takes milk and kind of liked the idea of us taking our coffee the same, or just because she likes correcting me, but since then, I have taken milk in my coffee. It isn’t out of some sort of familial loyalty, but because I half-secretly-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye believe that I’m actually engaging in a kind of ulcer-prevention. Often our decisions are not based on any generally accepted truths, but are tics and tendencies and coping mechanisms motivated by irrational reasons buried in our formative years or rootless whims.
Fake science is folklore, magical thinking, misrememberings, superstition and myth: the correct cadence of spelling a word aloud, the order of your morning routine, fear of certain animals, debatable pop trivia remembered as fact. It is small versions of what Danny Loehr articulated in his February Celebration address this past month: the stories we tell ourselves become our reality. We adopt them and drop them, not realizing their groundlessness until years later. Sometimes they stick and continue to manifest themselves in our preferences, actions and expressions in the long run.
Sometimes we are endearing. One of my friends used to insist on only wearing cute pajamas every night in case there was a fire and she would have to evacuate the house in the middle of the night and the cute neighbor boy would see her out in the street. Sometimes our fake science is sinister. A different friend used to obsessive compulsively knock on wood to ward off danger; another had convinced herself that her eating disorder was a vegan diet. Locating your irrationalities does not always end in exorcising them—the aim is simply to be more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is critical because, believe it or not, someone out there is learning how to live by observing you living out a fake science, through your words or emotions. It is a very frightening and exciting responsibility. Trust me when I say: You have an effect on other people.
I didn’t make up “kidiots.” It was the name of a blog active in 2010 run by some funny Middlebury students, one who is still a friend of mine. On the Kidiot blog, she wrote a short piece about turning 20. I recently saw her and she’s doing really well; she owns a pet hedgehog in Brooklyn and has really healthy chakras, which were somewhat shaken when I shyly mentioned how much that old piece meant to me and thanked her. She hadn’t expected anyone to be reading.
The site where we make a legacy that sticks to someone’s brain will not be where we expect it to be, and it is happening all the time. It won’t be what we wanted to have been remembered by, and it will not be by the people we care about the most. We won’t even notice all the micro-legacies we leave and collateral damage we cause for the most part, unless that person is moved to tell us about it. So that’s what I’m interested in here — the awareness of our own absurdities, the way they effect our community and the effort to reach out and make the stakes feel real for someone, even for a second.
This column isn’t Mythbusters. I’m not going to always talk about how we are dumb kids and what it is we’re getting wrong or right. I just want make some hazy observations and opinions on the intersection of “culture” (which is what exactly?), college students and the way we live. Most of these articles are inspired by nightmare notes I wrote to myself in the middle of the night or Gchat conversations or visions that come to me when I’m lying on the floor of my thesis carrel underneath my coat, reading Joan Didion. I’m just your neighborhood neurotic, popping an anti-anxiety Rx in Proctor and admiring your hair from the next table over. Humans! We’re so crazy! It’s so great, right? Lets talk about it until 4 a.m.
(02/19/14 3:41pm)
The Middlebury women’s basketball team wrapped up its season this past weekend with road games against conference foes Trinity and Amherst. The Panthers fell behind in the second half in a loss at Trinity on Friday, Feb. 14, before being beaten from tip to buzzer in Sunday’s matchup with twelfth-ranked Amherst, the final game in a Panther jersey for Middlebury’s senior class.
By virtue of their loss to Bowdoin the previous week, Middlebury was eliminated from possible contention for the NESCAC playoffs before beginning the final weekend of the regular season. This was the second time in three years that the team had fallen outside the top eight in the regular-season conference standings and thus failed to qualify for the conference tournament.
For the team’s five seniors, this meant that they knew going into the weekend’s games that they would be the last of their college careers.
“It is strange to think that Sunday was the last time that I’ll play basketball competitively because I’ve been playing since I was three years old, so I’m not entirely sure that it has hit me yet,” Laura Lowry ’14 said. “As always, it was great to be able to get the opportunity to put on my jersey and compete with my teammates.”
Middlebury got out to a quick start in Friday’s matchup with Trinity, taking a 7-2 lead three minutes in on a jumper from Elizabeth Knox ’17. The Bantams came storming back, however, knotting the score at 11 with a pair of free throws four minutes later. Trinity used a large rebounding advantage to stretch that lead through halftime, going into the break with a 35-25 lead.
The Panthers played their way back into the game in the opening minutes of the second half. After Rachel Crews ’15 hit on a pair of free throws, Knox converted a layup to cut the lead to 42-38 with 15 minutes left to play and force a Trinity timeout.
From that point, a rash of turnovers and poor rebounding from the Panthers allowed the Bantams to regain control of the momentum. Trinity was able to extend its lead to over 20 with seven minutes to play before a late Middlebury run cut the lead to a 65-50 final in favor of Trinity.
Guard Sarah Marcus ’14 led Middlebury with 10 points in the losing effort, while Lowry and Crews each added nine. The Panthers struggled to match the Bantams on the glass throughout the game, conceding a 48-33 rebounding deficit that led to 11 fewer shots for Middlebury. Trinity held Middlebury’s leading rebounder, Scarlett Kirk ’14, to just six rebounds in the game, nearly four below her season average.
Back on the road against twelfth-ranked Amherst on Sunday, the Panthers put up a fight early before letting the game get out of hand in the later stretches of the opening half.
After Amherst took an early lead, Crews converted a three-point play six minutes in to draw the Panthers within two at 9-7. Over the next 12 minutes, however, the Lord Jeffs went on a 29-3 scoring run that effectively ended the game before halftime. During that stretch – which included a seven-minute scoreless drought for Middlebury – Amherst used strong rebounding and deadly three-point shooting to overwhelm the Panthers. At the half, Middlebury trailed 43-15.
With Amherst’s reserves playing significant minutes, Middlebury was unable to mount any sort of comeback in the second half. The Lord Jeffs shot over 50 percent from the field after the intermission, allowing them to further stretch the lead. While the Panthers were more efficient on the offensive end in the second half, the lead was simply too much to overcome, and they fell by a final tally of 79-41.
That result was a bitter ending for Middlebry’s seniors.
“Obviously, I wish that the outcome was different but I love competing against the best teams in the country,” Lowry said. “I chose Middlebury because I wanted to play in the best conference in the country, among other things of course. I loved the four years that I got to play on this team and I learned an incredible amount.”
With the sour end to the regular season, Middlebury finishes the 2013-2014 campaign with a final record of 7-17, including a 1-9 mark in conference play. The Panthers finish in a three-way tie with Colby and Bates for last place in the NESCAC, a setback from last year’s 4-6 conference record and fourth-place finish.
For the team’s seniors, the season is the culmination of a rocky career which saw them go winless in the conference as sophomores in 2011-2012 before rebounding to make the playoffs during their junior seasons.
Nevertheless, Lowry believes that the seniors have left on a mark on the program that will allow the current underclassmen to build on their struggles going forward.
“When the underclassmen and the coaches look back and think about my class, I want them to remember us as a hardworking, unselfish group of competitors who embodied what Middlebury basketball is,” Lowry said. “I want them to remember us as great teammates, who cared about every girl on the team and put them before ourselves.”
In the senior trio of Kirk, Marcus and Lowry, Middlebury graduates nearly 30 points and 16 rebounds per game, a considerable void which they will need to fill if they are to start the rebuilding process in the 2014-2015. The seniors leave behind a core of talented underclassmen – including Knox and Crews, the team’s second and fifth leading scorers – who will hope to improve on this year’s record as they lead the Panthers into next season.
“I want the underclassmen to continue the unselfishness and relentless play that has characterized Middlebury basketball for at least the last four years and I am very confident that they will continue to do so,” Lowry said.
(02/13/14 2:57am)
Language Tables Head Waiter, Ricardo Martini '16
Ricardo Martini, is a language table super-star. He started working as a humble Italian waiter during the J-term of last year, and after just one semester, was chosen to be a head waiter this past fall. Martini says the position of Head Waiter is more than being a “glorified bus boy” in the dining room. “Behind the scenes, you have to clean the space, you have to mop, wipe down counters, grab the bread and salad, make sure everything’s there, the dishes are there, the utensils. At the end of the day, it’s under your belt that everything goes smoothly.” When hiring new waiters/waitresses, Martini said he looks for applicants who are “patient and attentive and will actually put in an effort into translating the menu; that’s why google translate and word reference exist!”
Martini also pointed out a key difference in shifting roles from a waiter to a head waiter. “You have more creative freedom as a waiter than as a head waiter where you have to act more like a responsible manager.” He recalled, “One time [as a waiter], I wore a suit and I was part of the Italian Mafia serving them the food.” However, Martini’s favorite memory as a language table waiter was serving special birthday treats to tables accompanied by a hearty performance of “Buon Compleano!”
“One thing I like to do with language tables is make people feel important,” Martini said. “They’re not just students sitting down [for a meal]; they’re key members of the culture they’re sitting at. I truly believe your mind changes based on the language you speak. Different cultures influence your thoughts and that’s something great that can happen in a place like Ross Dining.” Martini is now being promoted to the co-manager position alongside senior veterans, like Cameron McKinney ’14 and Niko Lambert ’14.
Usher, Jiaya Zhu '14
“This is a really good time to be thinking about becoming an usher,” Jiayi Zhu said, “because half of the current staff is going to be gone by the end of this year, so we need people to be trained now.” There are few jobs on campus that make you look more professional than being an usher. The white-top-black-bottom classic attire exudes an air of professionalism. You have most probably by now seen an usher at work: they check your tickets and hand you a program at the door, lead you to your seat in the concert hall and do a whole host of other things that you never noticed. These include checking that all the exits are clear before an event begins, for example, and picking up the programs on the floor and in the seats after everyone has left. “Getting the job was quite straightforward,” Zhu said. “Shannon Bohler-Small [Arts Events Manager] did an informal interview with me and asked me where the toilets are and how to go from the CFA [Center for the Arts] to Old Chapel, for example.” You only need to have been trained for crowd management to be qualified for the job, since most things can be learnt on the job. “What I like about my job is that I get to go to the CFA for theatre performances, concerts and dance shows that I wouldn’t have gone to otherwise. It’s mostly our community members that make the most out of these opportunities,” she said.
Bike Shop Mechanic, Peter Peltzer '17
An avid mountain biker, Parker Peltzer spends many of his evenings at Middlebury Bike Shop teaching students how to repair their bikes or even construct new ones entirely from spare parts. Having worked in a bike shop throughout high school and during his most recent gap year, Peltzer first learned the craft of fixing bikes through reading books including Zinn & the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance and by watching repair videos online. “Fixing bikes has always been something that has felt familiar to me and remains something I enjoy,” Peltzer said. “What I love most about my job at the shop is how enthusiastic the students are about fixing their own bikes here. Students who come in are ready to put in hours working on their bikes.” Interestingly, Peltzer recalls that he first landed the job through a stroke of coincidence in a game of Nerf War. “I was at BiHall at midnight and one of the guys I was playing Nerf War with said he had to wake up early for the Tour de Farms, and that his bike was broken. I went and I fixed his bike and he happened to know who to talk to about a job opening at the bike shop.” When asked if he had any advice for future prospective bike shop teachers, Peltzer encouraged students to drop by the workshop and get to know the work, the space, and the other mechanics. “As long as their skills are ready to go, I’d say that the most important quality is the ability to teach and communicate with others.”
Lead Help Desk Computer Consultant, Anis Mebarki '15
Anis Mebarki’s rapper name at the Help Desk is A.M.—in part because of his initials and in part because he voluntarily takes the early morning shifts. He is “genuinely happy” to go to work each day. He greatly respects his boss, Joe Durante, who Mebarki feels is training the Help Desk employees for work in the real world. “It’s way more than a job,” Mebarki said; you get to learn, serve, and get paid. Mebarki has always enjoyed working with computers. Before coming to Middlebury he owned a Linux machine, an alternate operating system to Mac or PC which “iwas a full time job” but taught him a great deal about computer operations. When he arrived on campus in the fall of 2011, Mebarki saw an advertisement for positions at the Help Desk, applied, and was interviewed and selected for the job. Within that year, he worked his way up to become a lead computer consultant, which, coming from Algeria, felt like the American Dream to him. At the Middlebury Help Desk, if not everywhere in the US, Mebarki believes that hard work really pays off.
Gift Planning Assistant, Meghan Buckley '16.5
Maybe one of the farthest “on campus” jobs for students is the post of Office Assistant at the Gift Planning Office, which is located off campus in the Painter House, across the street from Middlebury Inn.
Every afternoon, Monday to Friday, Meghan Buckley, makes the hike from her room at Hepburn to her desk at the Painter House, home of Middlebury founder, Gamaliel Painter, where she begins her two hour shift of answering phones and calling alumni.
“Depending on the weather, it can be a fifteen to twenty minute walk. Most days, I make it there in about fifteen.”
Buckley, who landed the position after she saw a posting on the Student Employment webpage earlier this year, says she didn’t realize “there are so many people who work at the college behind the scenes, making everything work for us. They put in so many hours, so much of their time, and I had no idea.”
“The up is hearing about different alum’s experiences from their time here. It makes me really appreciate the time I have here and makes me want to make the most of it.”
Crossroads Marketing Director, Naila Jahan '15
The brilliance of the Princess Peach and All That Razz smoothies at Crossroads Cafe has finally been uncovered. Naila Jahan, Middlebury’s own vibrant Junior, has adopted the role of Marketing Director at our favorite student-run cafe. Illustrating the range of employment opportunities, Naila’s job is simple: to make Crossroads sexy. Responsible for utilizing social media to publicize the cafe, Naila also collaborates with other workers to create new drink flavors, as well as their corresponding clever names. Her proudest accomplishment has been independently designing a new Crossroads website in hope to attract more attention from students. Although it can be difficult when an executed idea does not find success, the ability to simply “get [her] creative juices flowing” is her favorite part of the job. How did she land this gig? Connections. After getting a job at the cashier her first year with the help of her neighbor that already worked there, Naila gradually moved up to her marketing director position. Now, as the café greets more and more popularity each year, it is exciting for Naila to simply see the growing waiting list of students who wish to even work at the youthful cafe.
Theater Set Maker, Lydia Delehanty '17
When Lydia Delehanty arrived at Middlebury she was an experienced performer and musician, but had no knowledge about theatre and the backstage work that goes into a production. She saw a job posting for set construction on the student employment page and jumped at the chance to exercise her brain “in a way that classes don’t.” She’s been building sets for Middlebury’s various theatre productions, most recently Pentecost, since late September and is happy to have a job “that’s active and actually requires thinking.” Her main reservation about building sets? “I get covered in dust a lot. I end up leaving looking like I either have grey hair or really really bad dandruff.” Despite the dust, Lydia plans to continue working set construction for the rest of the year. As she told me, before the job “I couldn’t have actually gone and been like oh I can build this thing, but now I feel like I could do that.”
Admissions Office, Vladimir Kremenović '17
Vladimir Kremenović, a first-year from Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been working at the admissions office since his first week in college. Admissions is one of the most sought after gigs by student employees, and Kremenović made sure to get on the job three months before he even got to Middlebury; with his job interview taking place on his first day on campus. Now, he helps with filing and documentation at the Admissions headquarters in the Emma Willard house, occasionally answering emails and phone calls and answering questions for prospective students and their families. He stated that good communication, openness and “a good spirit” are key skills for a job at Admissions. The strangest part of working with Admissions, he says, are the amount of questions, some ridiculous, that come from parents rather than the prospective student themselves. Although he acknowledges that alphabetizing files can get tedious at times, he enjoys the job, especially interacting with and meeting new people, saying that his favorite part is being able to contribute to a prospective student’s decision in coming to Middlebury, that, as he puts it “might change their life.” His advice to novices searching for jobs is to contact the offices directly and as early as possible, instead of waiting for online postings.
(02/13/14 12:12am)
After leadership changes at the end of last year rendered the YouPower bike room nearly forgotten, new management and programming boosted bike use during J-term.
YouPower was founded in 2012 by a group of students who turned to MiddSTART, the College’s microphilanthopy network, to raise money for 10 spin bikes linked to generators to be connected to the College’s energy grid. Watt-hours produced by students riding the bikes go directly into powering the College.
Located in the Freeman International Center, the YouPower bike room has been used for individual riding sessions, free student-led classes, private classes and Watt-A-Thons — relay-style events in which teams compete to produce the largest amount of energy in a set period of time.
YouPower’s struggle stems from a lack of continuity. In the past, seniors would assume leadership roles, spend several months organizing classes and schedules and then graduate, leaving YouPower without a leader. This year alone, YouPower classes did not begin until November.
After this period of uncertainty, Nan Philip ’16.5 and Spencer Petterson ’14 are at the helm of YouPower and are working to improve programming, increase regular use and set future goals.
Petterson first became involved with YouPower in Fall 2012 when she served as an instructor. After a call for new managers went out over the summer, she decided to seek a leadership position.
“It was something that I really didn’t want to see die,” Spencer said noting the ecological impact YouPower can have and the value of it being a student-run initiative.
“It took a while for us to get it [YouPower] reorganized,” said Philip, who cited a string of miscommunications and misunderstandings as a roadblock to YouPower’s success.
In spite of past struggles, a recent boost in support has left Philip optimistic about YouPower’s future. Petterson noted Operations and Events Manager Franklin Dean-Farrar and members of the Student Government Association (SGA) who helped to boost operations and instructing YouPower’s leaders on exercise safety rules and regulations.
The location of the YouPower bike room on the north end of campus, adjacent to Ross, Coffrin, Atwater and the Chateau, offers an alternative to the athletic center.
“The YouPower room is a great alternative to the gym, especially because I live in Ross and that’s a long, cold walk in the winter,” said Rachel Kinney ’16.5, who plans to use YouPower throughout the spring semester.
As of Jan. 23, 323 students used YouPower during J-term, with most staying on the bikes for 30-60 minutes. The average watt-hours generated by students in an hour-long session is enough to power two 60-watt light bulbs for an hour.
YouPower currently has six student-instructors registered, some of whom are officially certified to teach classes and others who are merely passionate about spinning. Philip and Petterson are looking to expand their roster and bring on new leadership. Information about YouPower student-led courses, open ride hours and becoming involved with the bike room can be found at go/youpower.
“It’s cool … to think about the amount of energy needed for even the simplest things,” Petterson said. “It’s amazing to realize that after I turn my lights off, I would have to bike for an hour just to get them running again for that amount of time.”
(02/12/14 4:54pm)
A recent student initiative suggests that Middlebury’s system of academic requirements is in need of reform. Specifically, the authors of the proposal, Daniela Barajas ’14.5 and Rana Abdelhamid ’15, criticize the AAL requirement for failing to embody the College’s commitment to expose students to a variety of the worlds’ cultures and civilizations. Their proposal is rapidly gaining traction: it is the most successful initiative in the history of the We The Middkids online platform, and last week it gained an endorsement from SGA President Rachel Lidell.
The proposal is right to point out the oddity of lumping Africa, Asia, and Latin America together. This label cannot be explained in terms of geography or culturally affinity. The existence of AAL is only explainable as a transparent and inelegant attempt to avoid calling a spade a spade – that is to say, to avoid using the label OTH (“other”), AAL’s predecessor prior to 2003.
The proposed initiative would keep the NOR (North America) requirement, but eliminate AAL and instead require students to chose two regions from the following five: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Europe. On the surface, it seems inherently logical to disaggregate the AAL region into its constituent regions, as well as to recognize the Middle East as a distinct region.
But this suggestion masks a sea change in the distribution requirements: EUR (Europe) would no longer be required. Students could graduate without ever having taken a class covering the cultural and civilizational heritage of Europe – the Western heritage that is the fount of Middlebury College.
The authors of the proposal concede that the NOR requirement should remain in place, out of deference to Middlebury’s geographic location. But Middlebury’s position cannot simply be defined by physical geography. Middlebury is physically located in North America, but it is a Western educational institution, and as such it cannot be viewed as separate from the European tradition. Middlebury’s structure as an institute of higher learning dates back to the European Middle Ages; its values harken from the European Enlightenment. The fact that Western civilizations are especially emphasized at Middlebury is wholly appropriate, and should remain so.
This initiative suggests that the college errs somehow by emphasizing the study of Western cultures and civilizations. By privileging the study of North America and Europe over the rest of the world, they argue that it demeans non-Western thought. But the existing set of requirements does not somehow “minimize” the importance of non-Western culture and civilization. Any student worthy of admission to Middlebury can recognize that non-Western thought is neither uniform nor somehow less important.
But a four-year education is limited in scope, and cannot possibly encompass the study of the entire world. Choices have to be made, and, given the cultural roots of Middlebury itself, it is reasonable that Middlebury students should expect their education to uniquely emphasize the Western tradition. One would hardly think it fair to criticize al-Azhar in Cairo for paying disproportionate attention to the Arab cultural heritage, or Peking University for focusing on the achievements of Chinese civilization.
I commend Ms. Barajas and Ms. Abdelhamid for their work. Many students have undoubtedly pondered Middlebury’s graduation requirements and speculated on how to improve them, but they have created a logical, well-reasoned, and cogent proposal and have unsurprisingly gathered significant support. But while they are right to urge the scrapping of the AAL requirement, I believe their proposed solution would move Middlebury’s curriculum in an inauspicious direction.
With this in mind, I would like to present a modified proposal. Rather than beating around the bush, why not bring back the OTH requirement? What OTH lacks in political correctness, it would make up for in intellectual honesty. The exhaustive nature of the OTH category would at least recognize the inherent futility of trying to rationally subdivide the non-Western world into neat little groups. One need only look at the proposed new categories to see that any such attempt will result in an inelegant, un-nuanced framework. The ASI (Asia) requirement, for instance, would still lump together over half the world’s population, including the bulk of the world’s Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim civilizations. If the goal is to bestow a greater respect for the diversity of non-Western cultures, this hardly seems an improvement over the status quo.
The winds of change are in the air. President Liebowitz is leaving. Rumors surround the future of the honor code. Now Middlebury’s degree requirements also seem to be in flux. This is an exciting time to be a Middlebury student. Although I will likely not be around to witness the conclusion of these trends, I trust in the Middlebury community to resolve these issues logically and in the spirit of cooperation, collegiality, and reasoned discourse.
MAX KAGAN '14 is from Freeport, ME
(01/23/14 3:43am)
This weekend at the Hepburn Zoo, a group of five students will present “Gruesome Playground Injuries,” a two-character play written by Rajiv Joseph. The story follows the relationship of Kayleen and Doug, played by Alia Khalil ’14.5 and Ben Kramer ’13.5, from the ages of eight to thirty-eight as they experience various injuries throughout their lives.
The play is performed in a series of chronological vignettes, each presenting a new injury one of the characters has sustained and providing snapshots of the relationship.
“The physical injuries are metaphors for emotional injuries,” Khalil said. “I hope that the show will provoke thoughts on timing and why people come into our lives at a certain time.”
Growing up and the resulting maturation of relationships also permeates the work. The audience observes as the characters share brief encounters and bond over their painful injuries at irregular intervals of up to ten years without seeing each other. Their comparison of physical scars becomes an exploration of emotional self-portraits of their lives.
“Gruesome Playground Injuries,” penned by contemporary American playwright Rajiv Joseph in 2009, presents an unusual type of theater, composed of only two characters who remain on stage the entire duration of the 70 minute play. The staging allows the audience to witness the actors shifting their age, costume and props during scene transitions. Participants face a unique challenge to portray believable shifts in their characters with little transition time and without the opportunity to momentarily leave the stage to occupy a slightly different character. The actors must explore the idea of how people change over time as they live through new experiences, while also retaining a core sense of self—a concept not unfamiliar to Middlebury students.
“Gruesome Playground Injuries” is possible due to the dedication of the five involved students, including actors Kramer and Khalil, director and set designer Teddy Anderson ’13.5 and lighting designers Nick Hemerling ’14.5 and Mari Vial-Golden ’14. After Khalil chose the show this past October, the group began rehearsing throughout the fall before J-term, which allowed them to devote more time to preparing the show for production.
“I chose the show because of the intriguing roles of Kayleen and Doug, and the challenge of playing roles whose greatness stems from their difficulty for the actor,” Khalil said. “I constantly question the role and how to portray it successfully onstage.”
The students presenting “Gruesome Playground Injuries” have worked hard on their own time outside of their sizeable Middlebury workloads, and are proud to present their efforts to the college audience. Khalil is excited to connect with an audience of peers and share with her friends what the group has been working on.
“It’s not performing a play to an audience of strangers in the Hepburn Zoo,” Khalil said.
The students will present “Gruesome Playground Injuries” this Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8pm each night. Tickets are $4. Come support your fellow students and enjoy the result of their hard work and dedication!
(01/23/14 1:51am)
The College is expanding its network of schools abroad with the newly re-named Middlebury College - CMRS Oxford Humanities Program, in which the College will take on operations conducted by Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) at Oxford.
This is the College’s first C.V. Starr School Abroad in the United Kingdom and is affiliated with Keble College, the largest of the more than three-dozen small, independent, self-governing communities at Oxford.
Prior to the venture, students at the College wishing to study abroad in Oxford were limited to a highly competitive, yearlong stay with Lincoln College at Oxford University, or through CMRS, which is specifically for students who have not matriculated with Oxford.
While CMRS specializes in Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, students also have the option to pursue a general course of study in the Liberal Arts. The program will be open to students of all academic disciplines and will provide the option of a semester- or year-long study abroad experience. In keeping with College policy, students studying with CMRS will receive academic credit for their coursework while abroad.
CMRS follows Oxford’s one-on-one tutorial teaching, in which students register for two private tutorial courses with experts in the material they wish to study. Formal essays are due each week based on primary and secondary source readings. The individual attention by tutors allows for more flexible teaching methods and courses of study.
In addition to Oxford-style tutorials, students register for one seminar course and one Integral Course. The seminar course expands upon work completed in tutorials and allows students to learn from each other. The Integral Course is a larger lecture-based class that provides a broader overview of history, literature and scholarship of the Medieval period and the Early Modern period. Students present extensive formal research papers at the end of the semester, serving as the culmination of a semester’s worth of tutorial and seminar work, as well as independent research.
According to a College press release, A. Barton Hepburn Professor of History Paul Monod, who has been on academic leave this year, will become the program’s director.
“Middlebury-CMRS is an excellent program for students with an interest in the humanities who want to spend a semester or year in Oxford and experience an intellectually challenging environment,” Monod said in the press release. “At the same time, students have a wonderful chance to learn about British culture firsthand.”
Students who studied at CMRS in the past noted the benefits of the tutorial system, in particular, but also acknowledged educational inconsistencies that Middlebury can improve upon.
James McMillan ’14 called his oratory tutorial at CMRS “one of the most productive, formative learning experiences of [his] entire college career.”
“Even with discussion-based classes, … Middlebury doesn’t quite facilitate or foster the development of oral skills. Much of our future professional lives will, at least to some extend, require public speaking,” he noted.
While McMillan himself was paired with tutors who also taught at one of Oxford’s many colleges, his fellow students were not so fortunate.
“Their tutorial experiences were not nearly as strong,” McMillan said. “With Middlebury now overseeing the program, it will be interesting to see if the strength of the faculty becomes more consistent.”
(01/23/14 1:49am)
At the December 2013 Board of Trustees meeting, Professor of Philosophy Lorraine Besser-Jones, Professor of Economics Nicholas Muller, Professor of French William Poulin-Deltour, and Professor of Political Science Amy Yuen were promoted from assistant professors to the rank of associate professor without limit of tenure.
Tenure is granted to professors in tenure track positions after a series of forums and interviews by the faculty review committee. While candidates are evaluated primarily on performance reviews and research published while at the College, the process of granting tenure can remain flexible.
Poulin-Deltour, who has been a member of the College faculty since 2005, followed a non-traditional path to tenure after delaying the process after a year while he took a leave of absence due to throat cancer. The College then gave him an additional year before being reviewed for tenure.
“Because I had been here that extra year, I was starting to feel part of the furniture, as they say,” Poulin-Deltour said. “Having the tenure gives a feeling of rootedness. You’re obviously more willing to invest in the institution because the institution has taken this huge investment in you.”
Besser-Jones echoed Poulin-Deltour’s sentiments on the value of tenure.
“The importance of getting tenure is not only having job security, but also being included,” Besser-Jones said. “Being firmly part of the Middlebury community is why I’m so happy to have tenure. The community, the connection, between faculty and student and between faculty, is strong and cohesive, and I hadn’t found that at other places.”
Besser-Jones also noted that tenure is somewhat of a byproduct of her job, and not necessarily her primary motivation.
“If I were doing things for the sake of tenure I think I would be less successful,” Besser-Jones said. “I’m very motivated and receptive to making changes, and I am continually looking at how classes can go better. I’ve been successful from a research perspective largely because I’ve been willing to put myself out there, and I haven’t hesitated to put my work out there.”
Muller noted that the caliber of students and faculty — active people and active minds interested in talking about ideas both new and old — are what makes him excited to stay at the College.
With regards to research — tenured professors’ responsibility in addition to teaching — tenure can open doors.
“It’s supposed to protect things like academic freedom, so doing research that can be controversial, for example, but useful,” Yuen said. “But I think more else, especially in an institution like this, it also feels like you are accepted in an institution that values what you do.”
While camaraderie among faculty can be counted as a benefit of tenure, the practice and the job security it provides comes with the risk of abuse, according to Yuen.
“When people are granted tenure, most grow through the process and recognize their responsibilities, but some can get distracted and slow down in research,” Yuen said, noting that research and teaching responsibilities offer ample structure and can work to “keep faculty engaged with students, to keep them engaged with research and to keep them engaged with the institution.”
(01/23/14 12:55am)
I spent most of my life wanting to be more alone: wanting to leave neighborhood pickup whiffle ball games early so that I could instead go read a book, wanting my own bedroom at home instead of sharing with my brother, wanting to leave home for college and, once here, waiting anxiously to have a single. No roommate for me; I just wanted to be alone.
That fantasy of seclusion is deeply carved into the American psyche, built into the narratives of every successful politician and every movie superhero. Even the bible sends its protagonist to the wilderness for rebirth. We aspire to retreat into the backwoods when all else fails, and then to wall ourselves off in gated houses ringed by hedges when we succeed. While we work towards that lofty vision, we make do with white wires that plug music into our heads and lounges that have been converted into dorms because we don’t value the space that we provide as much as we value the contributions of a few more paying customers.
Even in our romantic efforts, such as they are at this place, we tend towards the solitary. There is no lonelier moment than the long walk home the day after a meaningless encounter, no deeper connection in a single drunken rendezvous with a stranger, where the conversation is scattered, not remembered, or entirely absent. We say that we would like to fix this, but we never take action to change.
We have become far too skilled at being alone together.
This is my fiftieth and final column for the Campus. While turning in my thesis last week might have seemed a more momentous occasion, these pieces stacked on top of each other would make a taller pile. In a little over a week I will ski down the Snow Bowl, pack my possessions into my car, and hope that it doesn’t break down on my way out of the state. I will finally have the option to be completely alone. I could call it soul-searching, or recharging, tell everyone that I need some space. But at long last, perhaps later than I might have hoped, I know that is not what I want.
We blaze trails not so that we might escape the world, but so that others might follow. Life is better with companionship. We are not born alone nor do we die that way; we are born into the embrace of our families and when we die they gather around to recount the happy moments of our lives, and the moments in between where we steal solitude from company are the moments most likely to later bear the tinge of regret.
As I move on into the next chapter, I do not regret the excesses of my time in college: the times that the night ended and the sun rose over the Green Mountains while my friends and I sat and talked about everything and nothing, the hours spent in Proctor over many tiny courses, or the morning classes that I blew off to head to make fresh tracks at the Snow Bowl. What I do regret are the times that I held back. I regret waiting until junior year to try out the sailing and debate teams. I regret waiting to join my social house and the Campus editorial staff until my senior spring, content for too long to contribute only this column. I regret valuing solitude and down time over team spirit and hard work.
The best friends that I have made here have been when I have taken a chance and given other people the chance to reject me flat out or welcome me into their circle. That may seem like an incredibly obvious point for a final column, but it is one that we only think about at orientation and I know too many people here with that same problem. Instead of complaining about hookup culture, ask somebody out the dinner, drinks or skiing. A shocking number of my male and female friends complain about the lack of dating at Middlebury. Too many seem to fear that the sheer act of asking reeks of desperation, but the regret of not acting far outlasts whatever embarrassment it might cause (especially if you don’t write about it in the Campus). Middlebury only changes when we do.
Some last shout-outs from my bully pulpit: Hannah — I was convinced that we would be at each other’s throats, but I have really looked forward to working with you every week to put this section together. Kyle and Alex — you have done an amazing job this semester. Middlebury — fossil fuel divestment makes financial sense. Rachel and the SGA — please reconsider the community education requirement. Dining services — more taco days! To everyone who read “Apply Liberally” over the past four years — it’s been a pleasure. I leave you with the words of President Josiah Bartlett (D-Sorkinland):
What’s next?
Illustration by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
