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(01/23/14 12:34am)
On Jan. 13, seven students from the class of 2013.5 auditioned to be the student speaker at their graduation at the end of the month. While only one student, Danny Loehr, will be delivering his speech at the ceremony, the following three students submitted their speeches to the Campus.
It is not without a bit of irony that I write this. To be honest, I didn’t choose to be a Feb. I had barely heard the word until the admissions office called me during June of my senior year of high school, just a few weeks before my graduation. “We can let you in off of the waiting list,” I was told. “You’ll be a Feb”. “Great!” I said enthusiastically, and hung up the phone. Almost immediately, I realized that I had no idea what I had just done. “Wait…what’s a Feb?”
Over four years have passed since that day, and I still haven’t figured out the answer to that question—at least not in a way that I can present pithily to you now. I’m sure you all have your own ideas as to what the essential Febness is, but for every such conception there is an exception. At the 2010 Feb celebration, it was rather famously suggested that Febs are the people who show up late to the party and are then left at 3am, still dancing around the room to Michael Jackson, alone. I think the truth, for better or for worse, might be that not all of us quite fit that bill. Some of us got too drunk or too tired and went to bed. Some of us stayed in to do some studying or watch TV. Some of us turned off the Michael Jackson and put on Blink-182.
But, of course, to focus on that would be to miss the point. Setting aside all generalizations about what being a Feb is or isn’t all about, we will gather together in just over a week because we share a common experience. That simple act of taking an extra semester, regardless of how or when that semester was spent, means that by definition we haven’t quite followed that “plan” that is the standard operating procedure these days. It might seem insignificant on paper, but for us, there was a slight glitch in the plan. You had to explain it to your high school friends, to your aunt at Thanksgiving dinner, to the boss you bailed on after a few months of work. Perhaps understandably, no one really got it. Some probably felt sorry for you. One of my friend’s moms sent me a care package during finals week that fall just so I wouldn’t be left out. It was nice, but kind of weird.
Well, being a Feb is kind of weird. And I don’t necessarily mean weird in that cool, quirky—dare I say Febby—way that we love to talk about so much. I also mean it in a different way: uncomfortable, awkward, unsettling. As fashionable as it can be, showing up late to the party can also lead one to feel a bit out of sorts. I think almost my entire hall during that first semester knew me only as “The Feb”, though the closer friends at least called me “Mike the Feb”. I tried to embrace it, but was never sure of exactly what I was embracing.
But that’s all part of the Feb experience, isn’t it? We don’t discuss those particular aspects a lot, but there’s a reason that they come about. When you break from what’s expected, there are certain consequences. You might have to rely on yourself a little bit more than you were prepared to. You might have to go out of your way to make things happen, instead of waiting for them to come to you. I’m sure we’ve all felt that at some point or another during our college careers. Over the past month, reflecting on those experiences—everything from taking forever to make friends, to sitting alone in the dining hall, to constantly getting hosed on class registration—has made me realize how important they are in the context of today.
That is because February 1st, our college graduation, marks the end of that part of our lives whose structure was predefined. Everything up to this point has been more or less laid out for us. I do not mean to say that we haven’t worked to get where we are—merely, that most of us have been on a path through relatively charted waters. Most of us have always known that we would go to high school and college, and that we would probably do pretty well there. Few of us have had a concrete plan beyond that.
That last bit is equal parts exciting and terrifying, but what I want to point out is that our college lives were a bit more uncharted than most others. And therein lies the greatest thing about being a Feb, besides getting to ski down the Bowl with our caps and gowns on. That weirdness that I’ve talked about, as hard as it’s made things sometimes, it’s meant that Febs have developed a tendency to make their own way through Middlebury. That is invaluable preparation for whatever is coming next. Amidst all of those big, inspirational ideas about changing the world that we find in Ted Talks and Upworthy posts, our postgraduate lives will inevitably bring us a day-to-day existence marked at various times by uncertainty, ambiguity, banality, and loneliness. So let’s embrace it, just like we embraced our Febness for the last four years—without always knowing what we’re embracing or exactly why we’re embracing it. Let us welcome and even encourage discomfort. Life is about so much more than fitting in.
I don’t know an easy way to explain what a Feb is. I do know that the graduates that will sit in Mead Chapel on February 1 are some of the most intelligent, engaging, and challenging people I’ll ever know. I know that we came into this place at the same time and that we’re about to walk out, together, four weird years later. And I know that we’re ready. Wherever we go, let’s take a piece of this place with us. We are Febs, and we can do whatever we want. Let’s get out there and do it.
MIKE GADOMSKI is from Moorestown, N.J.
A little over a year ago, I was sitting in my car outside Munroe, hands shaking on the steering wheel. It wasn’t because of the temperature, although it was bitterly cold. I had just returned from a semester abroad in Australia and had last seen Middlebury amid the greenery and blooming trees of May, during the two weeks out of the year when the campus becomes alive before we disappear for the summer. It wasn’t that I hadn’t talked to my friends since then – in the world we’ve grown up in, the people we talk to on a daily basis are decided not by geography but rather by choice – but nonetheless, I was nervous, unsure of how it would feel to be back at this place, experiencing the lives of my friends and vice versa without the filter of carefully curated pictures uploaded onto the internet. At the time I was working at home, and I figured that I could catch up with what I had missed while still setting aside some time to do work. Needless to say, I was terribly wrong.
I was wrong both about the work and about being able to catch up on what I had missed. The amount that goes on here over J-term is really incredible for a place that we tend to often complain is isolated and sleepy. I went to talks about energy and to Two Brothers, panels about Divestment and parties at Palmer. I skied at the Snow Bowl and sang “Like a Prayer” at Karaoke night and enjoyed the best that the dining hall had to offer: taco day (Please, President Liebowitz, if you do nothing else in your remaining months at the helm, make the dining halls have more taco days. For the sake of the febs who will follow us). I had the best of the Middlebury experience in a week, and so of course I did nothing productive. I was too busy “seizing the day” and “only living once” and so on and so forth.
But that week could have been very different, as far too many are.
I know that I am not alone here in saying that I have lost entire weeks of my life to absent-minded scrolling through information that is not relevant to either my success or personal happiness. On good days you might click through the New York Times” and the Atlantic, but more often than not it ends up being “23 Goats Who Cannot Believe They’re Really Goats,” “17 Animals Who Just Found Out Columbus Was A Terrible Person,” and “36 Things That Are Going to Make You Feel Ancient.” Did you know, for instance, that “Mean Girls” came out more than a decade ago? And those are all just from a single site whose name I am sure you could guess.
The defining challenge of our age is the constant flow of interrupting information and the ease with which we can satisfy our every curiosity and need for entertainment. This is certainly less of an obstacle than attacks by saber tooth tigers, mass starvation, or global thermonuclear war. It is, at its core, a “first-world problem.” But the fact that new information is constantly beeping its way into your head at every moment of every day is still an important phenomenon. Where our parents once had to hunt for information on shelves and through pages, for us the trail never goes cold. The challenge is not that we have too few variables, but far too many. After all, it is easier to watch somebody hit a massive ski jump on television that it is to learn how to do it yourself; easier to read every blog post on the subject than to actually talk to the proverbial Proctor crush. The challenge is to know when to stop taking in new information and to jump.
Especially in the freezing days and the never-ending nights of winter, this presents a dangerous trap. One of the greatest things about Middlebury is that the quality and even the quantity of the real distractions exceed the virtual ones. But in other places where the alternatives might be harder to find and the people further away, the temptation to stay inside and scroll can become overwhelming. With the internet, you have on your computer or in your pocket every word ever written down by Thucydides or Hawking, Shakespeare or Fitzgerald. You have the words of every great leader, the movies of every great filmmaker, and the sounds of every great musician. But you also have Rebecca Black, Ylvis, and every season of Scandal. It is not as much that we struggle to manage our time as it is that distractions spring up to make us forget that it exists until it has already slipped away.
The reach of ideas has never been further and the rewards of success have never been greater. One of the most amazing realities of this time is that the spread of a song, a speech, or a slam poem that makes us feel something in our core is constrained only by the speed with which we are able to pass it on to those with whom we believe it will resonate. But, like the Harlem Shake or The Fox, this success often proves fleeting. And the punishment for an accident or an ill-considered action forever stick to your name, plastered across Google for all to see: the future employer or the potential girlfriend, the angry young men in their armchairs at home or the grandmother who just signed up for Facebook and likes every single thing that you post. We live in a world without a delete button, in a giant town square where humiliation has become more public than ever.
This is not to say that technology is evil or that pop culture isn’t worth your time. But it has become incredibly difficult to separate what is actually meaningful or useful from the cascade of interruptions and quick alternatives. It is hard to muster the presence of mind to read a whole book when your pocket keeps buzzing with snapchats, text messages, and emails from Bob Smith about intermural sports. In the competition between the information that improves our lives and that which merely satisfies our brain’s addiction to dopamine, the trivial content has a home field advantage.
So what is there to stop us from giving into the temptation to binge watch another season of House of Cards instead of making the changes we fantasize about? Mostly, I think, our overpowering fear of missing out, or, as it was labelled during orientation, “FOMO.” FOMO is a powerful force, and not necessarily a bad one. It is what gets us out of bed and to that party that friend is having. It is what drives us to the mountain despite the bitter cold of the polar vortex. It is what compels us to plaster the names of our crushes on the walls of Proctor, if just for a few days.
On the Campus newspaper, we like to joke about how we come up with the headlines for our editorials. If you are one of the dedicated few who glanced at more than a couple during your time here, you might have noticed that they all follow the same format: don’t do this thing, do that thing instead. So here’s my version of that template: don’t get over your fear of missing out. Do the things that you’ll remember later. Don’t give in to information paralysis; take in the facts that you need and then move on. Don’t give into clickbait and mindless scrolling. Take advantage of the fact that we live in an era where knowledge is free and unfettered.
For when you are at a party and it is two a.m. and “Like a Prayer” comes on, there is no time to sit back and think about whether you have worked out recently or how many layers you are wearing, or whether it is actually an appropriate occasion. If you spend too long thinking about it, the song will be over. But here is what is great about Febs: That song is ancient; it was big when our parents were in college; it is practically Bach. But every time it comes on, it’s as if it is the first. So you tear your eyes away from your phone and your fingers away from the keyboard. You join your friends in the excitement of that moment, with that same grin on your face that each and every one of us had on day two of orientation running around in the February sun at the snow bowl. You jump, and that is the moment that you never forget.
ZACH DRENNEN is from Canandaigua, N.Y.
I will always remember the day I got my acceptance letter to Middlebury in the mail. I was so excited it took me about a week to realize I had been accepted as a Feb. To this day, I believe I checked the September only box. When I realized I was accepted as a Feb I felt semi-rejected. You can imagine my surprise when I arrived for orientation only to learn that most people specifically check the February-only box. Little did I know that I would soon come to realize how accepting to be a Feb was the greatest decision I could have made in my academic life. Having just lost my mother the summer before my senior year of high school, my aunts were very concerned with my future going in the direction she would have wanted. They feared I would go away somewhere, fall in love and never come back. This may be because my mother often went places, fell in love and was only convinced to come back because a sister was getting married. I am definitely my mother’s daughter, but I knew that college was not something to give up, no matter how in love I thought I was during my Febmester.
At orientation I was overwhelmed, I found out I had pneumonia the night I arrived and I had a cast on my hand. Not the best setup for a winter orientation. I remember hearing stories of people traveling in Senegal, trekking the Himalayas, teaching photography classes in Rwanda, living in Paris, adventuring in Laos, or working at home—wherever that was. I was amazed by how different the past three to six months had been for all of us, but how together we managed to feel— how together we wanted to be. That night as we walked from Ross dining hall through the candles of our Feb leaders into Mead Chapel I ended up alongside a girl who would end up being my best friend for the next four years.
After just a few days of orientation we had begun to form the bonds we were told we were destined to create. Within two weeks of being on campus we were skinny-sledding down the mead chapel, taking our shirts off every “Like a Prayer” we heard, and I learned the words to “Wagon Wheel” real fast so I didn’t feel so left out when everyone decided to start singing it. They say that the great thing about coming in as a Feb is that you create an instant community that follows you throughout your college years. I think that while our Feb class has gained a few members and lost a few—while we have all explored different social groups on this campus and made new friends along the way—at the end of the day a Feb is a friend you can always count on. Just like family, there will always be the cousins with whom you get along best, or the siblings with whom you feel you can share the most, but regardless you have a fundamental love that will always be there for one another. I believe that even though many of us have drifted in our own directions, it is just a reflection of us truly trying to find ourselves here. I can still look around this room today and say genuinely that there is not one of you I wouldn’t want to be there for.
I came to Middlebury as this young girl from Tucson, Arizona. I’d had one snow day in my life and it lasted until 10am. I had never experienced daylight savings because we don’t do that in Arizona, it wouldn’t make a difference. I knew cold as 60-degree weather. And although I still don’t know what is going to happen when I attempt to ski down at the snow bowl today, in my four years here I have done more than my fair share of streaking in mid-winter, I have cross country skied from the Mill to the Bunker, I have gone swimming in a frozen over pond at the snow bowl, and gone sledding down Mead Chapel every year, and I have my fellow Febs to thank for all of that.
Another great thing about being a Feb is although we feel pretty old by the end, we experience the greatest amount of people leaving and coming in to this school. We know things that no one else here knows but us. We were here for the very first screening of the Midd Kid music video. We lived the days of Asian carp and avocados, language tables in Atwater, and take-out cups from proctor. We know about MiddTwit, and know the founders of Middbeat. We know what the real Purple Jesus tastes like and we know how good a DJ Officer Chris is. We brought Dominique Young Unique to campus before she became a big deal. We knew Frank Sweeney before The Real World. We started spontaneous percussion during midnight breakfast and choreographed an amazing flash mob for the Hunt. We have lived through the ADP apocalypse, which has been more traumatic for some of us than others. I personally really enjoyed dancing in those window-frames.
We, as Febs, are thrill seekers and passionate believers. We may have felt a semester behind at times, but we have lived so much more than everyone else that showed up on time. And for those of you who have joined us along the way, you too have made choices in your life to redefine the path of what we are taught college is supposed to look like.
Now we get to redefine what the path of post-college is supposed to look like. Graduating from an institution like Middlebury gives us all a great responsibility to do something meaningful and successful with our lives. However, that does not need to be as stressful as we are pushed to believe. Whether you end up at Medical school, consulting in DC, bartending in San Diego, starting a farm in Vermont, or opening up a cupcake shop, success is about so much more than your starting salary or lack thereof. If I have learned anything these 22 years, it is how painfully short life can be, and how beautifully intense love can feel. Once we understand these things, we understand that a fulfilling life comes from choosing how we built it rather than just reading a manual.
For me, success is always living the adventure. Success is giving yourself fully so your loved ones know how much they mean to you. Success is looking yourself in the mirror everyday and always smiling back. Mostly because “we woke up like this” but also because no matter what happened the night before or what awaits us tomorrow, we have been doing the most we can to do our lives justice. For me, we make a difference through the people we choose to love, sing, laugh, and dance with. We are successful when we know ourselves well enough to be so fully there for the world around us.
I think that Middlebury, along with giving us a degree from one of the top liberal arts schools in the country, has also given us the opportunity to figure out who we are and what we want most. We have been given access to professors, who are not just great because of how they do their job, but because of the people they are and the life of knowledge they carry. We are more than just the grades we earn, the internships we’ve had, the important people we’ve met or attempted to meet—we are kids in our twenties who began this adventure of college in our own way. We are friends, and lovers, and family, and what we have learned from each other is just as valuable as what we have learned in the classroom.
Today I want to leave you with part of a poem from spoken word artist Anis Mojgani. This poem reminds us that whether we initially “chose” to be Febs or not, whether we identify today as a Feb or not, no matter where we begin or end upon leaving this college, we must never forget that we are Febs. For above all, we have learned that feeling set apart from others is not at all a negative experience, but rather a thrilling gift that opens us to all the endless possibilities which lie ahead. We must remember that sometimes the uncertainties presented to us by life, are the beginnings of the best adventures we’ve had yet.
So in the words of Anis Mojgani:
“You have been given a direct order to rock the (fuck) out.
Rock out like you were just given the last rock and roll record on earth and the minutes are counting down to flames.
Rock out like the streets are empty except for you, your bicycle, and your headphones.
….
Rock out like you’ll never have to open a textbook again.
Rock out like you get paid to disturb the peace.
Rock out like music is all that you got.
Rock out like you’re standing on a rooftop and the city’s as loud and glowing as a river flowing below you.
Rock out like the plane is going down, and there are 120 people on board, and 121 parachutes.
Rock out like the streets and the books are all on fire and the flames can only be extinguished by doin’ the electric slide.
…
Rock out like your eyes are fading but you still got your ears. But you don’t know for how long so rock out like 5 o’clock time, meant pop-and-lock time.
Rock out like you got pants full of tokens and nothing to do but everything.
Rock out like you are the international ski-ball champion of the entire universe.
Rock out like you just escaped an evil orphanage to join a Russian circus.
Rock out like your hero is fallen and you are spinning your limbs until they burst into a burning fire of remembrance.
…
Rock out like your dead grandfather just came back to take a drive with you in your new car.
…
Rock out like the walls won’t fall but, (dammit), you’re going to die trying to make them.
…
Rock out like it’s raining outside and you’ve got a girl to run through it with.
Rock out like you’re playing football! Football in the mud and your washing machine is not broken.
Rock out like you threw your window open on your honeymoon because you want the whole world to know what love is.
…
Rock out like a shadow of a man passes behind you, drops you to your knees. You’re buckling in sweat, cold metal’s pushed to your forehead, the trigger’s pulled and the gun jams.
Rock out like you got an empty appointment book, and a full tank of gas.
…
Rock out like the mangos are in season. Rock out like the record player won’t skip.
Rock out like this was the last weekend, like these were the last words, like you don’t ever want to forget how.”
Thank you all for loving, singing, laughing, and dancing with me these past four years. I know that no matter what our respective futures hold, we will find success in the earth beneath our feet, the music in our eyes, the hope in those around us, and the stories we hold in the palms of our hands.
Middlebury Class of 2013.5
Let’s Rock Out.
BELLA TUDISCO-SADACCA is from Tucson, A.Z.
(01/22/14 4:31pm)
Exactly one year ago, I was tapped on the shoulder in Ross Dining Hall by a sophomore guy who asked me, “Are you the girl that wore those patterned leggings last week?”
My answer was “yes,” as I grinned ecstatically, so incredibly pleased that someone noticed those leggings that were going to be either a total hit or miss. That conversation sparked the first of many, many conversations that Ola Fadairo ’15 and I have shared over our love of fashion.
Even if you do not know Fadairo, you know Ola. You have heard him, noticed him, admired him, and I guarantee you’ve wanted to befriend him. He walks around campus in his classic black pea coat, sporting either some type of NYC flat cap or exceedingly cool sunglasses.
The kid has style and there is no question about that.
Born and raised in New York City, Fadairo’s style originated in what some would call the fashion capital of the world.
“Every time I go out I feel like I need to be on par with everyone else in terms of what I wear,” he said. “I like seeing what I can do with my wardrobe in the context of a city where fashion is an essential part of its identity.”
Both of his parents emigrated from Nigeria and have become extremely successful individuals in their new New York City home. His father has his Ph.D. in computer science and is the chair of the computer science and information systems department at Medgar Evers College in New York. His mother has her masters in architecture and works as a real estate broker. His parents’ motivation to come to a different country for a better life and more opportunities has inspired Fadairo to “treat every facet of [his] life with dedication.”
According to his parents, part of success is “looking the part.” They believe that dressing maturely is an essential part of achievement, especially in a professional environment. Bottom line, they teach Fadairo that he will be assessed on the way he presents himself.
One of the things I admire most about Fadairo is his ability to admit the obvious. You will be judged. Everyone will be judged. Even though you cannot stop that, you can have some sort of control over what people think of you through the way you dress.
Fadairo’s style is a combination of urban and prep. Growing up in New York City, he rolled with a circle of people that were from lower-end parts of the city, but attended the private schools of high society. Their involvement in both ends of the economic and social demographics of the city influenced their mixture of hip-hop and classic elite prep.
“It isn’t too often you’ll find men from an urban background in a private school setting,” he said, which is why his hybrid style is not just for show, but a political statement.
By diving deeper into this idea of fashion as a kind of political propaganda, one can understand why Fadairo feels caught between two worlds.
“If I dress too urban, certain negative normative judgments will be passed and the same is true on the preppy side,” he said. “Finding the balance not only allows me to look good, but it makes my life a lot easier. It’s kind of crazy to think that the way one dresses has social implications.”
Fadairo was not always into fashion. When he was younger, he simply wore what fit. It was not until a guy two years older than him at Collegiate High School “took [him] under his wing in terms of transforming [his] sense of style.”
It was then that everything his parents had taught him about presenting himself properly made sense. The way Fadairo used to dress represented the way he was feeling on the inside, which at the time was purposeless. Once he really took a look at the way he dressed, he started taking himself more seriously and started having dreams and aspirations.
“It’s kind of ironic that something that can be viewed as superficial, such as fashion, helped me find myself on a deeper level,” he said. “Isn’t that what fashion is about? Dressing to express yourself, make a statement or just bring you confidence and happiness…not to imply your economic status or capability to wear things that others cannot.”
As far as inspiration goes, Fadairo is most profoundly impacted by his older brother’s fashion. His brother owns his own public relations firm in New York City and is surrounded by the industry, as he works fashion weeks in New York, London and Paris. To Fadairo, his greatest advice is to be yourself regardless of what people may think.
“He believes being stared at is a privilege,” he said. If people take time out of their day to acknowledge you regardless of their opinion, it means you’re doing something worth noticing.”
With that type of attitude as his role model, Fadairo “likes to take risks and develop something new everyday.”
Fashion can be seen on multiple levels. On the one hand it can be interpreted as superficial, materialistic and egotistical. On an entirely different spectrum, fashion can be used as a technique to bridge the gaps of our society and our world — it is up to you to decide which path you will let fashion take you down.
“Fashion connects humans on a more personal level than people realize, so if I can achieve a more personal interaction with people based on the way I dress, I’m content,” he said.
I think the relationship Ola and I have is a perfect example of that idea. We connected over fashion; it brought us together regardless of our different genders, interests, hobbies, backgrounds etc. So I leave you with the wise words of Fadairo and his incredibly unique taste:
“Fashion gives us a sense of identity. To know that you own a piece that is unique to you or that has some sort of sentimental value is a special value. I constantly ask myself ‘why are you wearing this?’ Some might consider this level of analysis to be too in-depth, but I feel if I’m not questioning myself, I’m going through life blindly.”
(01/16/14 4:14am)
The men’s basketball team (8-5 overall, 1-1 in NESCAC) went into winter break on a high note with a nail-biting 89-84 victory at Skidmore, but the long layoff did not favor the Panthers, who opened 2014 with three straight losses, including the NESCAC opener on Friday, Jan. 10 against Bates. Middlebury then captured its first NESCAC victory with an impressive defeat of a young and athletic Tufts team 80-66 on Saturday, Jan. 11, and followed-up that performance with a convincing victory over a struggling Lyndon State squad with an 81-69 win on Tuesday, Jan. 14.
Following two sloppy losses against out-of-conference opponents, Middlebury opened NESCAC play at home this past weekend. The Panthers had not lost to Bates since Feb., 2007, but suffered a 64-61 defeat on Friday night. Shots consistently fell for Middlebury in the first half, who took a 36-25 lead at halftime after making six three-pointers and shooting 45 percent from the field.
Prior to the game, Coach Jeff Brown spoke about Dylan Sinnickson ’15, who was poised to return from a personal leave of absence.
“We expect for Dylan to contribute, and in terms of how much, it will really depend on the performance,” Brown said.
Sinnickson rewarded his coach’s decision, exploding off the bench for 17 first-half points on 6-10 shooting, including three of four from beyond the arc.
Despite shooting just 24 percent from the floor in the second half, Middlebury maintained their lead as Bates bailed out the hosts with multiple fouls early in the second half, and 15 personal fouls total after halftime. As a result, the Bobcats (8-4, 1-0) worked tirelessly to cut into the Panthers’ lead. With less than five minutes to play, a missed layup on the Panther end resulted in a dunk for impressive Bates center Malcolm Delpeche to draw the Bobcats within one. On the ensuing Panther possession, another missed layup in traffic gave the ball back to the visitors. The crowd cried for a foul and the volume in Pepin Gymnasium reached a crescendo as the Panthers settled in to protect their one point lead. However, Delpeche made his presence felt again with a follow-up lay-in on the other end to put the Bobcats ahead 54-53.
Trailing by one at the 2:30 mark, captain Joey Kizel ’14 knocked down a free throw to tie the ball game at 56. Kizel, an 82 percent free throw shooter on the season, uncharacteristically missed the second, but the Panthers came out of the crowd underneath the basket with possession and Kizel knocked down a go-ahead three-pointer. On the other end, Adam Philpott retaliated with a three of his own. And then, with 10 seconds remaining, Bates’ leading scorer and co-captain Graham Safford drilled a back-breaking three. The Bates 64-61 victory was sealed when Kizel missed an off-balance three-point attempt of his own as time expired.
Sinnickson finished as the game’s leading scorer with 23 points, and attributed his performance to increased concentration.
“I was very focused heading into this weekend,” he said. “We were struggling prior to Bates and Tufts, but I think we have turned the corner,” Sinnickson said.
Kizel managed 12 of his own, primarily by getting to the line (7-11), and dragged down seven rebounds.
The Panthers played a much more complete game on Sunday against a freshman-laden Tufts (7-6, 0-1) team. With the Jumbos getting two experienced guards back from injury just in time to meet the Panthers, Sunday’s match-up provided a stiffer challenge than Tufts’ record would have suggested. However, Middlebury’s dead-eye shooting throughout made the difference. The Panthers shot at a 51 percent clip from the field, 47 percent from deep and 81 percent from the charity stripe, where Brown’s team has been inconsistent on the year.
The first half featured fast-paced basketball and dominant post-play by Tufts’ first-year big man Hunter Sabety, who was perfect from the field, making all eight of his first-half attempts and adding three boards. Hunter Merryman ’15 led the Panthers in scoring at halftime, knocking down two three-pointers and tallying eight points. As a whole, the Jumbos dominated the first half rebounding battle, played tight perimeter defense and made quick substitutions to keep legs fresh in order to secure a three-point lead going into halftime.
With the game close five minutes into the second half, the physicality picked up when, after the whistle, Sabety slammed the ball through the hoop onto a sprawled Matt Daley ’16. The insult drew a shove from James Jensen ’14, which resulted in a technical for the senior forward and outrage from the Middlebury fans. A minute later, further physical play resulted in a double foul on Jensen and Tufts’ first-year forward Drew Madsen. The rough play meant that both teams were in the double bonus with more than eight minutes remaining, a development that favored Middlebury, as the Jumbos converted only 56 percent of their second half free throws. Both Madsen and Tufts’ junior guard Ben Ferris left the game early due to foul trouble.
The game remained tightly contested until the last two minutes, when a Daley three, followed by an old-fashioned three-point play by Matt St. Amour ’17 pushed the game out of reach as part of a 20-5 Middlebury run over the final 8:54 of the game.
The victory over Tufts halted the team’s first three game losing streak in eight seasons. In Middlebury’s first action of 2014, the Panthers dropped a road game at Salve Regina (9-4) after an eight hour bus ride due to inclement weather and only a 30-minute warm-up. Middlebury followed that by shooting an abysmal 28 percent at home against Plattsburgh St. (8-3) in a 63-47 loss, the team’s lowest scoring performance of the season.
Coach Brown believed that the team’s offense executed well against Plattsburgh, despite displeasing results.
“I think it really just sort of got contagious in that we missed some shots we normally make and we got tighter as the game went on, but in reviewing the game I think our offensive execution was pretty good,” Brown said.
After the two out-of-conference losses, Brown admitted that his team’s resolve had been challenged.
“I think our confidence has been shaken a little bit, not coming out of the gate strong in the second semester,” he said.
On the heels of the conference victory over Tufts, the Panthers traveled to Lyndonville, Vt. to take on in-state opponent Lyndon State.
The Panthers lead throughout, eventually closing out a 81-69 win. Merryman, Sinnickson, St. Amour and Jensen all scored in double digits, while Jack Roberts ‘14 lead the squad with eight rebounds.
Now sitting at 1-1 in conference, the Panthers will resume NESCAC play this coming weekend with road games at Wesleyan and Connecticut College.
(01/16/14 4:11am)
MiddCORE Receives Innovation Award
MiddCORE, the mentor-driven experiential learning Winter Term and summer course on entrepreneurship and innovation, received the Ashoka U Cordes Innovation Award. MiddCORE was one of six recipients of this year’s award, which is given annually by Ashoka, the world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs.
“This is a tremendous honor and we’re proud to be in the company of the other winners,” Jessica Holmes, director of MiddCORE and associate professor of Economics, said in a press release. “We also recognize the strong support we received from our incredible mentors, the administration and our colleagues at the Center for Social Entrepreneurship and the Programs for Creativity and Innovation. We are fortunate to be part of such a strong ecosystem for innovation at Middlebury College.”
The award is given to programs which “demonstrate how students, faculty and community members can achieve social impact through colleges and universities — from admissions, curriculum and career services, all the way to community and alumni engagement,” according to Ashoka’s website.
The six winners, including MiddCORE, will be featured at the annual Ashoka U Exchange, an annual international conference featuring 140 institutions from 40 countries which will take place at Brown University on Feb. 20-22.
Mellon Recognizes Dance Department
In early December the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a $310,000 grant to the College in support of “Movement Matters,” which a College news release described as “a multi-year interdisciplinary endeavor to bring emerging artists in the field of dance together with Middlebury faculty and students for creative and curricular development.”
According to a College press release, Assistant Professor of Dance and Chair of the Dance Program Christal Brown will be the director of the project, which will address the literal and metaphorical interactions between the human body and “our physical and political worlds.”
As part of the project, “emerging movement artists” will come to the College during Winter Term 2015, and one of those artists will receive an appointment as the Mellon Interdisciplinary Choreographer at Middlebury.
In the press release, Brown said that the grant could make the College a home of dance innovation.
“This is an investment in the field at large which we hope will lay the groundwork for our dance program to grow into a hub for creativity and innovation among emerging movement artists.”
According to Brown, the grant is likely to boost the prestige of the College’s dance program, attracting both students and visiting artists alike.
College Mourns Armstrong, 12th President
Dr. James Armstrong, the 12th president of the College, passed away on Dec. 16, 2013. Armstrong helmed the College from 1963 to 1975. During his time in office, he instituted the College’s first system of tenure, created a professional leave program, worked furiously to surpass fundraising goals, increased faculty salaries and worked to improve curricula first-hand.
Armstrong’s tenure was marked by social and political unrest, along with financial difficulties. Nevertheless, Armstrong successfully posited the College as one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges.
Armstrong was born in Princeton, New Jersey where his father was a member of the faculty. He attended the Taft School in Connecticut, and then Princeton, where he studied Classics. After Princeton, he served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and was recalled for the Korean War.
Armstrong was an instructor at Princeton and Indiana University before he was approached in 1963 by the Board of Trustees to replace Samuel Stratton, the College’s 11th President.
After his term as president, Armstrong headed the Charles A. Dana Foundation. In 2010 the College established the James I. Armstrong Professorship in Classical Studies, currently held by Professor of Classics Jane Chaplin. Armstrong and his wife Carol had three children and numerous grandchildren.
With Additional Reporting by NATE SANS
(01/16/14 1:39am)
Students were faced with difficult travel conditions caused by Winter Storm Hercules and a polar vortex while attempting to return to the College for the start of J-term, forcing instructors to make accommodations for those who were absent because of travel delays.
The storm, which battered the Midwest and Northeast from Jan. 1-3, has been cited for at least 16 deaths and complicated travel for several days thereafter. Illinois experienced up to 17 inches of snow, while New York was hit with anywhere from six to 11 inches, and parts of Massachusetts received almost two feet of snow.
According to a Fox News report, on Jan. 3 alone, almost 1,500 flights were cancelled due to Winter Storm Hercules. Such cancellations snarled the travel plans of students such as Colleen Harper ’14, a member of the Women’s Swimming and Diving team who spent 48 hours travelling from her home in Chicago to Middlebury in order to dive at the team’s meets at Bates and Colby on Jan. 4 and 5.
“My flight to Burlington [on Thursday] was cancelled, so I took another flight to Newark that was delayed, causing me to miss the last flights to Burlington until Sunday,” Harper said. “I ended up taking a train from Newark to New York and then on to Burlington, and then drove to Middlebury, arriving at 1:30 a.m. on Saturday morning after leaving Chicago at 6:00 a.m. on Thursday morning.”
Delays also forced some instructors to make accommodations for missing students during the first few days of classes. Philip B. Stewart and Sarah F. Cowles Stewart Professor of Chemistry Jeff Byers is currently teaching Organic Chemistry I, which meets five days a week for over five hours each day, putting students who miss even one class at a great disadvantage. Byers turned to new technologies to aid those who were unable to return to campus on time.
“Two students missed the first lecture, and I was recording my full lecture on a Smartboard, so they had full access to everything,” Byers wrote in an email. “They got caught up pretty much immediately.”
C.V. Starr Professor of Russian and East European Studies Tom Beyer, whose Beginning Russian course meets for three hours every day, also leveraged technology to keep an absent student up to speed in the class as travel troubles kept her at home.
“We used FaceTime to let her participate fully in our intensive language where she was able to view, listen and respond,” Beyer said. “In the past for reasons of weather and personal emergencies, I have also used Skype to stay connected with class members.”
Other professors opted for replacement or make-up class meetings. Sasha Whittle ’17, whose flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport was cancelled, missed the first class in her J-term course “Infectious Disease: Historical Epidemics, Current Dilemmas, and Emerging Problems.” She was not alone in her absence, however.
“About 15 people missed our first class, so the professors [Visiting Professors Andy Hale ’06 and Russell Johanson ’06] held a make-up lecture so we could catch up,” Whittle said.
(01/16/14 12:46am)
I am very comfortable with myself, thank you very much. I like to think I am confident with who and where I am. Do I regret not studying abroad? Me? Why would I ever regret something like that? You must have me confused with some other less confident person! Okay, fine; maybe just a little kind of sort of dreading the semester when most of my people depart, leaving me flannel clad, exactly where I have been for the last two years.
Perhaps dread is too strong a word. In truth, I have looked for reasons to regret sticking around and have come up with few. After all, we do spend two years or so trying to figure college out only to decide that it is time for a break. On a more personal level, I feel I have earned my position as a junior Feb. I made it through angsty freshman weekends and sophomore slumps to reach the good life. I’m nearly legal, I get to go skiing any time I like and do work I genuinely find fascinating. What’s not to like?
Now I enjoy my friends, my sense of home and setting down my roots, so studying abroad was never truly in the cards for me. What I find particularly troubling is not that I am missing out on some great experience, but that people leave for reasons not necessarily abroad but here in Middlebury. The narrative of fantastic new lands to explore rarely seems to match the reality. It seems to be far more common for Middkids to leave because they simply want out of Middlebury for some time and see going abroad as that escape. I understand that, but that exchange seems to carry consequences beyond changing your country of residence for a few months.
As the first wave of my fellow juniors return there is a common theme in their response to “how was your study abroad?” There’s usually a blank stare, maybe a few ums and ahs and then, “It was good. Really good.” When pressed for details they are noncommittal and vague and you quickly look for a way out of the conversation.
I exaggerate, but in these responses there is another untold story: loneliness, hardship and genuine difficulty, and not the kind that builds character. Studying abroad is not the luxurious, adventurous experience we want it to be. It certainly can be, if done for the right reasons. A passion for a certain region and the chance for academic progress at different institutions are fantastic reasons. Needing to get out of Middlebury or simply because it seems to be the thing to do tend towards these stories of melancholic loneliness in a foreign land.
I wonder if part of it is just the need to reset. You get to return and reinvent yourself, give people time to grow up or work on themselves. But why do we choose that way to do it? Why not simply travel? Take time and go places and see things you want to see. Experience regions and cultures without the looming academic rigor. Go and take the experience you truly want, not the one imagined by the grandeur of studying abroad. Are we really convinced after all that at an academic level these schools outdo Middlebury? A handful, sure, but all of them?
I do not mean to simply rant at our study abroad system. In truth I think it provides some incredible experiences for the right people. If students want to have terrific experiences abroad they need a better reason than wanting to leave Middlebury. And we can’t ignore the very real challenges that being in a foreign country presents. This takes tenacious, outgoing people with global mindsets and usually quite a bit of optimism. I lack many of those things. So when asked whether or not I am study abroad I am comfortable with my response. For me, that experience of loneliness and melancholy seems to be more real than an incredible time abroad.
We have a terrific luxury in our ability to travel around the world and we would be misusing our time if we did not do it as often as we could. There is time for travel and experience beyond studying abroad though. For those of us considering it, I hope there is a sincere reflection on the motivation to study abroad so we can hopefully avoid summing up what should be terrific experiences with, “It was really good.”
(01/16/14 12:43am)
The day that I was supposed to head home for winter break and the holidays, I put my foot down on the brake pedal of my car and it didn’t stop. It was a scary moment that could have resulted in serious damage, so I decided to take my car to the mechanic before braving the 300 mile journey to Western New York. Two days later and $1200 poorer, I finally made it home.
I didn’t buy that car. I never had to scrape together enough savings or make a monthly car payment. When he bought it new in 2002, my grandfather had — rightly — called it the last car that he would ever own. It was my first.
I don’t pay the insurance on that car, either. My parents cover the cost of that through their policy (and if they haven’t given that recent thought, this will be a very expensive column for me). I pay for the gas and the maintenance costs, and for small repairs. But when calamity strikes, my parents are still my first call. This does necessarily not make me lazy; when my parents wanted to buy their first house, they too called their parents, who probably never could have called on their own for such a favor. If the goal of each generation is to leave their children better off, then success is not something that happens overnight. It builds over years, through family, across generations. We benefit from the hard work and good fortune of those who came before.
Most people in the United States do not have this option. Their ancestors weren’t on the boat as early, or were denied the same opportunities, or were unlucky. If they run into car trouble around the holidays, they must take it out of the money that they might otherwise spend on Christmas presents for their kids, on family trips, or on visits to the dentist. Or they scrap their car and hope that a bus comes along. Millions of Americans live just one piece of misfortune away from utter financial ruin. Some of them may be lazy or unimaginative. Some of them might not have given their bootstraps a tug. But the vast majority are pulling with all of their might, and their fingers are getting sore, but they stay locked in poverty, struggling to make things work out somehow. Until one day their brake pedal sinks to the floor and it all falls apart.
In the alleged economic recovery of the last few years, the type of middle class jobs that come with the type of salary that allows for saving have largely been replaced by low-wage or minimum wage jobs. With a federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour, a worker who might need a car to get to their job every day would need to work for more than 160 hours — four full-time weeks — just to pay for those repairs. Ford could help by making more reliable cars, but the federal government can help by raising the minimum wage, which when adjusted for inflation is a third lower than its original level. Raising the minimum wage will not slow job growth, especially since many of the worker who would benefit work in service sector jobs that cannot move overseas. Instead, a raise in the wage would help to shift money from record corporate profits and executive compensation to the people who will immediately return that money to the economy. This is not because they lack in thrift, but because their daily needs exceed their daily income.
I have worked in a number of jobs throughout my time in college — landscaper, janitor, web designer, research assistant. For me this has always been a point of pride. I like to think of myself as financially independent and fiscally responsible. But this ignores some inconvenient realities. It ignores the nature of success and the nature of generational improvement. When you are one unexpected serious illness away from bankruptcy, or homelessness, or not being able to afford breakfast for your children — situations that plague millions of Americans — every day is a battle and every spin of the roulette wheel could be deadly. When you struggle to survive it is much more difficult to further your education or build a career. When you struggle to stay out of the ditch it is much more difficult to climb the slippery hill and look beyond it to the stars than if you started two thirds of the way up the slope, where the pitch starts to level. The American Dream is not a rocket ship, but rather a hard slog and the people just starting the trek do not deserve our scorn. They deserve our help.
(12/12/13 6:43pm)
President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz will step down at the conclusion of the next academic year, effective June 30, 2015. He announced the decision in an email sent to students on Dec. 12 in conjunction with major revisions to the structure and governance of the Board of Trustees.
“It has been an honor of the highest order to serve as the 16th president of this remarkable institution,” he wrote in the email. “With its dedicated and committed staff, superb faculty, and outstanding students, Middlebury has never been stronger or better positioned for the future.”
Liebowitz has been at the helm of the College since 2004. During his presidency, the College acquired the Monterey Institute of International Studies, opened 23 Schools Abroad sites and added 120 endowed student scholarships for financial aid in addition to 15 endowed faculty positions.
“Middlebury is a far more complex place than it may look. From the outside, it might look like a university, or something like a university, but not so. Undergraduate education needs to remain the focus of Middlebury, no matter what other programs it acquires or develops,” he said.
Liebowitz, a New York City native, graduated from Bucknell University in 1979 majoring in economics and geography while competing as a varsity swimmer. After receiving his doctorate from Columbia University, he joined the faculty at the College in 1984 and was promoted to full professor in 1993. In 2009, Time Magazine named him one of the 10 best college presidents in the country. The President acknowledged the difficulty of this decision, but noted that the time was right for both the institution and for him.
“This isn’t something I just thought about last night.. “The average collegiate presidency these days is now around six years. I’ve had thirty-plus years on the faculty here and 11 years as president, and I think it’s good for the institution to change leadership and I think it’s good for me as a person to take on different challenges.”
Board of Trustees Chair Marna Whittington said that the board would provide information about a presidential search committee following the February board meeting.
Liebowitz also took the chance to announce changes to the governance structure of the board. Of note, the number of standing committees will be reduced to six from the current 15, with three overseeing boards: one for the undergraduate College, one for the Monterey Institute, and one for the rest of the “Schools.”
“We are involving students, faculty, and staff on these overseer boards for the first time. That will allow the board to hear more perspectives beyond just the president and senior administration,” he said. “What we need with the many challenges facing higher education are more voices, more opinions to be heard. There will be a student sitting on the board of overseers for the College. They will be full-fledged members of that board. The only thing they will likely not partake in are personnel decisions such as tenure decisions. Student, faculty, and staff participation on the board of overseers represents a fairly big change for the College.”
Liebowitz would not discuss what he plans to do after leaving the College, saying that his focus is on continuing to work with faculty, staff, and students on the institution’s “already ambitious agenda” during the next 18 months.
(12/05/13 2:57am)
During the week of Nov. 18, prior to Thanksgiving break, the Faculty Council, in consultation with members of the administration, sent a survey to all faculty with the goal of learning about pre-vacation attendance policies across the College.
Classes are typically held on the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving, with vacation officially beginning at 4:15 p.m. on Tuesday. A large number of students do not attend classes on Tuesday, and sometimes Monday, due to travel plans. Airline tickets are less expensive and highway traffic is less severe earlier in the week than it is one or two days before Thanksgiving. Thus, students often choose to miss class in favor of more convenient travel options.
Professors choose for themselves whether to cancel class in the days before break. Due to varied policies and frequent early departures by students, the Faculty Council sent a survey asking about “their practices regarding the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the reasons they have adopted such practices and the extent to which they find the current Thanksgiving schedule agreeable,” according to Associate Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Council member Kareem Khalifa.
Dean of the Faculty and Philip Battell Sarah Steward Professor of Biology Andi Lloyd consulted with Faculty Council members on the survey.
“Discussions of our calendar at Thanksgiving have been going on, at least informally, for years,” Lloyd wrote in an email. “Faculty tend to point out that many students leave early, resulting in low attendance. Students will likewise point out that they leave early because flights are cheaper or because faculty cancel classes. [You can see] the feedback loop that could result … We decided to get a quick estimate of what’s happening this year in order to inform [future] decisions.”
Peer schools Amherst, Bates and Hamilton hold a week-long Thanksgiving break, but most — Williams, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Connecticut College, Trinity, Tufts and Colby, Swarthmore, Wellesley, Smith and Vassar, among others — all begin vacation at the end of the day on Tuesday.
Professors at the College who choose to cancel class before Thanksgiving do so of their own accord and choose to schedule an alternate class time if they deem it necessary.
Dean of International Programs and Edward C. Knox Professor of International Studies Jeff Cason co-teaches a class with Professor of Economics William Pyle called Democracy, Development and Globalization on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Cason and Pyle cancelled the class in anticipation of poor attendance.
“We decided to reschedule that Tuesday afternoon class to Wednesday evening of the final week of class, figuring that we would get a better attendance during the final week,” Cason wrote in an email. “We did not reduce the overall number of class sessions; we simply readjusted our class meeting times to avoid the Thanksgiving week.”
Cason believes that a weeklong Thanksgiving break makes sense and that it would be easy enough to extend the fall semester by a few more class days.
“We have shortened the exam time in recent years, so we could certainly manage a few more class days at the end, to give students a longer Thanksgiving break,” Cason said.
(12/05/13 1:53am)
It’s that time of year again. The ‘jobs/internships’ tab on MOJO is slowly filling. Questions like “is there any way Middlebury would give me funding for this?” and “Do they really mean econ majors only?” are once again popping into our heads as we scroll. The emails from home are growing increasingly passive-aggressive. Internship season is upon us.
If you’re a junior like me, you’re probably feeling a little extra tug of anxiety as you contemplate possible options for next summer, wary of your one final opportunity to pad the résumé in anticipation of entering the real world. If you’re a senior, that anticipation might have boiled over into full-blown panic as you face the imminent reality of life after Middlebury. For all of us, the next several months feel like a personal crossroads, a chance to make or break our prospects for future success.
I think we’re right, but in a totally different way than you might expect.
For me and others that I’ve spoken to, this crossroads seems to have presented a pair of distinct options: pursue a traditional career – in law, journalism, consulting, whatever it is – or do something pro-social and thus risk what seems like a lifetime of underemployment and romanticized futility. Most I have heard from seem set on taking the first route, putting their liberal-arts idealism on the backburner – at least in the short term – in order to gain skills or simply to ‘keep their options open.’ I think that, for many of us, that choice would be a mistake.
I don’t mean to imply that seeking a career in the business world is bad, nor that strategies of effective altruism and top-down social change are necessarily untenable. What these paths often miss, however, is the undeniable power of occupation: the fact that what you do on a daily basis changes you.
As much as you might think something like “I only want to be an investment banker for a few years, then I’ll quit and teach high school math” (as a friend of mine told me a few weeks ago), you might consider the relative dearth of banker-turned-teachers in assessing the possibility of that ever happening. More likely, I would wager, is that there are hordes of bankers out there who once made themselves that same promise. Again, that does not mean that none of us should pursue careers in finance or any similar field; the world needs people to manage money just as much as it does people to teach math, and anyone who truly wants to pursue such a career should go for it. For the rest of us who aren’t totally sure what we want, though, it means that we should be realistic about the significance of the choices that we make over the next few months, and where those choices are likely to lead.
The reason I decided to write this (and the reason that I, a 21-year-old college student, feel licensed to dish out what looks like career advice) is that I don’t think this message is in any way specific to jobs or the professional world. I need only to reflect on how much I have changed in less than three years at Middlebury to see the power of occupation in action: it’s as if I have been constantly and subconsciously internalizing little snippets of the culture here. These changes have built over time and, at least it seems to me, will remain with me long after I leave Middlebury. In short, I have become a different person because of what I do here.
As this pertains to internships and the job search, I think we should all be intentional about what we choose to do, and about the impact of five or ten years spent teaching in an underfunded school district – or doing market research for a private equity firm or any other career option that you might be considering – on the people we are going to become and the decisions that we are going to make down the line. At the end of the day, delaying the opportunity to do what we feel called to do – pushing it back until we have achieved some nebulous standard of wealth, success or power – really means reducing the likelihood of ever doing it.
If you’re like me and internship season makes you feel a bit self-conscious about your lack of marketable skills, realize that the thoughtful idealism that you have cultivated since arriving at Middlebury might be just the angle you have been looking for. You will likely never be more idealistic than you are right now. Embrace it. Take advantage of the perspective that your education has given you and try to position yourself to become the sort of person that you really feel, deep down, that you should be.
(12/05/13 1:51am)
When simple solutions and polished narratives are applied to complex issues, there is often something fishy lurking beneath the surface. Such is the case for Teach for America (TFA), which presents itself as an organization that recruits graduates of elite colleges, like Middlebury, and provides them with two-year teaching positions in “high-need” rural and urban schools.
Several of our friends and peers who we respect and admire and whose intentions we trust have become involved in TFA as corps members, recruiters or in other roles. Our goal is not to demonize them. After all, we personally know many past, current and future TFA members who are committed to teaching and who were even positively impacted by TFA teachers themselves growing up. But, we believe that, as a whole, the TFA organization threatens public education in our country by giving priority to the desires of private interests over the needs of American children whose communities have been impoverished by unjust economic and societal structures.
TFA began 20 years ago, seeking to address teacher shortages by placing inexperienced college grads in schools where their presence would be better than no teachers at all. Since then, the public education landscape has changed drastically: there is now a surplus of qualified, veteran teachers who are getting laid off, often via massive school closings. But instead of adapting to its diminished need, TFA has grown to 32,000 people and boasts assets totaling over $400 million. This huge amount of human and monetary capital is needed, TFA claims, to further its work using “innovative” tactics to address a “crisis” in our public education system caused, they imply, by lazy teachers and corrupted teachers’ unions. This “crisis” has occurred at the same time the Program for International Student Assessment found that, when controlling for poverty, American public school students outperform top scoring nations like Finland and Canada.
Something, indeed, is fishy.
And it is time for us as a campus community — which is one of the top 20 schools TFA recruits from — to closely examine what is going on. Here are some places to start:
First, TFA is “deprofessionalizing” the teaching profession. TFA corps members, often entering classrooms with only a 5-week training course, are rarely equipped to deal with large classes of struggling students. Not only that but 80 percent of them leave the classroom after 4 years. This increase in the teacher turnover rate destabilizes school systems and makes teachers into interchangeable commodities instead of long-term community members and leaders.
And while apparently 60 percent of TFA corps members continue in the education field, that figure represents not only teachers, but also those who enter into school administration, education policy and charter schools, where they often push the same agenda of privatizing public education.
As these TFA corps members flood classrooms, veteran, unionized long-term community teachers in both public and charter schools are being laid off. In Chicago, for example, the city closed 48 schools and laid off 850 teachers and staff while hiring 350 corps members. And those TFA positions are often funded with the heavily lobbied help of federal and state subsidies and grants, in addition to corporations invested in TFA’s privatizing methods such as ExxonMobil Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, Monsanto Fund, and Shell Oil Company who have bolstered TFA’s endowment with six and seven figure donations.
TFA claims that it is challenging the status quo, but we believe that it is part of maintaining an unequal system. Instead of addressing societal and economic structural problems that create poverty and inequality, TFA preaches that the courageous efforts of “leaders” from elite colleges and innovative (read: neoliberal) approaches to education are what is needed to address the “solvable problem” of education inequality.
Catherine Michna counters in Slate that in order for education inequality to have been eliminated at the school where she was a TFA corps member, “We needed smaller class sizes, money for books and materials, money to renovate the crumbling school building. We needed more professional development…Our students’ parents needed jobs that paid a living wage. We needed the police to stop profiling and imprisoning the young men in our community. We needed the War on Drugs to end. We needed all these problems addressed.” Instead, the polished narrative of TFA and the corporate education reform movement conveniently leaves out these issues while calling for an increase in high stakes testing, charter schools, and interchangeable TFA corps members in schools across the country in an effort to privatize them, bust teachers’ unions, “commodify” the teaching profession, and undermine public education.
We challenge Middlebury students to reconsider applying for Teach for America and accepting positions in the program, and instead find other ways to learn about and get involved with education in our country.
Students Resisting Teach for America, including ELMA BURNHAM ’13 (Student Teachers Program) of Fishers Island, NY/Stonington, CT, LUKE GREENWAY ’14.5 of Seattle, WA, HANNA MAHON ’13.5 of Washington DC, ALICE OSHIMA ’15 of Brooklyn, NY, MOLLY ROSE-WILLIAMS ’13.5 of Berkley, CA, LUKE WHELAN ’13.5 of Seattle, WA, ALLY YANSON ’14 of Naples, FL and AFI YELLOW-DUKE ’15 of Brooklyn, NY
(12/05/13 1:41am)
This week our paper looks a little different because we have a few new writers — high school students!
Two weeks ago, middbeat posted a video made by an English class at Middlebury Union High. Although the video was made a few years ago, it is still relevant and highlighted an issue we, as the College community, don’t talk about very often — town-College relations. As an editor for the local section, I wanted to find a positive way to explore town-College relations through The Campus. Rather than an article, we decided on a different method — The Campus has partnered with Middlebury Union High School’s journalism class to bring you this issue and insight into Middlebury Union High.
The partnership, which we hope will be ongoing, is mutually beneficial — the high schoolers will give our readers valuable insights they don’t normally have the privilege to see about the town we live in. We can give them by-lines (good for college applications!) and insight into our lives. I imagine only good can come from something like this, right? In the end, my goal is selfish — I want to learn from these students and see what their lives are like since, in the end, I don’t know very much about the town and people that have generously hosted me for the past four years.
My mom’s side of the family has lived on the same piece of land for nearly a century, so my sense of home and belonging is strong. As a super senior feb, technically I’ve lived in Vermont for four years, but I would never say that — somehow that feels false, especially when I think about my personal feelings regarding my home and my family. Even after being the local section editor on and off for several semesters and making every effort to pop the Middlebury bubble, I got swept up in school, lost touch with Vermont and began obsessively counting the days, hours and minutes before I could go home.
Looking back on my four years here, I’m saddened by this disconnect and by the fact that, by the end of the year I was too frazzled and homesick to stay in Vermont. Hopefully, in my last month and a half here, a little can be salvaged and my sense of place heightened. This is one attempt to do so.
Even though it can be difficult, it is important to make an effort to reach out. The town of Middlebury hosts each college student for four years and then most of us leave without a trace or an idea of this place. Ideally, I would love for this partnership between The Campus and Middlebury Union High School to continue while I’m gone, but it depends on the interest and free time of the high school students — they’re awesome but it’s hard to fit it all in!
Regardless, I hope the Middlebury Union High School students know that they always have a voice in our paper and advocates in our office. It is a small effort to make, but important to me and The Campus.
(12/04/13 11:16pm)
After viewing the documentary made in a 2011-2012 Middlebury Union High School (MUHS) English Class on middbeat, Local Editor Molly Talbert and Editor-in-Chief Kyle Finck reached out to MUHS Journalism teacher Matthew Cox. In a new partnership, The Campus will work with MUHS journalism students to produce local content.
Steve Small: Theater Instructor by Isabel Velez '15
Steve Small is a man of many talents. He works at the Middlebury Hannaford Career Center as the theater instructor. The Hannaford Career Center is attached to Middlebury Union High School. Steve has been working at the Career Center since 1994 and has been introducing students to the world of theater since then. When asked how he began his career in Middlebury he mentioned that a local playwright saw him act and asked him if he would sit in on a meeting about the new theater arts program at the Career Center. At the meeting Steve gave his opinion about what he thought the program could be, and the next day he was offered the job. The program in the Career Center that Steve teaches is called Addison Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) This program allows students the chance to run and create a theater company. This also allows students to immerse themselves in the world of acting. Every day students from local high schools have the opportunity of taking this course for either a semester or an entire year. People who go through A.R.T. learn not only acting skills but skills such as screen writing, lighting, sound, set designing, costuming, and theater management to name a few. As busy as Steve is teaching high school students everything he knows about theater, he also manages to keep his acting skills sharp by being involved in local plays at the Town Hall Theater. He recently played the role of Lennie in a production of “Of Mice and Men” and was just in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” as well.
Steve attended the University of North Carolina School of the Artsn where he majored in drama. During the course of his teaching at the Hannaford Career Center he has taught some incredible students who later went on to become stars. One of the students that he taught was Jake Lacy, one of the actors in the show “The Office”. Others include Quincy Dunn-Baker, Tristan Cunningham and Toby Schine along with many others. When asked about his most rewarding moment teaching theater he responded, “I think that it comes when the students finds that connection to the craft ... That is the moment I like best.”
Marshall Eddy: Longtime MUHS Teacher by Zoe Parsons '14
Marshall Eddy has been working at the Middlebury Union High School since 1970, and is one of the school’s longest tenured teachers. Before he was an art teacher at Middlebury Union High School, he got his Juris Doctor degree from University of Michigan Law School in 1968 and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Middlebury College in 1965. He has worked as an operating room orderly, a Russian language linguist in Army intelligence, a lawyer, and even a history teacher at MUHS before becoming an art teacher at the high school.
Moving from law to art is a big change, but Eddy became interested in art while he was practicing law in Middlebury. During one court case, he was snowed-in while staying in a hotel, and he started making art to pass the time. It started out as a hobby, but it grew to something larger, and he liked it more than he liked practicing law and teaching history. So when a position opened at the high school where he was working as an history teacher, he applied for the job and has been teaching art ever since.
Eddy acted in this year’s production of “Shrek: The Musical” at the Town Hall Theater with his family. He has acted in many productions before, and even preformed a one man opera with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, playing a “conductor” who sang while conducting. He also commutes to work every day on foot, year-round. “I’ve walked 14,000 miles to and from school in the last 43 years, but only moved two feet,” he said in a previous interview with The Tigers’ Print, the MUHS newspaper. He also led an extracurricular mime group at MUHS for 12 years.
As a teacher, Eddy has taught six current teachers, three staff members, and the chairman of the Union District #3 board. Eddy plans on retiring at the end of the next school year. Even though he has been teaching for over 40 years, he is always learning new techniques and taking art classes.
Jeff Clark: Bike Enthusiast by Jessica Prisson '14
Jeff Clark, a world history and photography teacher who has taught at Middlebury Union High School for 15 years, leaves at at 5:50 every morning and bikes 12.5 miles to and from the school year-round, regardless of the weather.
Clark has an extensive educational background and holds a degree in Political Science and Master’s degree in Computer Application Programming. He also did Ph.D. work in intellectual history and is ABD (all but dissertation). His dissertation traces the intellectual origins of western attitudes towards nature from the biblical period to the present through the lens of deep ecology and eco-feminism.
A partial list of colleges he attended includes St. Michael’s, Nova University, Florida State University, and Arizona State University.
Clark got his first bike, a Schwinn Varsity, as a high school graduation present and soon embarked on a 130-mile trip from Saxton’s River in Rockingham to Glover, VT. He currently owns six bikes.
In 1983, he biked about 600 miles to Acadia, Maine and back.
In 1989, the biking enthusiast sold his car and began commuting by bike as he worked on a Ph.D. for 3 years at Florida State University.
Just last summer, he spent two weeks touring between 16 Vermont Breweries with science teacher Noah Hurlburt.
These days, biking up and down the colossal hill to Ripton proves more difficult during winter because of the late sunrise, early sunset, and snowy or icy road conditions. Clark has outfitted his Salsa Fargo and Salsa Vargo bikes with studded snow tires and bright lights comparable to a car’s headlights.
He averages about 25 miles per day for a school year total around 4,400 miles. He recently passed the 10,000-mile mark since he began biking to work 2 years ago. That’s the equivalent of riding from Maine to California nearly 3 times!
When asked why he does it, Clark will answer that he bikes partly for mental health, but mostly for “a more direct, intentional relationship with the outside world.” Aside from the meditation aspect, Clark bikes solely for the experience.
Mr. Clark’s future summer plans include the Great Divide Ride, a 2,745-mile trip from the Canadian Rockies to the Mexican Plateau.
Jonah Lefkoe: MUHS Senior Class President by Samuel Messenger '14
Meet Jonah Lefkoe, Middlebury Union High School’s senior class president. Well, he’s not only the senior class president. He’s also president of the Middlebury National Honor Society, Brain Science club member, tenor sax player, and lineman on the undefeated football team that just won the state championship. As president of the National Honor Society, he helped organized many community service events and fundraisers, like the recent blood drive. Athletically, besides dominating people in the trenches on the football field, he also has thrown javelin, shot put and discus on the track and field team since middle school.
Also involved in the Brain Science club for all four years of high school, he hopes to major in neuroscience in college. He’s interested in the medicinal field, but is also considering careers in research or teaching after college. Jonah worked as an intern in the neuroscience lab at Middlebury College. Working with Assistant Professor of Psychology Mark Stefani, Jonah assisted in his research. He liked working there a lot, saying it “made him want to pursue neuroscience even more.” Jonah also is taking a computer science class at the college, which he also enjoys, taught by Professor Matt Dickerson.
In addition to playing tenor sax in band since freshman year, he also plays the ukulele in his free time. He has diverse musical tastes, ranging from Zac Brown Band to Al Green to Brother Ali. Jonah likes to read biographies and books about the brain. He lives in Middlebury with his parents Todd and Karen, his little sister Sophie, and his dog Pipin, a Havanese. He lives by Alexis Carrel’s quote, “Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.”
Yeweon Kim: Foreign Exchange Student by Krisandra Provencher '15
Middlebury Union High School has one foreign exchange student this semester; 18-year-old Yeweon Kim of Seoul, South Korea. Yeweon, meaning “Jesus Wants Me” in Korean, is a cat owner who loves piano, traveling and anything to do with cheese! Yeweon came to the United States through the Program of Academic Exchange, or PAX, a non-profit educational group that describes its mission as an effort “to increase mutual respect among the people of the world, to foster an appreciation of our differences and similarities, and to enhance our ability to communicate with one another.” Through PAX, Yeweon has been placed with the Foshays, a local Bridport family who have previously hosted three exchange students.
“When Grace, our oldest daughter, left for the Air Force, we had an extra bedroom and a hole that needed to be filled,” Jenny Foshay, Yeweon’s host mother, said. “Olivia, our youngest is 17 and homeschooled, so we thought it would be nice for her to have a sister around.”
Prior to coming to America, Yeweon had traveled to the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Japan, as well as Cambodia and the Philippines for missionary work. She dreams of going to Egypt one day. Even though she may be well traveled, Yeweon’s biggest adjustment while staying here in America centers around school. In Korea Yeweon experienced a very strict and methodical setting, yet here in America she is experiencing much more relaxed and amicable environment. One of the biggest differences involves student and teacher interaction. “Most students don’t ask the teachers questions or talk to them during class, mostly because students are shy. We just listen to the teachers speak during class.” said Yeweon. Schooling in Korea doesn’t end when school finishes at 4 p.m. though. “We normally have extra study so we tend to finish at 10 p.m. I know it’s crazy!” Many of the subjects taught here are the same as in Korea, she said, the learning environments just happen to be different. Yeweon said that while in America, “I hope to use this time in Vermont to improve my English, become more confident, and learn about American culture.”
(12/04/13 9:00pm)
The Middlebury men’s basketball team hoped to have plenty to be thankful for over the break with two games in the Hoopsville National Invitational Classic on Friday, Nov. 22 and Sunday, Nov. 24. Unfortunately the Panthers fell short in both contests, first by being upset by the host Stevenson Mustangs on Friday, and then by dropping an overtime thriller against 10th-ranked St. Mary’s (Md.). The Stevenson loss was the program’s first pre-New Year’s defeat since 2008.
The Panthers rebounded on Sunday, Dec. 1, with a victory on the road against Rensselaer, 92-79, and added to their win total with a 90-80 defeat of Castleton St. at home on Tuesday, Dec. 3.
Stevenson, who entered the game 1-0, disrupted the Panthers previously fluid offense and won the battle on the boards despite a disadvantage in height — grabbing 47 rebounds to Middlebury’s 42 and pulling down 19 on the offensive end. The Mustangs led 10-5 at the first stoppage in play and never looked back, dropping Middlebury to 2-1 with a 80-69 final score.
Captain Joey Kizel ’14 continued his slow start to the season. On the positive end, Kizel shot well from the line (7-8), a department in which the Panthers as a whole struggled (59.1 percent), and picked the Mustangs for six steals. Yet all that was not enough to make up for his 2-10 shooting from the floor and six turnovers.
The struggles continued for Vermont-native Matt St. Amour ’17 as well. In the starting lineup for the third consecutive game, St. Amour managed just two points on 0-6 shooting from the field.
Jake Brown ’17, in just his second game after missing the season’s first two contests due to injury, played a solid 25 minutes off the bench and handled the ball with poise. The newcomer gathered 14 points on 6-9 shooting to go along with five assists.
“I have a lot of confidence in Jake’s ability to lead our offense,” head coach Jeff Brown said. “[He] has made a quick adjustment to the college game.”
Hunter Merryman ’15 provided the team with an offensive spark. Since coming off the bench in the season opener, Merryman has started every game and has been a consistent scorer. On Friday, Merryman filled it up for 21 points on 8-17 shooting and 5-11 beyond the arc.
The Mustangs outplayed Middlebury physically and attacked the Panthers’ interior, forcing Kizel and others into foul trouble. Kizel fouled out late in the game, while some early whistles relegated Matt Daley ’16 to just 18 minutes in the contest.
Middlebury had a day to recover before squaring off with number 10 St. Mary’s.
Stepping into the starting lineup for St. Amour, Nate Bulluck ’14 had a great start to the game, scoring the Panthers first nine points and giving Middlebury a 9-4 lead. The Panthers led 34-31 at halftime, but with 10 minutes remaining St. Mary’s knotted the score at 52 all.
Kizel found his form in the game’s second half, particularly down the stretch, scoring 20 second half points on 6-10 shooting. With 1:30 left in the second, Kizel completed a three-point play to bring Middlebury within two. A minute later, Kizel went to the line down three and hit both free throws under pressure to make it a one-point game. After the subsequent foul, St. Mary’s hit both of its free throws, leaving the Panthers with 12.9 seconds to make up a three-point deficit. In classic fashion, Kizel knocked down a buzzer beater to send the game into overtime.
Responding well to his change of role, St. Amour played 29 strong minutes, tallying eight points, including a critical three points in overtime to give the Panthers a one point lead, followed on the next possession by two successful free throws.
Merryman played 39 minutes on the night, but did not have his typical solid shooting game. As the clock ticked down in the final second, Merryman got two looks from beyond the arc with a chance to tie the game once again and go to a second overtime period, but failed to tickle the twine, with the buzzer giving Middlebury the 81-78 loss.
For the second game in a row, Jake Nidenberg ’16 contributed significant minutes off the bench, scoring 12 points on 6-7 shooting in 23 minutes. Nidenberg seemed to be taking advantage of the void left by Dylan Sinnickson’s ’15 voluntary leave of absence and the injury of James Jensen ’14, who dressed for the first time on Sunday, but did not play.
“Jake has developed into a strong offensive post player,” the elder Brown said. “His ability to get us high percentage shots inside is his greatest asset.”
From the sideline, Brown looked for more positives despite the disappointing outcomes.
“I don’t view the two losses in Baltimore as a negative,” he said. “We had some bright spots in both games. Playing a strong non-league schedule on the road can be helpful going into the NESCAC schedule in January.”
The Panthers finally got back to their winning ways against the less-heralded RPI Engineers (0-4) on Sunday, Dec. 1, with a 92-79 win — improving to 3-2 on the year.
The Panthers led throughout most of the affair, though the outcome was in doubt until late in the second frame. With 4:28 left in the game, Middlebury led by just six, but their good day from the charity stripe (20-23) allowed them to seal the deal.
Brown, a promising first-year point guard, earned his first start of the season and distributed all game long, attempting just one shot but racking up six assists in 25 minutes. The first-year point guard did not know he would be counted on so heavily early on.
“Honestly, coming in I had no idea what to expect,” he said. “I think I can alleviate some of the pressure [Joey] faces every night. I knew I had an amazing opportunity playing with Joey so every chance I get I try and learn from his play.”
Brown believes he can be successful without scoring, as he was against RPI.
“I see myself as a pass first point guard that can score,” Brown said. “Setting up shots for Joey is a big part of our offense, so any time I can get him the ball I think it makes his job easier.”
Merryman returned to his scoring ways, hitting three shots from deep en route to a 23-point performance. Jensen saw his first action of the year, providing 17 high-energy minutes, 10 points, and three boards while also drawing a charge, earning the praise of coach Brown.
“Jensen adds a lot to our playing group,” coach Brown said. “After Joey he is our most experienced player. He is a tough matchup because of his mid-range game and his ability to drive to the basket.”
Nidenberg, again, shot well (6-12) in 16 minutes off the bench. Kizel, too, put together a strong stat line, with 14 points, nine rebounds, seven assists and three steals.
On Tuesday, Dec. 3 the Panthers defeated in-state opponent Castleton St. (1-3). The Spartans one victory on the season was impressive, coming over WPI who was ranked ninth at the time.
Castleton came into the game shooting 34 percent from behind the arc, but rode strong three-point shooting in this match-up to an early lead, and finished shooting 50 percent from deep.
Castleton St. took a one point lead into halftime, shooting 57.1 percent from the field in the first period and knocking down seven threes, but the Panthers’ significant rebounding advantage (22-12 in the first half) and the performance of Jensen kept it close. Jensen finished the game with a career-best 22 points, shooting 12-15 from the line, and locked down Castleton’s top offensive threat, forward Cornelius Green, who fouled out with zero points.
Jensen's head coach was happy to have Jensen back.
“On offense, he is a tough matchup because of his mid range game and his ability to drive to the basket,” Brown said.
In the game’s final three minutes Castleton could only muster two free throws, allowing Middlebury to pull away with the 90-80 victory.
Kizel had a typical game, scoring 19. Jack Roberts ‘14 tossed away an astonishing nine shots to go with 12 points and seven rebounds.
Despite the team’s losses in Maryland, there is optimism amongst the team and coaching staff.
“For a lot of guys on this year’s team,” Jensen said, “not only were out two weekend tournament games their first big games, but it was also the first time they saw significant minutes. Obviously I wanted to win the Invitational, but I was happy with how some of our younger players stepped up against good competition.”
The Panthers will be 5-2 when they travel to Skidmore on Saturday, Dec. 7 for their final game of 2013.
(12/04/13 8:45pm)
As I counted the bruises up my shins, I also kept counting down the days until the bubble would be torn down. I thought that I would never miss that two-and-a-half lane track — one of the lanes just disappearing into nothingness, the sharp corners, and concrete straightaways disguised with a thin layer of rubber. We dreamt of the new field house we had been shown on building plans and posters since the day we had our first recruitment meeting. We hardly thought about what we were going to do in the interim without a track, nervously giggling when we mentioned it off the cusp and our coach even shrugging with a grin when we asked about our plans for next year. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” With that bridge now ahead of us — and the baseball, softball, ultimate frisbee, and lacrosse teams all waiting to cross it with us — life outside the bubble all of the sudden feels very real.
I love running for its simplicity. That it’s just you out there on the trail or in your starting blocks, and that all you need is a pair of shoes. Abebe Bikila even won the 1960 Olympic Marathon in Rome barefoot. You are the creator of your own destiny. No one else.
However, it’s easy to say that simplicity has not been the theme of this year’s season. We leave now our fate in the hands of the weather gods, constantly checking the weather app on our phones for whether the temperature will peak at 2 p.m. or 3 p.m., when the sun will set, switching our off-day from Sunday to Wednesday in pursuit of an extra ray of sunshine and one more day on the outdoor track. 43 degrees used to be our outdoor cut-off point; we’re now pushing low 20s — snowflakes mixing with our cold sweat.
Indoors, Nelson Arena resembles something of a refugee center. Sprinters run on rolled out pieces of rubber or hug the walls of the arena trying to replicate 200m intervals. Hurdlers walk over hurdles set up in the middle of tennis courts. Throwers hurl javelins that occasionally get stuck in basketball hoops and jumpers launch themselves onto mats squished in the back. Other teams watch on patiently, waiting often until 7 p.m. or later for their turn.
Yet no one complains.
We are still the creators of our own destiny and nobody can change that. I’ve often been called crazy for choosing track and field as the sport I wanted to pursue in college. And to be honest, I probably am crazy; most of this team crazy is for how much they love running. That love is what is making life outside the bubble tolerable. The desire to get better, faster, and stronger never stops. I’m still hungrier than ever, and lamenting the fact we have no real place to practice doesn’t win races.
The future of Middlebury Track and Field is exciting; in the next year, and for the next 30 years and beyond, this team will be practicing in a facility that is capable of hosting NCAA competitions. Seniors, in their last year of racing and unable to reap the rewards of the new field house, still excitedly talk about the benefits of the construction. While racing is an individual event, this team is truly a family. While we run for ourselves, we ultimately each run for each other. We run bubble-less for this year for what it gives the next generations of Middlebury athletes, with the schedule changes, crowded spaces and sore shins are more than worth it.
Sport is sometimes sacrifice, but it makes the victory so much sweeter.
(11/20/13 11:27pm)
In response to criticism that he could only write for men, playwright David Mamet penned the farcical “Boston Marriage” in 1999, following two Victorian era women as they explore their relationships with each other and the people who surround them. The play enjoyed a Nov. 14-16 run in the Hepburn Zoo, delighting audiences with its careful presentation and razor sharp wit.
Members of the audience may have been expecting a scene out of a Jane Austen novel when they walked into the Zoo, greeted by Victorian furniture and harpsichord music playing overhead. Many were happily surprised by the vibrancy with which they were greeted over the next 90 minutes. The senior acting work of Christina Fox ’13.5 and Meghan Leathers ’13.5, turned the play “Boston Marriage” into a comic piece, examining relationships between gender and class through a fresh, playful lens, engaging the audience from the first quip to the final bow.
After much deliberation, Fox and Leathers departed from typical theater department productions and the roles they have filled in their time at the College to chose a play recommended to them by Assistant Professor of Theatre Alex Draper.
“It’s hard to find a comedy featuring two female protagonists that aren’t full of angst or misery,” Leathers noted. “The leads in this play are fantastic – they’re exciting and great and strong and absurd, and it’s been really challenging and fun to play with.”
“Boston Marriage” is built around the protagonists’ dynamic dialogue. Anna, played by Leathers, is the narcissistic, impossibly witty mistress of a wealthy man and a friend of Claire’s, acted by Fox, a woman visiting to tell the news of the new love of her life – a young woman. The emotional and physical tension between the leads is instantly recognizable, Anna sporting her lovers’ family heirloom emerald necklace, touching its garish size to reinforce its representation of all she has acquired. The necklace proves to be the key to the development of the plot, Claire’s lover stealing away to Anna’s residence only to find her father’s necklace sitting on a strange woman’s neck. Both women are potentially ruined financially and socially, and they turn to each other for comfort and complaining.
Anna and Claire are in a Boston marriage, a term used to refer to two single women living together in Victorian times with possible sexual implications. They curse each other’s faults, often likening one another to some sort of farm animal, only to be driven together by moments of affection and desire.
The two women are delightful to watch, with members of the audience jealously wishing that they too could join the action. The deliciously wicked gleam in Fox’s eye as she counters Leathers’ practically perfect comedic timing, along with Leathers’ revelling in the depth of her character, delivering line after line of complex, nuanced dialogue, is truly a treat for the audience.
Mamet does not give Claire as many bracingly funny lines, and in the wrong hands she could appear to be a weaker, more subservient version of Anna, but Fox breathed vibrant life into Claire with a graceful, realistic subtlety that revealed her character’s power over the duration of the show.
The only other character who appears in the play is Anna’s maid, Catherine, who finds herself in her own difficult situation as she must grapple with the possibility of pregnancy and the power that men hold over women in Victorian society. Charlotte Michaelcheck ’15 quickly became an audience favorite, charming with her character’s accent and tendencies for emotional outbursts (as well as, I suspect, Michaelcheck’s extremely expressive eyebrows and facial expressions).
Though the Irish – no, Scottish – maid has intimate access to Anna and Claire’s lives, in many respects she holds, like the audience, the role of an objective viewer, separated by class, nationality, and her love for men. Seemingly oblivious and occasionally rendered incompetent by nervousness, Catherine surprises the audience and the women she serves with an unassuming, profound wisdom that even the clever and confident Anna and Claire do not possess. These bits of wisdom interrupt a role that, if possible, provided even more comic relief to the play than the two characters already displayed.
Indeed, some in the audience were simply giddy in anticipation of the next laugh, gasping between breaths and nervously waiting for one of the three characters to continue the comedic rhythm.
Costume designer Elisabeth Harmor ’16 provided Leathers and Fox with beautiful wardrobes, supplying them each with two intricate Victorian period outfits, as well as accessories for a game of psychic dress up that did not disappoint.
Overall, the show had a vitality of spirit that radiated into the audience.
Director Jake Schwartzwald ’14 has been following Fox’s and Leather’s thesis play production process since last year, first agreeing to direct another play that the pair had selected before transitioning to “Boston Marriage” this semester.
“We sought Jake out because we knew we wanted to do a comedy and Jake is a comedian and we knew he could work with us and guide us in that comic spirit,” Leathers said.
Indeed, Leathers, Fox and Schwartzwald enjoyed an ease in each other’s company over casual lunch that transferred into a fluidity of performance onstage. It takes a lot of effort to appear at ease, and Leathers, Michaelcheck and Fox performed gracefully and naturally under Schwartwald’s direction.
The audience responded so well to “Boston Marriage” because it made them laugh, and after they finished laughing, they realized that Anna, Claire and Catherine were more relatable than first appearances may have allowed.
“Though this play is so different from Mamet’s other works, it’s very much the same in dealing with wealth, appearances, personal gain and the emptiness that can create,” Fox said. “There is timelessness to romantic relationships and the competitiveness within them.”
“Anna and Claire are competing for and with each other,” Schwartzwald succinctly noted.
“Boston Marriage” speaks to lives left behind and sacrifices made to search for better days, whether one is leaving a homeland to serve wealthy women or rejecting passion for a female friend to find financial security in a man. The audience left satisfied, connecting with each of the characters through their humor and pain, relating to women seemingly worlds away.
Some of the plays put on by the theatre department are thought-provoking, disturbing, subversive and puzzling, and those plays need to be shown to an audience of college students that may not usually be exposed to that certain brand of theatre. It is important to also remember that sometimes people go to plays to at once forget their troubles and be reminded that they are not alone, and that this is equally important, as “Boston Marriage” showed. As Anna sagely notes, “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
(11/20/13 10:39pm)
Members of the Student Government Association’s (SGA) Educational Affairs Committee will meet with the faculty Educational Affairs Committee (EAC) today, Nov. 21, to discuss issues surrounding credit-bearing internships. The talks occur amidst extensive conversation within the committee and the administration regarding awarding credit for summer internships.
Last spring, members of the EAC began discussing the possibility of credit bearing summer internships. Through these discussions, members of the EAC wrote a working document that was sent out to members of the faculty last summer. With faculty and student feedback, the EAC hopes to expand the working document to an official piece of legislation that would put forward the policy necessary for students to receive credit. When such a document is complete, a majority of the faculty must vote in favor of the policy for it to be effected. Right now though, the EAC is still in what Dean of Faculty and chair of the EAC, Andi Lloyd describes as an “information gathering stage.”
For the first two months of school, the EAC focused on identifying College-wide learning goals, a topic not unrelated to the committee’s new top priority – internship credit.
“I think the question of internships is not unrelated to those questions about the point of a liberal arts education because part of the question we are trying to answer here is what is the relationship between an internship and the curriculum? Are they separate?,” Lloyd asked. “Can they be connected? Should they be connected? What are the advantages of giving credit to these internships? What are the advantages of connecting internships to the curriculum? What are the disadvantages?”
Dean of the College Shirley Collado believes that these internships are advantageous and should be tied to the College.
“I’m an advocate for credit for internships because I see the value in what’s happening within the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) – I see the value in student led projects and the work that students accomplish during the summer,” said Collado. “If they were able to pursue a more structured way of tying it to their experiences at Middlebury and having their work be acknowledged in a particular way, credit for internships makes sense.”
Several reasons prompted the EAC to begin seriously considering the issue last spring including the fact that some internships are open only to those students who will receive credit from their institution.
Another reason comes with a discrepancy that has plagued many students, like SGA President Rachel Liddell, in the fact that students may be awarded credit for internships taken over J-term as well as some internships completed abroad. Internship credit awarded over J-term may be used only as a credit for that term and may not be counted towards fall or spring credits, while internship credit assigned abroad is taken only in lieu of a class taken while abroad. However, the question still looms in the minds of many – what is different about an internship during the summer than an internship during the winter?
“If you do an internship over J-term you can receive a credit and if you do it during the summer, you don’t” said Liddell. “That kind of low-hanging fruit is an inconsistency, and there are many other examples like that.”
In attempts to describe why this inconsistency exists, Lloyd cited the fact that J-term was originally a time for more experimental learning.
“Why in J-term and not the summer is one essential question. Historically Winter term was conceived of as a more experimental place in our curriculum — a time when things happen that didn’t happen during the fall and spring,” said Lloyd. “Although maybe an unsatisfying answer, that history explains why students can take internships for credit during J-term but not during the fall or spring semesters.”
However, she echoed Liddell’s feelings towards the seeming inconsistencies with this type of policy and explained that this is something the EAC will take into consideration when drafting the legislation.
“The why winter not summer question has a less clear answer and that’s one of the things the EAC is talking about – is there any rationale for saying yes to something in winter and no to the same thing in the summer?” Lloyd said.
These are just a few of the wide sweeping questions that the EAC has been asking while considering the possibility of awarding credit. Professors from a wide range of disciplines have argued on both sides of the issue, discussing various complicated issues such as faculty compensation for summer work. The EAC seeks to foster these debates while finding a middle ground with a policy that would meet both student and faculty needs.
“We want to be confident though that we aren’t setting up for a conflict in the legislation where students have a reasonable expectation to be able to do a new program and get credit for internships, but faculty say, ‘well why is this getting added to my responsibilities when my summer is already planned to be working on research or traveling or something else,’” said Associate Professor of Physics and EAC Member Noah Graham.
Vice President for Academic Affairs Tim Spears also saw the importance in a discussion that resolved many of the complications of the issue, pointing towards the major advantages students would gain from legislation on this topic.
“We want to have a good conversation about this proposal and we want the conversation to reflect all the complications that come with the topic, but I hope we can have the conversation in a positive spirit, keeping our eye on the advantages that can be gained from expanding educational opportunities for students,” Spears said.
One of these issues has to do with assessing the quality of an internship and the academic relevance that such an internship might hold.
“Internships vary widely in the type and depth of learning opportunities they provide. I’m open to the idea that some might be worthy of credit, but I think the challenges are how to identify the worthy subset reliably, and how to demonstrate their substance, rigor, and congruence with our goals. If we can find a way to do those things, we can provide students with exciting, novel opportunities to apply their liberal arts education outside the classroom, while still preserving the quality and integrity of a Middlebury education,” wrote Associate Professor of Psychology and fellow EAC Member Suzanne Gurland in an email.
To award credit for internships many professors feel the need for students to make a connection to the academic realm. This may come in the form of a paper, journal, or even a class. Graham acknowledged that pigeonholing internships into certain academic fields might be problematic.
“We wouldn’t want to get too narrowly constrained to say that a certain course corresponds with a certain internship because tomorrow a new startup may start in some new area,” Graham said. “I think we need to be wary about micromanaging too much, so we want to create an environment where that can kind of happen but where the unexpected can come in. An opportunity may arise and we hope to give a student that nimbleness to grab that opportunity.”
However, Spears stressed the fact that a strong connection between academics and the work experience must be made in order for the internship to be counted as a credit, which could effectively replace a class.
“I don’t think we are going to move into a situation where students are going to get credit simply for completing an internship. There will have to be something associated with the internship that we can identify as being academic in nature for a student to get credit,” Spears said.
Beyond issues of connecting internships to the academic world, there looms the question of finding a way to make internships equal to all students, an issue echoed by many faculty, staff and students.
For Russell J. Leng ‘60 Professor of International Politics and Economics Allison Stanger, this matter holds the utmost importance when deciding if the College should give credit for internships. As the number of unpaid internships throughout the U.S. climbs, the question of forced labor and widening inequality has come to light. Stanger and many others feel the College must address inequality when looking at internships.
“There is a major inequity in the current system that we need to address at Middlebury College,” she said. “I think that it is problematic to expand the possibilities to get credit for internships until that inequity has been addressed, and everybody who wants an internship can actually afford to have that experience.”
If the EAC were to grant credit to internships, many consider their support contingent on whether all students at the College will have equal opportunities to access these internships.
“It puts some students at a profound disadvantage compared to their wealthier peers. I wouldn’t want to support any policy that would exacerbate that divide, even though knowing that for some students in a more privileged position, it would be really helpful to get credit for the internships that they are able to do,” Stanger said. “There is a broader issue at stake.”
Liddell spoke similarly about the grave need for more funding within the CCI in order to make this a fair process.
“I’m really committed to ensuring that internships for credit don’t become one more way that a lack of financial means disadvantages students,” said Liddell.
Lloyd also sees the issue of equity as an important topic to discuss when writing legislation.
“I think that equity and access issues are huge, and EAC has certainly discussed them. As this discussion moves forward, I hope that we can provide some clarity to the broader faculty on what those equity and access issues are. The reality that there are internships that our students can’t participate in without earning credit is an important element of this discussion that we need to grapple with.”
With all these considerations in mind, the EAC hopes to get legislation out to members of the faculty within the next few months. Then, depending on the amount of feedback from faculty, it will hold open meetings in which faculty members could introduce amendments and air issues they may have with the policy. With approval of a majority of the faculty, the legislation will go into effect, although the logistics of such a complicated issue may take longer to actually be enacted.
While Liddell feels that this may be her most “optimistic campaign promise,” she feels that the implementation period may go far beyond this academic year.
“If the policy is implemented, I would say it will probably be three to four years before it’s really accessible to students,” she said. “We all have this four-year concept within our brains, and it will be hard for me to just walk away and never reap the benefits of this change, but I think it’s still powerful to leave a legacy.”
(11/14/13 4:13am)
As we once again gripe and groan about the inadequacy of BannerWeb, it’s easy to lose sight of other registration frustrations many students face as we choose how to spend the chilly month of January.
Instead of enrolling beachside at some Southern Californian college or braving the hustle and bustle of a city school, students of the College choose to spend the greatest four years of their lives in rural Vermont. This four-week haven from the crush of a real semester’s workload is allegedly an opportunity for students to capitalize on their decision to come all the way out to beautiful nowhere. But with a number of students left out in the cold to fulfill important requirements due to dubious course credit policies and a shortage of crucial classes, is this magical month all that the Admissions department dresses it up to be?
J-term’s selling points are its dialed-back rigor and the possibilities its surplus of free time affords: immersion within a singular subject of choice, the pursuit of a passion outside the myopia of one’s major or the exploration of the myriad extracurricular opportunities the College and its activity-laden environs provide. For some, this means taking a break from their strict regimen of lab science courses and indulging their interest in French poetry with a visiting poet, or putting down the paintbrush and trying their hand at business strategy in MiddCORE. For others, it means taking a class on dinosaurs and hitting the slopes every day after lunch. Despite the disparity in rigor, all are valid uses of the term — they demonstrate a willingness to take a break from their primary goal and to explore uncharted territories, academic or otherwise.
In a perfect world, this is the reality of J-term for all. However, many students find themselves incapable of realizing the vision of a semi-academic winter wonderland for one reason or another. Students who are in their first year of language study are required to take a class in that language, which meets five times a week with additional language table and recitation obligations. Others, like double majors or students who have changed their major later than most, discover themselves to be in an even more precarious situation wherein they need to take more credits to complete their major than they have semesters left. Especially in highly class-time intensive concentrations — like the Sciences, where it is simply impossible to take on a full schedule of classes in the field — J-term could be the time in which students can find a class to put themselves back on track. But, most of the time, it is not.
In order to incentivize the idealistic, exploratory usage of J-term propagated by tour guides and PR releases, some majors limit the number of winter term credits they allow to be counted towards one’s degree, while others do not accept any at all. Furthermore, even if one’s major might accept a J-term credit, this does not necessarily guarantee that a class in the subject will even be offered during the term. As a result, students who are in dire need of a major credit are forced to take a more whimsical class than they would have desired — because although learning about craft in the digital age with a visiting professor is insightful and beneficial for those who are interested in the subject matter, it does not serve much of a purpose for a Psych major who needs one more credit but does not have any classes offered in his/her area of study.
Another problem that perhaps exasperates the lack of substantial offerings during the winter term is that the College stands at an impasse regarding course credit. Every J-term, a throng of visiting professors are hired to teach classes within their fields of interest not only to help students expand their horizons, but also to give resident professors time off. If they were to teach a winter term class in addition to two semesters, professors would barely have any time to spend time with their families or conduct their own research between grading periods. Since the College wants its employees to both stay here instead of leaving for another school that will afford them the time off and to publish prominent research to increase its reputation as an institution, most professors are granted that time off. But, at the same time, the departments do not want to award credit for classes taught by professionals who may have a wealth of experience with the subject matter but a dearth of experience in the classroom. Therefore, while the “real” professors are away, students often have to take classes that do not count for anything as they wait for the barons of course credit to return.
While many students do enjoy the multitude of exotic classes and experiential learning opportunities, there still remains a crowd in need of one more credit that they cannot find during J-term. Therefore, in order to promote and encourage the timely success of every enrolled student, it is of vital importance that the College considers offering more courses in all majors that yield credit towards the major. If this makes for fewer classes like “The Elements of Murder,” unless the Chemistry or English department will accept the credit, so be it. The College has a hierarchy of fiduciary responsibilities to its students: ensuring them the opportunity to earn a degree in a four-year time frame should stand much higher than hiring a non-professors to teach supplementary classes.
(11/14/13 1:30am)
An entirely sophomore-driven and remarkably thought-out production, “Cock” was the collaborative brainchild of director Jordan DuBeau ’16 and producer Alexander Burnett ’16. Written by British playwright Mike Bartlett and debuted in 2009, the Hepburn Zoo production starred Burnett, Arnav Adhikari ’16, Juliette Gobin ’16 and Dylan Gilbert ’16 and ran from Thursday, Nov. 7 through Saturday, Nov. 9.
While on a break from his negative and domineering boyfriend (Burnett), John (Adhikari) finds refuge in a tender divorcée (Gobin) who shows him the light of a not-terrible partner, which John mistakes as the light of heteronormativity, thus throwing him into an identity tailspin that carries us through the rest of the play. We follow a meandering John as he demonstrates his complete inability or his unwillingness to make a decision, leaving his two overbearing paramours to battle it out over our meek hero.
The play’s climactic scene — a dinner party with John, his boyfriend, his girlfriend and, for some reason, his boyfriend’s dad (Gilbert) — culminates in (spoiler alert) John’s deciding to stay with his boyfriend, not because he really wants to, but because he is afraid to give up the identity that he has spent so many years constructing for himself.
Despite its intrepid title, “Cock” thankfully relies less on sensationalism and titillation than it does on sharp humor and skillfully drawn characters. Bartlett’s dialogue is precise and adept enough to carry the piece without much semblance of context.
“Looking at the script, with its zero stage directions and its incredibly particular layout of dialogue, I get the sense that the playwright cedes control of how the play is staged, with the condition that the dialogue comes through as he intended,” DuBeau wrote in his director’s note. “It’s written so well that it seems to scintillate regardless of the visuals.”
There is no set or props to speak of (although the costume design from Yvonne Chan ’16 was spot-on), and though we can glean enough from the text to determine that we are in contemporary London, we are given little framework for the characters’ lives off-stage. John is, in fact, the only named character — M, W and F comprise the rest of the cast — making “Cock” a modern-day take on the love triangle archetype.
Of course, in making John’s choice between a man and a woman, Bartlett explores more (post)modern themes than Shakespeare did — themes of sexual identity and labeling that feel especially relevant in a college setting. It gets a little heavy-handed towards the end, when John will not stop musing about the irrationality of the straight-gay binary — a deft filibuster, it seems, while he tip-toes around the inevitable decision at hand. But generally speaking, “Cock” presents a theme worth exploring at Middlebury: as Burnett put it in his producer’s note, “What happens when we forget the labels? Are there parts of ourselves we haven’t realized exist?”
At 90 minutes without an intermission, “Cock” felt, at times, too long. Part of this seemed intentional, an attempt to mimic structurally the frustration that all the characters feel at John’s indecision. As a rhetorical device, it was effective: I, too, was frustrated. When the girlfriend and the father took their respective exits in the final scene, I was relieved to see them go, simply because it meant that a choice was finally made.
What was best about “Cock,” though, was the cast, which brought Bartlett’s archetypes to life, fleshing them out into three-dimensional, if nameless, people with idiosyncrasies and flaws and shimmering humanity.
Burnett’s M was not just an antagonistic boyfriend but also a man who is deeply, adoringly in love. Gobin’s W was not just a magnetic, self-possessed seductress but also a woman with her own history, needs and insecurities.
Gilbert’s F was more than just a third-act wrench thrown into the three-wheeled dinner party — he was a hilarious and adept take on the overprotective father figure, adding depth to the M character and perspective on the evolving question of sexual identity.
Adhikari offered perhaps the most multilayered interpretation: he succeeded in creating a character that was alternatively infuriating and charming, pompous and unsure, and relatable through it all.
(11/13/13 9:30pm)
For college students across the country, class registration is a high-stress, high-stakes time of year. Not only do we have to pick the classes we want to take, we have to successfully register for them. Inevitably, around registration time, complaints and frustrations about BannerWeb and class registration flood the College. With J-term registration this past week and Spring Term registration fast approaching, familiar questions arise surrounding BannerWeb’s inevitable crashing and what we can do about it.
In the past few years, many J-term students have experienced BannerWeb crashing when they try to register, leaving them locked out of the system and unable to register. During registration this past week, many students, like Rachel Kinney ’16.5, found themselves locked out of registration for several minutes, causing frustration, stress and impatience.
“Although BannerWeb was only frozen for about 10 minutes, it seemed like a long time to worry about whether I would get into the class I wanted,” said Kinney.
As of now, it is impossible to say why the system failed, but Michael Roy, dean of Library Information Services (LIS) and his team are working to diagnose the problem with the vendor of BannerWeb, Ellucian.
According to Roy, problems usually seen with BannerWeb “appear to be associated with the volume of simultaneous requests being submitted to the system.”
But last week’s registration for J-Term was worse than usual.
“We are very disappointed with the performance of the BannerWeb course registration system this week and we apologize to students for the frustration they have experienced,” said Roy. “We do not yet have a definitive answer as to why the system locked up during times of peak usage.”
It is not just students who find fault with BannerWeb — Professor of Mathematics Frank Swenton is disappointed with the system as well.
“Given the multiple millions of dollars that Middlebury has spent on the Banner system,” he said, “including the initial purchase, presumably yearly costs, and a huge amount of staff time spent on it, I take it as completely unacceptable that our online registration has had such major and consistent problems.”
According to Swenton, Ellucian, BannerWeb’s vendor, should be paying penalties each time it crashes. Swenton pointed to outsourcing as one of the main problems.
“The fault here is essentially with the Banner system, over which we have limited control – this is unfortunately part of the game the College plays when outsourcing to outside companies,” he said.
Is BannerWeb the best option for a class registration system? Prior to using BannerWeb, the College used a self-made system for registration; however, this system presented many drawbacks, prompting the switch to an outside system, BannerWeb. For the past 10 years, the College has used BannerWeb with fewer problems than the previous system had.
Though countless colleges and universities across the country use BannerWeb, many institutions of higher learning have chosen other methods of registering for classes. Colgate University, with about 2,800 undergraduates, staggers and rotates registration based on last name. For example, a student with a last name beginning with letters E through G might get to register first with all other students in that category, but the next semester they would rotate two spots and register third, then fifth, then second, etc. Alexander Flagle, a sophomore at Colgate, does not find this system effective.
“It has crashed both times I have used it, and many people think registration is the most stressful time of the year,” he said.
At the University of Maryland, with 26,000 undergraduates, students register based on the number of credits they have.
Sophomore Samara Cohen has found drawbacks to this system, saying, “Many people complain about the system because they get shut out of popular classes.”
This system gives priority to upperclassmen, meaning that first-years and sophomores often do not have the chance to register for more popular classes.
Perhaps a revert to the student-to-professor method of registration could be the best solution. Professor Swenton thinks it could be worth a try.
“Was Arena Registration really that bad? Yes, students found it to be sometimes stressful — but faculty and advisors were there to answer questions, and yes, there were a lot of people, but Middlebury College is about people,” said Swenton. “Is it really better for our students’ first experience of course registration at Middlebury College to be hovering over their computers clicking furiously? Is that what we’re really about at this institution, or are we about student-faculty interaction, a place where people interact with other people to build as strong a learning environment as possible?”
Despite the problems seen in other registration systems, it is possible that those could be an improvement over BannerWeb. By using registration windows, it might be possible to avoid a crash caused by the influx of log-ins. Though this change could put students with a later registration time at a disadvantage, it might still be an improvement over BannerWeb.
As one student pointed out to Professor Swenton, “Is it really better for things to be determined by crashes and who can click their mouse at 7:00:01 instead of 7:00:02?”
The College will continue to use BannerWeb as its system for registering, is there anything an individual student can do to improve their registration odds? A common piece of advice is to take a deep breath and understand not getting everything on your class wish list is not the end of the world. In fact, many students may end up taking something unexpected and really enjoying it, only because they could not register for a class that was originally on their ideal schedule.
Second, having plenty of back-up options at the ready is essential. If one is unable to get into a popular class because of BannerWeb, preparedness with a second, third, fourth, and fifth option can earn a well-prepared student with a spot in a second-choice class.
Another precaution that is worth taking is e-mailing professors in advance.
“Most professors are pretty understanding when it comes to registration, especially if you contact them ahead of time,” said Sierra Stites ’14.
Getting on the wait-list for a class in advance or just conveying interest to the professor of a class can never hurt when BannerWeb remains so unpredictable.
