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(09/25/13 7:22pm)
While some students claim to have filled out a work order, the work of the Facilities Services staff that keeps Middlebury running smoothly often happens under the radar. As a result, many students do not know the extent of Facilities’ operations.
“I think the magnitude and the time we spend would be the most surprising thing that I think people would find,” said Wayne Hall, Facilities Maintenance Supervisor for carpenters, painters, and locksmiths.
The trades that fall under Facilities’ purview include carpentry, plumbing, heating, landscaping, electrical, an auto shop, car rentals, night watch and waste management — not to mention snow removal. That magnitude is apparent from even a brief tour of the Facilities building.
The first point of contact students have with Facilities happens at a front office.
“All phone and computer information comes through the control desk and the intention is to have it funnel through here so we don’t miss anything,” said Hall. The control desk prints work orders based off that information.
Most of the staff carry two-way radios so they can be contacted immediately. A corridor with offices of management personnel and an IT staffer is next to the control desk. An additional room in that hallway is the plan room, with large metal filing cabinets with original floor plans of various buildings.
“All of the buildings from when they were constructed have all their plans here – electrical, everything,” said Hall. “If we have questions this is our resource for checking in history.”
One of Hall’s responsibilities is managing the locksmiths.
“We have a full lock shop here,” said Hall near the entrance to the office where locksmiths solve broken locks. “All the keys you need, all the keys we need, they do it here.”
The locksmith shop is also an example of how the work of the Facilities staffers is evolving all the time.
“Now we are going install more keypad locks,” Hall said. “Each year we are trying to do more and more so we rely less on keys and more on combo.”
A large table next to the lock room is where staff repairs windows, screens, and window shades.
While the Facilities staff does most of the work that is needed, contractors are occasionally brought in. Chimney repair, masonry and other major painting projects are handled by contractors who are contacted by a Facilities staffer specializing in outsourcing work.
Downstairs, custodial services staff can pick up their radios from a wall of equipment and keys. According to Hall, some of them report in at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. to clean buildings when no one is using them.
“Our service time used to be very shrunk but now expectations with the way the world is and schedules it has really broadened,” said Hall.
The carpentry shop, near Hall’s office, has a box with the name of each staffer with work orders in them.
The plumbing department is headquartered in a cavernous room where above a conference table are shelves of stock supplies and uniforms. The paint shop, close by, has two hockey goals on large tables that are being painted in anticipation of the hockey season.
By the end of a short walk through the building the broad range of tasks completed by Facilities is clear.
Hall began working for Facilities in 1994. “It’s been a good learning experience,” he said. “I’ve got a great group of guys with a wide range of skills and aptitudes. We’ve got a great group. We all complement each other and work as a team.”
Hall also coordinates with getting tenants off-campus since many faculty live off campus in college-owned housing that require Facilities staff to repair. He also said he has the advantage of being able to interact with students.
One of the staff members working under Hall is Ed DeMatties, a maintenance carpenter who has worked at Middlebury since 1990. DeMatties is also on the emergency response team for confined space rescue, trained to rescue people trapped in elevators, manholes or other spaces where Facilities works.
On Friday, he could be found jetting around campus in a green John Deere Gator. The first stop was an unoccupied room in Stewart Hall where DeMatties had to install a new window shade.
“This used to be a lounge here,” said DeMatties, pointing to a room adjacent to the one where he was working. “I put this wall in and installed that door. We did that just a couple weeks ago.”
DeMatties said Facilities makes a point to be both as efficient and non-disruptive as possible when working on student rooms. This time, a piece to repair the shade was missing.
“You think you have everything and you get all the way up there and you’re missing one thing,” he said. But I’ll be back and this room is empty so it’s not a real rush.”
A minute later, DeMatties’ two-way radio crackled to life with a call about 51 Main’s basement hot water heater leaking. “Plumbers get more stuff like that,” he said. “They all carry radios. I’m the only one in our shop besides Wayne who carries a radio.”
After evaluating the Stewart room and determining he needed more parts, DeMatties selected the next work order. After taking the Gator back to the Facilities building to pick up a door stop, he went back to Stewart to install it in another student room to prevent a cabinet from hitting a wall mounted sprinkler when opened.
DeMatties said they see a lot of student damage work orders come in.
“Usually after the weekend,” said DeMatties. “This year I haven’t seen much at all.” DeMatties added with a laugh that it was hopefully a part of the learning process.
Having worked at the College for over 20 years, DeMatties has seen his fair share of projects on campus, including a repair of all the sinks in the bathrooms of Hadley and Milliken Halls. “I came up with a design to replace them,” said DeMatties.
“Hopefully now they should last a long time,” he said.
Commencement used to take place behind Forest Hall, but when it was moved to Voter Hall, DeMatties helped arrange the setup for the ceremony and put the flags atop Voter.
“I went to school for architecture and so they had me come up with the plan for the seating layout and so it was kind of cool I got to do that,” said DeMatties. “Now they come to me for questions.”
Aside from his work on campus, he put his training in architecture to use when he designed and built his own house. After successfully installing a doorstop on the wall, it was over to the Mahaney Center for the Arts to pick up a framed poster of the upcoming Fine Arts events to be installed in Axinn. DeMatties deftly measured an area on the wall by the entrance to the building and screwed in the hangers for the poster.
DeMatties is also in the process of working on guardrails for beds in Voter. “When I put the first one in, somebody else said, ‘I’ll take on too,’ and so I put two in and now somebody else has seen it, and now I’m making one for all of them.”
Although Facilities sees between 1,200 to 1,500 work orders sent to them every month, that does not mean their work is highly visible.
“A lot of the stuff we do probably doesn’t get noticed, such as in student rooms,” said DeMatties. “If the person is there, we’ll tell them we fixed it. If they’re not there, we’ll leave a note tag inside the door telling them we were there and what we did.”
Hall echoed DeMatties’ sentiment. “[Facilities] is behind the scenes. Nobody realizes it until we’re called on,” he said. “Everybody plays a role whether you’re a custodian or a manger, no matter what, because the faculty and the students wouldn’t be able to do their jobs if it wasn’t clean or if the lights didn’t work. Everybody’s job, no matter what it is, is a key part of making it all work.”
(09/25/13 12:00pm)
MiddCAM is a new student organization that pairs a senior from Middlebury Union High School with a student from the College who acts as a mentor throughout the college admission process. Its goal is to prepare high school students for navigating the oft-daunting process of standardized testing, college essays and all else that comes with applying to colleges.
The high school works to identify students who have particular interest in college and the idea of a mentor. The organization’s philosophy underscores what a help guidance from someone with first-hand experience can be during a time that is simply overwhelming for many students.
A friend of Megan Ernst ’15 approached her in the summer of 2012 about starting a branch of a program based in Palo Alto called Phoenix Scholars. The success of Phoenix Scholars is apparent; they annually send dozens of their students to top-tier institutions around the country. That fall, Megan pitched the idea of opening a branch of Phoenix Scholars to the College.
Phoenix Scholars and MiddCAM have similar principles that revolve around mentorship throughout the college application process. A key distinction between the two organizations is that Phoenix Scholars imposes three demographic criteria — that a student must be a minority, low-income and a first-generation college student — out of which its students must satisfy two.
After demographic research of Addison County, Ernst found that such requirements would seriously limit the eligible number of students the College could work with. Ultimately, she decided to start a completely new program, MiddCAM, that would cater to the specific needs of the students through an involved one-on-one mentor. Through a mutual friend and shared interest Ernst teamed up with Jessica Kong ’15. They determined that financial aid could not be MiddCAM’s primary concern.
“We have expanded our focus to writing application essays, helping with college research and helping prepare them for every aspect of college.”
Mentors and mentees are often paired up randomly, Kong conceded.
“It’s hard to match based on academic interest because no one really knows what they want to study,” she said.
Though a perfect match is not always possible, the goal is for the relationship between mentor and mentee to be personalized. In all cases, a mentor will be a helpful resource with a fresh impression the college process.
Midd students understand the value of mentorship during application season, especially from a peer, rather than a trained expert. Caroline Guiot ’16 had a college counselor in high school, but does not hesitate in saying what a help it would have been to have a college student to talk to about the application process.
The value of such a mentor often proves irreplacable for certain students. “First generation kids don’t have the answers, partly because their parents never went to college or don’t speak enough English to get that kind of information,” MiddCAM Program Administrator Jessica Cheung ’15 said.
The inaugural MiddCAM mentors went to a training session hosted by the Middlebury College Admissions office, leaving the session remembering their own college search process, a flashback that will inform their mentoring strategies.
Middlebury Union played a big role in identifying students who would be matched with mentors. This year, mentors will meet mentees in early October, midway through the fall of their senior year. However, both Kong and Ernst feel confident that in subsequent years students will be paired with mentors in the second semester of junior year, just in time for the SAT. Once mentors and mentees are paired, they are granted a fair amount of autonomy.
There is no end date to the mentorship, nor is there a specific time commitment, but Ernst estimates that the face-to-face interaction will be about an hour per week along with editing and research that might not require meeting in person. Mentors cover the academic side of the process, navigating the Common App and its intricacies, but they will also be there for questions that students might have about what awaits them.
The mentor is responsible for establishing an agreeable schedule. Although the mentors have been briefed extensively, Guiot admits that this inaugural year could be tricky.
“We are starting a little late in the college process because it’s our first year, so we only have a couple months to work with our mentee,” she said.
A tenet of the mentorship is first-hand experience and Guiot acknowledges that she is not a professional but that her main job is “to share from my experience and help them stay on track.” The mentors will not be completely on their own in this process. Kong and Ernst, along with program administrators Cheung and Steven Zatarain ’15 will continually check in with mentors and offer an outlet for questions or concerns they may have.
MiddCAM exists to assure that students at an information disadvantage but have a demonstrated interest in attending college don’t fall through the cracks. MiddCAM is the first program of its kind to exist in the community — something Ernst describes as Middlebury’s “unique ability to provide mentors.”
Ernst and Kong have their eyes on the future and admit that in focusing on the senior year, “we don’t change the academic course of someone’s high school career.”
Looking forward, expansion seems imminent. Primarily, MiddCAM hopes to start with students in junior year, which would cover the bulk of standardized testing. While it is only MiddCAM’s first year, Ernst already has hopes to bring the program to other high schools in Addison County. For now, though, everyone involved is tremendously excited that the program is coming to life and that the first class of mentees and mentors are but days away from being matched up.
(09/19/13 12:16am)
In concession to strong student demand, the College has agreed to continue offering a finance course this academic year in a last-minute addition to the course catalog.
When the Alan R. Holmes Professor of Monetary Economics Scott Pardee, the College’s only finance professor, announced his intention to leave the economics department at the end of the last academic year, many students were concerned that finance courses would no longer be available at the College.
The economics department received several emails, letters and course evaluations voicing this concern. In response to students’ demands, the faculty has reinstated a finance course within the Interdepartmental category. Corporate Finance and Accounting (INTD 306) was a last-minute addition to the course catalog for the fall semester, and will be co-taught by Professor David Colander and newly-named Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) Emeritus Faculty Fellow Scott Pardee.
INTD 306 will be the only finance and accounting course offered this semester, a reduction from previous semesters when Pardee taught four courses devoted to the subject.
Following the College’s announcement of the course, 48 students enrolled in the class and 80 more were added to the waitlist, in spite of its last-minute appearance in the course catalog.
The demonstrated popularity of this course, in addition to the reduction of finance courses from four to one, has edged out some students hoping to prepare themselves for a career in finance.
“The Economics program at Middlebury is outstanding and I have benefitted immensely from it,” said Jake Feury ’16. “However, I strongly believe that adding more finance courses into Middlebury’s curriculum will help us perform better in job interviews and succeed in a career in finance after college. It would certainly make me feel more comfortable applying for jobs if I had the opportunity to take more finance courses here at Middlebury.”
Even Middlebury alumni are speaking out on the subject.
“As an alum who works in finance and took all of Prof. Pardee’s classes, I can definitely say that my experience looking for a job in finance would not have been the same without the knowledge that I gained in Prof. Pardee’s classes and more importantly, his real world experience in the field,” an online commenter to The Campus’ article titled “College Drops Finance Courses,” published last spring wrote. “When a MiddKid is out there competing with a Finance major from Yale, Dartmouth, it is better for the company to hire someone who needs less training.”
Both Colander and Pardee expressed a desire to spend the fall developing a curriculum of several new finance courses to supplement the current single offering.
Pardee emphasized the importance of these finance classes in giving students a competitive edge in the job search, as well as to the College’s standing.
“If you don’t have somebody here who is teaching that stuff then we lose,” said Pardee. “These schools that we are in deadly competition with have these courses so we have to have them to even maintain the position that we have.”
The debate over whether finance courses belong at the College represents a much larger discussion happening across departments about the role of specialized courses at a liberal arts college based on the current job market.
Christian A. Johnson Professor of Economics and Head of the Economics Department Peter Matthews disagreed, responding that the “out-of-the-box” thinking that a liberal arts education generates will make any Middlebury student marketable.
“The liberal arts experience … prepares students for all pursuits, not individual jobs, [and] for a lifetime of engagement with the world, not specific job interviews,” said Matthews. “I believe that the current Economics Department, with its renewed commitment to ‘research-based learning,’ embodies this experience, and I’m confident that our students are well prepared to excel in the world. I also know, however, that there are more opportunities than ever at the College to acquire marketable skills.”
Many students question if this is enough, however.
“Middlebury needs to reconsider what it means to be a liberal arts college in the 21st century and offering finance courses is part of this,” said Max Kagan ’14. “Students need job skills in order succeed in an increasingly competitive job market. The world is changing; the oft-repeated refrains that a liberal arts degree is a degree in ‘learning how to think’ and that ‘you can do anything with a liberal arts degree’ are under threat.”
(09/19/13 12:12am)
Six weeks ago I stepped out of the airport with a suitcase, two backpacks and new passport stamp. Having overconfidently thought that I could survive the Argentine “winter” in sandals after spending two J-terms in Vermont, my toes immediately froze in the crisp breeze. I gazed with envy over at the Argentine girls fashionably sporting Ugg boots with their leather jackets and made a mental note to invest in some close-toed shoes. The heat and humidity of North Carolina hadn’t followed me to the southern hemisphere.
Living in Buenos Aires and thinking, living and breathing in Spanish 24/7 is simultaneously fun, challenging, rewarding and exhausting. To give my adjustment a little context: I’ve been hanging out with Vermont’s cows in the Organic Garden for the past two years and spent my childhood in a small southern town where the biggest event was the annual Labor Day BBQ Picnic. Needless to say, transitioning to life in South America’s second largest metropolis has been an adventure. For starters, I’ve given up on introducing myself as Sayre and have learned to love the name Sarita. It’s easier than explaining my name as “pronounced like slayer, but without the L.”
Learning how best to take advantage of the city’s public transportation has also been a tricky adjustment. Although I need to leave myself at least an hour to get anywhere in the city, I can arrive at nearly any destination by Subte (metro) or Colectivo (bus) for about 31 cents, and it gives me time to knock out a few pages of reading and get in some solid people watching. In spite of the ease of the Colectivo, I typically shell out a few extra pesos for night transportation and take taxis after 11 PM. While the park by my apartment is my go-to place to run during the day, transvestite hookers are known to strut their stuff and linger on street corners after sundown. But it’s all part of the experience, right?
Buenos Aires nightlife and dining have presented me with equally unique experiences in relation to college life in Vermont. My nighttime schedule is far different from a standard Saturday night quilombo (translation: hot mess) at Midd. My host family sits down for dinner and Malbec at around 10:30 p.m., which is already go-time by my American college student standards. While at Midd, I like to hit the sack by 3 a.m. at the latest. Here, however, I was laughed at by my platform tennis shoe-wearing Argentine friends for trying to sneak out of a birthday party at 4:30 a.m. I learned soon enough that rolling into bed as the sun starts to peek through the morning clouds and sleeping until empanada lunchtime is how the Argentines do nights out.
It’s strange to think that I won’t be waiting in line for the panini machines in Proctor or stealing a quick nap in the dangerously comfortable red and blue chairs in Bi Hall when classes start this week, but at the same time it’s incredible to reflect upon the relationships and experiences I’ve already had in the past month and a half. Whether it’s waking up in the middle of the night, ecstatic at the realization that I was dreaming in Spanglish, mustering up the courage to pose a question in class or the fact that I’m on a first name basis with the staff at my two favorite cafes, I have found that venturing outside of my comfort zone and outside of the Middlebury bubble can be immeasurably entertaining and rewarding. Suerte con el semestre and see you fools in Play-Term.
Written by SAYRE WEIR '15 from Buenos Aires, Argentina
(09/18/13 8:32pm)
For those just arriving as well as those preparing to leave in a few months, the fall at Middlebury is the perfect time to explore all that Vermont has to offer. Since the beginning of 2013 alone, over 2.2 million cars have passed into the state, many of them tourists coming to experience the very things we Midd Kids have all around us every day. Vermont is famous for its fall foliage, but there are always hidden gems to explore. Below are some must-do items to place on your bucket list this fall.
Vermont Flannel Store: Nothing, and I mean nothing, says Vermont like flannel. A quick drive up route 7, and on your left as you leave Middlebury, the Vermont Flannel Store offers some of the best you can get, and was even inducted into the 2010 “Made in the USA” hall of fame. Not only are the products good, but the store sits next to an iconic covered bridge covered in tasteful lights that will give anyone who goes an authentic Vermont vibe. But be warned - shirts go for around $50 a piece.
Fiddlehead Brewery & Folino’s Woodfired Pizza: If you’re 21+ and appreciate amazing beers, head on up to Fiddlehead Brewery in Shelburne. Even if you can’t yet legally drink or prefer other beverages, the brewery also features a pizza restaurant that is incredible. It’s well worth the drive to taste some Vermont native beer and enjoy some of the best pizza around with a group of good friends.
Morgan Horse Farm & Museum: For avid runners, you may have trotted past the Morgan Horse farm and admired the buildings, but not given it much thought beyond that. I urge you to make a special trip not past the farm but onto it. The Morgan Horse farm is on the National Register of Historic places and the University of Vermont has cultivated one of the best lines of the Morgan Horse in the world there. A short walk from campus, you’ll never regret it. Careful though! The farm closes to visitors on Oct. 31.
Shelburne Farms: Their website asserts that the Shelburne farm is “a nonprofit education organization whose mission is to cultivate a conservation ethic for a sustainable future.” At 1,400 acres, the farm offers an incredible view of Lake Champlain and is a National Historic Landmark in Shelburne, Vt. You’ll have to take a car, but if you’re on Route 7 headed towards Burlington, you shouldn’t miss it.
Champlain Orchards: Fall is apple picking season and nowhere hosts a better selection and atmosphere than Champlain Orchards in Shoreham. A 20-minute drive from campus, Champlain Orchards offers all manners of apple picking from the tree as well as apple cider, cider donuts and other apple-themed tasty treats.
The Skinny Pancake: The iconic creperie of Burlington, Vt. is a key stop any time you’re in the city. The Skinny Pancake features sweet and savory crepes as well as some of the best fries I’ve ever had – seriously. Set on a corner near Lake Champlain, the atmosphere is young and geared towards foodie appreciation. They are now collaborating with “Localvore Today” to host an après-work get-together at the restaurant from 5:30 - 9 p.m. every Thursday night.
Church Street, Burlington: If you haven’t already been to Burlington, find a car (or take public transportation – its easy!) and head on up. Church Street is a pedestrian only causeway that runs through the heart of Burlington. Featuring shops as unique as Burlington Records for your LPs and 45s and as convenient as an Apple store, Church Street is perfect for meandering and missions to purchase specific items. There are also street performers to dazzle and delight.
“The Big Picture”: This café/theater in Waitsfield, Vt. is, according to their website, “the Mad River Valley’s unofficial cultural center and café.” The Big Picture is perfect for dinner and a movie, serving locally grown vegetables and herbs from the Small Step Farm as well as local meats and cheeses. They have show times available online as well as nightly specials and music too!
Burlington Bagel: If you like to eat at Middlebury Bagel, you will be blown away by Burlington Bagel. The small building sits in South Burlington, right off of Route 7. Its size doesn’t do justice to the big taste packed into each bagel. It’s well worth the drive on its own, but it’s also a great addition to any excursion to Burlington.
The Organic Farm: Students at the College have a wide range of relationships to the Organic Farm. A great way to change your previous experience of the college’s student maintained plot of land is to watch the sunrise over the hill and Meade Chapel one morning. If you’re not an early riser, there are Adirondack chairs and a fire pit positioned perfectly to watch the sun go down over the mountains on the other side.
Snake Mountain: Standing 1,287 feet tall in Addison and Weybridge, Snake Mountain is great for the outdoorsy and less adventurous alike. The hike isn’t steep, takes about an hour and opens out into a panoramic view featuring lake Champlain and the mountains of New York. If you time it correctly, you can watch the sun set from the top – it is a moment you’ll remember for a long time, I promise, but be sure to bring a flashlight if you do a sunset hike!
Ben and Jerry’s Factory: Located in Waterbury, Vt., the Ben and Jerry’s factory offers a tour of the facility. With your ticket, you receive a discount on a t-shirt and a free pint of ice cream. I would also check out the “Ice Cream Graveyard” that features all the discontinued flavors Ben and Jerry’s had over the years, commemorated by poems on gravestones.
Shelburne Museum: Located, as many of these bucket list items are, along Route 7 as you head towards Burlington, the Shelburne Museum is another must-see. There are over 150,000 works of art in 39 different exhibition buildings. Buildings ranging from The Ticonderoga Steam Boat to a brand new facility completed last year give any tour of the museum a unique character that you wont find anywhere else.
Robert Frost Trail: In East Middlebury as you head towards the College’s Snow Bowl, the Robert Frost Trail offers an easy and picturesque hike. The loop is 1.2 miles and takes on average 45 minutes to an hour. The trail commemorates Robert Frost’s poetry by featuring mounted poems along the woods and fields for you to read and experience.
Magic Hat Brewery (21+): Although Vt. is home to many breweries, none have a tour quite like that found at Magic Hat in South Burlington. Something you have to see to believe, the tour is free and can be guided or self-guided. It includes views of the factory that cranks out 400 bottles of beer per minute, but transcends the typical tour by offering a film about their Mardi Gras event and punk-themed decorations throughout. The group is friendly and dedicated to their work, willing to chat about the process as they offer samples of classics such as #9.
Cookie Love: A tiny shack easy to miss on Route 7 North, Cookie Love has some of the best you’ll ever taste. It’s situated in North Ferrisburgh and features pre-made cookies, cookie dough and creemees. All the flavors are named after a type of love: “first love” is chocolate chip, “puppy love” is peanut butter chocolate chip and “it’s a wonderful love” is holiday sugar, for example.
The Camel: I can’t give much explanation beyond this: if you’re driving on Route 7 North towards Burlington, about 20 minutes away from Middlebury, you will pass a dilapidated looking farm that has a camel who hangs out with sheep like he’s a sheep. Pull the car over, take as many pictures as you possibly can. The camel has two humps and if anyone finds out his or her name, please let me know.
Vergennes: A short and beautiful drive or do-able bike ride from Middlebury gets you to Vergennes, a perfect weekend brunch destination. Restaurants such as 3 Squares and Vergennes Laundry (a bakery, not a Laundromat) are perfect to eat at and even to get a little homework done on a Sunday.
This is just a short list of the many opportunities available in the area. The most important thing is to pop the Middlebury College bubble and explore this glorious area we’re in for four years of our lives.
(09/18/13 6:44pm)
Learning is painful. It took me a summer to realize that, but our liberal arts education can be unpleasant. Or at the very least allow us to see unpleasantness that already exists.
The jump from our cozy bubble of educated students and professors into the real world can be jarring. You find that people under the age of 18 still exist, not all cars stop for you to cross the street and food is surprisingly expensive. Even more though and perhaps most rattling is stepping back into a world with the experience of a liberal arts education.
My friends from high school are some of my oldest and most dear, but they have not had the experience I have had here. So when I hear one of them use the word “faggot” and then watch as nobody responds, I feel uneasy. Three years ago hearing that word would not have bothered me. I corrected my friend and was greeted with surprise: “Oh sorry Andrew, yeah sure I won’t say that again. Do you actually know any gay people though?”
Yes. Yes I do.
At one point this instance would not have bothered me. This was not a product so much of my education as it was experience. Sure, I have gay friends but – sorry guys – they are not the motivation for my response. Even more than defending my friends, morality makes me find that word unacceptable.
Re-entry into everyday society is filled with these instances and it is not my responsibility to correct the world because I deem myself more educated. However it is part of the responsibility, or burden, of a liberal arts experience. The privilege of education would be spoiled if we did not use it to affect the world around us. On campus this feeling is fleeting or oftentimes non-existent. The burden does not feel so heavy when surrounded by people who share similar points of view and educational experience.
A subtler example came at dinner a few weeks ago. For whatever reason, the topic of marriage and relationships in general came up. Both my parents are college educated, and I think quite smart, but they did grow up in a different time and culture. I would not describe their views as traditional, but they were certainly influenced by Italian-American cultural norms. So when my mother made the comment “Andrew, you wouldn’t want to marry a girl who had been with a lot of men,” I could sense an old world mentality. What I found more troubling was that when I asked “Why not?”, she could not give me a response.
I don’t mention this to highlight the failures of my mother; far from it. At one time I may have made a similar statement and I have plenty of friends who would have no problem with it. Why not though? What is wrong with a woman sleeping with as many men as she likes? Does that make her a worse marriage candidate? Most of us would sense the double standard, especially when my sister would likely be told to make sure her choice of spouse was kind, compassionate and loyal above caring about the number of people he slept with.
Every summer it has been more jarring to leave this very real bubble. The first summer I was ambivalent, and the second my arguments were flimsy, but now after nearly three years in this place I can no longer ignore the fact that the world has stayed more or less the same, and we, as students, have become something different.
I don’t mean to sound preachy or to highlight what a wonderful, life-changing experience we have here. Nor do I think it is our duty to go out into the world and make it politically correct. The ability to recognize injustice in the world around us makes a sense of responsibility unavoidable. It is the byproduct of education. I do feel a sort of selfish envy for friends who have not been exposed to that. They have the luxury of ignorance at times, while it can feel we are burdened by the responsibility of education.
Whether we like it or not, Middlebury takes the blinders off. Or at least we think so. Professors, I’m sure, see us as ignorant in our own way as students. There is no denying the amount left to learn. As we step back into the bubble, I cannot help but reflect on the responsibility that comes with education. Learning is painful because it makes injustice and unpleasantness more visible in the larger world. Hopefully, by the end of our four years we will have solutions to the problems we now see.
(09/18/13 6:34pm)
One of Middlebury’s strengths is the drive with which students endeavor to make the world a better place. We don’t always agree on how to do this, and thus the College has recently witnessed impassioned debates on a number of important issues. Many, including myself, have been enriched by these discussions. Yet there are those who reject our community’s embrace of civil discourse in favor of so-called “activism.”
Whether out of egocentrism or simply blind passion, these people have alienated supporters and foes alike with their self-aggrandizing tactics and moral absolutism. They have broken the law and willfully disregarded College policies. So convinced are they of their own righteousness that they eschew the need to win over supporters through rational argument and compromise, preferring the familiar intellectual comfort of demagoguery.
I have very strong feelings about this issue. But these thoughts were far from my mind on the morning of Sept. 11, 2013. It was a bright, warm day, just as it was twelve years ago. It was not until that evening that I learned that group of individuals had uprooted thousands of American flags that students had carefully laid out in front of Mead Chapel as a memorial to those who died on that terrible day twelve years ago. A picture available online shows Anna Shireman-Grabowski ’14.5 shoving flags into a black trash bag.
To be honest, I’ve never been sure about how to feel about this annual memorial. On the one hand, I am proud that Middlebury students are still dedicated towards remembering the events of Sept. 11, 2001. On the other hand, I am uncomfortable with the implication that we need a display in order to remember the significance of the day — as if anyone could ever forget.
Yet that cluster of 2,977 flags has a deep symbolic meaning for many members of our community. Just as each and every one of us has our own unique tale of what we went through on Sept. 11, we each have our own ways of remembering our loss. The Middlebury community standards — to say nothing of common decency — demand that we respect everyone’s right to grieve as they see fit.
I had thought that this spirit of mutual respect was self-evident to all members of the Middlebury community. To my shock and dismay, it apparently is not.
Shireman-Grabowski and her co-conspirators have brought shame upon Middlebury and upon themselves. There can be no justification for their actions; they deliberately exploited a terrible tragedy to gain publicity. The Middlebury community welcomes constructive dialogue and collegial dissent, but it cannot and should not accept deliberately provocative action intended only to cause pain.
Shireman-Grabowski has attempted to cloak her petty vandalism in the veneer of moral righteousness. She claims that placing the flags in the earth constituted an offense towards the Abenaki people, and that this ostensible cause justifies the hurt she has caused. Leaving aside the fact that the Abenaki — with whom Shireman-Grabowski could not even be bothered to consult — reject her action, her own actions belie this rationalization as self-serving and dishonest.
There is in fact no evidence to support her bloviating claims; the Abenaki themselves are unaware of any burial sites in the area and the geology of the site seems to preclude its use as a burial grounds in any case. If Shireman-Grabowski truly cared about the rights of the Abenaki, she could have easily reached out to the organizers of the memorial ahead of time in order to share her concerns and work towards an appropriate compromise.
Indeed, organizer Ben Kinney ’15 proposed several such compromises to the five vandals even as they were the process of stealing the flags. But these people have no interest in compromise. After all, compromise doesn’t get your name published in the Huffington Post.
The College Community must now come to terms with these repugnant acts. We have already begun to do so. On the night of the vandalism, students united to re-create the memorial with flags they were able to recover. Other community members reached out to local and national media to make it clear that this heinous act does not represent Middlebury College. President Liebowitz has stated that the administration is beginning a disciplinary investigation. The other four individuals should be charged with theft and vandalism and banned from returning to Middlebury College. They have forfeited their right to meaningfully contribute to our community.
That leaves Shireman-Grabowski herself. After several days, she issued an online apology to members of the Middlebury community she harmed by her actions. The question now remains whether she and her cohorts will learn from their mistakes and accept our community standards embracing civil and collegial discourse or whether they will continue to gleefully defy our shared values in the future.
MAX KAGAN '14 is from Freeport, ME.
(09/12/13 1:13am)
Nothing says possibility like the first day of school. With each autumn, we lucky youth are given the opportunity to start from scratch. In third grade, it’s new crayons, in high school it’s new sneakers, and now, in college, it’s new everything. New classes, new dorms, new faces, new sushi bars in Crossroads. Not to mention the influx of 626 freshman, who are completely and utterly new to the rest of us.
And since we’re all overachieving Midd kids, we’ve just spent our summers doing amazing things, like saving orphans in Ghana, climbing Kilimanjaro, curing cancer at the Mayo Clinic, or writing about condoms and erectile dysfunction at Cosmopolitan. So, with three months full of new and amazing experiences, we’re all coming back a little bit new too.
But since this is a sex column, and since I’ve practiced writing about love and lust all summer, of course I’ll be focusing on one thing in particular: new hookups. The question is foremost in everyone’s mind: Who will you be locking lips with tonight on Atwater’s overcrowded and slimy dance floor? (R.I.P. ADP.)
Have you been thinking about it all summer? Or maybe you’re utterly surprised at your newfound attraction for So-and-So who looks really good with a tan. Or perhaps you’re reserving your judgment until you’ve gotten a chance to scope out the first-years.
So while that excitement is overwhelming, it’s not always rainbows and lollipops. What if the girl you’ve been dreaming about all summer has flown across the Atlantic with almost every other junior girl for a semester abroad? Or, maybe you fell head over heels for a senior last year, who’s graduated from the Middlebury bubble. (Sigh, been there.) Or perhaps all you can think about is that SOB ex who broke your heart last spring, who you’ve been trash talking and hate-texting all semester, but now that you’re back in Vermont you really want nothing but to kiss and make up.
Have you made a new school year’s resolution for hooking up? “This year, I’m only going to sleep with someone if we’ve hooked up sober.” “This year, I’ll only sex-ile my roommate if the guy is really, really hot.” “This year, I’m going to spend more time interpreting Shakespeare than his text messages.”
Whether you’re looking for your future spouse (we all know the Midd marriage stat) or just someone to pass a weekend with, everyone’s coming into this year with an expectation – a new expectation.
Freshmen, these first hook ups are your first firsts, unless maybe they already happened at orientation, but either way these are the most exciting. You are beginning the whirlwind that will be your lives as sexually-active college students.
Sophomores and juniors, you’re in the nebulous zone – not the new kids on the block, but still not the big kids. These first hook-ups are just another great way to punctuate the beginning of a brand new year.
And seniors, class of 2014, this is your last first hook up. Pretty scary, huh? Because when we graduate in 9 short months, we’ll be leaving behind us not only classrooms and dinning halls, but also the collegiate-styled hook up culture. Never again will we all be living in a one-mile radius of each other, consuming unhealthy amounts of alcohol, and living without supervision or responsibilities in the height of our sexual prime. When else can we be so reckless with our hearts and hard ons?
College hook ups are fun and exciting. They have the potential to lead to something huge, and they offer the possibility to lead to nothing. And never, never are they as highly anticipated or as thrilling as the first ones of the year. So enjoy it – and remember it. As it’s happening, catalogue it as your first first, the year’s first, or your last first. And even if you’re a bit black-out, ask your roommate to remember it for you, and then fill you in. Maybe it’s your first kiss with they guy you’ll marry, or maybe it’s your first and last kiss with that girl from your first year seminar. It doesn’t matter. It’s the year’s first hook up and it’s important. It’ll be Sunday morning’s brunch conversation, and it’ll also be how you remember the start to your freshman/sophomore/junior or senior (AHH!) year of college.
Brand new year. Right now, it’s a fresh slate. This weekend’s antics will be the first on the record. What will you do to kick it off?
(09/12/13 1:06am)
A weakened Middlebury men’s soccer squad traveled to Amherst for a matchup with the heavily favored Ephs on Saturday, Sept. 7. Middlebury played well against its eighth-ranked NESCAC rival, taking a 1-1 tie into overtime before Amherst ended the drama quickly with a goal in the fourth minute of extra time, sealing a 2-1 final score.
The team’s roster of 25 players includes 11 first-years, none of whom were present because of the mandatory MiddView orientation trips, leaving only three substitutes on the bench for coach David Saward. A handful of first-years are expected to see significant time the remainder of the season.
Amherst controlled the tempo in the first 15 minutes, setting a frenetic pace. Middlebury tried to slow the ball down, but Amherst was able to continually apply pressure and speed up the game. However, by the middle of the first half the Panthers settled in and put together a few chances. Late in the half the Panthers drew a clear foul and earned a penalty kick, which Harper Williams ’15 netted in the 42nd minute.
Amherst again applied steady pressure to begin the second half. Less than 20 minutes in, keeper Thomas Bull played a long ball forward to the head of Nico Pascual-Leone who redirected the ball to teammate Greg Singer. Singer ripped a low shot into the net and past goalkeeper Ethan Collins ’14.
Amherst appeared to have momentum after drawing level. But the Panthers were able to rebuff the Amherst offensive.
“They bunkered down and defended well,” said Saward. “Ethan was coming and getting the ball for us, which really helped.”
In extra time Amherst used a long throw to earn the game-winner. Max Fikke tossed the ball into a mass of bodies and found Ben Norton, who played the ball to the back post where Pascual-Leone scored the game winner.
“They worked so hard to get to that point,” said Saward. “I think they knew they did really well. I just hope that it carries forward into Wednesday [at Norwich]. I was definitely encouraged.”
Saward’s options were limited with the absence of 11 first-years.
“Especially when you think you’ve got three or four impact-level players, the lack of depth had an effect on the team’s spirit and attitude as well,” said Saward.
One such first-year, Greg Conrad ’17 was disappointed, but felt the decision aided the team in some ways.
“Obviously, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear when arriving on campus, especially the fact that it was Amherst,” Conrad said. “But, it has really fired up our squad and we are anxiously awaiting our first game with everyone back.
Saward would not use a reduced roster as an excuse, however.
“You work hard, you do your best over whatever period of time you play, and if you’ve got some talent, then some good things will happen,” he said.
“Overall you have to be disappointed with a loss,” said midfielder Andres Rodlauer ’16. “It was a beatable Amherst team and a good performance for 90 minutes but ultimately we came up short.”
A few individuals performed particularly well in the close loss. Deklan Robinson ’16 had a strong match, and captain Adam Batista ’14 “worked his socks off” according to coach Saward. Williams shook off the pressure to score the Panthers’ only goal.
Despite the defeat, the Panthers are confident that success is on the horizon.
“We’re confident that we are the best team in the NESCAC and are poised to make a big run at a championship season,” said Rodlauer.
The Middlebury men where back in action on Wednesday, Sept. 11 at Norwich whom they beat 2-0 last season, and will be reinforced by the return of the first-years. NESCAC play will resume on Saturday, Sept. 14 at home in a tilt against Conn. College.
(09/12/13 1:01am)
There has been a long-standing myth at the college: in halcyon summer days on an idyllic campus, chatter in Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish twirl in the open air like dandelion seeds dance across campus. Students fill the campus with passion and curiosity for a language, entering a new world but still remembering an old-aged rumor. In the corner of their eyes, they are on the lookout for tall men in black shades, trailing behind their combat boots, suspicious that they might disappear into revolving bookshelves in Axinn—yes, they are on the staking out the mythical FBI and CIA recruiters.
“It is true that the CIA and FBI have recruited at Middlebury,” Associate Director of Career Services Tim Mosehauer said. “They are interested in students for their language skills, including Arabic, Russian and Chinese — what you would call critical languages.”
“There is no cloak-and-dagger story here,” Vice President for Language Schools Michael Geisler said. “No special opportunity courses,” where agents are stowed away secretly in dark underground classrooms.
Dispelling the myth takes away the James Bond dramatizations. Yet mystery and intrigue remain in the question this debunked rumor left behind: what is it about learning a second language that makes a student so worthy?
“It is important for anyone working in a global society to acquire intensive-immersion linguistic and area studies skills,” Geisler said. “We don’t teach language. We teach culture broadly with classes on linguistics, media studies, art, history, the social system, the political system.
“The real connections you need to make as a journalist, government employee or business [partner] are connections that can’t be made in English or university classroom,” Geisler said. “It’s in the pubs.”
The Middlebury Summer Language schools has a long history of attracting students who come to learn a language having caught a fever for a culture from a song or historic event. But there has been a quiet but noticeable shift in the kind of students that enroll in the Middlebury Language Schools.
“Traditionally, language school has served students who are curious about a culture—we still have those students and they may be the majority,” Geisler said. “But a growing and strong minority of people come to language school with a more utilitarian approach, interested in adding business and journalism skills. People realize they need cultural and language skills in an economic global society.”
Applications surged in recent years, namely in the critical languages. The increased demand comes as the Language Schools are adjusting to predict how many more spaces they should add to the language schools of high interest and determine the faculty they will hire to teach additional courses to accommodate increased enrollment, while keeping the student-teacher ratio low.
Just in the past five years, the Hebrew School doubled its size of enrollment, according to School of Hebrew Coordinator Tania Bolduc. In 2013, the language school broke the record for most students ever enrolled with 1,533 students.
“For schools like Portuguese that enrolled beyond projections, we managed our yield by particular demands, and supplemented our offerings with additional faculty and courses,” Assistant Dean of Middlebury College Language Schools Elizabeth Karnes Keefe said. “The director of the school would in such a case expand the scope and offerings of the school to accommodate particular levels and academic interests.”
The changing marketplace and diversifying economy hastens the demand for spaces at foreign language education institutions.
“I see linguistics, language and ESL not in the field of teaching, but in the world of business,” Chinese School Coordinator Anna Sun said. “I guess it’s a good trend. I have two kids who graduated from the liberal arts colleges and knowing a second language gives them grounding and real life application. My son stepped into the job market as a religion major but was able to get a career as a union organizer (because of a second language).”
It used to be the case that multi-lingual competency wasn’t all about material payoff. It wasn’t even about speaking. It was about transporting yourself into the mind of a nation. It is a mosaic of history and culture on a language that, the more you build your vocabulary and idioms, forms a running, constantly expanding world.
But the passion-over-payoff trope is dying. Students, like it or not, will enter a marketplace, forced to compete against other graduates emerging out of the talent pool, or they fail to get a job.
But for some language school officials, there is no division between the students who come to learn a language for professional reasons and those who come for personal reasons. Their reaction: so what if you do turn to a language because of its emerging economy or political conflicts?
“Their professional reasons are resultants of personal reasons,” Sun said. “They are one in the same, if not just more practical.”
“When talking about why students come to the Language Schools, you can’t necessarily separate personal and professional goals,” Keefe added. Even if you are a student who wants to learn Chinese in order to gain entry into the financial community in Beijing, for example, “you also want to develop personal relationships and cultivate language skills along with cultural understanding.”
Of course, the Language School depends on students who come for professional reasons. The very fact that the job market is shifting in favor of graduates with language skills is what prompted the steady rise in applicants.
While the federal government and other universities funnel money to launch programs for the day’s critical languages, in the past, it was Japanese; now Arabic and Chinese, language schools at Middlebury, according to Geisler, have long established these programs before it became a popular language. When created, “these languages are here to stay,” he said.
But the fact that language school officials are jumping in with talk of expanding the studies to include Korean, Farsi and Swahili indicates that the Language Schools is itself changing. The brand of the school is changing with the pace of its students toward marketable languages: Swahili—a language with growing popularity in the west, Farsi—a language in high demand by federal agencies, and Korean—a language with South Korea’s economy on the rise and culture breaking into Western markets.
The growing trend of students coming to the Middlebury Language Schools to become marketable, in turn, leave that spirit with the administration, now interested in expanding its languages to ones that appeal to students with professional purpose.
Whether good or bad, the trend exists and carries with it the drastic potential to change the philosophy of education not just in language schools but educational institutions across the board: With the emphasis on professional outcomes, might we run the risk of teaching students to put a premium on money over pursuing their ideals? Or can passion and profession really be inseparable?
Perhaps, it is not enough anymore to do something simply for the love of it. Most would like to think that in an increasingly specializing setting, there is still be a place in the world where learning something gave one a fever, where learning is not a means to something but an end to itself. But maybe, for a student in a globalizing age, the follow-your-passions orthodoxy, is now something of the past.
(05/09/13 3:42pm)
This past Thursday through Saturday, May 2 through 4, the College’d theatre program presented the play “The Castle: A Triumph” by contemporary British playwright Howard Barker in the Seeler Studio at Mahaney Center for the Arts. The college website says the play is “blasting with humor, bawdiness, violence, and the limits of desire, pain and sexuality.”
In “The Castle,” a group of 12th-century English Crusaders return to their homeland after a long period of time, but find that the civic, agricultural and religious practices they were familiar with have been turned upside down while they were away. The women who were left behind in the village had radically changed the government and religion into an egalitarian culture. With the return of these reigning crusaders, they brought back an engineer who plan the largest castle in the region in order to regain control over the women. As the construction of the castle went on, they not only transformed the landscape of the village, but also the power dynamics manifesting in gender, sexuality, race and age. The play is serious, mature but yet comical in its exploration of gender and love.
Director Richard Romagnoli, the Isabel Riexinger Mettler professor of theatre at the College, is an authority on the work of Howard Barker. He has directed six of Barker’s plays and a few poems for the theatre department, PTP and companies in Boston and New York City since his first year at the College.
In Director’s Notes, Romagnoli viewed “The Castle” as “a story about love – love rejected – love betrayed – love pursued – the inability to love.”
With inciting action, a series of compelling conflicts and a resolution followed by an ironic denouement, the play formed the theatrical polarities of humor and sadness, a beautifully structured story.
Telling Barker’s story, conventional exchanges between characters were interrupted by direct addresses to the audience, inviting the audience to participate in the dramatic dynamic. The direct connection between the audience and the performer was not only engaging, but also challenged the imaginative boundaries of the audience.
Limited by the space and the budget, set designer Jon Crain and the director decided to have curtains dyed and painted shades of green, furnishing the landscape at the beginning of the play. The castle was revealed through the abrupt, violent tearing down of the curtains. The walls of the Seeler Studio became a part of the castle as the plot unfolded. In addition to that, the set provided the literal embodiment of a forbidding and dehumanizing structure in the space where the show finally took place with concrete columns and cinder block walls.
Instead of using traditional music scores as a melodramatic device to intensify the emotional scenes, the sound designer Cormac Bluestone used construction sounds to underscore some of the emotional moments. “The Castle” starred Christina Fox ’13.5 as Skinner, a witch, Meghan Leathers ’13.5 as Ann, a changed woman, and Noah Berman ’13 as her husband Stucley, a knight, embattled lord of the land.
Tickets sold out for all three performances. Students, professors, parents of the cast and friends of the production crew came and watched the two-and-a-half hour play.
“This play is not likely to leave the audience unaffected and indifferent and that makes for a potentially productive evening in the theater,” said Stephen Donadio, Fulton professor of humanities, sharing his experience in an email after the performance on Saturday night. “For what it is be worth, my own sense is that “The Castle” reveals the nature and scale of Barker’s dramatic ambition, which is Shakespearean, and that the changeable, conflicted texture of the play reflects Barker’s uneasiness with such an ambition, which he cannot help but find suspect, because it may be associated with pretentiousness and a will to power and domination.”
“As Romagnoli’s production makes clear,” he continued, “the playwright’s handling of this bleak assessment involves a lot of humor — subtly ironic humor and humor of the broad, loud, vulgar music hall variety. So, in the end, ‘The Castle’ seems to me unstoppably exploratory and genuinely unsettling.”
Unsettling seems to be a frequently mentioned adjective after the performance. Some of the students refused to leave any comment on “The Castle” because they do not know how to respond to this dramatic theatre work and were not sure if they got the underlying meanings of the work right.
Jack DesBois ’15 said that it was helpful for him to understand “The Castle” better with the experience of learning about Howard Barker in class. He said the abstract concepts of conflicts, domination and power might be hard to get out of the play if the audience came without knowing what to expect.
Precise construction of the castle, demolition of nature, betrayal in love, doubts in religious belief and conflicts in power; there are so many themes discussed and explored in “The Castle” that the general audience had a hard time grasping them all.
From a techniqual perspective, Sumire Doi ’13, who did her senior acting thesis “17 ½,” one month ago, thought “The Castle” was a brilliant project.
“The wall of the Seeler Studio was always standing there,” Doi said. “It’s nice to see the crew use it as a part of the castle, so the studio itself represents the castle. Besides, I really appreciated the poetic dialogues in the play.”
This summer, “The Castle” will be a part of summer shows in Season 27 of the PTP/NYC project off-Broadway.
(05/08/13 8:52pm)
Last Friday afternoon the Davis Library hosted a reception to honor all 22 members of the faculty and staff who have published works in the last year. The works were displayed in the Special Collections room, and after each author gave a brief overview of their book, the staff mingled and had a chance to take a closer look at each other’s work.
“It is always great to see what your colleagues are up to,” said Paul Monod, A. Barton Hepburn professor of history and acting dean of international programs, who recently authored Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment.
According to Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts “is a study of occult thought in England and Scotland, including alchemy, astrology and ritual magic.” This is his fifth book, but not the last — a sixth, a short book on British politics in the period of the American Revolution is in its early stages.
Christina Cartwright, German School coordinator, and translator of Zoo Station, agreed with Monod and commented on how “nice it is to feel recognized” by other members of the staff faculty. Zoo Station was originally published as Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo in Germany in 1979. It is an autobiographical piece by a former drug addict on her troubled teenage years. The book is very famous in Germany and is required reading for most high school age students.
“Teens of Addison County and Middlebury students [should] read it as well,” said Cartwright. “It may be based in a different culture, but the issues the book confronts carry over. It is a tough story, but a good one.”
Another Middlebury author also has published a work confronting the same issue, but from another direction. Rebecca Tiger, assistant professor of sociology, recently published Judging Addicts: Drug Courts and Coercion in the Justice System. Tiger was not able to attend the lecture, as she is on leave this year, mainly researching from New York City and working on another book about addictions. Rock Bottom: Celebrity and the Visual Culture of Addiction focuses on the representation and construction of drug use and addictions in popular press and reality television shows.
Juggling teaching and writing on campus this semester is Visiting Lecturer in Spanish Ricardo Chavez-Castaneda, who has had four works published in the last year, and 40 in his lifetime. He writes narrative literature for children, young readers and adults. In 2012, he received the “Premio Iberoamericano” for his short story Julio Cortázar, along with numerous other awards. His book El Libro que Se Muere was selected this year by the “Banco del libre de Venezuela” as one of the 10 best books published in the Hispanic world and in Spanish.
“Writing and teaching is like a blood transfusion,” said Ricardo, “students constantly give me a fresh look at all the things around us, and they renew my curiosity about life and the world. With that renewed curiosity, perplexity and fresh perspective, those of us that dedicate ourselves to teaching are stimulated to explore many new ideas.”
Another book published by a member of Middlebury’s languages department was Assistant Professor of Spanish Luis Castaneda’s Viaje al Norte de Verano, a coming-of-age novel for young readers, set in the northern coast of Perú, dealing with father-son conflicts, romantic relationships and personal ethics.
Two works by Middlebury professors were published in the Latin language in the past year. Professor of Classics Randall Ganiban collaborated on Vergil: Aeneid, Books 1-6, containing the first half of Vergil’s Aeneid with line-by-line commentary and other material to aid college-level students in translating and appreciating the classic poem.
“I’m lucky to be able to write on authors I teach in my courses,” said Ganiban. “I have my own students in mind when I draft the commentaries. The opportunity to ‘test’ these commentaries in class has been invaluable.”
Associate Professor of Classics Christopher Star published The Empire of the Self: Self-Command and Political Speech in Seneca and Petronious, a book on Latin literature and philosophy. Star has received a grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and agreed with Ganiban that his “classes at Middlebury have all been helpful in refining ideas.” Star has nearly completed his next book, an introduction to the life and works of Seneca.
Many of the works written will be helpful to the Professors in their classrooms as well as aid the teachings of their colleagues. For example, Larry Hamberlin, associate professor of music, co-authored a college textbook on American music. Director of the Breadloaf Writers Conference, Michael Collier, most recently published his sixth collection of poems, titled An Individual History. He was the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001-2004, and teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland. Retired professor Gary Margolis published A Poets Journey to the Shamans in Ecuador, and his previous work, Fire in the Orchard, was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy Emeritus Victor Nuovo edited and introduced John Locke: Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity, which looks at several writings by John Locke on religion. He also is a senior research fellow at Oxford University.
Director of Arts and Associate Curator at the College Museum Pieter Broucke, editor of Edward Burtynsky’s Vermont Quarry Photographs in Context, made a point nearly all writers agreed on. “I just love it when I learn from my students,” he said. All authors also repeatedly thanked their colleagues for the continued advice and editing.
This is just a selection of the 22 works published by Middlebury faculty and staff in the last year. The full collection of works is housed in the Davis Family Library, to the left of the Circulation Desk.
(05/01/13 8:54pm)
Barbara McCall, currently the Campus Wellness Education Coordinator at Castleton State College, was hired as the new Director of Health and Wellness Education in March and will begin working at the College this fall. Though the position is not new to the College, the role has remained unfilled for two years.
“We took time to reflect on what we wanted in that role, what we needed in the College right now, whether we needed to reshape the position in any way, and then we launched into the search,” said Dean of Students Katy Smith Abbott. Given the importance of student outreach in the role of director of health and wellness, the position was changed slightly so the new director can work more closely with the Office of the Dean of Students.
Smith Abbott explained, “Before, the director of health and wellness reported within Parton, and now she will be located right in the Dean of Students’ Office.”
According to Smith Abbott, McCall’s background makes her well suited to Middlebury.
“She comes out of a rich background of experience, both as an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke and her graduate work at [the University of Massachusetts Amherst],” said Smith Abbott. “So I think she comes well equipped to match the needs and the conversations that are really afoot on our campus right now.”
The Campus contacted McCall to talk to her about her new position.
Middlebury Campus: What issues do you focus on at Castleton that you think will translate to your new role at Middlebury?
Barbara McCall: I am a generalist by trade which means I cover lots of different topics – alcohol, drugs, stress, sleep, sex, nutrition, cold and flu – you name it, I get to do it, which is really great. It means no day is the same here at Castleton or otherwise. And I think all of those topics are really going to have some relevance at Middlebury because I think they are all really pertinent to the ways that college students interact with their campus and interact with their emerging independent lives as they get ready to leave Middlebury when they graduate.
I think two of the topics that have been brought to my attention in my interview process and in my initial interactions with Middlebury folks are alcohol and social life and then sexual violence and sexual respect. And so I imagine I am going to be spending a fair amount of my time working on those two issues with a lot of the campus committees, coalitions and taskforces that have already been set up and have been primed to be having those conversations on campus. I’m excited to join in those conversations and hopefully get moving on some programming for responding to those concerns and those questions that the conversations have been bringing up.
MC: Do you have a favorite topic in college-based health education?
McCall: The thing that gets me really excited, that I’m passionate about, is talking about sexual health, women’s health and LGBTQ health. Those are my favorites to talk about.
MC: As a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, are there any issues pertinent to working in campus health and wellness at a small, highly selective and academically rigorous school like Mount Holyoke or Middlebury?
McCall: I think it’s a double-edged sword. What I think is so fabulous and wonderful about small, exclusive liberal arts colleges is that you are dealing with a student body that is incredibly informed, incredibly vocal and they are evolving all the time in knowledge and understanding. I think it’s such a special and inspiring place to work. What can be difficult about those same wonderful attributes of a place like Mount Holyoke or Middlebury is that sometimes you can find pockets of campus being on different pages of a book or pages of a conversation. So it can take some real time and effort to unite folks who may be just entering into a conversation with the folks who have been having that conversation for a while and are ready to move into action. So I think sometimes uniting all people in all of the places where they are in their knowledge and their behavior can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. As I’m sure you know, when folks get ready to go on an issue or a topic, it can take a little time for [others] to play catch-up, whether the catch-up is getting stakeholders involved or alerting the campus administration to student needs or alerting students to administrative needs. I love that fired-up energy and I think sometimes it can take a little finesse to get everybody together to move with that energy in a direction that actually gets us somewhere. It’s one thing I love and find equally as challenging about schools like that. And I’m really looking forward to returning to that high-energy, high-achieving environment at Middlebury.
MC: In this position, you will be working under the Dean of Students at Middlebury – how is your position at Middlebury going to be different from your role at Castleton?
McCall: We’re a pretty small staff here in wellness at Castleton. There are four of us who are full-time and that’s counseling and health services. We’re an integrated center, so it’s really small compared to what you all have going at Middlebury, which means that, essentially, it’s pretty similar to working under the Dean of Students at Middlebury. I’m part of the Student Life team here – my supervisor is supervised by the Dean of Students – and I interact daily with folks from student activities and career services. We’re highly integrated in student life. So I actually think that building those relationships here and understanding how to co-program and interact with those folks is really going to translate well to Middlebury, where I’ll still definitely get to interact with folks and will be working right alongside the folks from student life. So that won’t be that big of a change. It’s actually a model I really enjoy and it’s one of the things that drew me to the position at Middlebury – getting to really be integrated as a member of the student life team.
MC: What do you do in your free time and what else should the student body know about you?
McCall: I have really missed being able to go out to a coffee shop and read and just sort of people-watch – we don’t really have the setup for that in Castleton, I have to drive to Rutland to do that. And so I’m really excited to be able to do that in Middlebury. I have a dog (her name is Maddie, I call her my canine soul mate), so I imagine I will bring her to campus to go on walks. She loves students, she loves being on college campuses. I’m also a huge foodie, so I’m really looking forward to getting to explore some of the food culture at Middlebury on campus because I know you guys have great food service but also getting to poke around, eat at some local restaurants and check out the farmer’s market. I’m trying to be a locavore since I moved to Vermont two years ago and so I think that’s going to be really fun to expand my access to local foods and products by moving to Middlebury.
(05/01/13 2:46pm)
On Sunday, April 28, the discussion of the divestment of the College’s endowment from fossil fuel industries continued with a student-only panel, featuring three students in favor of the movement with four students whose opinions ranged from strong opposition to measured skepticism.
The panel took place in Dana Auditorium, which was about half-full of community members, a stark contrast with the almost 300 attendees who filled the McCullough Social Space for the College’s first panel on divestment. The first panel on January 22 featured professionals in investment, finances and the divestment movement with opinions ranging from support to opposition of divesting the current 3.6 percent of the College’s $950 million endowment invested in fossil fuel companies.
The student panel on Sunday featured former Governor of Vermont Jim Douglas ’72 as the moderator and students Jeannie Bartlett ’15, Ben Wiggins ’14, Janet Bering ’13, Ryan Kim ’14, Zach Drennen ’13.5, Michael Patterson ’13 and Teddy Smyth ’15 as the panel participants. The panel lasted for over two hours.
Vice President for Finance and Treasurer's Office Patrick Norton began the evening with opening remarks noting that the “management of the endowment has grown increasingly complex” and stating that his hope for the panel was to have a “meaningful discussion” that would “give us an opportunity to hear diverse perspectives and a broad range of opinions.”
Bartlett, co-president of the Socially Responsible Investment Club (SRI) and a member of the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investment, began the panel arguing for divestment, focusing mainly on the negative effects of climate change on the environment and how she believes divestment will help push a movement toward a healthier planet. She emphasized that as a college that preaches a green agenda, divestment falls in line with the College’s proposed eco-friendly practices.
“I think divesting from fossil fuels will align the school’s investments and practices with [its] mission,” said Bartlett.
“It’s imperative for our health and prosperity both now and in the future,” she concluded.
Smyth agreed with Bartlett’s arguments, saying that it is “morally wrong for us to profit from the destruction of our planet.”
Smyth cited strong student support for divestment, mentioning the results of this year’s Student Government Association (SGA) survey, which found that over 60 percent of the student body supports divestment and 24 percent are opposed to it.
“At this point, the question isn’t whether or not we’re going to divest, but when.” he said.
Bering, a self-described “environmental studies major who is skeptical of divestment as a tool for change” conceded that divestment “is the morally right thing to do,” but she questioned if divestment is addressing climate change in an effective way.
“It does not get people talking about and aware of the real issue,” she said. “They’re mostly talking about financial risk, not climate change. Divestment is a distraction.”
Bering, a Texas native, also argued that divestment is not a “national movement,” pointing out that one-third of the over-300 colleges that are currently a part of the movement are in California, New York or New England, and two-thirds would consider themselves on the west or east coast.
“We need a better movement,” added Bering, “and I think Middlebury is the perfect place to start doing that.”
Wiggins and Patterson also argued against divestment, but focused on the idea that the risk to the College’s endowment is too great to justify divesting from fossil fuels.
Wiggins expressed his belief that, while he agrees that “we need to pursue alternative forms of energy,” the endowment is too essential to the College’s running effectively to endanger its investment returns through divestment.
“I think the goals of the endowment are more important than divesting from fossil fuel,” Wiggins added, “and I think we need to wait until we can be assured that divesting will not have a significant impact on the size of the endowment.”
Echoing an earlier reference from Wiggins, Patterson also highlighted the importance of the endowment for funding financial aid, as he noted that for the 2012 - 2013 academic year, 42 percent of students are on financial aid with an average Middlebury grant of $36,277 per student.
In addition, Wiggins cited the complications that would come with having to divest. He stated that as the College is a part of a consortium under Investure — the firm that manages the College’s endowment — divesting from fossil fuels would require that the College either part ways with Investure or convince all of the other colleges and foundations in the consortium that they must divest as well.
Kim, a member of the Student Investment Committee, a student organization that invests about $355,000 of the endowment in stocks, also used economic reasoning based on his involvement and knowledge of the endowment’s investments to argue against divestment, which he feels is not currently a viable option.
“The energy sector has been doing exceedingly well,” said Kim, stating that his greatest concern for divestment is “risk and return.”
However, he did say that under certain circumstances, he would support divestment.
“If we can find mathematical proof that we wouldn’t incur undue costs in leaving Investure, then yes, I’m totally for [divestment].”
Drennen took a different angle in his support of divestment. While he said divestment was important for “the purpose of symbolism and the purpose of good investment practices,” he called for divestment from coal industries as an attainable first step.
“Not all fuels are created equal,” he said. “Coal has twice as much carbon per unit of energy as natural gas. I think it’s important to restrict the scope to something that I think can feasibly happen.”
After students on the panel gave their opening statements, they were allowed the opportunity to respond to and question each other. Then the audience was invited to ask questions of the panelists.
A number of audience members took this time to verbalize their own opinions on the divestment movement. In the majority of cases, these comments only weakly sought feedback from the panelists. All of the audience members who spoke seemed to be in support of divestment.
After the panel, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz expressed his approval of the proceedings of the panel.
“It was very good. I thought that it did provide a good representation of points of view and that was helpful.”
The panel was videotaped, a copy of which will be sent to members of the Board of Trustees, giving them the opportunity to watch the panel before their meetings from May 9 - 11, during which they will discuss divestment.
Liebowitz did not outline any specific outcome he thought would emerge from the meetings.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said. “It all hinges on the Investment Committee’s presentation first and then our discussion [of divestment] on Saturday [May 11].”
(05/01/13 2:43pm)
Inspired by the fervor for educational reform among members of the college community, Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB) has invited Mike Feinberg, co-founder of Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools, to be the 2013 spring speaker. KIPP is a nationwide group of free charter schools aimed at preparing students in underprivileged communities for college.
Feinberg will give a lecture called “KIPP to Z: Lessons Learned to Help All Children Succeed in School and Life” at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, May 7 in Mead Chapel, followed by a question and answer session. No tickets are necessary for the talk, and all students, faculty, staff and community members are welcome.
Feinberg started KIPP in 1994 with co-founder Dave Levin just three years after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. While working for Teach for America in Houston, Texas, Feinberg and Levin were frustrated when they noticed that even the most successful students in their fifth grade classrooms lost their good habits — not skipping class, not smoking — when they moved on to other grades. The determination to make a long-term educational impact on students gave Feinberg and Levin the idea for the KIPP program, and in 1995, they founded KIPP Academy in Houston.
Unlike private schools, admission to KIPP schools, which run fifth grade to twelfth grade, is determined by lottery. They are similar to private schools in their rigor and demanded level of commitment. Students have class from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., for four hours on Saturday and must come to school for an extra month in the summer. Students, parents and teachers are all required to sign a learning pledge called a “Commitment to Excellence” in which all three parties promise to take every action to promote the child’s learning.
Monica Moua ’15, a graduate of the KIPP Summit Academy in San Lorenzo, Calif., believes that it was this cooperation that separated her educational experience from those at other schools.
“We stress the value of a team and family, because KIPP becomes our second home,” reflected Moua. “We work hard at breaking down walls and barriers that typically separate individuals to create a space where everyone is given an equal opportunity to thrive.”
Kit Tse ’16, who attended a KIPP school for high school, believes her teachers were the most influential part of her KIPP experience.
“They hold an immense amount of passion and enthusiasm for teaching and have high standards for their students,” said Tse. “It is incredible how much they care about their students personally and academically.”
Moua credits her KIPP experience for keeping her on the path towards college.
“They always said, ‘Climb the mountain to college,’” said Moua. “If I had never made the decision to enter a KIPP school, I do not believe I would have taken the opportunities that allowed me to get where I am today.”
There are currently 125 KIPP schools in 20 states, educating more than 41,000 students. Feinberg now works on regional and global development for the KIPP foundation and serves on the board for KIPP Houston. Among many prizes and recognitions, Feinberg and Levin received the Presidential Citizen’s Medal for their inspiring work, the United State’s second highest presidential award for private citizens.
Christian Schoning ’13 and Ellie Alldredge ’15 of the MCAB Speakers Committee thought Feinberg would be “a timely pick” for the spring speaker because of the widespread interest in education issues at the College.
This fall’s panels on affirmative action generated much discourse on campus, and the waitlist for the class Education in America is one of the longest at the College. Furthermore, approximately one quarter of the class of 2012 is presently employed in education, a higher percentage than any other occupation.
Alldredge explained how Feinberg’s youth paired with his amazing accomplishments was a main draw for MCAB.
“He’s a social entrepreneur who really manifested his dream and his goal within 10 years of leaving college,” said Alldredge. “Who could be a better role model to bring to our campus?”
There are presently several KIPP school graduates who attend Middlebury College and a few alums of the College teach at KIPP schools. The College has had applicants from KIPP schools in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, North Carolina and Arkansas and hopes to enroll more KIPP students in the future.
As part of the event, MCAB will host a dinner in partnership with Atwater Commons for students of the College who are KIPP graduates to meet with Feinberg.
MCAB will also host a small-scale discussion before the talk for students to speak with Feinberg, in addition to the question and answer session following the lecture. Students who are interested in this discussion, which will focus on the role of charter school and other reforms in promoting educational change, should email MCAB at mcabspeak@middlebury.edu explaining their interest in the discussion.
(04/21/13 7:27pm)
Inside the Pepin Gymnasium on Friday night, with stage lights blazing in all directions, hundreds of students aglow crowded around the stage, feet moving to the beat, hands reaching for a leather-jacketed band-boy with more cool strut than flashy flaunt. Hip-hop duo Timeflies blasted the house with thumping arrangements colliding from electronic, pop, dubstep and rap in this year’s spring concert, an annual event curated by the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB).
“They are a cross between Maroon 5, White Panda and Wiz Kalifa,” MCAB Concerts Committee co-chair Nick Mallchok ’14.5 said.
No stranger to the NESCACs, Cal Shapiro and Rob Resnick, nicknamed Rez, of Tufts University interweaved their performance with Midd Kids in mind, spinning Ke$ha’s “Die Young” into a narrative of the Middlebury party life. Lobbing this track would seem to pander for cheers if it weren’t for their earnestness in engaging with the audience.
“The wildest moment of the show was definitely the Middlebury freestyle,” MCAB Concerts Committee co-chair Molly Sprague ’13 said. “Before the show, Cal requested a list of Middlebury specific terms and then took it from there.”
With Shapiro carrying the vocals and Rez producing music, the up-and-coming duo impressively stretched across the stage: Rez dialing big beats raised at center stage, Shapiro frequenting all corners of the stage with the flashing lights and thrashing music overcoming the audience with boom and bass. Still, the boom and bass seemed to overcompensate for the lack of pull onstage. With Rez stationary, leaving Shapiro on duty to raise energies, the stilted and somewhat cohesively void gravity on stage spread across the room as some stacked against bleachers and dance circles strayed to the outskirts.
Still, rounding the edges was the multistory of LED landscape screen that stretched across the stage, a giant clock and raised DJ booth. In paralleling Timeflies’ genre-blended soundscape with a glittering display of lights, the concert took the audience to new terrains.
But Timeflies did not exactly throw us in new terrain; rather, they gently guided us. The duo remixed and covered familiar songs like the timeless Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea” and Calvin Harris’ “Sweet Nothing” putting a Timeflies spin on the usual formula.
At first blush, Timeflies might be construed as another uniform pretty-boy-band — only in the sense that they simply are pretty boys with — my only gripe — the squint of a Jonas Brother. But they move beyond those labels, self-identifying their music as “Electro Hip Pop Dub-Something.”
However much they may be akin to boy bands, Timeflies, it seems, is all about sonic variety, covering a broad range of tracks from rap to introspection.
“We’re mostly just hoping you don’t know what to call us afterwards,” Timeflies said in a Sunset in the Review interview. “That you can put it on when you’re out on Saturday night and then again when you’re hungover in bed Sunday morning.”
Timeflies is best known for their weekly Youtube-released tracks series “Timeflies Tuesday,” under the channel name Timeflies4850. Ranging from dulcet acoustic tones to piano ballads to dubstep remixed covers, their in-studio videos rack up as much as 2.5 million views, the most popular of which: a remix — sans irony — of Carly Rae Jepsen “Call Me Maybe,” Celine Dion’s “I Will Always Love You” and Flo Rida’s “Wild Ones.”
But what is perhaps most interesting about Timeflies is their ironic claim to fame: where idiosyncratic meets the hackneyed. They delineate themselves from the very songs they cover, namely, from the Top 40 music catalog. They make original out of what was originally not theirs without posturizing, running the sounds through so many alterations that it ends up being a different product while maintaining its singular beauty. While this is what all cover bands essentially do — recrafting popular songs — Timeflies reinterprets and repurposes the tracks entirely, layering springy synths, freestyling over remixes, dropping pulsing beats, heavy on its hits.
Now the duo has broken free from strictly relaying tracks, releasing their own content. In November 2012, their six-track EP, “One Night,” shot to number one on the iTunes overall charts. Their lead-off track, “Swoon,” was released a few weeks ago off their second all-original album slated to drop this summer.
As long as Timeflies can innovate, there are good things ahead.
All to say, Timeflies’s concert was flashy, forcing stage energies that landed kind of flat. But out of that light, for only two guys, their sound is loud and as diverse as they come. Still, with an evolving interest from imitation to imagination, Timeflies is indeed a product of its processes.
(04/21/13 7:17pm)
The tale of Cinderella is one well known throughout the world. In the classic story, a fairy godmother transforms Cinderella into a beautiful girl, a spell that will fade when the clock strikes midnight. She goes to the ball where the Prince falls in love with her, but runs away to make her curfew before the Prince can find out who she is — leaving behind a lost slipper. The Prince searches the village for the girl whose foot fits the slipper and Cinderella gets her happy ending when she is discovered as the girl from the ball. Her stepsisters are left alone, and in some retellings, blinded by the birds which had befriended Cinderella.
This popular fairytale served as the source story for the Inaugural Middlebury New Play Festival, an ambitious presentation of 14 original plays in Wright Theater April 10-13. Visiting Assistant Professor and alumnus Andrew Smith ’97.5 searched for a writing prompt suggesting reinvention of a classic tale in his role as artistic director of the festival, asking for 10-30 minute plays using any character from Cinderella as the main focus except for Cinderella. The plays did not need to be connected to the tale and could take place anytime or anywhere. One hundred and one submissions from around the world were narrowed down to 14, including five alumni playwrights and one current student entry. The festival faced the unique challenge of developing new work, and featured the efforts of 21 students in 66 roles and a massive behind the scenes team. Teddy Anderson ’13.5 co-directed the festival with Smith as his senior work and called the experience, “amazing. Having the opportunity to direct seven, very different plays with actors of varying experience has forced me to break out of my comfort zone as a director.”
The festival was broken into two evenings of seven plays each, alternating the two distinct presentations over the four evenings of the festival. Wright Theater was transformed into an intimate space, a riser of seating facing the stage and two smaller seating areas facing stage right and left, allowing for a closer interaction between the performers and the audience.
Evening A offered a wide variety of thought-provoking plays. “That Girl is in the Rearview Mirror,” by Samantha Collier ’09, explored Cynder, wonderfully portrayed by Nicholas Hermerling ’14.5, a boy confused by his desire to dress like a girl until he meets Prince, a girl similarly confused by gender constraints. Prince is comfortable with his male identity and convinces Cynder to accept who she is, taking her away from her intolerant stepmother. The play cleverly reinventedthe original tale, discussing a very modern issue in a real and conscious manner.
Similarly addressing a modern issue was “Service Dogs” by Naomi Shafer ’11.5, which examined the value of a liberal arts education in the modern workforce and the struggles of 20-somethings to conform to stereotypes of carefree happiness while worrying about how to pay the rent. This play was my favorite of the night, imaginatively playing with the relationship between the characters and blurring the lines between good or bad.
I did not understand why “Living the Dream” by Lia Romeo was chosen as the opener for the night and for the festival. The play featured three college guys waking up, hungover, after a night of partying at a club. One of the guys described his encounter with a girl from the night before, and the three characters exchanged painfully long conversation about partying and girls and drinking before realizing that the girls name was Cindy and that she’d left her shoe. The play simply seemed to promote the heavy college drinking stereotypes and did not offer any thought-provoking insight.
Evening B, in my opinion, offered seven solid plays from different, creative perspectives. The opener was “After a Spell,” by Kirk German ’00.5, featuring a mouse family whose daughter is transformed for one night into a majestic horse and eventually decides to leave her family for the opportunity to make a permanent change.
The most confusing and thought-provoking play of the night, “Sister Dear,” by Gillian Durkee, was a haunting interpretation of the two stepsisters, who holed themselves in an attic and played the same creepy game each day, serving tea for themselves and their father, represented by a teddy bear, and their sister Ella, represented by a porcelain doll. After spreading cinder on the doll to try to make it talk, it is taken away by the Prince, who is a friend of their mother and worried that the doll is making them paranoid. It takes a chilling scene where one of the sisters almost cuts of her toe before the sisters realize that the only thing that will keep them going is being together. Chelsea Malone ’15 and Evann Normandin ’15 offered compelling performances emphasized by the use of effectively dim lighting and mist.
However, I think the final play of the festival stole the show for me. Set in the world of modeling, the play started with all of the actors in black clothing with black coverings over their faces, taking away their identities. One of the female models, Freja, seemingly humble and unaffected by the problems of the industry, forms a relationship with Mathias, a male model with similar ideals. She is later negatively influenced by Othillia, a model obsessed with appearance and bitter towards the most popular supermodel, Abby, a girl who seemed to fall into superstardom with no effort. The girls decide to attack Abby, using hairspray to try to blind her, but instead blind each other. Mathias ends up with Abby, the girl still unaffected by the greed of the business. This play used an excellent combination of blocking, lighting, sound and technology, projecting photographs of the models on the wall throughout the play.
This extremely ambitious festival is an excellent presentation of 14 starkly different plays based on the same tale. The work of the behind the scenes team made for effortlessly excellent blocking choices, a deceptively simple set that still allowed for depth and movement, imaginative use of the company as props and mythical lighting design. A festival of plays is something new for Middlebury, and I think that the flexibility it required of all the artistic voices was an incredible learning experience. Co-director Anderson said, “I only recently switched my focus from acting to directing after returning from abroad. So this has been very much a learning process for me. Everything about this project is new for me. I had never worked with new plays or directed a large cast of actors before.”
The plays were fresh, inspired takes on a classic tale, some so far removed from the original that it took the duration of the play to figure out who each of the characters was supposed to represent. I eagerly look forward to the next New Play Festival, as it invites unique discussion about modern issues and exposes the community to a usually inaccessible kind of theater.
(04/17/13 10:50pm)
Grant Nishioka '13 is from Wayland, Mass.
As liberal arts students, we’ve learned a lot. We’re able to contrast the behavior of international markets with that of individuals. We can use exponential functions to better comprehend musical scales. If we really wanted, we could even delineate Plato’s transcendental metaphysical theories from Nietzsche’s existential poetry in order to appreciate religious and atheistic perspectives simultaneously. Some can do it in multiple languages. It seems we’ve learned how to tackle just about any question, yet those without any “right” answers leave many of us stumped.
What do I want to do? What skills will I need? Am I ready for the “real world?” While the uncertainty surrounding these questions can frustrate even the most competent student, one program has a reputation for helping them navigate the unknown.
We have all heard about MiddCORE. The program prepares students by developing leadership and innovation skills. It connects participants to inspirational mentors who help them approach real life problems with no right answers, including every adult’s favorite conversation-starter,“What are your plans for after graduation?”
It’s a tempting opportunity for many students, yet the time commitment is quite intimidating. We’re so busy preparing ourselves for life after college by maximizing our GPAs and cramming as much knowledge as possible in between our ears that we seldom stop to think about bridging the gap between what we’re taught and what we want do with it. However, if there’s one point I want to make in this article, it is that MiddCORE is worth every minute of your time.
During my first week of MiddCORE at Monterey, I found myself surrounded by students who were exceptional in their ability to take initiative and search for more. They were willing to step outside their comfort zones and lead in the face of uncertainty. As we began the social challenge aspect of the course, each team quickly ran into the same roadblock. Our task was to generate ideas addressing the future land usage of a former army base called Fort Ord. For the first time in our educational careers, we encountered a problem whose solution couldn’t be taught or studied because there simply was no correct answer.
As one executive said in the New York Times, “we can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.”
One day after class I approached our head instructor with a look of confusion and defeat. Before I said anything he addressed my question. “This is a real life problem, which means there are no right or wrong answers. Thousands of professionals haven’t found a solution in over 20 years. Use the workshops as your tools and do something.”
Realizing that we weren’t going to solve the social problem in its entirety, we began to brainstorm ways to help push the stalemate between stakeholders in a direction. We proposed a campground and welcome center to boost ecotourism and give visitors and locals the opportunity to experience the natural beauty of Fort Ord firsthand.
MiddCORE enables students to generate innovative solutions to complex problems and made me confident in my ability to add value to America’s largest grocery wholesaler after college. When I reflect on my four years here the most important thing I’ve discovered is my love for learning, and relying on that in order to approach uncertainty made it all worthwhile. Thanks, Midd(CORE).
Curious? Check out middcore.middlebury.edu
(04/17/13 10:39pm)
“We cannot be the anti-illegal immigration party. We have to be the pro-legal immigration party,” Marco Rubio emphasized to fellow Republicans at a 2011 rally. “We have to be a party that advocates for a legal immigration system that’s ... good for America and honors our tradition both as a nation of immigrants and as a nation of law.”
Growing up in an extremely diverse Seattle suburb, some of my best friends and closest neighbors were green-card holders or first-generation immigrants. I remember going to friends’ houses and hearing stories of grandparents who worked their entire lives with the single goal that their grandchildren – not even their children – could live in America. Other neighbors told stories of sending money to the other side of the world as they waited for their family to get visas or green cards. Some of my neighbors and friends’ parents work several jobs and still can hardly afford monthly international calls home; some have entry-level jobs at Microsoft that they studied for 40 years to obtain; some received great job offers while studying in American colleges. But despite their different paths, my neighbors have something in common: they worked hard to give their children access to American education and freedom, and they are now among the proudest Americans I know, regardless of the languages they speak at home.
Our strength as a country depends on the ingenuity and labor of our citizens. Since its inception, the United States has attracted the best and brightest minds with the promise of work and freedom. Generations of intelligent, hard-working immigrants from every corner of the planet have travelled here and assimilated into American culture, learning English, studying for citizenship tests and becoming active members of their new communities despite the roadblocks.
Today, our immigration system is clearly broken, with 81 percent of Americans believing that America needs to reform its immigration strategies and policies. In some states like Texas and California, one in every 15 people is undocumented, with the majority of these illegal aliens speaking “little to no English” and living in highly segregated communities without any pressure to assimilate into or contribute to American society.
Though not all illegal immigrants are from Latin America and almost 40 percent of undocumented workers arrived legally and simply refused to leave when their visas expired, illegal immigrants are largely disconnected from American society even while benefitting from American jobs and federal programs. Few illegal immigrants participate in federal programs, yet American taxpayers still lose an estimated $113 billion each year providing education, healthcare and other services to undocumented workers and their families. $53 billion of this tax burden goes towards education alone.
Furthermore, while the 11 million illegal immigrants benefiting from our freedoms and rights while evading taxes and strict immigration procedure certainly hurt all taxpaying Americans, illegal immigration is most harmful to the millions of intelligent, hard-working foreigners attempting to legally immigrate to the United States each year. Many politicians have voiced their frustration at our broken immigration system by declaring that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from Americans, but in reality, most of the jobs they are taking are the jobs sought by other immigrants – many of whom have spent their entire lives working for the chance to find employment in the United States. These are the real victims of illegal immigration.
We need to ensure that it is easier to immigrate to America legally than illegally, while also finding a viable solution for the 11 million illegal immigrants already here. Mass deportation, surprisingly expensive and indiscriminating between undocumented families that have lived in the United States for decades and those who just arrived, is not the answer. Besides, we do not want illegal immigrants to leave. Economically, they present potentially great benefits to our country – we merely need to ensure that they become assimilated into our society as taxpayers and English-speakers. Indeed, if all illegal immigrants became citizens, the United States would make between $5.5 and $10 billion more in annual taxes and working-class wages would dramatically increase.
On the other hand, granting amnesty to immigrants neither invested nor participating in American socio-politics will intensify American social divisions and encourage further illegal immigration. We need to encourage foreigners to immigrate legally, and this must be achieved through a defined and easily navigable route from temporary visa to permanent citizenship in conjunction with a difficult and long process for illegal aliens. It is absurd that our government turns away 40 percent of American-educated, foreign-born math and science graduates after their graduation. Our priority must always be to attract and keep the best immigrants, but we must not forget to help undocumented workers assimilate into our society through education, hard-work and a demonstrated commitment to America through taxation.
(04/17/13 4:25pm)
At the end of the 2012-2013 academic year, Alan R. Holmes Professor of Monetary Economics Scott Pardee will finish his term as professor and instead take on the role of Education in Action (EIA) Emeritus Faculty Fellow. Pardee is currently the only economics professor who teaches finance courses, and while the economics department intends to continue to integrate finance into its course offerings, the College will not be hiring a replacement for Pardee.
During his time as professor, Pardee has developed four different courses on finance: Monetary Theory, Corporate Finance and Accounting, Investments and Financial Markets and Empirical Finance. Approximately 150 students enrolled in Pardee’s four classes this year.
Next year, when Pardee is working in Adirondack House, finance courses will only be offered to students during winter term. It is also possible that Pardee will lead small workshop courses during the fall and spring semesters on the subject of finance.
“I would hope that we can develop some kind of program that brings it back into the regular terms, because students need it — there is a tremendous demand for these courses, and students have to get jobs,” said Pardee. “Economics is all about jobs, and we have a responsibility in the economics department to prepare students for the real world.”
Unfortunately, finance professors like Pardee are not easy to find.
“It’s worth noting that a month or two ago, we offered a position in macroeconomics to someone whose research combined insights from finance and labor economics, and who had teaching experience in both governance and finance,” explained James B. Jermain Professor of Political Economy Peter Matthews. “However, she turned the position down.”
While several other peer institutions offer finance courses, finding a capable professor can be difficult. For that reason, Pardee has had a unique role at the College.
“Having someone come in to teach finance at a level that I teach is very unusual for a liberal arts college, but there are people who are willing to do this,” said Pardee. “You come out of the real world and into the world of academia, with a PhD in your background, and work with students. I have been very comfortable at Middlebury because I share four passions.”
These passions include liberal arts, civil rights, the environment and ethics.
“I’m excited to go on to work with the EIA because I will continue to work with students, and I’ll have some teaching responsibilities,” said Pardee.
Though Pardee will still be on campus and teaching during winter term, a void will be left unfilled by the disappearance of the four finance classes.
“A lot of the courses offered by the economics department are theoretical, which means many kids leave Middlebury feeling like they know much more about theory than application,” said Ryan Kim ’14, co-leader of the Student Investment Committee (SIC), for which Pardee is the adviser. “Finance courses provide students with practical tools and vocabulary.”
Kim feels that students without access to finance courses would be at a disadvantage in their job searches.
“A lot of feedback from students applying for jobs and alumni trying to hire students from the College is that Middlebury candidates lack a lot of the hard skills of math and financial knowledge, even basic terminology,” he said. “Professor Pardee has offered a really valuable service in helping to bridge that gap, both as the advisor of the SIC and by providing financy-related courses.”
While the College is not hiring a replacement for Pardee within the economics department, monetary and financial economics courses consistent with the College’s mission as a liberal arts institution, such as Monetary Theory and Policy, will continue to be offered.
Pardee will be working in the Adirondack House to help foster student-alumni relations and aid students in finding job opportunities.
