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(11/14/19 11:04am)
“Middlebury College has never been considered a hotbed of political activity,” reads an article published in The Middlebury Campus from November 2002. “Its own students describe the atmosphere as ‘sleepy,’ ‘detached,’ and ‘bubbled-in.’ Those who dare to shatter the quiet are a minority that is sometimes scorned for disrupting this remote paradise. ‘Protest’ is something that is debated; ‘activism’ is something that occurs elsewhere.”
The author noted later in the article that this trend was already changing. Now, 17 years later, most students would likely disagree with the notion that Middlebury students are apolitical.
In the past few years alone, student activists, leaders of campus extracurriculars, and campaign organizers have built websites to direct students to resources surrounding sexual health (go/sexysources); they have also successfully petitioned the college to become a “sanctuary campus” after President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Notably, after nearly a decade of work, the student-led effort by Divest Middlebury culminated with Energy2028, a commitment from the college to divest its endowment from fossil fuels companies over the coming years.
These success stories are the glossy stuff of press releases. But the long-winded road to change — enacted by an ever-changing student body amid a minefield of obstacles — is anything but straightforward.
Isolation and insulation: Student activism in the “Middlebury bubble”
The college’s location in rural Vermont can make some students feel disconnected from national and international political issues. Many students reference “the Middlebury bubble” to describe the seemingly impermeable membrane that blocks students from the “real world” and to some, seems to propagate homogenous ideologies.
Annie Blalock ’20.5, current president of Feminist Action at Middlebury (FAM), said that Middlebury’s relative isolation may contribute to the feeling that students are confined in how they can respond to larger issues. Blalock joined FAM to combat this feeling of voicelessness.
“As time passed during my first semester, I felt the weight of the Middlebury bubble every day [in] that new inhumane policies were introduced or protective legislation taken away,” Blalock wrote in an email to The Campus. “I turned to FAM to stay educated about current events and take action in an accessible, fun environment.”
Madison Holland ’21 has been involved with the college’s branch of Amnesty International, an international organization that focuses on human rights, and Juntos, a campus organization that advocates for quality working conditions for local farm workers. She said she enjoys building relationships with members of the community through her activism.
“It’s important to realize the broader picture, that that there are other people off campus with real lives and real stories,” Holland said. “Especially considering we’re only here for four years and there’s a world out there that we’re going to have to encounter eventually, so we might as well start now.”
The college’s small size has other impacts as well: the activist community is very insular, according to Taite Shomo ’20.5 and Grace Vedock ’20, two students with long resumes of campus activism.
Amongst other initiatives, Shomo and Vedock are the organizers of It Happens Here (IHH), a storytelling event that draws attention to campus sexual assault. They also helped coordinate The Map Project, which documents locations of incidents of sexual assault on campus with red dots on a map. Last spring, Shomo and Vedock helped organize the peaceful protest that was scheduled to occur during the Ryszard Legutko lecture that was set for Wed., April 17. The lecture and the protest were unexpectedly cancelled by administration due to “safety risks,” which were left ambiguous when first announced.
“A lot of people who are leading activist charges, it’s the same group of people over and over,” Shomo said. “What I find very frustrating is that I think the Middlebury population constructs itself as aware and involved and liberal. But in my experience, when we have asked people to step up and be part of things, they’re not there.”
According to Shomo and Vedock, the core group of activists — those who organize most of the major protests and campaigns on campus — is so small that students have created various group chats to connect with other students who are committed to using activism as a tool of social change.
“Student activism is difficult for so many reasons. It takes so much time and so much emotional energy. Usually the people that are involved in certain initiatives have been directly affected by those initiatives, ” Vedock said. “If the burden is on the affected population to change the culture, it can be extremely bleak.”
Vedock said that student activism can be “exhausting,” and Shomo said that doing activism takes energy away from friends, school, family and her own health. This is a common constraint that many students face when organizing changemaking efforts on campus: they are students first, with the primary goal to obtain a degree.
With time already a scarce resource in college, it can be difficult to mobilize students for a particular campaign or event.
“Students are stakeholders in so many different areas of campus, so I think that’s a struggle — not necessarily in getting people to voice their support but to act on that support,” Holland said.
Student activists also must navigate the rules set by administration for student organizing, a process which Blalock said is “unnecessarily burdensome.” The consequences for violating college policy, however, can be serious.
Prior to the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Middlebury in 2012, five students who dubbed themselves the “Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee” circulated a mock press release to students, faculty and media outlets announcing that the college would divest from industries of violence. The students were charged and ultimately found guilty by the Community Judicial Board during an open hearing and were given a reprimand, but were not subject to any official college discipline.
In 2013, a student was suspended for one year for uprooting thousands of flags that were put in the ground as part of a memorial to commemorate the victims of 9/11. The student claimed that the memorial sat on top of an Abenaki burial site, and should be treated with respect.
More recently, when students protested and shut down the 2017 lecture of controversial sociologist Charles Murray, the college punished 74 students with sanctions ranging from probation to official college discipline. Students were accused of violating the section in the Student Handbook that prohibits “disruptive behavior at community events or on campus.”
“If we have to be afraid of being suspended because of engaging in protest, that’s a very precarious situation to be in,” Shomo said.
While some students do not engage with student activism, many feel compelled to act, no matter the risks.
“People don’t engage with activist activities for a variety of reasons — maybe you’re working a job, maybe your course load is so difficult — but for some people it takes an enormous amount of privilege to not be concerned about things or to just not think about things,” Vedock said. “When you’re engaged with these initiatives, you have to ask yourself: Who are you fighting for?”
Changing the world … in just four years
Though students encounter unique challenges when trying to create change, some have identified strategies that have proved repeatedly effective in moving their campaigns forward. Megan Salmon ’21 serves as president of Amnesty International and is the student activism coordinator for Amnesty USA, meaning she oversees all efforts by Amnesty chapters at universities in the state of Vermont. She said incentivizing students can be effective in persuading people outside of the core group of activists to show up to events.
“Whether it’s a musical performance, or it’s interactive, or there’s food, or prizes — it gets them off the couch, basically,” Salmon said.
Holland said coalition building can be an effective way to show that an issue is important beyond one group. Early this month, Olivia Pintair ’22.5 and Hannah Ennis ’22.5 organized the Milk with Dignity campaign at the Hannaford supermarket in Middlebury. The campaign was one of about 20 campaigns across the Northeast that was organized by Migrant Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for economic justice and human rights of farm workers.
“Our organizing included… networking with other groups on and off-campus in order to get as many people as possible to attend the action itself,” Pintair wrote in an email to The Campus.
According to Pintair, Middlebury Refugee Outreach Club (MiddROC), Juntos, Sunday Night Environmental Group (SNEG), a church group in Middlebury, and Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) all “contributed in different ways to the action.” Some members of these groups made signs to display at the event, while others attended the rally. Pintair said activists from Migrant Justice were also present, leading chants in both Spanish and English. They also hand-delivered a letter to the manager of Hannaford at the protest, urging the supermarket to “ensure human rights for the farmworkers behind the company’s milk.”
“I sometimes find student activism challenging on campus with how many different clubs and groups there are at Middlebury, each with their own specialty,” Ennis wrote in an email. “I was really inspired by the action and rally on Nov. 2 at Hannaford because of the way many different student organizations came together for this one cause. I hope to see more events in the future with groups working together.”
Change is slow, Ennis said, and it’s important to “connect with people, create a network, and build outwards.” Students attend Middlebury for four years, but larger structural changes may take longer. According to Vedock, movements must “cultivate institutional memory” to have a degree of longevity.
Divest Middlebury, a movement created to divest the college’s endowment from fossil fuels, has been able to sustain itself throughout several generations of Middlebury students. The movement can be traced back until at least 2012, when the students from the Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee pushed the issue into prominence.
Many activists feel responsible for passing along information and resources to younger students, lest the movement die from lack of participants. Divya Gudur ’21, who has been involved in various environment-focused organizations such as SNEG, the Divest Middlebury movement, and Environmental Council, said that SNEG has a Google Drive folder filled with documents containing information from past events, and that they also have a reliable alumni network.
“Over the recent years we have been more and more intentional about our recruiting efforts and have been working towards making sure that underclassmen feel like they have ownership in the organization and the campaigns,” Gudur said. “SNEG has often struggled with retaining activists not only because of burn-out, but also because there seems to be a dichotomy of you’re either all in or on the outside, and we need to make space ... for all levels of participation.”
Students have also found they can build institutional memory by collaborating with a group of people who will remain at Middlebury much longer than themselves: faculty.
Last spring, research assistants for the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (GSFS) Department, Ruby Edlin ’19.5, Elizabeth Sawyer ’19 and Rebecca Wishnie ’20, gave a presentation titled “Collective Memory, Collective Action: Building a Digital Archive of Student Activism” which explained the ongoing efforts to build a digital feminist archive of campus activism. The project was supervised by Sujata Moorti, who was the chair of the GSFS department at the time, and Karin Hanta, director of Chellis House.
(10/31/19 10:01am)
For the bookish among us, Halloween is a perfect time to revisit some of the spookiest tomes ever written. Brace yourselves for my top three fear-inducing books of all time. Don’t read this article alone.
I’m giving third place to Ford Maddox Ford’s “The Good Soldier” (1915). The novel tells the story of four early 20th-century couples: two hopelessly naive Americans, and two world-weary Brits. John Dowell, the American narrator, tries to make sense of his shattered world after discovering that his wife had a long-term affair with Captain Edward Ashburnham, Dowell’s only friend. Meanwhile, Briton Lenora Ashburnham schemes against her philandering husband.
In a sinister plot twist, Ford even adds one or two possible murders. I write “possible” since Ford’s protagonist is a confused, laughably unreliable narrator. Consider this rambling passage: “I don’t attach any particular importance to these generalizations of mine. They may be right; they may be wrong; I am only an ageing American with very little knowledge of life.” Beneath Dowell’s bumbling language lies unnavigable darkness.
Psychological horror does not often feature in romantic novels. The most heart-stopping scene in “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), for instance, is when Jane Bennet gets a bad cold. But “The Good Soldier,” despite its lusty beginnings, slowly becomes an utter nightmare. “I know nothing — nothing in the world — of the hearts of men,” relates Dowell. “I only know that I am alone — horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever again witness, for me, friendly intercourse.” Note the use of the word “intercourse.” Ford writes about sex in the same way that horror writer H.P Lovecraft characterizes the cosmic entity Cthulhu in the eponymous short story: as an ominous, primordial reckoning.
“The Good Soldier” ends with Nancy Rufford, the Ashburnham’s ward, descending into madness. After Nancy falls for Captain Ashburnham, the four main characters unite in banishing her to India. She spends the rest of her days in a madhouse, murmuring “Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem” [I believe in one all-powerful God] over and over again. Like Nancy’s recitation of the Nicene Creed, “The Good Soldier” will haunt you long after you have reached the story’s end.
My runner-up is “The Woman In White” (1859) by Wilkie Collins. T.S. Eliot wrote, in the introduction to a 1928 edition of the book, that Collins’s other great novel, “The Moonstone,” is “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels in a genre invented by Collins and not by [Edgar Allen] Poe.” “The Woman In White” has even more sleuthing than “The Moonstone” (1868). But while the latter book has a comic tone, “The Woman In White” invokes pure dread.
The novel’s opening scene is simple, but spooky. Walter Hartright, an impoverished drawing teacher, walks through the streets of London late at night. From out of the fog appears a young woman clad in pale tatters. She asks for some directions, but then suddenly flees. We learn that her name is Anne Catherick, and that Anne has recently escaped from a ward for the criminally insane.
Some months after this strange encounter, Walter falls in love with Laura Fairlie, a wealthy art student. All is well for a bit, but developments arise. For one, Anne Catherick is stalking Walter. For another, Laura gets engaged to Sir Percival Glyde, an old rake who values his fiancée’s dowry a bit too much.
I shall divulge no more of the novel’s plot; “The Woman In White” is too good a book to be spoiled. Let us suffice to say that identity theft, mail fraud, false imprisonment and a nationalist Italian spy ring all feature in Collins’s blood-curdling narrative.
What makes Collins’s novel truly terrifying, though, is its main villain, the plumply evil, wickedly charming Count Fosco. The Count likes to sing church hymnals, drug unsuspecting heiresses and murder for money. In a weirdly funny scene, he even talks to his pet mouse. “...And then, Mouse, I shall doubt if your own eyes and ears are really of any use to you. Ah! I am a bad man... I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.” Cynical and sadistic, Count Fosco raises the novel’s stakes to a fever pitch. Move over, “Rebecca” (1938) — “The Woman In White” easily dwarfs all other English country-house thrillers.
I’m giving some honourable mentions before I unveil my top winner. “The Raven” (1845) by Edgar Allen Poe has not lost its neurotic punch over the years. Try reading the poem aloud for optimal spookiness — Poe’s jumpy style suits the spoken word perfectly. Another great scary read is Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” (1992), a bleak character study about six students at a liberal arts college in Vermont. (If you are a fan of Vermont horror stories, I also recommend our article on the vandalism at Atwater A and B).
But Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” gets my Spooky Story Gold Medal. Unlike my third and second place winners, Christie’s sparse novel can be read in one sitting. It tells the story of ten perfect strangers who are stuck on an island vacation resort. One of the guests, we discover, is a psychopathic murderer. Who could the bad guy be? Phillip Lombard, a dapper gun-for-hire? Thomas Rogers, the creepy butler? Just when you think you know who the murderer is, Christie kills off your prime suspect.
Christie gives a ghostly aura to “And Then There Were None.” In particular, the novel’s dream sequences are unsettling: they contain flashbacks that foreshadow the grisly fates of Christie’s characters. In an eerie scene, an old woman speculates that the murders are a divine judgement. She is right, in a sense: all the people trapped on the island have their own demons to confront. Even before the novel’s climax, it becomes clear that Christie’s characters are all going on a one-way ticket to Hell; the murderer merely expedites their journey. Read “And Then There Were None” once for the scary bits, and then read it again just to marvel at Christie’s athletic prose.
So that’s my list. And, yes: I am aware that I have neglected some of the horror genre’s usual suspects. Stephen King, Mary Shelley and dozens of other fine writers did not make my final cut. I suppose that is because I don’t find fantasy a particularly exciting genre. “It” (1986) and “Dracula” (1897) have fangs galore, but the mundane wickedness of “The Good Soldier” is to me much more terrifying. The books that get under my skin understand the demons of the human condition; true scariness confronts the monsters of everyday life. The horror, dear Brutus, is not in our Count Draculas, but ourselves.
(10/31/19 10:00am)
Choosing your major is a big decision. It should be: a lot of money and effort goes into earning your diploma. These days, the professional world places so much emphasis on education that for some, filling out their major declaration form feels like the first step in a job application. As an editorial board, we weren’t surprised to come across a recent Washington Post article explaining how — as a direct result of this perceived professional pressure — there’s been a big shift in the kinds of majors students declare. Ever since the financial crash in 2008, English and History departments across the country are a lot less crowded. Students in Economics or STEM classrooms, on the other hand, find themselves struggling to find a free seat.
At Middlebury, things are no different. Humanities departments report declines in both major declaration and individual class enrollment over the past several years, while the Comp Sci department seems to grow bigger by the day. Class numbers aside, there’s a pretty pervasive belief on campus that an Economics or science focus leads to a surer or higher-paying job. A lot of the time, STEM subjects are equated with “practical skills,” while humanities or languages courses are treated almost like intellectual hobbies. Many students seem to think that the only reason to declare a humanities major is out of pure passion.
As the semester progresses and job and internship searches collide with many sophomores’ major decisions, these kinds of course-related anxieties are only intensifying. All over campus, Music or Literary Studies majors can be overheard making the obligatory deprecating jokes about future employment challenges. We wouldn’t run off to Forest for an Add/Drop card quite yet, though.
As it turns out, many of the assumptions we make about the relationship between majors, job prospects and earnings simply aren’t true. For instance, the fields of arts and communication formed the largest employer for the Middlebury class of 2018, while financial services came in second. The Post article further points out how, while graduates with science and technical degrees initially earn higher salaries than say, English majors straight out of college, this pay gap disappears over time. Numerous reports attest to how employers at large banks and tech companies seek humanities and social science majors. As often as not, humanities majors (and liberal arts students in general) are championed as “well-rounded” and “highly adaptable.”
And so, contrary to Middlebury myth, the kinds of skills which students gain through humanities courses are enormously important in the working world. As an editorial board composed largely of humanities or language majors, we realize we might be a little biased. In our experience, however, the stuff we’ve learned in class proves incredibly, professionally valuable.
This past summer, for instance, one editorial board member worked as an Investigative Intern at a public defender’s office in D.C. She stresses just how crucial storytelling was in and around the courtroom; her job involved listening to clients and writing clear, compelling statements. She roots these skills — namely the ability to appreciate and tell stories — in a lot of the classes she’s taken at Middlebury, both within and beyond her Political Science major. Even the structure of humanities courses teach professionally valuable skills; another member of the board reflected on how the ability to write and defend a thesis, or argument — something she gained, in large part, through English Literature essays and seminars — came in handy speechwriting and canvassing for her local political representative.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Contrary to Middlebury myth, the kinds of skills which students gain through humanities courses are enormously important in the working world.[/pullquote]
The benefits of humanities majors extend beyond purely professional skills. To that end, many editorial board members pointed out that job prospects aren’t the only reason for declaring a major. There are other, equally valid ways to go about compiling your course schedule. One editorial member reflected on how important a role her History major plays in her broader, “personal” education. She explained how the things she learns in class have proved more applicable to her everyday life than she could have ever expected. Another board member explained how she declared her GSFS major because of the profound impression left by a couple of the department’s professors. In her experience, creating a close relationship with a department — any department — represents a thoughtful and rewarding way to approach your education.
It’s equally important to acknowledge that, for some students, the choice of major isn’t really a “choice” at all. Many students entering the workforce face unavoidable financial concerns. For many international students, there are visas to consider (for example, US Immigration Law means that international college students who choose to major in STEM-related fields are substantially more likely to receive an HB-1 visa for two years, rather than one). Some international students may circumvent these kinds of restrictions by studying liberal arts or choosing to double major or minor in non-STEM fields. But even at schools like Middlebury College, obtaining a visa often comes at the cost of complete freedom of major choice. These considerations too, form important and worthwhile reasons for approaching your education a certain way.
At Middlebury, there are as many valid reasons for declaring a major as there are students. Our goal isn’t to pretend that job prospects don’t figure significantly in those reasons; we simply want to point out that they aren’t the only reason. Not just that, but the majors which lead to jobs aren’t always the ones you might expect to. And so we encourage you not to silence your passions. Instead, embrace them — they might translate to the next chapter of your life much better than you imagine.
(10/10/19 10:02am)
Dr. Ofelia Zepeda’s visit to the college on Thursday, Oct. 3 provided an opportunity for students to learn about the vital work of indigenous language educators during a talk entitled “Indigenous Language Teaching, Revitalization and Maintenance in the International Year of Indigenous Languages.” To begin her talk, Zepeda thanked listeners for their presence in her first language of Tohono O’odham, a Native American language from southwestern United States, before speaking in English for the rest of the presentation.
Zepeda is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award and a Regents’ Professor of Linguistics and Native American studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, not far from the Tohono O’odham lands where she grew up. Associate Professor of Anthropology Marybeth Nevins, who organized the event, introduced Zepeda as “a linguist, a poet, a literary editor, a teacher, a language policy expert and a builder of indigenous language infrastructure.”
This infrastructure, as Nevins elaborated, includes her authorship of “the only pedagogical grammar of Tohono O’odham, a text that she still teaches regularly.” As an integral scholar in the field of linguistics and Indigenous Language education, Nevins said the Linguistics Program was “deeply honored to have her.”
This year in particular is important for Zepeda’s field. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) dedicated 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL). Zepeda outlined UNESCO’s goals for the year, which, as she stated, are “to raise awareness of indigenous languages, to mobilize stakeholders, to mobilize resources, and to preserve and promote indigenous languages.”
Zepeda delved specifically into the work being done at the University of Arizona, specifically at the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI), an organization she co-founded in 1978 and continues to direct today. At AILDI, indigenous language educators, linguists, poets and writers develop curricula and skills they then bring back to their communities in order to promote language learning. Zepeda structured her talk around her organization’s work in Arizona, illustrating AILDI’s impact on maintaining the legacy of indigenous languages and meeting the objectives that IYIL set out.
[pullquote speaker="Dr. Ofelia Zepeda" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Language revitalization is a lifetime commitment.[/pullquote]
To support and promote indigenous languages, for example, her organization provides its students with “culturally relevant” curricula and tools that they themselves design for their own communities, such as a digital mapping program that provides context for certain cultural sites.
AILDI also recognizes the need for “teachers who carry cultural knowledge with them,” and thus includes indigenous elders as an integral part of instruction. To mobilize resources and stakeholders, Zepeda added that AILDI seeks to understand the needs of each student, recognizing that they come from diverse backgrounds with different language circumstances.
This diversity in language endangerment was an important nuance that Zepeda discussed, stating that not all language communities are the same or are experiencing the same level of language attrition. She announced that “language revitalization is a lifetime commitment,” often without praise, and that all people, even non-speakers, are an important part of the effort. She ended her speech with a note on the English language, urging listeners to rethink the “role and value” we all place on this language, and to understand that there are other languages in our state, country and world.
“They’re all here,” Zepeda said, “and they all need to be valued.”
(10/10/19 10:02am)
Everyone has heard the phrase “do what makes you happy.” We see it in magazines, in stories our English teachers made us read and even in those Buzzfeed quizzes where we learned what we should do with our lives based off our cereal choices. But how many of us have actually managed to listen and implement this ideology in our lives? How many of us college students will go on to “do what makes us happy?” The truthful answer is too few.
Bryan Terrell Clark is proof that one can find a way to combine passion and purpose to live the equivalent of eternal summer: a life brimming with happy days. While he is most well known for his role as George Washington in the groundbreaking, Tony Award-winning Broadway musical “Hamilton,” he can also be seen in numerous television shows, such as “When They See Us.” On top of his hugely successful acting career, he co-founded an initiative titled inDEFINED, which works to inspire children to break free of the labels placed on them by society through exposure to the arts.
In front of an eager audience in Wilson Hall, Clark began speaking on the themes of reflection and motivation. He opened with two seemingly simple questions: “What is your passion?” and “When did you first engage with that passion?”
After a moment of contemplative quiet, everyone turned to someone near them to share their ideas. Clark pulled the scattered threads of conversations in the room back together with a reflection on his own role in “Hamilton,” which he referred to as “an honor and a privilege.” This eight-times-per-week “honor” was shared with the audience when he proceeded to perform George Washington’s entrance, no backdrops, no backup singers and no inhibitions. “Here comes the general” indeed.
His clear passion for his everyday reality solidified in this impromptu performance, though the significance of playing George Washington lies in his love for the fact “that [George Washington] started off as a farmer and became a soldier, a general and a president, but in his heart, he always knew he was a farmer.” So we see it in Clark’s own life.
Growing up in Baltimore, Clark began discovering his love of the arts before he could talk — he would just “bounce in front of the TV.” His mother took note and knew it was “her job as guidance to foster and shape” that passion. He explained that his mother was “the angel” who taught him how to strive to be the best him he could be, while his father was “the dragon” who taught him that no matter how many times he messed up he could be resilient. “Both of them taught me how to fly,” Clark said.
This “flying” didn’t occur until he shook off his shy middle-school persona and became a theater major at a magnet school. There, acting gave him “access to other people,” and to his voice. He began studying theater on a full scholarship at the University of Maryland, but snuck to New York City to audition for shows. A figure in his life told him he shouldn’t audition for “big-name” schools like NYU and Yale, because they would “accept less of him” on the basis of his race. To get past this shocking remark, he realized he had to tap back into his inner voice even when other people try to silence it. After receiving acceptance letters to both schools, Clark embarked on a journey to Yale, where he found “the reason why we do what we do,” by engaging his passion for theater.
Bryan Terrell Clark dropped learned-wisdom like pennies, tokens to be picked up and tucked away in a pocket to be carried throughout one’s day-to-day life. Growing up, his grandmother always said to him, “you make sure you enjoy your life.” He believes that life comes with so much and we forget to enjoy it, often sacrificing ourselves for others to the point of no longer knowing ourselves. In his eyes, we “enjoy the journey” when we “find gratitude,” which is the “key to abundance.”We must also embrace change,” Clark said, as it is the “most consistent thing” in life. Only then can we begin to make “decisions based on the inner voice.”
So, how do we do what makes us happy? His advice: “let your passion be your GPS to bring you to the moments of purpose that fulfill your life.” Well, then, why are we wasting time recalculating when we can just press “GO?”
(10/03/19 10:31am)
Though corn and dairy are the staple crops for farmers in Addison County, Boundbrook Farm owner Erik Andrus decided to grow something different — rice. At his five-and-a-half-acre property, located 20 minutes north of Middlebury, Andrus maintains rice paddies on the largest rice farm north of the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi River.
Boundbrook is not only distinctive for its crop choice, but also for its farming methodology. Andrus follows the traditions of “Aigamo,” or “duck-and-rice farming:” a Japanese farming practice where ducklings are released into rice paddies. Their activity clouds the water, destroying weed competition, as well as getting rid of snails and other bugs that could potentially harm the rice plants. Sticking to practice, owner Erik Andrus keeps 600 ducks on his farm each year, most of which are of the Khaki Campbell variety.
This past summer, Middlebury College students Lucy Kates ’20.5 and Katie Cox ’20.5 worked at Boundbrook Farm through the Middlebury FoodWorks internship. On their first day, they were told they needed to build two hutches to transport the ducks to and from the paddies.
“We kind of embarked on this small-scale construction project with [Andrus],” Cox said. “I didn’t have a bunch of construction experience, so it was my first time using staple guns, power saws and stuff like that. We made these two kinds of fortresses, and [Andrus] named both after French battleships.”
Other tasks included putting up fences around the fields to keep the ducks inside and transplanting rice seedlings in the paddies.
“We got to drive these Japanese-imported specialized rice planting machines,” Cox said. “They were unlike any machine I’ve ever seen.” Andrus taught Cox and Kates how to drive the equipment in one afternoon before sending them out to the paddies.
“It felt like we were definitely being entrusted with a very important task,” Kates said. “That was the foundation of the whole growing season.”
One week, Andrus attended a rice grower’s conference in Japan and left Cox and Kates to manage the farm. Among other responsibilities, the two were tasked with herding ducklings in and out of their hutches every day.
“That was often a pretty fun process,” Cox said. “It wasn’t super hard to coral them all, but sometimes we would have to chase the ducks down and grab the ones that were freaking out and trying to run away.”
Overall, the work environment on Boundbrook Farm is driven by Andrus’s commitment to flexibility and innovation.
“[Andrus] himself is still very much figuring out what ways work best for him and trying to navigate this import of a traditional method of agriculture, which has been practiced in Japan for thousands of years, into New England,” Kates said. “He was very open to different approaches, and it was very cool to feel like we could contribute new ideas.”
Andrus started out growing wheat in his early years in Addison County, but after struggling to dry the soil sufficiently, he switched to rice in 2010. He was inspired by the works of Takeshi and Linda Akaogi of Akaogi Farm in Putney, who had come to test Japanese rice varieties in Vermont. After attending their workshop at a Northeast Organic Farming Association conference, he committed himself to creating a commercial pilot operation for rice. Ten years later, he currently oversees six acres of the biggest rice installation in the Northeast.
Still, as a pioneer of this agricultural venture, he faces challenges.
“We just don’t have the extent of experience, knowledge or community resource for rice,” Andrus said. “When we encounter difficulties, we have to look to the other side of the world for peers that can help us. So that’s what makes the kind of farming we do also a cross-cultural communication project.”
Andrus’ own life has been marked by cross-cultural experiences. He studied Arabic in Morocco from 1993 to 1994, has worked in construction, and for a while even lived in Japan as an English teacher. His biggest influence, however, was his study of Renaissance instrument making in Australia from a master lute maker named Bruce Tekle. Tekle was a handyman, gardener, adventurer, activist and a friend to Andrus.
“It was the growing things and living out in nature that stayed with me more than the lute making; just that envy of having a place around you that you could shape and create your own contract with away from the pressures of having a regular job,” Andrus said. “That was kind of the vision I held onto.”
Boundbrook Farm is currently preparing for harvest, which begins Oct. 7. But Andrus’ long-term enterprise is to expand ecological rice growing regionally, nationally and internationally.
“If the Northeast had been settled by Asians and not by Europeans, we would already have a lot of rice knowledge,” he said. “But because of the European mindset that we brought to this region, there’s a lot of opportunity for wetland growing that’s part of Asian tradition that has been totally underutilized and misunderstood by the current population.”
Andrus is looking to change that.
(10/03/19 10:21am)
Political Science Professor Keegan Callanan became a fully-tenured Political Science professor last May, but that wasn’t the only highlight of his summer.
Fifteen months after he was nominated by President Donald Trump, Callanan has joined the National Council of the Humanities (NCH), a board of 26 private citizens that advises the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in its allocation of funding for a gamut of humanities programs.
Callanan was sworn in by the council’s chairman at a small ceremony in Washington D.C. four days before classes began at Middlebury. He will serve until 2024, convening with the council three times annually to discuss and vote on grant applications.
The NEH functions without input from the President, but nominations originate in the Oval Office. Callanan was among the 15 freshmen council members nominated by Trump in 2018 and confirmed by the Senate in August.
There’s no way to know for certain how his name ended up on the President’s desk, but Callanan said the White House usually casts a wide net when scouting individuals to fill these positions.
“I was recommended to Presidential Personnel by several people close to the administration,” he wrote in an email to The Campus. When asked if he knew who had recommended him, he said, “A variety of friends and acquaintances in Washington helped in the nomination and confirmation processes.”
The White House Presidential Personnel Office reached out to Callanan in early 2018 to ask for an interview, and then he was vetted — a lengthy process that included a full FBI background check and a 35-page questionnaire for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
Callanan’s name was then sent to the full Senate. On Aug. 2 of this year, he was confirmed.
Other new appointees include David Armand DeKeyser, a previous U.S. Senate chief of staff for Jeff Sessions and Bob Corker; Noël Valis, a Spanish professor at Yale; Kim R. Holmes, the executive vice president of the Heritage Foundation and a former assistant secretary of state; and Bowdoin Professor of Social Sciences Jean Yarbrough, who taught Callanan when he was an undergraduate at Bowdoin and also spoke at Middlebury last spring.
Members are supposed to serve six-year terms, but D.C. gridlock can prolong transitions between council members. Christopher Merrill ’79, for example, served an expired term three years past his due. Merrill, who majored in English at Middlebury and worked at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He was appointed to the council in 2012 by then-president Barack Obama.
Merrill attributed the delays to backlogs in the Senate confirmation process.
“In my time, the council members who were appointed under the Bush administration and then the Obama administration went through very extensive background checks, then the nominations just sat on the Senate side for a very long time,” he said. “Most of the people I was serving with were serving on expired terms, waiting for the Senate to act.”
Merrill said that in his experience, members appointed during Democratic and Republican administrations “have gotten along quite well.” Callanan said the NEH has not had a reputation for partisanship under any administration.
“This is probably because the grant-making process relies heavily, although not exclusively, on peer review,” he said. Peer reviewers read all applications before they head to the council, although council members are not required to follow reviewers’ recommendations.
According to the NEH site, the agency has issued more than $5.6 billion in funding since its inception over 50 years ago. The NEH is one of Middlebury’s major federal funding sources.
Various college faculty have benefited from the endowment’s summer stipend program, for example, which awards up to $6,000 for individual scholars to pursue summer research projects. Religion Professor Jennifer Ortegren is a recent beneficiary. She is slated to begin research on her project, entitled “New Neighbors, New Muslims: Gender, Class, and Community in Contemporary India,” next summer.
The NEH also funds institutional grants for projects involving more than one faculty member. In 2015, 2017 and 2018, Jason Mittell and Christian Keathley of the Film and Media Culture department ran summer workshops with NEH grants. Research for the sophomore seminar on “the good life” was also funded by the NEH.
To avoid conflicts of interest, Callanan has recused himself from all grants connected to Middlebury and Princeton University, where he completed a fellowship in 2017–2018.
The NCH also selects winners for the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities and manages the nomination process for winners of the National Humanities Medal. Trump, however, has not yet awarded any National Humanities Medals during his presidency. By contrast, the medal has been awarded every year since its inception until 2016.
“It’s always been a wonderful thing, Trump’s just done away with it,” Merrill said. “It’s clear his interest in the arts and the humanities is nil.”
In March, Trump proposed severe cuts to the NEH’s budget for the third year in a row. Congress has previously rejected Trump’s suggested cuts, and is yet to approve next year’s proposed budget.
NCH meetings take place in December, March and July, with occasional teleconferences occurring throughout the year. The majority of these meetings fall during breaks in the college’s academic calendar.
(10/03/19 10:01am)
“Downton Abbey” is a fantastic time at the movies. The film — a sequel to the hit PBS period piece of the same name — showcases sharp dialogue, fine acting and deft period-design from director Michael Engler. From start to end, “Downton Abbey” (the movie) remains frothy; Engler’s film definitely lacks the cinematic aspirations of “Boyhood” (2014) or “The Revenant” (2015). But “Downton Abbey,” unlike those films, is actually fun to watch.
The Downton Abbey movie opens in 1927, two years after the show’s end. Robert Crawley, seventh Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) raises his eyebrows upon receiving a letter. “The King and Queen are visiting Downton,” he murmurs. Soon enough, we learn that the Earl is not referring to Elvis Presley and the “Bohemian Rhapsody” guys; instead, Downton must host King George V of England and his wife, Mary.
Complications ensue. The current head butler (Rob James-Collier) cannot quite manage the royal visit, for one. To make matters worse, the royal household’s domestic staff will conduct the king’s luncheon and dinner, undermining Downton’s own staff. To solve this mess, the Crawleys reach out to their butler emeritus, Mr. Carson (Jim Carter).
“Leave this to me,” Carson snarls. He puts on a tabby striped suit and walks down the road to Downton Abbey, his stern physique silhouetted by an English sunrise. This shot, like many others in this film, envelops the screen with the rich beauty of Northern England. Yorkshire essentially becomes a character in and of itself.
Other storylines come up in “Downton Abbey,” but a Downton layman should not worry — none of the subplots particularly matter. There is some business about an ingénue/maid (Tuppence Middleton) who catches the eye of Tom Branson (Allen Leech), the earl’s son-in-law. Meanwhile, the future of Downton must be decided by the household’s matriarch, Lady Violet (Dame Maggie Smith).
Maggie Smith’s acting alone makes “Downton Abbey” worth watching. The Scottish actress throws around zingers like nobody’s business. “Machiavelli is frequently underrated; he had many qualities,” Lady Violet quips at one point. Is Smith’s performance a rehash of her role as Professor McGonogall? Well, sort of. But Smith still rules.
Despite its strong acting and dialogue, “Downton Abbey” has a few parts that rocket beyond the stratosphere of the silly and into the cosmos of the misguided. There is a story arc wherein Downton inhabitants must foil a plot to kill the king (Simon Jones). The section reaches a climax when two men brawl over a pistol while, only five yards away, an unaware George V inspects his troops. Thankfully, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) emerges from behind a hedge and karate-chops the would-be assassin.
“Downton Abbey” is not “John Wick” (2014). The gunplay scene was so incongruous with the rest of the film that one wonders if Engler added the assasination storyline to simply beef up the movie’s runtime.
Even stranger is when the Downton staff must go to war with the royal domestics. The household’s cooks and maids use sleeping pills, fake telephone calls and outright abduction to ensure that only Downton workers can serve the King’s soup. When Lord Grantham learns about all the trickery from downstairs, he expresses his gratitude. After all, his staff is defending Downton’s honor — or something. If “Downton Abbey” took place on Earth, Lord Grantham would probably demand resignations, or maybe even go so far as to call the Yorkshire constabulary.
But these are minor quibbles. In what other film does one get to hear: “The day has dawned and the weather proves conclusively that God is a monarchist?” What other movie currently running in theaters features a kleptomaniac dressmaker? “Downton Abbey” might be a guilty pleasure, but the film is undeniably well-done. Give the movie a shot — you will feel quite at home during your stay at Downton.
(10/03/19 10:00am)
Last year’s Student Government Association Senate ended in the spring with threats of dissolution. Now, the new SGA is hoping to move in a different direction.
Seven members of last spring’s senate — current President Varsha Vijayakumar ’20 and all senior senators, junior senators and Feb senators — are still on the SGA this fall. The 10 remaining senators were not in office last spring when the senate created its “13 Proposals for Community Healing,” many of which followed frustrations about slow progress on several issues between students and the administration. The proposals were announced in a school-wide email on Apr. 23 in the wake of the cancellation of a controversial talk from Ryszard Legutko, a far-right Polish politician, and were written with input gathered from the wider student body at a town hall a week later.
After the administration’s initial response to several of the proposals — which included a tentative commitment to add a student delegate to the Board of Trustees and increase student representation in the administration’s Senior Leadership Group — the Senate decided not to dissolve in their last meeting of the semester.
Status update
Several of the 13 Proposals have been completed as written in the original statement, including the second proposal, which called for a student, staff member and faculty member to each be appointed as representatives to the College Board of Overseers. The College Board of Overseers is one of three committees within the Board of Trustees; there is also a board for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and one for the Language Schools, Schools Abroad and Bread Loaf School of English.
Vijayakumar, Associate Vice President for Advancement Operations Jami Black and History Professor William Hart were elected by the student body, Staff Council and Faculty Council, respectively, to serve as the three representatives to the board. Each representative will report back to their constituents following board meetings.
Saif Panday ’21 joined Wengel Kifle ’20 as a student representative on the Community Bias Response Team (CBRT), addressing the ninth proposal’s call for more student representation on the team.
Addressing the second half of that same proposal, which demanded more direct communication after the cancellation of campus events, Chief Diversity Officer Miguel Fernández explained that the request does not fall under the job description of his office.
“Cancellation of campus events is not a bias incident and thus does not fall under the purview of CBRT, so we will not be sending out such communications,” he said.
The college is offering a Black Studies major for the first time this fall, which was called for in the 13th proposal and has been in the works for several years. The major, led by History Professor Bill Hart and American Studies Professor J. Finley, came as a combined result of academic planning by faculty and administration, as well as renewed student campaigns in support of the program.
Several other efforts related to the proposals are in the works. Fernández said President Laurie Patton has plans to appoint an ad hoc working group in the next few weeks to look into an LGBTQ+ center, which was the 10th proposal.
“Movement on this center was stimulated by a student desire for programming, support, and mentoring for queer and trans students on campus,” he said. “I would say it was student-driven.”
Elisa Gan ’20 was nominated to be the the Student Liaison to the SGA on Endowment Affairs (SLSEA). This came after a weeks-long nomination process, in which Gan was approved by the Senate during its meeting on Sunday, Sept. 22. Gan will be a non-voting member of the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees, has full access to information about the endowment, and will report back to the SGA on how the school’s endowment is being invested.
The Senior Leadership Group (SLG) will be creating student advisory committees for each administrator in the group in response to the first proposal. This move will help bring in more student perspective to the work of the administration, and help improve cooperation between students and administrators.
The third proposal, which asked the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (OIDEI) to create a due diligence form for speaker invitations, is no longer on the table and was deemed unworkable, according to Fernández.
“It is not OIDEI’s place to vet speakers. My office was not consulted ahead of time and we do not foresee taking on this role,” Fernandez said.
Fernández said that the fifth proposal, which proposed bias training for all hired staff, faculty, administrators and students, will be covered by Renee Wells’ Inclusive Practitioners program.
Parton Health Center is currently conducting a search for a counselor with expertise working with marginalized communities, which was the 12th proposal.
Administrators did not respond to comment on the progress of several other proposals. These include the proposals centered around communication from the administration about ongoing proposal progress, revisiting the protest policy, improvements to the Green Dot program, making all buildings ADA accessible and making all organizational expenditures available on the college website (the fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and 11th proposals, respectively).
A spokesperson from student government said some of the above proposals are in the works.
A change in tone
Vijayakumar, who was serving as a junior senator last spring when the proposals were issued, has decided not to focus her presidency on their completion.
“Frustration about the lack of student voice included in decision-making processes that will significantly impact our campus culture and student life was, is and should be warranted,” Vijayakumar said. “That being said, this new SGA has worked hard to lay the groundwork for a significant shift in approach that will focus on earning student support and attacking problems on our campus through a more analytical and pragmatic lens.”
This new approach has been welcomed by administrators, some of whom felt the way last year’s SGA presented the proposals was unreasonable.
“The administration did not sign off on the 13 Proposals,” Fernandez said. “This administration believes in dialogue and does not take well to demands. And let’s be honest, these proposals were demands.”
As Vijayakumar worked over the summer to construct a new approach to achieve the SGA’s goals, this was very present in her mind as she built her cabinet, set initiatives and planned for the year to come.
Her approach has been apparent in the first several meetings this year, and she has emphasized the importance of cooperation, accountability and responsibility amongst the entire body. Vijayakumar and her chief of staff, Drew Platt ’20.5, have stressed in recent meetings that representatives need to hold themselves accountable to their own personal initiatives and to the overall goals of the SGA.
“In the past few years many individual members within SGA have done a lot of good work, but the body as a whole has suffered from lack of collaboration and consistency,” Vijayakumar said. “We spent a lot of time this summer diagnosing these issues and developing an action plan to ensure that SGA members will be held accountable within our body, and more importantly to the student body as well.”
For example, the senate was unable to vote on the full proposed list of committee members of every SGA Cabinet Committee during the senate meeting on Sept. 30 after several committee chairs failed to submit their proposed lists on time. The SGA Cabinet consists of dozens of committees that touch every aspect of student life, from athletics to sexual respect.
Vijayakumar called out these unnamed cabinet committee chairs who “didn’t pull their weight” and caused the delay to the approval process. After Vijayakumar set a new deadline, the senate voted Monday to approve the lists of committee members.
The heightened focus of the cabinet, which had taken a backseat in previous administrations, has led to greater responsibility, support, and accountability for appointed cabinet directors from Vijayakumar and her executive team.
Vijayakumar said she and her staff are holding cabinet leaders to a higher standard.
“We have implemented several new accountability measures to ensure that these cabinet committees are more effective than they have been in the past,” Vijayakumar said. “As a result we are confident that the initiatives inspired by the proposals are in the hands of the people that are most dedicated to making tangible progress on those issues.”
Vijayakumar has also sought to improve the underlying issue that drove the 13 Proposals, namely a lack of cooperation between students and the administration. She hopes to improve that relationship to make her SGA as productive as possible.
“Students should also expect a new level of collaboration with the administration,” Vijayakumar said. “They have proven themselves to be more open to student input than ever before, and we are excited to work together in efforts to make this campus a better place for students to study and live.”
For an example, she pointed to an event led by Fernández that will bring more clarity to the faculty hiring process and how that translates to hiring a more diverse faculty. The event, which will take place on Oct. 16, was organized by members of the Cabinet together with Fernández and the OIDEI.
“The fireworks that we saw towards the end of last year represented justified emotions but ultimately did not serve as a means to build consensus or lasting change,” Vijayakumar said. “We have been very conscious of that as we set out our plans to shift SGA culture this year.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the number of returning senators.
(09/26/19 10:05am)
Curious students on the heels of the global climate strike movement turned out in droves to the three-day Clifford Symposium this past week.
There, they grappled with the future of the global ocean and were introduced to exploratory and conservationist efforts. The symposium brought together researchers, activists, filmmakers and students to offer a multidisciplinary perspective on one of the world’s most precious resources.
“I wanted to strike a balance between sounding the alarm and asking people to share research that would incite a sense of wonder and hope,” said Associate Professor of English and American Literatures Daniel Brayton, one of the symposium’s organizers who also teaches in the Environmental Science Department.
Keynote speaker Dr. Kara Lavender Law, of the Sea Education Association (SEA), struck that balance in her talk, “Reflections of an Oceans Plastic Scientist” on Thursday night in Wilson Hall. Law, a leading scientist in the study of marine plastic debris, spoke about her educational path and discussed the harm that plastics, especially microplastics (pieces less than five millimeters long), can have on marine life.
Law and colleagues recently estimated that between 1950–2016, there were 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic produced globally. “I can’t even tell you a reasonable number of Empire State Buildings or elephants or football stadiums to give you an idea of how much material that is,” she said.
Scientists don’t know exactly how much of that plastic debris is now in the ocean, what form it takes or how it will impact human health. However, they widely agree that plastics are hazardous to marine animals, who are likely to ingest or become entangled in the material. Some bio-families will even grow on floating microplastics.
To Law, solving the ocean plastic pollution will require a multidisciplinary overhaul of the current system. She suggested the audience start locally, by asking themselves: “What happens to my trash?” Although the question may seem obvious, acting on it can be hard.
“The conveniences of [using plastic] don’t impact us on a daily basis and we’re privileged enough to live in this beautiful clean, green environment regardless of the waste we’re producing and the impact on our earth,” Alex Cobb ’20 said.
[pullquote speaker="Daniel Brayton" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]We tend to think of the environment as green. We think of green space, of grassy meadows and forest, and yet 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water.[/pullquote]
Outside Wilson Hall, a group of local women from Sewing For Change, a “community effort to end the use of single-use bags,” were working to reduce our collective waste. Since January of 2019, they have sewn 500 bags from reused materials. Bethany Barry Menkart, a group member, said they hope to reach 1,000 bags by the end of the year with the help of students.
On Friday afternoon, attendees crowded the Rohatyn A. Jones conference room to hear about whale watching in New Zealand at a talk comparing previous and present global whale population numbers. Jennifer Crandall ’20.5 and Caitlin Dicara ’20 presented alongside visiting Associate Professor of Maritime History and Literature Richard King of SEA.
The students opened by discussing their experience conducting six weeks of fieldwork on a tall ship off the coast of New Zealand. Crandall described being woken up at 3 a.m. one day amidst rough seas. The waves were over 13 feet high and it was pouring rain and windy. In that moment, Crandall recalled, “the ocean became more alive to me because I saw how powerful it was.”
Over the course of the semester, Crandall, Dicara and their 14 classmates transcribed the log book of Commodore Morris, which detailed where and when the sailor had seen and killed whales in the 1850s. Using data from the log and their own journey, they created a Geographic Information System map and studied shifts in whale populations.
King presented an overview of the history of right whales (or black whales), whose coastal living and bountiful oil made them the “right” whales to hunt. His discussion, like Law’s, struck the balance between underscoring the perils of the present and offering hope for the future. King explained, for example, that from 1927–1963 not a single right whale was sighted off the coast of New Zealand, in large part due to over-whaling. Now, with the population on the rebound, there are around 70 sightings per year.
Throughout the symposium, audiences and speakers alike grappled with the idea of how to get oceanic issues on peoples’ radars. As Dicara explained, “it’s really hard to get people to care who are inland of the ocean.”
“We tend to think of the environment as green,” Brayton said. “We think of green space, of grassy meadows and forest, and yet 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water.”
The symposium’s message was clear: If we want to understand environmental issues and advocate for a healthier world, we can start by looking to the ocean.
(09/26/19 10:03am)
World-renowned cellist Sophie Shao and her sextet performed at the Mahaney Arts Center’s Robison Hall last Saturday evening, Sept. 21. The concert, “Sophie Shao and Friends,” featured works by Arnold Schoenberg, Orlando Gibbons and Johannes Brahms. “Sophie Shao and Friends” also marked the first concert in the centennial of the Middlebury Performing Arts Series.
The evening began with three small pieces by 17th century English composer Orlando Gibbons. “Fantasia a 6, no. III” kicked things off. Shao and cellist Fred Sherry grounded the sextet’s tempo, using a call and response scheme that allowed violinists Jennifer Frautschi and Zachary DePue to let their instruments sing. The two other Gibbons pieces, “Fantasia a 6 no. IV” and the song “Go From My Window,” featured more from violists Che-Yen Chen and Paul Neubauer. In “Go From My Window,” the sextet’s violists acted as a firm harmony to the showier violins and cellos.
“I still hear different things in the Gibbons,” Chen said. “There’s a simplicity to his pieces.”
These musical vignettes shined in their simplicity, but they also highlighted Gibbons’s veddy British pith. Each cello riff conveyed no more or less than Gibbons’s gist, and the dynamics remained crisp, somewhere between piano and mezzo forte.
“Some might call Gibbons the English Palestrina,” Shao said. Gibbons might write like the Italian Renaissance composer Palestrina, but Shao’s group played Gibbons with earnestness, as if they were playing Scarlatti. Their interpretation had swagger.
The program moved on to “Transfigured Night” by Arnold Schoenberg, a 20th century Austrian-American composer. If you know your classical music, you know that Schoenberg is a hot-button issue. In “Debussy: A Painter In Sound,” musicologist Stephen Walsh writes, “Schoenberg may be the first ‘great composer’ in modern history whose music has not entered the repertoire almost a century and a half after his birth.” Poor Arnold.
I asked Shao about Schoenberg’s trickiness for listeners. “[The music critic] Donald Tovey said something like, ‘It’s not a matter of whether you like Schoenberg’s music or not. It’s great no matter what.’”
At “Sophie Shao and Friends,” the beauty of “Transfigured Night” brought some audience members to tears.
“Transfigured Night” started with a two-note whisper from the cellists, followed by the same motif from the violas and violins. Robison Hall felt sad and lonely for a few minutes. Then suddenly, the strings went in dissonant directions — the cellos sung gaily; the violins whined ambivalently. Shao’s ensemble hurled arpeggios left and right, descending the audience into the chaotic middle section of the piece.
“It’s a psychological portrait,” Shao said, referring to the Richard Dehmel poem that Schoenberg based “Transfigured Night” on. The poem deals with a conversation: a woman tells the man she loves that she got impregnated by someone else. The man takes this news rather well and says that he will raise the woman’s child anyway, attributing his forgiveness to the mystique of the night sky.
Such a cerebral work requires transparency, Shao argued. When I asked her what she meant, she said, “[Transparency is] allowing the melody to play so quietly that you shiver.”
The conclusion of “Transfigured Night” suggested less atonal glum than it did the calm euphoria of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending.” Despite a murky beginning in D-minor, Shao’s sextet allowed the closing measures to sing a bittersweet farewell.
“The piece invokes a dream,” violinist Jennifer Frautschi declared, adding that “Transfigured Night” offers a more accessible take on the infamously atonal composer. “[The piece] acts as a great introduction to Schoenberg.”
During the first two pieces, I was struck by how the sextet moved together. When cellist Fred Sherry cocked an eyebrow, the violins burst into pizzicato; a nod from Shao yielded a key change. “I think you learn what helps and what doesn’t help,” Shao said when asked about the group’s signals. The six musicians worked together like clockwork.
[pullquote speaker="Sophie Shao" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Music can be like a complex sudoku.[/pullquote]
For lovers of the avant-garde, the Schoenberg piece provided the most enjoyable part of the evening. But “Sophie Shao and Friends” ended with a seminal piece of classical music: Brahm’s “String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat Major.”
In “What To Listen For In Music,” Aaron Copland characterizes Brahms as a musical conservative, a reactionary who fought for “a lost cause” when he rejected the chromaticism of Wagner and pyrotechnics of Liszt. Brahms comes off as an old-fashioned guy.
Sometimes, however, the old ways really are the best. The Brahms sextet dominated the night.
The first movement of the Brahms struck home with its melody. It was refreshing to have a consistent theme after the tonal skulduggery of “Transfigured Night.” The audience never got lost in a jungle of notes; Shao patiently led us through the music.
“Sophie Shao and Friends” absolutely killed the “Andante ma moderato,” the second movement of the sextet. The Andante drummed out a slow, haunting chant in D-minor. One heard the folksy motifs that Brahms later capitalized on in his “Hungarian Dances.”
The last two movements of the sextet charmed the audience with unabashed Romanticism. The cellists especially owned the rondo movement, holding their own with lightning-quick ostinatos that zoomed to the piece’s end. After the last chord of “Sophie Shao and Friends,” the audience roared in approval.
After the concert, I joined the musicians for a late dinner at Two Brothers Tavern. Over onion rings, Shao told me about the grueling effort it took to pull off “Sophie Shao and Friends.”
“There were long days,” Shao admitted. “Music can be like a complex sudoku.”
I responded by quoting my favorite Sergei Rachmainoff proverb: “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.”
The cellist nodded, smiling.
(09/12/19 10:05am)
Drive down scenic Route 125 and you’ll find, situated across from the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail, Middlebury College’s Breadloaf Campus in Ripton, Vt.: home to the Breadloaf School of English graduate programs during the summer as well as various MiddView groups during first-year orientation week. What’s lesser known, however, is that for 44 consecutive years, Breadloaf has welcomed back hundreds of alumni, their friends and spouses, and parents of students for an annual four-day program called Alumni College.
From Aug. 29 to Sept. 1 this year, 139 alumni came to Breadloaf to reconnect with friends, soak in the Vermont scenery and explore one of the weekend’s five course offerings. Most hailed from the New England area, but many others traveled from California, Texas and the UK to participate in the program.
According to Associate Director of Alumni and Parent Programws Lori Mackey, classes filled within the first few weeks that registration was open.
Professor of Psychology Matthew Kimble taught a course on happiness at Alumni College in 2001, and has since 2013 overseen the program’s course programming as its faculty director.
Courses for Alumni College are typically decided upon in February. Generally, Kimble looks for a program of five courses that span the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences. One Alumni College tradition is that there is almost always a field class offered, so that students have the opportunity to take full advantage of Alumni College’s pastoral setting in Ripton.
Kimble said that one of the major attractions of Alumni College is its location at the Breadloaf campus. “I don’t know what percentage of people we would lose if we were like, ‘Oh, we’re going to have classes in BiHall this year,’ but I’m feeling it would be a lot,” Kimble said. “I think people would be very disappointed. There’s something special about being up [at Breadloaf] at that time of year; it’s so beautiful.”
Despite being relatively unknown among current students, news of Alumni College travels fast through word of mouth among alumni friend groups, and the program welcomed its largest group in its 44-year history this year.
Often, classes and friends will come back regularly, using Alumni College as a reunion. “Some of [the participants] are real regulars,” Kimble said. Participants this year ranged from individuals in the class of 1951 to those in the class of 2007. Of the participants, the Class of ’55 has been known for attending Alumni College together as annual mini-reunions. They will be celebrating their 65th reunion in June of 2020.
[pullquote speaker="Bruce Byers '55" photo="" align="left" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can’t overestimate how important it is for our group to be sitting together, three times a day.[/pullquote]
Sue Byers ’55 and Bruce Byers ’55 have been attending Alumni College for 18 years. “We became kind of famous, the class of ‘55, because we had so many of our class come. And then their spouses would come, and they just loved it, as we did,” Bruce Byers said.
This year, 14 members of the Class of ’55 cohort attended Alumni College. “These people came with us in 1951, and we’ve been pretty close with all of this group for all that time. We’ve lost a few last couple of years, but that’s one reason why we come,” Bruce Byers said.
“The setting is number two,” Sue Byers continued, echoing Kimble’s sentiments about the beauty of late summer in Vermont. “You can hike after your class, or you can play tennis after your class, or you can sit in the wonderful Adirondack chairs anywhere around and catch up on your reading for the nexwt day,” she said.
And sometimes, the pure pleasure of seeing old friends and familiar faces is enough to keep people coming back. “Breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Bruce said. “You can’t overestimate how important it is for our group to be sitting together, three times a day.”
This year, Bruce took a course with Associate Professor of Geology Will Amidon on Geologic Controls on Human History in the Champlain Valley, which took the class on field trips to the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail and to Port Henry. He noted the difference in age between students at Alumni College and undergraduates at Middlebury College. “From the professors’ point of view,” he said, “they’re talking to people in their 60s and 70s and 80s instead of teenagers.”
Sue, however, pointed out that “because of their age, [Alumni College participants] can draw on experiences that are pertinent to what the course is about.” She said that in her course with Associate Professor of Philosophy Martha Woodruff on Socratic Legacies Today, there were about four teachers or school counselors in the class, who were able to provide input about their experiences with the Socratic method in K–12 education.
“The one thing that’s different about Alumni College is that students bring so much experience to the table,” Kimble said. He said that most attendees of Alumni College have “fairly recently retired” and estimates the average age of a student at Alumni College to be around 70, which made for interesting discussions in courses like his on Happiness, which had “individuals with a lifetime of experience” and “will comment on ways that are really different than what you’ll see in undergraduates.” The insights that can be gained from the wealth of experiences of students at Alumni College can often be rewarding for faculty as well. According to Kimble, most faculty who have taught at Alumni College describe it as one of their most rewarding teaching experiences.
“Most alums don’t know about [Alumni College] until they’re older,” said Alumni College participant Bobo Sideli ’77, P’08, P’13. Sideli had been curious about the demographics of the program’s participants, and did a little analysis of his own. “You can get the attendee list online,” he said, “and I sorted it, and 99 out of 140 people are alumni; the rest are spouses or parents. And then I looked at it in excel, and the peak is in the class of ’67. Thirty-five percent of the attendees are from the classes of ’63 to ’68, so they’re in their seventies. It’s a bell curve.”
Sideli is trying to convince friends from his class to come to Alumni College. “They still haven’t gotten around to it. In their mind it’s an old people’s thing,” Sideli said. “They’re still – you know – the go-go. I’m the early group.”
Despite a generally positive experience at Alumni College, however, Sideli also noted a lack of racial diversity in the program’s attendants. “One thing that bothers me is the total lack of diversity — it’s so obvious.” Sideli said. “You look at the Middlebury student population and you come here, and it’s like — what the hell is going on? But you also have to remember, you’re thinking about mostly people who came to Middlebury in the mid-60s. When I came to Middlebury in ’72 I think we had a dozen or 20 African Americans. I always joked that because I’m an Italian from South Shore, Long Island, that I was diversity.”
Sideli took a course titled James Brown, Bob Marley, and Beyoncé: Protest Music as Political Mobilization Across Countries taught by Associate Professor of Political Science Kemi Fuentes-George. The course was based on a J-term course Fuentes-George had taught in the past, and included numbers from a variety of genres and origins and ranged from songs that celebrated subaltern identities, to those that were more provocative and explicit. Fela Kuti’s “Lady”, Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright”, and NWA’s “F**k the Police” were among the songs on the syllabus. “We didn’t just do hip hop music, we did music from Jamaica, we did music from Nigeria, we did Pussy Riots from Russia, and we did music from Egypt and Tunisia as well,” Fuentes-George said.
Fuentes-George went into the weekend with some reservations of his own: “I’ll be honest,” he said, “I was a little bit — I don’t know if nervousness is the word -- but I was a little bit concerned: how are these retirees, older white people, going to deal with Tupac and Kendrick Lamar? But if this is material that’s new to them and subject matter that’s new to them, I think that’s probably even better than just — ‘Oh, here’s more of just stuff that you’ve already read.’”
To prepare his students for the program, Fuentes-George sent them a video in June about the technical construction of rap music, background on the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the involvement of certain music in that movement, “stuff coming out from Beyonce and Kendrick and so on.” It was Fuentes-George’s attempt to “situate this so that people who might not have a familiarity with hip hop and rap music see that, not whatever their stereotype of it was.”
“It was an opportunity for me to get people to think about things that they ordinarily wouldn’t have thought about,” he said. “The way to do that is to have people do readings and make them engage with material that they ordinarily wouldn’t have engaged with. I didn’t want it to be just a dog and pony show.”
“I think they engaged with it,” Fuentes-George said when asked about how his students had responded to the course material. “I know that there were some who came away from it with a not just a better familiarity, but a better appreciation for some of the artists that they didn’t necessarily know.”
“I know protest music from the civil rights movement, but I didn’t know any other protest music, and I had no knowledge of rap,” Sideli said. “And hip-hop — I mean, that was foreign to me. So I thought it would be good exposure, and it is.”
A recent retiree, Sideli had worked in healthcare for most of his adult life. Now he “does” music, he said. He plays, reads about and studies music, and sees Fuentes-George’s course as a further exploration into the “larger macro level of music.”
Though Sideli doesn’t typically write protest songs, “’cause I have nothing to protest about,” he made an exception for the last night of Alumni College: putting his own spin on James Brown’s iconic 1969 song “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Sideli and his classmates serenaded the Alumni College with “I’m Old and I’m Proud.”
“We’re so sick of our culture that’s so youth-oriented — and so this is our protest song,” he said.
Sideli is one of many participants for whom Alumni College was an opportunity to rekindle interests and passions they had temporarily set aside in life post-Middlebury.
“For anyone who’s gone to college, there’s just always part of you that misses that environment and longs to go back, and so many do,” Kimble said. “To some extent, my worst fear is that people will learn what an amazing thing Alumni College is and we won’t be able to accommodate everybody. I do feel like it’s a bit of a secret.”
Correction: A previous version of the article suggested that Professor Matthew Kimble assumed the role of faculty director of Alumni College immediately after teaching a class at Alumni College in 2001. Kimble assumed the role in 2013, taking over from Jim Ralph, Dean of Faculty Development & Research and Rehnquist Professor of American History and Culture, who was faculty director from 2008 to 2013. James Jermain Professor Emeritus of Political Economy and International Law Russell Leng was faculty director of Alumni College from 1993 to 2008.
(09/12/19 10:04am)
So, you want to be a Broadway star? For a few chosen Middlebury students, this dream becomes a reality each summer with the Potomac Theatre Project.
The Potomac Theatre Project, or PTP/NYC, is a Middlebury Theatre Department program that allows undergraduate students to be a part of the professional theatre world while still studying at the college. The project was founded in 1987 by Professors Cheryl Faraone, Richard Romagnoli and Boston University Professor Jim Petosa who were “determined to establish a dynamic and provocative company that would also provide a bridge to professional theatre for aspiring young students,” according to the company’s website. Students work alongside Actor’s Equity professionals and professors on two different productions that run in an Off-Broadway theatre in New York City for five weeks throughout the summer.
This program is unique to Middlebury and cannot be found at any other liberal arts college. Students are able to see what the “real world” of professional theatre is like while working with established actors and learning from their professors. Many of the Actor’s Equity professionals are Middlebury alumni who were originally students at PTP.
Students audition for the two summer productions at the college in a more personal setting than others in the industry. Zachary Varricchione ’21 said this was a major draw for him to do the program because he knew how other students had to deal with “huge cattle-call type auditions” to work in professional theater. The addition of having the program led by Middlebury professors made his decision even more clear. “To have a program that’s run by your own professors with intimate auditions is almost unheard of,” he said.
Madeline Ciocci ’20, who has been a part of PTP for two summers, says that the special connections between students and Equity actors are also what make the program so impactful. “It’s really exciting to get to know them, their craft, and their process, to learn from them.”
Varricchione said that observing the professionals at work contributed to “some of the biggest artistic growth I had this summer...[they] really inspired me to do my best and take some of their habits to raise my work to a higher caliber.”
Students at PTP are incorporated into every facet of the production, not just performing onstage. The entire cast and crew work together to help with marketing, business planning, and even set and costume design.
This deep-dive into the intensity of the Off-Broadway world is eye-opening and exciting for students who have been involved in theater previously. “I’ve been doing theatre for almost my whole life, but not until I did PTP did I understand not only how much emotional work theatre can be, but also how exhausting it can be in a physical sense,” Ciocci said. “It’s a life that’s totally and completely exciting, but also one that takes a wild amount of constant energy and commitment.”
The added responsibilities involved in being a member of the company is more realistic to what the professional world is like, which Varricchione appreciated coming from a college theater setting. At shows at the college, cast and crew members often have their designated roles with not that much overlap. PTP is more the “classic theater company experience, where the actors are in charge of run crew, and building sets, and everything else,” said Varricchione.
This season, the company put on two productions, “Dogg’s Hamlet,” “Cahoot’s Macbeth,” two plays often performed together by Tom Stoppard and “Havel: The Passion of Thought,” written by Harold Pinter, Václav Havel and Samuel Beckett. “Dogg’s Hamlet” is a play where three young boys try to confuse a driver by speaking “Dogg,” a language that is comprised of English words that mean the opposite of what speakers are used to. The play then turns into a 15-minute interpretation of “Hamlet.” The same cast also performed “Cahoot’s Macbeth,” which consists of actors performing Macbeth in a controlling state while under surveillance by a hidden government agent.
The other cast performed “Havel: The Passion of Thought,” which is composed of five one act plays that expose the challenges living in an oppressive Communist state. These plays were once considered so controversial that they were banned in Czechoslovakia, leaving actors to perform them in private homes and distribute them illegally.
This season’s choice of plays is in line with PTP’s focus on art that critically examines the world outside of the theater. On their website, the organization states how since its inception, PTP’s work has “addressed the necessity and difficulty of art, homelessness, censorship, pornography, AIDS, totalitarianism, apartheid and gender wars -- always in passionate, deeply human terms.”
When asked about what he wanted audiences to take away from “Dogg’s Hamlet” and “Cahoot’s Macbeth,” Varricchione said that the cast hoped that “the audience would think about how their actions have been complicit and how they have been resistant to oppressive systems today.”
Ciocci, a member of the “Havel” cast, felt that when she was “working on this set of plays that investigates resistance and dissidence under an oppressive regime, it’s impossible to not think about how timely the content feels.”
She elaborated on a specific moment in the play where a character, Stanekova is forced to decide whether or not to protest a fellow artist’s incarceration because of his activism or to “continue to subtly fight while existing within an unethical system.” She felt that this crisis when deciding which way to act against oppression to be relevant in today’s world where “it’s not clear which actions will yield the best results, and which actions you’ll be able to live with and respect yourself for.”
PTP co-founder, co-artistic director, director of “Dogg’s Hamlet,” “Cahoot’s Macbeth” and Chair of the Theatre Department Cheryl Faraone stated in the season’s introduction video that these plays are “the best kind of theatre; it makes you think, and it makes you feel, which has been kind of a PTP mantra for most of our 33 years.”
(09/12/19 10:03am)
Retiring Faculty
Over the next few years, Middlebury will see significant turnover in faculty and staff due to the college’s workforce planning initiative.
President Laurie L. Patton announced in June 2018 that the college would be offering its faculty elective, incentive-based retirement plans, often called “buyouts.” Currently, 24 professors have signed agreements to participate in the Faculty Retirement Incentive Program (FRIP).
FRIP is intended to save the college money because new tenure-track faculty can be paid lower salaries than professors who have held tenure for many years, as previously reported by the Campus. The FRIP package includes a year’s salary, funds for scholarship and research for up to three years after retirement, and establishment of a Health Reimbursement Account for health care.
This past May, the first round of FRIP participants were honored at a reception at the Mahaney Arts Center with other retiring faculty.
Professor of English and Liberal Arts John Bertolini decided to retire this year for health reasons and was happy to take the “generous offer” he received through FRIP. “I had been thinking I would go on associate status for a few years, but when the buy out became possible, I took the plunge,” Bertolini told the Campus last spring.
He began teaching at Middlebury in 1975 and was joined at the college by his wife, Mary Ellen Bertolini, in 1993. Bertolini expects changes in faculty to come with changes to the English and American Literature Department offerings, as the classes he taught disappear from the offered curriculum and new courses take their place.
Peter Hamlin, a professor of music, also retired last May. Hamlin said the incentive program was not a factor in his decision to retire, but that he did “get a small amount based on a formula [the college] used.”
Hamlin is looking forward to having more time in retirement to sail, swim, snowboard, cross-country ski, travel and learn Spanish with his wife.
Newly-Tenured Faculty
Keegan Callanan, assistant professor of political science, and Daniel F. Silva, assistant professor of Portuguese, were both offered tenure last May.
Silva described the experience of achieving tenure as both painful and joyful.
“I found myself mourning all who I left behind, because achieving ‘success,’ in academia or otherwise, while coming from communities like mine, often and sadly implies an involuntary divorce from home,” he said.
Silva will serve as interim director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, while teaching International Global Studies 101 this fall.
“Through both capacities, I hope to continue finding a place here and working so that others of marginalized experiences may also find a place here,” he said.
Callanan is teaching two thematic courses this fall, one on problems at the intersection of religion and politics, and the other on the relationship between power and justice in international relations.
Tenure was developed in American universities to protect professors’ freedom of inquiry and speech, Callanan wrote in an email to the Campus.
“The intuition behind the practice is that the vocation of a scholar entails the pursuit of truth, and this pursuit should be undertaken without the risk of losing one’s livelihood as a consequence of reaching unpopular conclusions. Luckily, I hold no unpopular views, so tenure is a formality in my case.”
Callanan feels having tenure will positively impact his work as a professor.
“Tenure affords the scholar time — time to develop thoughts patiently, without being bound by short-term demands for results,” he said. “This enables a certain kind of intellectual risk-taking that would be rarer without tenure.”
The Board of Trustees also promoted nine associate professors to the rank of professor. Rebecca Bennette, one of the newly promoted instructors, explained this review occurs after five to eight years of associate professorship, and can mean a salary boost as well as eligibility for various positions and committees.
SOAN Split
Sociology and Anthropology, formerly one joint department, are now two separate departments, each with its own major offerings. This decision was made at the May faculty meeting, according to Dean of Curriculum Suzanne Gurland.
“Anthropology and sociology have always been different disciplines, but communicating that difference to students was always difficult in a joint department,” said Professor James Fitzsimmons, the chair of the new Anthropology Department.
As Fitzsimmons explained, both disciplines have diversified their offerings, they’ve grown increasingly separate, to the point where splitting made the most sense.
“Instead of being buried — yes, I’m an archaeologist, so pun intended — under joint departmental requirements, our anthropology students are going to be able to pursue a subfield or even sample them all,” Fitzsimmons said. He believes the split means his department will be able to diversify its curriculum, make study abroad easier and further develop subfields.
The separate departments will allow for “more disciplinary depth,” according to Linus Owens, Sociology Department chair. Owens added that Middlebury was the only one of its peer colleges in the Nescac league with a shared department and major before the switch.
Food Studies Minor
Faculty also voted to approve a new Food Studies minor at their May meeting.
The minor will include two introductory courses, a seminar course or independent study, and two courses selected from other disciplines including social sciences, health and humanities or natural sciences and geography, said Molly Anderson, academic director of the Food Studies Program. All minors will also participate in experiential learning.
Anderson sees the minor as “a way that students who are interested in food issues can dig deeper and get recognition for their work.”
Said Anderson, “Food Studies are important because food is connected with almost every discipline in one way or another. The ways that we produce, consume and waste food can either contribute to huge environmental and social problems or be part of the solutions.”
(09/12/19 9:54am)
I am currently living in a rural village in the Eastern province of Zambia as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. My main assignment is “capacity development” at my community’s primary school, a job which includes teaching English, facilitating teacher trainings, and working with adult literacy and gender equality. My secondary assignment is to improve programs that raise awareness for HIV, malaria, early marriages, and gender-based violence. At least, these are my stated objectives; my actual services have evolved out of the desires of the community. While the Peace Corps is far from perfect, I believe that the way we respond to specific communities is incredibly important.
School infrastructure in rural Zambia tends to be a little rough around the edges, and my school is no exception. We have three classroom blocks of three rooms each — for a total of nine classrooms — but not all of them are functional. My school is old (it was originally built in 1954), and not much has changed since then. The floors are covered in chips and cracks that leave the desks at variety of weird angles. The chalkboards are virtually useless, the windows have no glass, and the classroom walls have holes in them, leaving students exposed to the elements. Rain pours in, soaking their notebooks. The wind is a constant distraction. During the hot season, the classroom feels like a desert: dry, dusty and insufferably hot. Conditions like these are not conducive to teaching, much less learning.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]While the Peace Corps is far from perfect, I believe that the way we respond to specific communities is incredibly important.[/pullquote]
An overall lack of resources has also crippled our school’s ability to engage the students in much-needed extracurricular development. Because the only available classrooms are in use during both the morning and afternoon, we are unable to carry-out educational programs such as GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), GRS (Grass-Roots Soccer, an HIV/AIDS program), or other programs designed to increase literacy.
And so instead of simply teaching, I have been restoring the school. On that note, my current (and biggest) undertaking is a community-driven school restoration grant. This will allow us to buy the materials needed to bring our school back up to working order (including new cement for the floors and walls, paint for the chalkboards, new frames and panes for the windows). Yet even here my role evolves in response to the community: the locals are the ones writing lists, creating a budget and organizing volunteer workers. They are the ones telling me what needs to be done. I am not the driving force behind this endeavor-- I am simply a cog in the machine, working with community members to achieve a common goal.
Peace Corps Partnership Program grants (or PCPPs) are not uncommon amongst Peace Corps Volunteers. In my opinion, they are the safest way for American donors to ensure their money is being put to good use. The grant applications are written by Peace Corps Volunteers on behalf of a community that lacks the resources to address a specific need. Often, grant applications are concerned with infrastructure: building libraries or new school blocks, or — as in my case — restoration. What is particularly great about PCPPs is that you know your money is going directly to the community. It is not being filtered through a committee of sticky-fingered bureaucrats, and it is not being spent on futile, albeit well-intended, programs. For these reasons, I believe there are few better options than to donate to a PCPP.
As I said, the Peace Corps is far from perfect. It has the same flaws that plague any institution of its scale and scope. So do its volunteers. Some of them come off as “white saviors.” Some of them do a poor job of readjusting their world lens when working within their communities. Volunteers like this make it easy to write the Peace Corps off as another misstep on an aid-heavy path to development. In my experience, however, there is a strong base of Peace Corps volunteers who have the right intentions, and our working to correct the Peace Corps’ flaws. As volunteers, we are most effective when we stay open and responsive, and, whenever possible, amplify the voice of our host communities.
(05/10/19 8:53pm)
I may be mistaken, as Alexander Khan's argument in his recent letter to The Middlebury Campus is not always easy to follow and on occasion descends into ad hominem attacks that are frankly below the level of what one should read in a newspaper, but it seems to me that what Khan is basically questioning in it is the veracity of my colleague Professor Moss's description of Ryszard Legutko and his party in Poland, Law & Justice (PiS), as homophobic. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions in anything of course, but here, objectively speaking, it is beyond dispute that Law & Justice and Legutko in particular hold views about LGBTQ rights that are controversial and "hard-right" by US or European standards. This is not just something you will only hear from left-wing campus radicals, or even specialists who happen to speak Polish and know a bit more than most about the region, it is also something you can read about in The New York Times, in English.
The article in the NYT is from last month, but Legutko's views on LGBTQ rights have been "well-known" for years. See, for instance, this article from The Guardian from 2011, which describes British Conservatives' efforts to "play down" their relationship in the European Parliament with hard-right parties like Law & Justice and their representatives, chief among them Legutko himself.
What I myself find especially remarkable about the many discussions of the events surrounding Legutko's visit last month is this: on one hand, one side of the debate seems to insist that it has an "inviolable" right to invite any speaker to campus, no matter how controversial he or she may prove to be; on the other, there has been a consistent effort on the part of many of the same people to "play down" the controversial nature of Legutko's views, to present him as an even-handed scholar rather than an ideologue. Why this reluctance? Simply put, I think that if we invite controversy to campus, we also have a responsibility as academics to own that controversy, as it were.
I also think that if we are to make any progress in our arguments over free academic inquiry and inclusivity at Middlebury, we have to begin by being honest with ourselves. First and foremost, we have to admit that our right to the former is not, in actual practice, an absolute principle, that there are indeed lines that most of us are not willing to cross (I, for one, do not believe that any of my colleagues would ever invite, say, David Duke to lecture on campus, and I hope I am never proven wrong). Once we admit to this, then we can have a more honest discussion about Mr. Legutko: as the reluctance I mentioned above indicates, what both sides are really arguing about in his case, now, in 2019, is how close to the line we are.
Matthew Walker is an assistant professor of Russian at Middlebury College.
(05/09/19 10:05am)
One afternoon last October, the four students studying abroad in Middlebury’s school in Yaoundé, Cameroon, received a cryptic message from the program’s director, asking them to meet for dinner at the home of one of their host families.
The puzzled students assumed that the director, Ariane Ngabeu, wanted to discuss some change to the semester’s academic programming. They nearly discounted the possibility that the meeting had anything to do with Cameroon’s contentious presidential elections, which had taken place nine days earlier on Oct. 7, and whose results were slated to be announced within the next week.
“In our wildest dreams it was something about the elections,” said Emily Ray ’20, one of the students in Cameroon last semester. In Yaoundé, the country’s bustling but tranquil capital city, the notion that the election results could unleash a wave of political violence was unthinkable.
But while the students were waiting for Ngabeu to arrive for dinner, they received an email from Nicole Chance, an assistant director for Middlebury’s international programs and a liaison for the Cameroon school. It contained a startling announcement: Middlebury had decided to relocate the four students to Morocco, fearing that electoral violence could sweep Cameroon and shutter its airports. The group would be put on flights to Rabat, Morocco just over a day later, with no guarantee that they would be able to return to Cameroon to finish their semester.
“It was traumatic,” Ray said.
Ultimately, the trip proved to be successful — and also unnecessary. The four students, along with Ngabeu, spent a pleasant week in Morocco before returning to Cameroon, which had remained almost entirely peaceful after the election results were announced.
During the hectic, stressful period immediately before the trip to Morocco, and in the months since, people involved have raised questions about how the decision to relocate was made, whether Middlebury applies standards to its African programs that it would not apply elsewhere, and how Middlebury makes judgments about its faraway programs from a campus in rural Vermont.
MESSAGES FROM MIDDLEBURY
Middlebury’s decision to relocate the students in Cameroon came as the nation, historically one of the stablest in Central Africa, entered a period of relative instability. Within the last two years, peaceful protests by the country’s English-speaking minority against the largely French-speaking national government turned violent after government forces cracked down on protesters. This growing “Anglophone crisis” has caused increased opposition to President Paul Biya, who has led Cameroon since 1982. But Yaoundé is located well within the country’s peaceful Francophone region, and last semester’s students detected little unrest as they navigated the city each day.
“I remember my host mom saying, ‘Oh, Cameroonians don’t go out in the streets, so no one’s going to protest it,’” Ray said. “No one thought that anything bad would happen in Yaoundé.”
Other educational programs operating in Cameroon have had varying responses to the country’s fraught political situation. A program operated by the SIT Graduate Institute hardly altered its plans that semester, Ngabeu said. On the other hand, Dickinson College suspended its long-running program in Yaoundé in December, citing risks posed by the Anglophone crisis.
The first signs of Middlebury’s discomfort came the morning of the elections, when Ngabeu received an email from Liz Ross, Middlebury’s associate dean for international programs, containing a link to a New York Times article published the day before. The article described Cameroon as being “on the brink of civil war,” asserting that the upcoming election was “escalating an already volatile situation” in the country.
“I was surprised,” Ngabeu said. “Because if anything is happening in Cameroon, I’m the first to know about it.”
After asking around, Ngabeu said she learned that the images in the New York Times article were out-of-date photographs of the conflict in the Anglophone region, with little bearing on the city of Yaoundé or on the upcoming elections.
Still, several days later, the message from Middlebury had grown more urgent: Chance asked Ngabeu where she would be able to travel with the students, in the event that Yaoundé became unsafe following the announcement of the election results. Ngabeu told Chance she would spend the next day putting together a plan.
Ngabeu reached out to an acquaintance who worked at the Belgian embassy in Yaoundé, asking whether any arrangements had been made to help Belgian nationals stay safe. The employee dismissed her concerns, noting that the embassy was located in Yaoundé’s upscale Bastos neighborhood.
“They told me, ‘No no no, you’re in Bastos! It’s already safe. If you’re afraid, look for a hotel in Bastos,” Ngabeu said.
So Ngabeu wrote back to Middlebury, proposing that she wait out the election results with the students from a hotel in Bastos. But Middlebury staff said this failed to address their main concern: the possibility that Cameroon would close its borders and airports, trapping the students inside the country.
“We were afraid that if [violence] did spread out, that it would be too late for us to make a decision about what to do with the students,” explained Carlos Velez, the dean of international programs, in an interview with The Campus.
Within a day of Chance’s urgent message to Ngabeu, the two of them, along with Velez and Ross, had agreed on Morocco as a destination. Middlebury’s existing program there would provide the infrastructure needed to host the visitors. The only problem was that Ngabeu, a Cameroonian national, needed a Moroccan visa which would take five days to arrive — and the group was set to leave in just two days.
So Ngabeu visited the Moroccan embassy and bribed an employee to expedite the process. Soon after, she sat with the students as they reacted incredulously to the news.
“I said, ‘Don’t ask any questions, because I am not capable of answering them,’” Ngabeu said.
Unsure whether they would ever return, students spent the next day hurriedly packing all their belongings, saying goodbye to their host families and traveling around Yaoundé, buying souvenirs to bring back to the United States. Ngabeu left her two young children at home in Yaoundé, presuming that Middlebury would not pay for their travel to Morocco.
“That’s the proof,” Ngabeu said. “I left my children and I went away, because I knew there wasn’t any violence.”
Although Ngabeu was skeptical, she said she suppressed her doubts. “When they say it’s for safety, what can I say? I can’t say with certainty that nothing bad will happen,” she said.
Velez said the Middlebury staff were certain their precautionary steps were the right ones. “Nobody could assure us that nothing was going to happen,” he said. “Even if somebody had, I’m not sure if I would’ve believed it.”
CLAIMS OF UNEQUAL TREATMENT
On Oct. 22, the students watched from Morocco as the incumbent Biya was re-elected Cameroon’s president, earning a suspiciously resounding 71% of the vote. The expected result was received calmly in Yaoundé, and within two days, the students found out they would return to Cameroon. The trip to Morocco had lasted one week.
The trip itself had been enjoyable, Ray said, but the stress caused by the departure did not seem to be fully acknowledged after the group returned. And as the months have gone by, Ray said she has begun to think more critically about Middlebury’s decision to evacuate the group.
“It just makes me mad,” Ray said. “There’s already so many different hurdles and obstacles that the Cameroon program has to go through, because it’s a program in Africa. There’s so much unfounded fear.”
Ray is not the only one troubled by the excursion to Morocco. Nadia Horning, a professor of political science who serves on a faculty committee that oversees the Cameroon program, said she was taken aback when Velez and Chance first notified the faculty committee about the trip — just hours after the decision to evacuate had been made.
“I didn’t take it particularly well,” Horning said. A native of Madagascar who studies African politics, Horning said the incident in Cameroon was the latest in a succession of cases in which the continent has received unequal treatment at Middlebury. She pointed to an effort by faculty several years ago to convince the college to offer Swahili at its summer language schools. After receiving a verbal commitment from an administrator that Swahili would be chosen as the schools’ newest language, Horning said she found out abruptly during a speech by an administrator that Korean had been picked instead.
“That did bother me personally,” Horning said.
When it came to Cameroon, Horning said she understood administrators’ desire to take safety precautions, but still felt the college applied unreasonable standards. “I’m not pro-recklessness and anti-safety,” she said. “But I’m definitely anti-exception. I’m anti-standards for Africa that don’t apply elsewhere.”
Ngabeu suggested that students studying in Asia or Europe would not have been relocated in similar circumstances. “They wouldn’t have done anything,” she said. “People would have stayed where they were.”
Moreover, she worried about the precedent the relocation may have set. “Middlebury really has to reflect on its strategy," Ngabeu said. “Because if every time there's an election, we have to send people to the opposite coast — that's nonsense.”
Velez disputed the idea that any double standard had been applied. “If I fear there will be widespread violence anywhere, I would take more drastic measures,” he said.
Still, many involved with African Studies at Middlebury tell anecdotes about biases and unfounded fears they have encountered on campus. Ngabeu recalled instances in which parents of students interested in the program asked her how their children would drink water or receive medical care in Cameroon, presuming the country did not have hospitals.
One first-year at Middlebury, interested in studying in Cameroon, told The Campus that a French professor recently tried to dissuade her from going and urged her to study in France instead.
“When I asked him why, he discussed African accents, meaning it would be really hard for me to understand an African accent and that when I came back from Cameroon, I would have an African accent,” said the student, who was granted anonymity so she could speak freely about the exchange. “He implied that that wouldn’t be good for my future career prospects,” she recalled, adding that the professor “made a face” as he discussed African French.
Seeking to expand Middlebury’s curricular offerings outside of Francophone Europe, Charlotte Cahillane ’19.5 and Zorica Radanovic ’19 — both alumnae of the Cameroon program — wrote an op-ed in this week’s Campus, advocating that the French Department create more courses that venture “beyond the geographic boundaries of France.”
For those involved in the October evacuation, meanwhile, the heart of the problem seems to lie beyond Middlebury’s campus. Ngabeu, for her part, says she cannot blame Middlebury staff for the decision they made, given that they had to account for Americans’ general prejudices towards Africa.
“It’s a question of how Americans look at us,” she said. “It’s not that Middlebury wanted to do this, it’s that Middlebury wants to show to other institutions, to parents, to Americans — ‘You know that our kids are in this country, and we’re taking care of them.’”
“The problem is distant,” Ngabeu said. “Middlebury only acted to respond to what others were thinking.”
(05/09/19 10:00am)
This year, The Campus has grown its online presence, extended its investigative reporting, and most importantly, extended its reach to include the perspectives of more members of the Middlebury community. We are proud of the work we have done this year, but we recognize there is room for improvement. Reflection is always valuable. We hope by recognizing how we can improve our paper, we will resist complacency and continue to enhance our publication and its reputation.
We see ourselves as a paper for students, alumni, staff, faculty and town residents. Middlebury is a small community filled with engaged and passionate people. We know The Campus reaches audiences beyond the confines of the college. This is why we covered the local elections during the 2018 midterm season and why we devoted an entire issue to staff at the college and the workforce planning process. After all, students are stakeholders in the broader Middlebury community too. We hope to continue reporting on local issues, paying special attention to the ramifications of the workforce planning process, local governments and the economic development of the town in the coming year.
We believe one of our most important roles is to create a public historical record of life on campus. We hope our reporting continues to include as many voices as possible to create a more comprehensive record. Early in the year, we ran four powerful student responses to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Recently, a wide array of students, faculty members, alumni and even academics outside of our community have written in to comment on the Legutko controversy. We want to keep doing this: providing a platform for impassioned opinion pieces. Thank you for submitting your thoughts to our publication. We hope you continue to do so.
This publication is reliant on thoughtful and inquisitive student writers. We are grateful for their hard work and dedication. Next year, we hope to organize more events in which writers and editors can meet. Perhaps, having “live edit” sessions could help writers feel appreciated and supported.
We’d also like to thank our copy editors. They are often the last students to read over our content before we send the paper to print. We are grateful for our online editors who upload all of our content to our website and help spread our news beyond the physical boundaries of the college. Our photographers and cartoonists work hard to capture footage and create illustrations which not only make the paper look nice but also make wordy content easier to digest.
In our latest issue, we relied on graphics to detail the results of Zeitgeist, our first general survey of student opinion. The goal of the survey was to capture student attitudes about campus culture. We are grateful that nearly 50% of the student body responded to the survey. We hope, in the future, to continue reporting news stories, creating surveys and constructing graphs which indicate students’ concerns and feelings about life on campus. Zeitgeist was special because it revealed some of the common concerns students on campus have, like, for example, feeling a lack of belonging.
We published more news in real time this year — delivering news to the community online instead of waiting until our Thursday print issues. Especially during the recent weeks of controversy over the inappropriate chemistry test question that referenced Nazi gas chambers, a professor’s decision to show a cartoon referencing the slave trade in a classroom, and the Legutko controversy.
Our investigative work this year also delved into the long-term impacts of the events of the past several years. In March, we published a retrospective piece following up on the ramifications of the Charles Murray incident and the disciplining of student protesters two years later. This week, we’re publishing the results of a monthslong investigation into mental health services on campus.
We fell short this year when we failed to break the story about the inappropriate chemistry test question that referenced Nazi gas chambers. But in the future, as we try to provide a record of campus life that our whole community feels they can contribute to, we hope that similar incidents will not go unreported. We need to keep calling attention to the incidents and factors — both positive and negative — that affect every member of our community.
In order to do that more effectively, we need to diversify our editorial board. We work to explore a broad range of Middlebury experiences in our reporting, but we cannot do that if we have a limited set of perspectives in the room. We want more students of color to serve on our board. We’d also like to have students on the board who have a wide range of academic and intellectual interests. You don’t have to be a English major to write or edit for the paper.
To our writers, and to those who have never written for The Campus before: we want your voices, not just on our pages, but on our editorial board. If you are interested in joining the board, keep writing for the Campus, pitch us your stories, and let your section editors know you want to join us. We need your perspectives to report Middlebury’s history.
(05/09/19 9:57am)
We, the members of The BTW Project, seek to trouble popular LGBTQ rights advocates’ ‘Born This Way’ narratives. You know these narratives. They are so prevalent that you may have internalized them without fully thinking them through. (Even Lady Gaga tells us that LGBTQ people are born that way.) Informed by readings we completed for GSFS 289: Introduction to Queer Critique, we propose a queerer alternative, one that does not pathologize queerness. We reject the commonly held belief that gay people are born gay—a belief that has spurred much scientific and medical inquiry into the ‘problem’ of ‘homosexual’ biology. The ‘Born This Way’ narrative inherently others queerness by defining it as something that can’t be helped, as something that some biological aberration has unfortunately predetermined; that is, it implies that if we could choose our desires, we would obviously choose not to be gay.
Our goal is to inform LGBTQ activism on this campus by generating discourse about the ways in which our desires are constructed, conditioned, and cultivated. We intend for this project to speak to LGBTQ rights- and justice-minded students across disciplines. In light of this, we hybridized our methods, to capture the attention of STEM students and humanities students alike. Our methods are multifaceted. We hope, for example, that this Op-Ed will encourage people to check out the resources on the website we created. There, we have collated media that challenges the ‘Born This Way’ narrative’s biological determinism: you will find a video essay we produced that reveals and interrogates how the ‘Born This Way’ narrative has permeated pop culture, PDFs of the artistic and provocative posters and fact sheets we designed and distributed, links to supporting scholarly articles, and detailed explanations of our motives. You may have noticed our posters around campus already. They intentionally deploy confrontational language that emphasizes (perhaps obliquely) the difference between sexuality and gender, the limitations of perceiving desire as compulsory and fixed, and the importance of dismissing a political narrative that suggests queerness is a problem to be scrutinized, objectified, and corrected.
We hope to complicate LGBTQ rights-minded students’ infatuation with ‘Born This Way’ ideas by presenting “queer” as a verb. Our “‘QUEER’ IS AN ACTIVITY” poster may be the most confounding, but also the most hopeful piece in our project, as we explain on our website:
Maybe it’s easier to rally conservative tolerance around a definition of “queer” as a thing someone immutably is, but this definition is pretty flawed. As sociologist Jane Ward points out, if sexuality is biologically predetermined, then why do even liberal parents worry their daughters will turn into lesbians if they get too into feminism in college? Why do they worry that allowing their kids to watch too many queer TV shows might “encourage” them to explore homosexuality? To some extent, we all know that our desires are socially-conditioned and cultivated—this doesn’t make them any less real[...] Acknowledging this opens up our understanding of “queerness” to include all those transgressive acts performed by people who didn’t identify as “homosexual” (let’s recall that the English word “homosexual” has only been around since the late 19th century, and that corresponding terms in other languages, such as Arabic, are even younger). If “queer” is something we do—if it’s defined by those acts we perform that resist heteronormative expectations—then suddenly our politics become much more active.
In short, our slogan asks viewers to think about how our politics might change if we defined “queer” as conscious behavior rather than a helpless, inherited burden?
You might be thinking: Sexuality isn’t just a “choice”! Or, How can we expect conservative homophobes to get on board with this?? To that we say, why not rethink the biology/choice dichotomy? And yes, why not rethink the whole conservative “tolerance” thing? (Don’t we queers want more than just recognition, anyway? What about economic justice for unmarried people, or better healthcare for trans or HIV-positive people?)
Our project doesn’t mean to just “call out” a narrative as “problematic;” it means to generate new and difficult conversations. In light of this, we want to hear from you. Comment below, and be sure to visit our website at go/btw.
(05/09/19 9:55am)
In the culmination of a highly successful season, the 2018-19 Middlebury Debate society traveled to Panama City, Panama last week for the Pan American Championships (Pan Ams) and achieved a historic performance for the program.
The annual title tournament features teams from North, Central and South America, bringing together college debaters from the United States, Panama, Colombia, Jamaica and Mexico, among other countries. The tournament includes both an English-speaking division and a Spanish-speaking division, which take place simultaneously. In an international debate community dominated by English-speaking speakers and events, this Spanish facet of Pan Ams increases inclusivity across language barriers and fosters cross-cultural community.
The society sent two debate pairs to the tournament, consisting of Amanda Werner ’21 and Justin Cooper ’22, as well as Nate Obbard ’21 and Charlotte Massey ’19. Additionally, Middlebury Debate member Van Barth ’21 served on the tournament’s adjudication team.
“It was quite exhilarating to compete in Pan Ams,” said Cooper, the society’s Vice President in an email to The Campus.“To represent Middlebury College to all of North, South and Central America is a big role to fill, but I feel that we did a good job of filling it.” Cooper and Werner made it to semifinals
Both Middlebury teams made it through seven preliminary rounds and placed in the top eight teams in the semifinal rounds. Obbard and Massey continued onto the final round, which covered climate change ethics. They ultimately won the tournament’s English division. This marked the team’s first time winning a title tournament in known history since its conception in 1912.
Massey explained that competing with Obbard was a deciding factor in their success at Pan Ams. “We were very in sync and had our prep time and speaking roles dialed in.” She explained that they have different strengths and that their skill sets balance well.
In fact, Massey and Obbard had seen success together in several tournaments over the course of the season, competing abroad in Oxford, England and Cape Town, South Africa. One week prior to Pan Ams, the pair ranked 22nd at the United States Universities Debating Championship (USUDC) in Clemson, South Carolina.
“In total, we did 20 full rounds of competitive debate during an eight-day period between USUDC and Pan Ams,” Massey said.
For the society, which has a particularly young membership this season, it has been a record year. In December, Massey and Obbard placed 70th at the World Universities Debating Championship in Cape Town, a competition including 400 teams from over 90 countries. Werner and Quinn Boyle ’21 ranked 224th.
At the Berkeley IV in January, Massey, Barth and Boyle made it to the semifinals, with Massey ranking third speaker overall. In February, Barth and Obbard made it to the quarterfinals of the US Universities Eastern Championship at George Washington University. At the Empire Debates at Kings College in New York City, Massey and Cooper made it to the semifinals, Massey won second varsity speaker, and Cooper won second novice speaker.
Massey reflected on her four years on the team, noting that, after graduating a class of talented debaters her first year, the team underwent a redeveloping period. Now, the majority of the team is composed of sophomores and first-years.
All debaters said that the sense of community on the debate team is the reason they keep working towards their goals, not to mention the valuable critical thinking and presentation skills they are building.
“Since joining the debate team in my freshman year, I have formed close friendships with other members of the team,” Werner said. “I truly love debate’s close-knit community, and I value how much we support one another both inside and outside of debate rounds.”
Next year, the team will look to build on its current success with a new group of novices. For more information about the debate society, or to join, contact debateso@middlebury.edu.
