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(11/08/18 10:55am)
Naomi and I have been living in Italy for two months now, and one month ago we started studying at the university of Ferrara. Sharing this experience, we have talked a lot about preconceived notions about what living in Italy would be like, first impressions, and our current understanding of living here.
When Naomi told people about her intention to study abroad in Italy, she got a similar reaction every time. People gushed over the idea of pasta for every meal and the Italian countryside. She kind of shrugged and went along with it, but never felt quite comfortable with the romanticization of a country that has nuanced identities. She never felt like she could contradict them, knowing that it could very well be more complicated than that. Based on what we know about study abroad programs in Italy, some students really might have this experience. They might only speak English and live in a tourist center and miss the real particularities of this country. In our situation, however, we are faced with the prospect of confronting these cultural “shocks,” and sometimes they create truly unpleasant challenges. For the last two months, I have been grappling with fitting into a society with which I might not always agree and trying to live up to the pre-imposed expectations of myself and my community that Italy is perfect.
In a lot of ways, these “culture shocks” that we have experienced came unexpectedly. When asked by friends and family if I was nervous to go to Italy before departing, I typically responded, “No.” I thought culture shock was a phenomenon that people only experience when they enter cultures that are much different from their own. I believed that life in a developed European country couldn’t really be that different from the U.S. However, we have found that even subtle differences from how to greet people on the street (or not) to using formal discourse with strangers and professors may cause discomfort.
One of the most challenging parts for us has been adjusting to the Italian university system. We were told before we came that it would be different, but we didn’t know what that really meant. We have been confined by scheduling time conflicts and prerequisites so we both ended up in classes that don’t academically push us. There are no assessments throughout the semester — no papers, projects, or midterms. A student’s entire grade in the class is computed from one final exam. Both Naomi and I will be required to write a junior thesis for history when we return, and we both intend to also write senior theses. However, we don’t feel that this university system is helping us develop the writing skills necessary to compose theses when we return to Middlebury. The main thing that Naomi feels she has learned from her class is how to listen to a nonstop lecture in Italian for two hours. This is meaningful and useful in some ways, but it means that we are missing out on one of our precious eight semesters at Middlebury. As it turns out, we both started study abroad with the intention to stay for the whole year. And yet, neither of us will be attending the University of Ferrara in the spring. We have also found from friends currently studying abroad and who have studied abroad in the past that to leave early for academic reasons is common.
In addition to challenges with the academics, I have also found that the lack of a proper campus, university events, and university-sponsored student groups has made it difficult to both integrate into the university culture and understand what concerns young people in this country. Instead I find that my interactions with the university are limited to the time I spend in class, a feeling that is very different from the life I live at Middlebury.
Naomi and I wanted to write this article mainly to express the frustrations that come along with this experience abroad. It felt like we were required or predisposed to have the best year of our lives, but it has been more complex than that. Given the frustrations that we have faced, I also feel that this experience has had a positive impact on me personally. Being abroad has challenged me to really think about what I am looking for out of my college experience, and how I need to manage the rest of my time in Italy and at Middlebury. This experience has challenged me to think about how I learn and how I take care of myself. I have learned that it takes resilience to live in any foreign country, and even though Naomi and I have decided that the university experience is not what we currently need, I still feel that living in Italy has been valuable because of what I have learned about myself.
(11/01/18 9:48am)
As our taxi inched along, I watched all the students in their school uniforms, adults on their way to work and the countless Yaoundéens in the street, selling papayas, corrosols (my new favorite fruit), plantains, credit for telephone calls, fabric, tires and really anything you can imagine, and all I could feel was happiness. At 8 a.m., I arrived (surprisingly on time) and met up with my classmates for our étude de terrain or field trip, as if nothing had happened. We climbed into the bus with my professeur de géographie, and started off for the village of Okola, to walk around a cocoa plantation, talk to the Cameroonians working there, and of course, to suck on the sweet inside that envelopes the cocoa beans as we walked through the forest. The village was just a bit north of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon and the city of about three million people where I’ve been studying for more than two months now.
As we bumped around on the bus (you’d be hard pressed to find a street in Yaoundé without bumps and holes), it didn’t feel like I had just gotten off a plane at 4:30 a.m. from Casablanca, Morocco. It didn’t feel like I had just spent an entire week exploring Morocco, staying in Rabat and visiting the beautiful surrounding cities by train and bus. It didn’t feel like the country of Cameroon, situated between West and Central Africa, had just elected the same president, Paul Biya, for the seventh time, after having lived under his power for 36 years. Middlebury’s decision to send us to Morocco for a week felt like a dream. I understood the reasoning: the necessity to avoid possible election violence breaking out after the announcement of the results, which could have caused the airports to close and trap us inside the country.
When I first came to Cameroon, I never expected to be asked by my host parents: “Et toi? Tu as vécu pendant combien de conditions présidentielles aux États-Unis?” which is French for the question: how many American presidents have served during your lifetime? The answer for me is four. The answer for my host siblings, even my 25-year-old sister, is one. In the month leading up to the election, you could see the evidence of Paul Biya’s (and the state’s) power everywhere in the streets. The posters of his face were everywhere, on billboards, the walls of stores and houses. His face was on t-shirts, dresses, hats, backpacks, umbrellas and more, which people received for free at organized meetings. There were eight other candidates, but they were hardly visible.
The week before the election, we were told not to discuss politics in the shared taxis (the main form of public transportation) and on the streets. There was a rumor that people were positioned in Yaoundé, trying to find secessionists and stop their voices from spreading throughout the city. The secessionist movement in the country is part of the Anglophone crisis, a long-running conflict that intensified in Cameroon in 2016 between English-speaking separatists and a national government dominated by French speakers. The police presence grew in various locations. There was another rumor that a series of random arrests was going on throughout the city. When we went out, we had to carry copies of our passports with us. The phone connection went in and out, making communication harder. However, no violence or anything of significance occurred in Yaoundé leading up to Oct. 7, the jour de vote. Walking through the streets, I could feel in so many people the hunger and readiness for a change of power. On election day, the streets were eerily calm, especially for Yaoundé, a city of bustling disorder. It was said that it would take two weeks for the Supreme Court to officially announce the election results, on Oct. 22.
A week and three days after the election, the students of Middlebury’s School in Cameroon were abruptly told that we would be leaving for Morocco (a North African country that speaks Arabic and French) for a week, with the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to return. I was devastated. At the airport in Yaoundé, the program director told me, “Tu vas rentrer au Cameroun, Emily,” or, “You’re going to come back to Cameroon, Emily” and I took her words to heart. Luckily, she was right. We watched Paul Biya’s smiling face from Rabat, Morocco, as it was announced that he had won 71 percent of the vote (but who really knows how much of the vote he won given that the government also falsely claimed that Transparency International watched over the election process, according to a statement on the organization’s website). Following the results, there have been small incidences of violence in the Anglophone region, as well as a peaceful protest march in Douala, another major city, organized against fraud during the election.
It saddens me to imagine the future of Cameroon under the power of an 85-year-old president, who has failed to follow through on initiatives for his people in his 36 years of power. However, I know that this October’s election awakened the spirit of many Cameroonians. I’m sad for my adopted country and its questionable democracy, but I’m also a little bit hopeful. Now that I’m back, I just get to appreciate everything in Cameroon: my host family, my classmates, the markets, the rainy season and all the adventures, a little bit more.
Editor’s note: Cameroon held national elections on Oct.7. On Oct. 17, students participating in the college’s study abroad program in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, were flown to Morocco on short notice amid concerns that the threat of violence following the announcement of election results would shutter airports and trap students in the country. All students returned safely to Yaoundé on Oct. 26. Yaoundé has not been stricken by election violence that other parts of Cameroon have seen, and the step to extract the students was precautionary. In this piece, Emily Ray ’20 reflects on this experience.
(10/25/18 9:56am)
Hala Kassem ’19 began her introduction of André Aciman by thanking Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web.
Her gratitude is perhaps also owed to her own habit of procrastination. Late one night as she avoided homework, Kassem, a Film & Media Culture major, took to the Internet for distraction, researching films and other things she found interesting. On this particular night, she was researching the 2017 film “Call Me By Your Name” based on the 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman.
As she researched Aciman’s life and career, Kassem discovered a personal connection with the writer: both have roots in Alexandria, Egypt.
“I too am ‘out of Egypt’ in a sense,” Kassem said in her introduction, “as Alexandria is the city my mum first flew to from China; it is the city where she met my dad, the city where their journey as partners began and subsequently mine, the city that generated the love that brought my two favorite people together and gave me the opportunity to be here doing what I love doing.”
Kassem emailed Aciman to thank him for his work and was surprised to find he had replied to her inquiry the next morning. What is more, he even offered to come to Middlebury so they could speak in person.
Kassem’s determination to see his promise through was the driving force behind his visit which Professor of English and American Literatures Robert Cohen called “hard to come by and expensive.”
Aciman was born in Alexandria in 1951. A few years later, Israeli, French and United Kingdom forces invaded Egypt during the Suez Crisis of 1956 in order to regain control of the Suez Canal.
Shortly thereafter, Aciman explained, “life changed radically for anybody who was not an Egyptian in Egypt. Essentially anyone who was French, English and ultimately Jewish was immediately expelled from Egypt.”
Being themselves Jewish, Aciman and his family were forced from the country in 1965, when he was only 14.
This exile was neither the beginning nor the end of Aciman’s struggle with his identity. He admitted he was surprised to discover his family was Turkish after so many years of hearing the country ridiculed. His father eventually disclaimed his Turkish citizenship, making himself and his family stateless. Later, his father bought an Italian passport and thereby became “a fake Italian.” Finally, Aciman immigrated to the U.S. and gained citizenship here despite not feeling like an American at all, considering the citizenship to be removed from any sense of identity with the country.
The struggles and confusion surrounding his identity reflect his attraction to the ambiguous.
“If I don’t find ambiguity,” he said, “I’m not interested.”
During much of his talk, Aciman described his attraction to and views on romance and the romantic in the modern sense of the word. For him, the most powerful part of attraction lay not in sexual or marital acts but in the build-up, in the dancing around the issues, in the moments when two people are talking about something without ever saying what they truly mean.
His 2007 novel, “Call Me By Your Name,” made famous by the 2017 film, greatly concerns itself with this idea of romance. Set in 1980’s Italy, “Call Me By Your Name” follows Elio, an introverted and intelligent teenager, and his attraction to Oliver, a graduate student working with Elio’s father over the summer.
Aciman read from the novel the scene when Elio attempts to verbalize his desires to Oliver, a scene that epitomizes Aciman’s quiet and equivocal romantic style.
Although he is most famous for this novel, Aciman’s first book was a memoir about his life and subsequent exile from his home country, “Out of Egypt.” Kassem described the work in her introduction as “a story about memory lost and regained.”
Her summary is an apt one for the memoir as well as for Aciman’s talk as a whole. He emphasized his view that writing is a way to resurrect, alter and remember the past with the purpose of understanding who we are and where we come from.
“I liked what [Aciman] said … about not settling on any one self-definition,” Cohen said in an email. “Keeping things mobile and in-play and unresolved (or rather acknowledging that they already are, and not falsifying that complexity): among other things it allows the writer to surprise him/herself, stay light on his/her feet.”
For Kassem, Aciman’s talk and body of work reflect this ambiguity she sees surrounding her own self-conception.
“I was born to a Chinese mum and an Egyptian dad and so the theme of identity was a constant in my life,” she wrote in an email. “As a little kid, I did not know what my identity was because my parents integrated me equally in both cultures, which is something I thank them for everyday.
“However, it brought me a sort of confusion about where I belong and whom I belong to,” she continued. “I always thought that I had to pick one side or to pick one identity and so I always found it challenging to answer the question ‘where are you from?’ My response to this question changed many times over the years. … This was my least favorite question and for the longest time I dreaded answering this question mainly because I did not know the answer myself.
It took me a while to accept that this aspect of my life would always be part of me and that it is what makes me myself. … It has offered me so many blessings that I would not want to have it any other way.”
Her connection with Aciman’s work and life inspired her to send a simple thank-you, a choice that culminated in Aciman’s visit to the college.
“Hala’s initiative [in bringing Aciman to the college] was instrumental in making this happen, and a very welcome and all too rare phenomenon for an undergraduate,” Cohen said. “It’s crucial, I think, to bring in working writers for the students to see up close and interact with, to get a sense of them as a particular sensibility with a particular set of aesthetic prejudices and preoccupations — not perfect or finished creatures but just bluffers like everyone else, trying to give voice to things that we’re not all accustomed to giving voice to.”
I asked him how he would advise other students who wish to bring writers or other artists to campus.
“I’d advise them to do it the same way Hala did,” he said, “boldly, thoughtfully, seize-the-day-ishly.”
(10/25/18 9:54am)
I don’t remember why I chose to study abroad in Amsterdam. I knew I wanted a semester abroad, some sort of experience that I couldn’t get at Middlebury. The classes at the University of Amsterdam fit my studies, but I didn’t have a clear purpose for spending four months in the Netherlands. I was nervous that I was missing out on a semester of opportunity and high-caliber learning at Middlebury.
I did not realize that I would be learning every second of my time abroad.
When I arrived in Amsterdam in late August, I was thrown into a weeklong orientation with a group of 25 out of the 2,500 total international students. My worries about the semester shifted to the background as I focused on my new surroundings. Our orientation leaders Bart and Borus, the ultimate Dutch dynamic duo, steered us across canals, through squares and into tiny cafes (not coffee shops, which sell marijuana). Dazed and jetlagged, we stumbled through the Red Light District at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday. Bart and Borus cracked up as we tried to figure out how to react to the prostitutes posing in the windows.
Much to my surprise, I was one of the only Americans in my group. The students hailed from all over the world — Australia, China, Germany, Belarus, and so on. As I talked with my group members and orientation leaders, I came to an unsettling realization. Everyone knew so much about my culture, and I barely knew anything about theirs. Of course I got questions about Trump and our peculiar measurement system, but I was also having serious conversations about American culture with students who didn’t speak English as their first language. I could barely ask a reciprocal question about their own culture. Everything I said highlighted how little I knew.
Although exhausted after that first week, I was left with a nagging desire to get up and go learn—about the Netherlands, about Europe, about the cultures of my group members. I had never experienced this feeling in the United States before. I had found the purpose that I was missing.
I have been living in Amsterdam for a month and a half now. The fairy-tale image of the city is true. The canals are beautiful, everyone bikes, and the people are the tallest in the world. The Dutch language sounds like German but looks like English with too many vowels. There really is a Dutch town named Gouda where the cheese was first traded. I can see the tolerance and progressiveness of the Dutch in all aspects of their culture, from the thousands of bikers to the lenient policies on drugs and prostitution. The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage. I’ve come to realize that the cornerstone of the Dutch progressiveness is their “bluntness.” When they think or feel that something is wrong, they say it. In the gym last week a man walked up to me and told me I was lifting incorrectly and not benefitting from the exercise. Even though I don’t know how to react in such situations, I respect this straightforwardness immensely. It is how the Dutch get things done.
One of my first trips outside of the Netherlands and its rich culture was to western Germany with my dad. We visited the cities of Frankfurt, Cologne and Bonn. It amazed me that such a short train ride took me to a place with completely different people, language, culture and history. In Bonn, we walked along the Rhine River and saw layers of history through the drizzling rain. Ruins of ancient Roman walls lined the river, constructed almost two millennia ago to mark the frontier of the Empire. Tucked behind these ancient walls were minimalist government buildings from the post-World War II era, when Bonn was the capital of West Germany. My nights ended in warm pubs crowded with loud Germans and hearty meals of schnitzel and fries.
As I zipped through the countryside on my way back to Amsterdam, I realized the magnificence of Europe. There are 44 countries and over 740 million people in Europe, all packed into an area roughly the same size as the United States. It is a mosaic of cultures, connected through a complicated web of history. Although there is so much I don’t know, I am beginning to understand this mosaic. I am putting together the history of Europe by seeing and experiencing. This is why I am here. I am so glad that I allowed myself to figure that out by embracing the uncertainty of going abroad.
(10/11/18 10:00am)
“A little irresponsible” is how Film and Media Culture Professor Ioana Uricaru describes her decision to move to the U.S. in 2001 to study film and television production at the University of Southern California. She did not have any friends or family in the U.S., and naively she thought the university would provide housing for her. Moreover, she did not have the money to pay for the expensive program.
Luckily, she found a room to rent online while she was still in Romania, her home country. She became friends with the landlady Tracey, who picked her up at the airport three days before school started, and stayed with her for a couple of years.
During her first year in Los Angeles, Uricaru sometimes found herself in a far from ideal situation. At some point, Tracey told her that she had to make lemonade, because “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
That is where the name of Uricaru’s debut feature film comes from. “Lemonade” centers on Mara, a 30 year-old Romanian immigrant and single mother working on a temporary visa in the U.S. who marries an American man. When she applies for a green card, things start to become difficult, and she is forced to confront various obstacles.
“I wanted to make a film about a Romanian woman who immigrates to America, because that’s what I know,” Uricaru said. “That’s what I lived through.”
When she heard the overly-optimistic American expression that seems to suggest any trouble can be turned into something positive, she was puzzled and found it “really stupid and almost offensive.”
Later, she started to realize that the idea behind the saying is one deeply rooted in American culture — the belief that one can always find a way around hardships as long as one makes the effort. Yet that may not be totally aligned with reality, as the challenges faced by Mara in the film show.
Uricaru’s own story as a filmmaker and an immigrant perhaps can be seen as one of making lemonade out of lemons. Her father is a writer, her mother teaches Romanian, and Uricaru grew up in Cluj, a city in Transylvania, in a house full of books and a love of literature and fiction. At the same time, she grew up under the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Control over media is just one of the many repressive aspects of the totalitarian regime, and going to the cinema to watch movies became one of the very few things that Uricaru enjoyed and needed in order “to escape the bleakness of everyday life.”
The reality of the dictatorship also influenced Uricaru’s choice in what to study in university, and she considered the range of options to be very narrow.
“A lot of possibilities were just out of the question, because many of the humanities were not just ideologically influenced, but [also] ideologically controlled,” she said. “You couldn’t do literature, or history, or philosophy — anything like that — and have a good feeling about it.”
The sciences were what remained. For young Uricaru, going to a large city after university to work was also important. A degree in science and a potentially high-level research job in laboratories seemed to be the way to achieve success in Communist Romania, where the government would assign graduates their jobs.
Uricaru graduated from University of Bucharest in the Romanian capital with a Masters of Science in Biochemistry. The degree, however, did not land her a job in a lab. When she was still a student at the university, violent demonstrations against the totalitarian regime led to the overthrow of the government and the execution of Ceaușescu, ending the 42 years of Communist rule of Romania. What followed was a painful transition to capitalism and democracy.
“Although I was a student in biochemistry, I felt that this is the last chance that I have to maybe do something else,” she said. “So I started thinking about it, and I realized that I still wanted to do film.”
The only film school in Romania, National University of Theatre and Film, was harder to get in than one might imagine. The school would only accept about seven students each year for the directing track, and there was a rumor that only those with private ties could get in.
Despite not knowing anything about film production, Uricaru believed it was the last chance that she had to pursue her passion. She took the admissions test twice, first when she was still in her fourth year of the biochemistry program, then when she had finished her science degree.
She compared the test to the kind of reality television show in which people try to survive on an island. It was probably a little less dramatic, but there were multiple rounds of stressful competition over the course of one week that eliminated the number of applicants from 120 to seven.
“I thought … if I don’t get in the second time, then forget it, I’m just going to become a scientist,” she said. “But I did get in the second time.”
The offer was not something she could turn away, and she started her journey toward becoming a filmmaker. Later, she continued her studies at USC and paid for the tuition herself through — unexpectedly but perhaps not surprisingly — a teaching assistantship in the university’s biology department.
“So in the end, it was good that I did the degree in biology. It was useful,” she said, laughing.
It was also useful in the sense that filmmaking is as much a process of artistic creation as analytic, scientific organization. Uricaru possessed skills and experiences for both, and the duality of their combination resonates with both “Lemonade” and her identity.
“Lemonade” is a Romanian film and is mainly produced by a Romanian company, while it is also set in the U.S. and focuses on this country of immigrants, making it somewhat similar to an American indie film.
“I’m now a permanent resident, so I’m kind of an American now too. And if I ever get an American citizenship, I will keep my Romanian citizenship,” Uricaru said. “So I’m going to always be both. I like the film to also be both.”
The film depicts the struggle of balancing two identities as an immigrant in the U.S., and the events in it all came from real-life stories that Uricaru gathered through extensive interviews with young Romanian immigrants with children. They told her different stories, but all of them expressed a similar sense of “ambivalence between what they left behind and the new country.” Uricaru found that they somehow saw themselves as “the sacrificial generation,” and that they were doing everything for their children, who were either born in the U.S. or came here early on.
The immigrants she interviewed had some discoveries of their own, too. When she told them that she was looking for a little boy about eight or nine years old, who speaks Romanian to play Mara’s son character in the film, they all responded that their children could speak Romanian, which turned out to not be the case when she met the children.
“The parents lived in this kind of illusion almost, because they spoke Romanian around the house, [and] the child seemed to understand, but actually the child didn’t speak it,” Uricaru explained, adding that many parents had since told her they started to try encouraging their kids to speak the language more.
Uricaru was interested in this feeling of not fully belonging in either place and the constant self-questioning of whether the decision to emigrate was a good one. As for herself, she found it difficult to tell if that is something she still wonders about. What was more important was that she make a “very conscious effort” to spend time in Romania and do work there so that she stays in touch.
If the style of her film can be an indicator of whether or not she has stayed in touch, it seems that Uricaru has. According to media production specialist Ethan Murphy, “Lemonade” is “very much in the style of new wave Romanian [cinema].” One of the film’s producers is Cristian Mungiu, an established Romanian filmmaker whose achievements include a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.
Mungiu is among a group of new Romanian filmmakers who have been exceptionally well-received in the last 15 years.
To show me the Romanian films she considers to be masterpieces during our interview, Uricaru stood up from her office chair and reached for a few DVDs, including “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005) and Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007). The films have come to represent what people call “Romanian minimalism” — the idea that the individual story and detail of everyday life are emphasized, as opposed to the focus on the national and the collective under the Communist regime.
“It’s really a contagion,” she said, referring to the filmmakers who continue to produce excellent films. “So I’m very proud to be a Romanian filmmaker at this time, I think it’s great.”
In the one-hour talk with Uricaru in her office in Axinn, the fact that she is a professor dedicating a lot of of her time teaching two classes in one semester almost faded into the background.
Finne Murphy ’19 is an English major taking Uricaru’s screenwriting class, and she appreciates how hard she pushes students to make their screenplays even better. Murphy, not unlike Uricaru, grew up with a writer father.
“[My father] has a MFA in screenwriting, so my whole life he has been writing scripts. I grew up learning it, but I’ve always wanted to write fiction,” Murphy said. “But since being in this class, I kind of wish I was a Film and English double major, or that I had started this sooner.”
This is now Uricaru’s seventh year at Middlebury — producing “Lemonade” took eight. She shot the film in Canada during her year on sabbatical and completed the post-production while teaching, flying to Europe during one semester, Thanksgiving and winter breaks.
After its Canadian premiere in Montreal (where it was also shot) this week and before its Romanian premiere next week, “Lemonade” will reach Middlebury audiences as well. The film will be screened this Saturday as part of the Hirschfield International Film Series. Uricaru and Mălina Manovici, who plays the film’s protagonist, will be in attendance for discussion after each screening. The film will also be shown in Burlington on Oct. 18 at the Vermont International Film Festival.
Editor’s note: Finne Murphy is an Arts & Academics editor.
(10/11/18 10:00am)
Dear President Patton, Dean Lloyd, Provost Cason, and Executive Vice President Provost:
We, the undersigned, write to request that the college restore the book ordering function to the campus store in order to ensure timely and reliable supply of the books that are necessary for classes in the first weeks of the semester and beyond. The current system has had a significant negative pedagogical impact for the following reasons:
• Students do not (and will not, going forward) purchase books through the online system in advance because they are not sure about their schedules and, not unreasonably, don’t want to spend large sums on books they might not need. We have now had two semesters to test out this system, and the record is clear that students have not changed their purchasing patterns.
• This situation is exacerbated by the demands of the drop/add period. Students who shift classes during this period have even more difficulty catching up and getting the appropriate books than regularly enrolled students.
• There are significant delays in ordering books through the MBS system—up to two or even three weeks. Under the current system, students have no way to get immediate access to the books for reading assignments required during the early weeks of the semester.
• Trying to reduce delivery delay costs our students extortionate amounts in shipping costs. This problem obviously disproportionately affects lower income students.
• Because of these delays, students do not have the books when they begin class, causing faculty to scramble to introduce their courses and move through their syllabi with students who don’t yet have access to books.
• When students do finally locate books from various sources, they are often not the editions the professor ordered. This makes class discussion difficult, and again compromises the students’ access to the selected material.
• Professors are spending valuable time during the early weeks of the semester photocopying materials and trying in other ways to help increasingly anxious students chase down books; the process wastes both faculty and student time.
• The lack of books at the beginning sends a negative signal to students not only about the value of books themselves, but also about the absolute necessity (in an already short semester) to jump directly in to the course material and get to work.
• The whole situation has a significant negative impact on the central thing—teaching—that we do. It undermines the process and experience of teaching and learning, as well as sending a message that course materials are devalued or irrelevant.
We wish to underscore the fact that these problems are in no way the responsibility of the various staff members who have had the difficult task of implementing this system. The fault is entirely in the system itself. We believe that this effort to save costs by cutting the presence of physical books in our bookstore sends the wrong message about our values as a Liberal Arts institution, and we cannot support it. If the college does not resume a system that guarantees our students access to physical books at the beginning of the semester, we will be forced to place these orders at other local venues or to find other means to ensure our students have what they need and deserve.
We understand that the Senior Leadership of the college is aware of the severity of the problem; we appreciate their efforts to rectify an untenable situation, and hope that a solution will be found as quickly as possible.
Sincerely,
Department of English and
American Literatures
Department of Theatre
Louisa Burnham (HIST)
Jane Chaplin (CLAS)
Maggie Clinton (HIST)
Nikolina Dobreva (FMMC)
Murray Dry (PSCI)
Paul Monod (HIST)
Michael Sheridan (SOAN)
John Spackman (PHIL)
Carly Thomsen (GSFS)
Marc Witkin (CLAS)
Martha Woodruff (PHIL)
Don Wyatt (HIST)
Editor’s Note: This letter reflects the views of the Department of English & American Literatures as a whole and came after a discussion during a department meeting. The letter was then circulated among other faculty members who had expressed interest in the issue.
(10/04/18 9:59am)
Ask my ex, I am notorious for picking bad movies so this instance was a fluke when I happened upon Como nascem os anjos, a high quality film, which I enjoyed.
The Brazilian, Portuguese-language film (which has English subtitles available), follows a queer plot that grows increasingly absurd over time. Succinctly, three residents of a favela* find themselves needing to escape home after one of them accidentally kills a very powerful and criminal figure who is a drug lord within the community.
They unexpectedly encounter an American citizen and, without any anticipation, end up sequestering him in his home by force. The American man tries to reason with the trio, promising to help them escape legal repercussions if they’ll just leave. Tensions, however, start to mount, when the three find that they are not alone in the home. Police begin patrolling the neighborhood and the homeowner’s secretary is looking for their American prisoner.
What I like about this film is the way it explores issues of socioeconomic class in a way that seems effortless or even by chance. The residents of the favela, generally marginalized and underprivileged, cannot expect the police to protect them from the violent vengeance that awaits them at home.
The deceased drug lord’s posse, after all, are the de facto leaders of the favelas and this forces the three to flee. Comparatively, the American expatriate they find is bathed in riches, riches that these Brazilians have only encountered on television and in magazines. They marvel, for example, at the fact that all the appliances in the American’s kitchen actually work and are not in a state of disrepair, which, for them, is unfathomable.
The chord that struck me the hardest, perhaps, was when German journalists visit the favelas in the opening scene and ask one of the lead characters, a young girl, about her dreams for the future. She has been exposed to so little that she cannot imagine a fulfilling life outside of rising in the ranks of the favela’s social hierarchy. Her vision and dreams are limited by the borders of her community.
The film thinly veils a moralistic tale, seeming to suggest that despite the comforts we enjoy and the inequalities we choose to ignore, the world of privilege and lack can and will inevitably encounter one another, sometimes in unexpected ways. They become entangled and wrestle to break free from each other either without much success or at great cost.
I highly recommend this work to anyone studying Portuguese and/or planning to study abroad in Brazil or Latin America.
For more films that touch on the themes of the intertwined nature of social castes, see Paul Haggis’ 2004 Crash (DVD Collection- Davis Family Library PN1997.2.C735 A1 2005D) or Olivier Nakache’s and Eric Toldeano’s 2011 The Intouchables (DVD Collection- Davis Family Library PN1997.2.I5765 A1 2012D).
For more on life in the favelas, see André Diniz’s graphic novel Morro da favela (Davis Family Library Portuguese Language Browsing TR140.H64 D56 2011).
*Note: A favela is sometimes translated to “slum,” “shanty town” or “ghetto.” It refers to groups of homes in Brazil that often house residents who are experiencing chronic and generational poverty, are haphazardly built, lack basic infrastructure like plumbing, are illegal and governed beyond the powers of the state and are plagued with drug warfare and violent crime.
(09/27/18 9:55am)
Reading literature is the answer to our struggles with race and difference — or at least it’s the best place to start, according to participants in this year’s Clifford Symposium.
The 15th annual academic forum, which took place from Sept. 20-22, centered on the works of Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning writer and activist for racial equality. Her most recent book is “The Origin of Others,” this year’s required reading for all first-years and the title of the symposium.
The symposium was interactive, enabling audience members to not only react to Morrison’s work, but also engage on a personal level with the text and fellow attendees. While the vast majority of the comments and ideas shared venerated these texts for their remarkable ability to evoke empathy and inspire honest dialogue, the discussions also revealed questions left unanswered.
On the first night of the symposium, American Studies Professor J Finley delivered a talk entitled,“‘Yonder they do not love your flesh’: Ghosts, Strangers, and the Specter of Race” which discussed how Toni Morrison’s “The Origin of Others” prompts a conversation on the nature and shape of American racism, and how violence and brutality have become its daily doings.
Finley addressed how the stories of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who murdered her daughter rather than see her enslaved, and Eric Garner, who was viciously murdered by the NYPD in 2014 while selling loose cigarettes outside a beauty supply store, help us reach understandings about guilt, explicit or otherwise, in the perpetration of racial violence. This discussion opened the symposium with a frank conversation about race. Finley’s talk explored how estranging another has become easier than knowing a stranger for instance, citing a sort of interdependence between blackness and whiteness. This interdependence has become an obstacle, she said.
To this point, Treasure Brooks ’21 asked how to encourage widespread participation in the movement for racial equity.
“I think often whiteness is deracialized to make it seem as if to be white is to be void of race,” she said. “So I was wondering how do white people, or people who believe that they are white, have stake in the movement for racial equity?”
“It depends on what kind of world people want to see and live in,” Finley replied. “For white people, or people who identify as white, on a very basic and material level, what is the thing one is willing to give up? If you are actually willing to participate in a movement for racial justice because justice requires that the scale is not a metaphysical thing. One way is to become educated about the meaning of race and how it has come to be any particular context.”
The following day, the symposium shifted to a discussion of artistic interpretations of Morrison’s work. A performance that presented an adaptation of one of Morrison’s short stories, “Recitatif,” artfully experimented with racial erasure, toying with the audience’s perception of the character’s races in order to recount the story without explicitly racializing the characters. It was a collaborative effort that revealed how music, dance and theater can intersect and enhance meaning in Morrison’s work.
Matthew Taylor, a new faculty member in the Music department, and the pianist Asiya Korepanova captured the emotions, intensity and complicated presentation of characters in Morrison’s work through music. A choreographer and performer, Professor of Dance Christal Brown used the art form as a way to emphasize the story’s central themes. Though at times confusing, the dance performance’s ambiguities were deliberate. It sought to deconstruct understandings so that new insight might replace them. According to Michole Biancosino, who adapted Morrison’s work into this form, this intention guided much of the piece’s staging.
Although many of the events fostered constructive dialogue, some felt a need for continued conversation. One individual, who chose not to identify himself, spent much of the student forum objecting to the ideas presented by students and faculty, claiming, “the history of America is in the direction of progress.” This comment came after nearly an hour and a half of readings, all of which conveyed the deeply sad truth of racially motivated violence in the history of the United States, and the shared experiences of students of color on being othered.
While the symposium showed the college’s desire to spark dialogue around race, there were no direct mentions of other college initiatives related to the issue, except a book club organized in the spring by students in a course taught by Will Nash, a professor in the American Studies and English and American Literatures departments, and one of the symposium organizers.
In remarks delivered on the symposium’s opening night, President Laurie Patton stressed that Middlebury has only begun to scratch the surface of these issues. No direct references to any recent on campus incidents were made. Regardless, Patton’s sentiments expressed a desire to not only maintain discussions of race and difference but also to deepen those discussions.
“I believe that we at Middlebury have only begun to scratch the surface of the ongoing and deeply historical conversations we need to have about race in this symposium and about all forms of difference — class, gender, gender identity, sexuality, religion, just to name a few,” she said.
Patton said the community must think about how individuals have othered people in the past and continue to do so today at Middlebury. In order to make inclusivity part of the college’s everyday ethic, she argued, the community must understand the ways that Middlebury itself has been based on othering, built with some but not all people in mind.
Similarly, Nash commented on the timeliness of the symposium during his talk entitled, “Why Read Toni Morrison Today.” This discussion comes at a time when the community is wrestling with what it is going to be, he explained. In an interview with The Campus before the symposium took place, Nash emphasized that the symposium is not the end of the conversation, but part of a longer pursuit.
“We’re envisioning this as the beginning of a yearlong conversation, not a stand-alone weekend event,” he said. “We’re looking forward to how we can continue the work that we start with the Clifford throughout the course of the year.”
Student Government Association President Nia Robinson ’19, Shatavia Knight ’20 and Oratory Now Director Dana Yeaton organized the symposium’s student forum which sought to do just that.
The session began with audio of Toni Morrison reading excerpts from “The Song of Solomon,” recorded live at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1977, just before it was published to great acclaim. Middlebury students read and responded to excerpts from “The Origin of Others” and Morrison’s other works including “The Bluest Eye” and “Song of Solomon.” They then opened the floor for wider conversation.
“We have been struggling with the idea of the other for a while and we will continue to struggle with this idea long after the Clifford Symposium” Robinson said.
In the meantime, students, faculty and staff are beginning a conversation. Nash offered a class this fall on the work of Toni Morrison, which filled-up quickly, indicating student interest in the topic. And yet, at the student forum, many tables remained unfilled. Empty chairs, timid audiences, unanswered questions and ambiguous declarations about progress and the lack thereof characterized this symposium and the college, an institution struggling to identify itself but eager to include the community in a collective effort to imagine a better Middlebury.
(09/20/18 10:00am)
For three days following the tragedy, the public did not know his name.
It was in the early morning of Saturday, Jan. 13, that Middlebury police found the body of a man who had frozen to death overnight off a path on the Town Green, covered with snow and sleet. The following Monday, local media began to report his identity: Suad Teocanin, a 45-year-old Middlebury resident who had been living at the Charter House during a recent period of homelessness. Following a night of drinking, Teocanin tried to make his way back to the Charter House before apparently collapsing, just yards from the shelter’s front door.
Reports of Teocanin’s death circulated around Middlebury that week, accompanied by photographs of his smiling face, descriptions of his recent homelessness and statements by police that alcohol had been a “significant factor” in his death. What these relatively brief media accounts could not capture, however, was the totality of Teocanin’s experience before his death — a life that began in the Bosnian city of Zvornik and led to ten years of employment at Middlebury College and another decade in the kitchens of several restaurants in town.
To the many people who knew him at the college and in town, Teocanin was not only a friend and coworker, but also a generous neighbor, a fellow immigrant and a bright spot amid the stresses of college life whose broad smile was cited without exception.
“The best antidote”
Teocanin came to America as a war refugee.
From 1992 to 1995, Bosnia was torn apart by ethnic conflict, as Serbian forces targeted the Muslim Bosniak population, burning cities and towns and massacring entire communities. In Teocanin’s hometown of Zvornik, tens of thousands of residents were driven from the area, and almost 4,000 were killed.
Teocanin was not Bosniak, however, but Romani, the historically itinerant ethnic group known colloquially as gypsies. Romani people, persecuted in Bosnia as they are in much of the world, were targeted specifically in the killings that took place in Zvornik. Those who knew Teocanin in Middlebury would recall that he rarely spoke about his life in Bosnia, or about the family he left behind. One former Proctor Dining Hall colleague, however, said Teocanin had spoken of witnessing the deaths of his parents and siblings.
Over 1,700 Bosnian refugees were resettled in Vermont between 1993 and 2004, and Teocanin was one of them. In Middlebury, a small community started to form by the mid-1990s, centered in the Pine Meadow Apartments near the Pulp Mill covered bridge. From their homes in the apartment complex that became known as Little Bosnia, Teocanin and his fellow refugees began to rebuild their lives in Vermont.
Jovanka Jandric was among the Bosnians who settled in Pine Meadow during that time, along with her husband, Refik, and their children. Refik came to the United States first in 1994, to a New Hampshire hospital, having lost both of his legs in Bosnia after stepping on a landmine. Jovanka came with their children several months later, and the family moved to Middlebury.
The older couple found jobs in town — Refik at Danforth Pewter, and Jovanka at the now-closed Greg’s Meat Market — and cared for Teocanin, who, in his early twenties, had arrived in town alone. “I loved him like a son. I’m old enough to be his mother,” Jovanka said. “He was too young.”
Teocanin’s childhood education had been minimal and he never learned to read or write. In order to communicate with his brother, who fled to Germany, Teocanin brought his letters to Jovanka, who would read them and help him compose replies.
Teocanin, after a stint at Mister Up’s restaurant, found his way to the college, where he began work in 1998 as a pot washer in Proctor Dining Hall. His coworkers, several of whom remain at Proctor today, were struck by his ability to adapt in what must have been a daunting new environment.
“You always start out in a different place, not being sure of yourself,” said Claudette Latreille, who still works at the college. Colleagues watched Teocanin transform from an inexperienced new hire who spoke little English to a skilled worker who mastered the language and the intricacies of food service.
“He was the kind of guy who fit in by watching, and then doing what the cooks were doing and saying,” said Richard O’Donohue, now retired, who worked as Proctor’s head chef. Coworkers helped Teocanin study for a driving test, went with him to college hockey games and invited him to Middlebury Union High School to watch their children play sports.
A few years into his time at Proctor, Teocanin began to work in the main dining area known as the servery, and students began to gravitate toward his warmth and near-constant smile.
“College can be a little intense, and literally, Suad was the best antidote for that,” said Megan McElroy Rzezutko ’04, who formed a close bond with Teocanin at Proctor. She recalled the feeling of “being in the library for many hours and then seeing his smiling face, so elated to see you.”
Libby Pingpank ’04 remembered meeting Teocanin soon after her arrival on campus. “It was the first time we were away from home,” she said. “He was just this welcoming, friendly face that we always knew we would see when we went to eat.”
Teocanin became known for stopping by tables to chat and joke with students, and for his vast collection of movies on VHS tape that he offered up as gifts and even as betting payments, when a group of fellow employees began placing bets on football games.
“Suad had some money, but not a whole lot, and he’d make side bets,” O’Donohue said. “When he couldn’t pay the bet, he’d bring in a bag of VHSs. Everybody got to the point of, ‘No, Suad, we’re not doing VHS.’”
To employees like Dawn Boise, the current Proctor manager, memories of Teocanin’s socializing feel like symbols of a bygone era, when the smaller student population meant that staff could talk freely with students without the looming threat of the mealtime rush.
“You used to have a little down time, where you could chat with people,” she said. “Now, you really don’t have time to get to know a lot of the students, which is hard.”
For the students who knew Teocanin, memories of those conversations have only grown in value in the years since their graduation.
“Honestly, when I think back, it’s my advisor and Suad who had the most impact on my time in college,” McElroy Rzezutko said. “There’s obviously faculty and administrators there that are a part of your life, but this was different. It was comforting, and wasn’t forced.”
“He was too good”
After over a decade, Teocanin left the college in 2010 after accepting a voluntary separation package offered by Middlebury following the 2008 financial crisis.
“When he decided to leave, we were pretty upset,” O’Donohue said. “But we couldn’t talk him out of it. He had his mind set.”
Years earlier, during his stint at Mister Up’s, Teocanin had worked alongside Megan Brady. When she and her husband Holmes Jacobs prepared to open Two Brothers Tavern, Brady insisted they hire Teocanin.
“He had a reputation of being a golden soul, a great person, a great work ethic and just a big heart,” Jacobs said.
Teocanin remained at Two Brothers until his death, working his way up from dishwashing to food preparation. There, like at the college, he became a beloved and visible figure, famed for his humor and, of course, his enormous grin. “Even though he had so many things stacked against him, he brought out the best in other people,” Jacobs said.
Work was steady, but Teocanin’s personal life was not. Over the years, the Bosnian community in Middlebury splintered along many of the same ethnic lines that had been present during wartime, and prejudices welled up against Teocanin’s Romani heritage.
“Not so many people liked gypsies,” Jovanka Jandric said. “Some people would open the door for him, some people would close the door.”
To make matters worse, friends say that a girlfriend extorted Teocanin out of what little money he had. Generous to a fault, Teocanin supported her unquestioningly. “Suad was one of those rare people who gave of himself to anyone without expecting anything in return,” Jacobs said.
For years, Teocanin had moved around frequently, often camping or living out of a truck when he had no reliable source of housing. As cold weather approached in the fall of 2017, Jacobs helped Teocanin move into Charter House.
“We’re so grateful for the Charter House,” Jacobs said. “But if he had been less generous with all of his time and money he probably would have had a housing setup that was more permanent.”
“He was too good,” Jovanka Jandric said. “Too naïve.”
“Richer and happier”
Jacobs remembers the day of January 12 vividly.
“It was a really weird, beautiful, sunny, 60-degree January day,” he said. “As the sun fell, the weather turned really quick.”
Temperatures that night dipped to 30 degrees and falling rain turned to snow. And Teocanin failed to make it home to the Charter House after a night of drinking in town.
The amount of alcohol that Teocanin had ingested came as a shock to those who knew him, as alcohol did not seem to play a major role in his life. News of Teocanin’s death left many in the community with the impression that he had long struggled with drinking, a notion that Jacobs feels compelled to refute.
“I don’t believe that he had a real substance abuse problem,” Jacobs said. “But that’s how he died, and that’s perhaps part of the perception that comes from that.”
In the days and weeks following his death, posts made on the Two Brothers Tavern Facebook page memorializing Teocanin garnered hundreds of reactions and dozens of comments.
“We have lost one of the biggest hearts we have ever known,” the first post read. “But deep down, somewhere hard to find tonight, we realize, as we always have, that each of us is so much richer and happier for having had Suad in our lives.”
However, months later, his friends still puzzle over the circumstances of his last night, and why Teocanin was in such a situation in the first place.
“It still confounds me a bit how he was left alone,” Jacobs said. “It’s unclear to me why the police weren’t called sooner to try to find Suad, especially when there had been witnesses to where he was. I feel like a phone call to the police could’ve saved him.”
Of all the ironies surrounding Teocanin’s death, including that he passed out just steps from shelter and that alcohol, a substance he seemed to use only rarely, was involved, what most disturbs those who knew him is the disjunction between the way he lived and the way he died.
“To me, the most horrific thing is that he was alone,” McElroy Rzezutko said. “This person that created such warmth, human-to-human.”
Amid their grief, James and Jacobs planned a memorial befitting Teocanin’s legacy at Middlebury’s Congregational Church. After first offering a small room, a church official eventually agreed to open up the entire building for the January 27 service.
Among the many attendees were Jandric, Jacobs and several Proctor employees. Speakers recounted how Teocanin made an impact on their lives in Middlebury.
“Everyone had a story, even if they didn’t really know Suad, about how he would help them cross the street, or [how] he would hold the door for them when he was walking into their shop with a big smile,” Jacobs said.
Since January, mementos of Teocanin have accumulated inside Two Brothers Tavern. A framed photograph hangs on the wall in the dining area, near the bar. Another sits above the sink, where Teocanin spent many hours washing dishes. And Jacobs is proudest of the life-sized poster of Teocanin, showing him beaming in his cook’s uniform, that now sits in the kitchen to greet Jacobs every day as he walks into work.
“It’s not Suad,” he said. “But it still makes me smile.”
(09/20/18 10:00am)
The community-initiated conversations have been hosted, the survey results analyzed and invitations to facilitated talks no longer populate student inboxes. The next phase of Envisioning Middlebury begins this semester, the phase in which the framework will start to have a concrete impact on the institution. Yet, despite the fact that this process has been in the works for well over a year, many in the broader Middlebury community still do not understand what it is.
That is in part because Envisioning Middlebury is not the typical strategic plan college presidents implement upon assuming their roles. Instead, it is a set of guidelines and values that inform decision-making, big and small, across the institution. Since Envisioning Middlebury’s adoption in 2016, members of every facet of the Middlebury community have engaged in dialogues centered around the future of the institution. Those discussions shaped and informed Envisioning Middlebury, and under President Laurie Patton’s direction, then-Provost Susan Baldrige took the lead in developing the new framework. The Board of Trustees approved the framework last October.
The decision to create a framework, rather than the typical checklist plan, came after issues that arose with the institution’s last 10-year-plan, Knowledge Without Boundaries, implemented under then-President Ronald Liebowitz in 2006.
Knowledge Without Boundaries took a more traditional approach, offering 82 concrete recommendations that were hindered when the 2008 financial crisis interrupted the subsequent fundraising process. According to Vice President of Communications Bill Burger, Envisioning Middlebury is intended to be “crisis proof,” to provide more flexibility and withstand unknown future obstacles.
This fall, the project will move into the implementation stage. With all the major building blocks of the program now in place, centered around a new mission statement, the institution is ready to accept proposals for “first moves” that will lead to changes based on the values and goals laid out in the strategic framework.
FRAMEWORK COMPONENTS
Envisioning Middlebury is comprised of five distinct pieces. First, a new institution-wide mission statement, which emphasizes immersive, engaged and creative learning. Second, a vision statement, which underlines the need for a “robust public sphere” in which citizens work across boundaries. Burger said the goal of the vision statement is to provide a more short-term focus in service of the broader mission statement.
The framework also highlights “distinctions,” or areas in which Middlebury already succeeds, and “directions,” which are areas for growth. Distinctions include Middlebury programs around the world, as well as more local programs like MiddCore and Oratory Now. The “directions” aim in part to bolster existing resources and programs, like the Anderson Freeman Resource Center and the Middlebury School of the Environment. Lastly, the framework includes four principles: promoting community, making intentional choices, responsible use of resources and committing time and space to collective goals.
Burger explained the principles as values that would guide intentional choice making. “That means holding ourselves accountable for the fact that Middlebury tries to do so much, or not allocate sufficient resources to our ambitions.” he said. “We have a tendency to stretch ourselves a little too thin sometimes and so these exist to help check ourselves as an institution.”
The entire framework can be found at go.middlebury.edu/envisioningmiddlebury.
With the framework in place, the Envisioning Middlebury Committee set about developing transformational goals, which the Board endorsed in January 2017. The three goals are to turn Middlebury into a center for persuasive and inclusive dialogue, a laboratory for curricular innovation and experiential learning and a globally networked changemaker. Each goal now has a working group led by a senior administrator who is responsible for brainstorming programs in pursuit of that goal.
ALL OF THE INSTITUTION
The framework also incorporates for the first time each part of Middlebury: the Language Schools, C.V. Starr Schools Abroad, Bread Loaf School of English, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, School of the Environment, Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) and the undergraduate college.
Amy Morsman, interim dean for faculty development and research, believes the broad framework model is particularly useful for an institution with so many branches, though she acknowledged that it may feel undefined.
“It is a set of guidelines and that sometimes can feel frustratingly vague, but Middlebury is a big place and it doesn’t make any sense to create a fixed plan that is one-size fits all,” she said. “Some folks may not like that, but that is the reality of Middlebury, and so our strategic planning process should reflect that.”
The Campus reached out to three of the four undergraduate students who served on the advisory committee. Two felt that the inclusion of MIIS and other branches of the institution in the Envisioning Middlebury process made it harder to address issues specifically related to the college during the conversation phase.
“I had to keep reminding myself that Envisioning Middlebury was about all of the programs that fall under Middlebury’s umbrella,” said Tabitha Mueller, who graduated last May.
“I’d hoped Envisioning Middlebury would be a campaign to develop and strengthen the undergraduate college, but it took a macro-scale approach rather than a micro-scale one,” she said. “This macro-scale approach may have achieved the administration’s goals, but as a student, I remember getting frustrated because there was so much I hoped to address at the more micro-scale.”
Morgan Rawlings, a MIIS student, served on the advisory committee and wished more students and staff at the institute had participated. She felt the Envisioning Middlebury process was relevant to MIIS and hopes the framework will have an impact in Monterey. She also felt, like many at the college, that students at MIIS did not understand what Envisioning Middlebury was.
NEXT STEPS
Jeffrey Cason, the interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, began overseeing Envisioning Middlebury on July 1 after Baldridge stepped down, and has been tasked with moving the framework from conversation to implementation.
“Envisioning Middlebury was designed to hear from as many voices as possible across Middlebury,” Cason said. “Now that those voices have been distilled into strategic directions and transformational goals, we have a solid foundation from which to act, and to build.”
According to Cason, the next stage of the process, which is already underway, is to solicit ideas from programs, departments, offices and self-organized groups on how to move forward within the framework. Cason received initial proposals for programs and initiatives on Sept. 14, though he says the submission process will be ongoing. Working within budget constraints, academic leadership will determine which projects have priority and help refine proposed ideas. “There will also be some great ideas that we will have to say no to, because they require resources that we don’t have or don’t align with the strategic directions,” Cason said.
Cason acknowledged that resource allocation is especially important since Envisioning Middlebury took shape as much of the institution is working to cut costs and rein in financial deficits. But he argued that a strong strategic framework is exactly what Middlebury needs in the face of tough financial decisions. “In a sense, the Envisioning Middlebury process is even more important now, when we know we have to limit our expenses,” he said. “We need to decide what is most important to invest in, and we need to prioritize.”
ENDURING CHANGE
Envisioning Middlebury is designed to create change gradually while asking big, complicated questions about what Middlebury is and where it is going. Given the wide scope of the project, it is unclear whether current students will see the effects of the framework before they graduate. With time, though, the foundation laid so far during Envisioning Middlebury, and the work that has yet to be done, could fundamentally change the character of the institution.
For that to happen, Morsman believes, faculty and staff will need to continue to frame their work with the aforementioned directions and principles in mind. She acknowledged that this can feel like a big ask when everyone is already so busy.
“If people don’t stay engaged, then they are just leaving decisions to be made by a smaller group who have to pay attention to this, and that will reinforce the notion I have heard several times on campus that the administration is ‘just going to do what it wants anyway,’” she said, adding that the framework can create lasting change.
“I see the possibility of a Middlebury that is more focused, more collaborative among faculty and staff as well as students,” she said. “And more in tune with helping learners become highly capable participants and contributors to the world that is developing in this century.”
(09/13/18 10:00am)
Have you ever wondered what makes the music that so often drifts across campus from Mead Chapel?
It is the sound of the carillon, a bell instrument that plays Bach, Lady Gaga and everything in between.
This summer, Middlebury College hosted its 33rd Summer Carillon Series.
College carillonneur George Matthew Jr. explained that carillons are defined as instruments with 23 bells or more. Matthew played the third and last concerts of the series. When summer language schools are in session, he also plays music from the respective origins of the Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian schools for their graduation ceremonies.
“We all know each other,” Matthew said, “the carillon players throughout the world. People in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia.”
It is through these friendly relations that carillon artists find their way to Middlebury for the long-running Summer Concert Series and through these same networks that Matthew is invited to play at concerts all over the world.
Between the Summer Carillon Series and Matthew and his students, the carillon at Mead Chapel averages over 100 playings a year.
According to Matthew, the bell corresponding to the lowest note on the carillon, an E one octave below middle C, is 2,300 pounds and weighs more than the Liberty Bell. Playing this note on the wooden manual keyboard requires about as much force as stapling together a ten-page paper. After the keyboard at the console is pressed, a clapper connected by wire to the keyboard strikes the corresponding bell in the tower above. Though the bells of Mead Chapel ring clear over almost all of campus, inside the tower, the music of the bells above ismuted and sounds far away.
During the school year, pieces such as Middlebury’s alma mater, various Bach chorale preludes, Hedwig’s Theme from the Harry Potter movie franchise and even a few of Gaga’s billboard hits can occasionally be heard.
Though he doesn’t name favorites, Matthew says that ragtime is a genre for which the carillon works surprisingly well — his European debut, in fact, was an all-ragtime program in Ostende, Belgium. In addition to pieces written for the carillon, any pieces he plays were originally written for the organ or piano and arranged for the carillon, sometimes by Matthew himself, to adjust to the monumental instrument’s unique characteristics.
“Just think of a piano transcribed down a fourth or an octave,” Matthew says. “You wouldn’t want to play very fast on that.”
Matthew’s carillon repertoire ranges from Bach to ragtime to music from around the world, and his students come from a similarly diverse range of musical backgrounds and experiences. Despite varying degrees of exposure to the instrument, most found their way to the carillon at Middlebury serendipitously. When he plays, Matthew leaves to door to the bell tower open and unlocked as an implicit invitation for students to come see the carillon for themselves.
Benjamin Feinstein ’20, who started playing in his freshman year at Middlebury, discovered the carillon “a bit by accident.” Wandering up to the bell tower one day, he found at the carillon Mr. Matthew, who was “super enthusiastic about getting more people involved with lessons and concerts.” Feinstein has been taking lessons on the carillon ever since.
One of Matthew’s accomplishments in teaching the carillon is to help his students see the variety of expressions and possibilities in the carillon. Feinstein said“a giant, echoing contraption” such as the carillon, pieces such as Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” sound “particularly ridiculous” in a good way, but even more contemporary works such as “Into the Unknown” or Harry Potter tracks can feel “very satisfyingly powerful, emotionally.”
As a freshman, Hannah Blake ’21 had been intrigued by the variety of pieces played on the carillon bells throughout the day and wondered, “What the heck is going on up there?”
Though her three years of playing the clarinet in elementary school gave her limited musical background in keyboard instruments, Blake enjoys her weekly lessons with Matthew.
“It’s quite an experience when you play the real one in Mead Chapel knowing the entire campus can hear you,” Blake said.
“There’s something a little nerve-wracking about knowing you’re guaranteed to be heard, but it’s honestly pretty exciting for the same reasons,” Feinstein said.
Coming from a background in English handbells, he is familiar with the dynamics of “working together as an orchestra of sorts,” and “usually prefers to blend in the background” musically, but found the resounding presence of the carillon to be “a fun change of pace.”
Tiansheng Sun ’20 reflects on the nuances of playing an instrument that is meant to be heard from near and far.
“When you inevitably make a mistake,” Sun said, “you can’t panic. You have to smooth it over, and create the illusion that there were no mistakes in the first place.”
The mechanics of playing such a large instrument can present another difficulty.
“The bass notes of the carillon are particularly loud, and sometimes tend to overpower the higher-pitched parts of the melody,” Sun said. “We don’t get this feeling on the practice carillon,” whose sound is produced by a xylophone, he said, so figuring out how to appropriately practice and play in a controlled manner becomes an important issue to resolve.
The only student of Matthew’s with prior experience on the carillon, Abigail Stone ’20.5, had played on a 23-bell carillon in high school as part of a student group.
“We didn’t really have a teacher and we had no idea what we were doing,” Stone says, “but we figured out some basics with our combined music knowledge.”
Stone is thrilled to be playing on Middlebury’s 48-bell carillon, which she views as “a fun challenge to adapt to,” and points out that the larger number of bells means that “there’s a much more diverse array of repertoire that can be played on Middlebury’s carillon.”
Student lessons on the carillon are free, Matthew says, and provided without financial incentive.
Filling the walls of Matthew’s office are posters from concerts in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Russia, where he was the first American to play in St. Petersburg in 2004. Hanging among the posters is a poem by a former student of Matthew’s at Middlebury, which captures the expressiveness and sweeping presence of an instrument that deserves to be heard as more than just background noise.
“Now an evanescent whisper,
Soon a burgeoning cry.
Ever clanging, yet softly shining.
Hark, from on high there
Floats a glorious sound!
Oh, triumphant bells,
Echoing throughout the world.
Breathing, speaking, ceasing not.”
At busy times in the semester when entire days and weeks can seem like a blur, the carillon is a grounding presence. It reminds us to be present, to be aware and to be appreciative of where we are.
(09/13/18 9:57am)
In the middle of February in my senior year of high school, my twin sister and I met for an interview with a Middlebury alumna in a Starbucks crowded with tourists in ski gear. When she asked us what drew us to Middlebury, I did what any overworked 18-year-old would do and I racked my brain for anything that sounded vaguely informed and intelligent.
“The School of Bread Loaf,” I’d said.
When I was accepted to Middlebury, I did a better job of researching the options open to English majors at the college. The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference really did end up drawing me to the school, as I always knew I wanted to write and the conference looked fun and valuable — not to mention the cost of attendance is waived for a select few Middlebury students. I can remember talking with my mom as a first-year and telling her my plans to apply as a junior and hopefully attend in the summer before senior year.
My acceptance two years later felt like things were falling into place and reminded me that, while Middlebury has had its ups and downs, this college was definitely the best choice for me.
My first day at the conference was hot and anxious as I sat in my room in the Inn waiting for my mystery roommate to appear. I knew what to expect because I had worked with Jason Lamb and Noreen Cargill (coordinator and administrative director, respectively): readings, dinners, classes, workshops, but I did not know how I, a quiet and reserved sort of person, could handle ten days of noise and events.
Evidently, I had forgotten that most writers are also quiet and reserved and in some ways being around such like-minded people brought out in all of us an eagerness to introduce ourselves to strangers, chat about college in the Barn and inquire about each other’s lives and work.
Really, attending Bread Loaf is a lot like experiencing a collective fever. Rarely do we get the opportunity to isolate ourselves on a mountain with 200 people who also desire above all to spend their time writing in the hopes that someone will read their words someday.
There is a joke amongst Bread Loafers that Robert Frost’s ghost haunts the writers’ conference. I am inclined to believe it, if only because of our habit of discussing him as if he were there made it seem like he really was inescapable. Frost, whose legacy (and Ripton home) are closely tied to the conference, attended Bread Loaf 29 times — so in some ways he haunted it when he was alive, too. Other writers to earn fellowships or faculty positions have ranged in genre and style from Toni Morrison to George R.R. Martin, John Irving to Eudora Welty.
It is a place that doesn’t really let you forget those who have come before you, not simply because we all want to stand in awe of these writers, but because, sitting in the little theater where our literary heroes have also sat, we can more easily imagine ourselves writing something great (maybe even something good).
“It was really enthralling being part of a tradition and history of quality writers,” Steve Chung ’21 said. “If you’re a poet like me, for example, mingling with fiction writers or nonfiction writers was a really wonderful experience. There were so many experiences that people brought to the table.”
I imagine there are as many answers to the question, “What was the best part of Bread Loaf?” as there are attendees, but I am sure that many people would agree with me in saying that it felt like both a relief and an inspiration to be surrounded by so many writers. Maybe we aren’t so crazy or deluded. Or at least, we are not alone in our craziness and delusions.
For the most part, Bread Loaf was simply fun. From the dances to the readings, the workshops to the hayride (apparently the only accurate part of “The Simpsons” episode parodying Bread Loaf), the Conference participants delighted in the warm weather, new friendships and joy of writing.
“Definitely apply,” Chung said when I asked him what he would say to anyone interested in the conference. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Nowhere else do you get to meet so many writers in one place. Even if you don’t necessarily think you’re going to go into writing professionally, you should apply.”
What I experienced at Bread Loaf represents the most valuable time I have had at Middlebury and I imagine many years from now when I look back on the time I spent in college, I will remember the August skies of Ripton and fields of goldenrod as vividly as I will recall the flurries of snow and late nights in the library.
(05/09/18 11:41pm)
Library Reserves Coordinator Kellam Ayres is liaison to the Bread Loaf School of English and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.
“Advice from the Lights” by Stephanie Burt, 2017
The What
Stephanie Burt, a poet, critic, and soon-to-be Breadloafer, is a Professor of English at Harvard, an author of several works of poetry and criticism, the co-poetry editor of The Nation, and will serve on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for the first time this summer. Her latest book of poetry, Advice from the Lights, was published in late 2017 and I’ve found it to be a compelling exploration of self, gender, childhood and the search for commonality in the world.
The Why
I always appreciate a book that starts with a powerful opening line, and Burt (who was previously known as Stephen) does not disappoint, as she begins by stating: “Everybody wants a piece of me.” This first poem, “Ice for the Ice Trade,” is a persona poem (which, if your Latin is a little rusty, just means that it is in the voice of another person or object). The speaker continues by saying “I have been weighed and measured, / tested and standardized, / throughout my young life.” Burt explores the examination of self throughout the book, and takes a thoughtful and often playful look at what surrounds us: the natural world (mole rats, water striders, cicadas), pop culture (there’s a nod to Taylor Swift), adolescent mean girls and 1980s nostalgia. She is able to blend feelings of anguish with a certain spiritedness, as she does in the poem “A Nickel on Top of a Penny,” when she writes about wanting “contradictory things, like security and excitement, / immortality, hang gliders, gumdrops, a home and all / the space in the world—…”
The book takes its structure not only through the frequent appearance of persona poems, but also by several powerful poetic sequences: poems centered on specific years in the 1980s, as in “My 1986,” which begins: “I painted all ten of my toenails with Liquid Paper / then followed my father’s injunction and scraped it all off.” The Stephanie poems, a sequence of self-portraits as a (longed-to-be) girl, include “Esprit Stephanie”:
The hard work of appearances disappears
into the apparent effortlessness, and the loose three-quarter sleeves
of trying to become what other
people, your friends, your real friends, are convinced that you already are,
like trying to follow the pale fleck of a small plane,
or a big plane far away.
Burt also skillfully uses rhyme throughout the book, and its use feels particularly moving and effective in another persona poem, “Secondhand Flashlight,” in which a flashlight details its moments at a rave, and scaring off skunks, and later:
Having resigned myself to my fixed form,
I was surprised to escape the cardboard coffin
of the charity shop that sold me.
Though none of my parts can soften,
the humid summer air can still corrode me.
Pick me up; test me every so often. Hold me.
Burt’s ability to address these questions of longing is so carefully considered and I especially enjoy her fresh and moving take on the classic existential questions: who am I and who am I meant to be? In the last Stephanie poem in the book, “Final Exam Stephanie,” the speaker explores both the rules and conventions of school and schoolwork, but also what happens after the final exam is over, as she seeks a place where she can be herself:
What is this air, this space in which nobody rewards
me for conformity,
or punishes me, or keeps
track of my time, what I wear, how I see
myself, or tries to tell me what my name should be?
(04/26/18 8:51pm)
The same police sirens blare out into the air. The same, yellow crime tape is placed around the scene, marking yet another tragedy in American society. The media picks up the same stories.
But that is often where the similarities end.
Police officers seem to have preconceived notions as black and brown people are villainized in the media. Their lives are expendable. My life, in a sense, seems less important than my white counterparts. Here’s how…
On February 14th — Valentine’s day, an international day of love and affection — a school in Florida was the target of a gruesome, deadly and senseless attack.
It was a safe haven for students, a place to master the disciplines of science and math, English and history; a place they came to develop relationships and one day, hopefully, go to college.
17 students were not going to college; 15 were wounded, left with physical and physiological scars. A community destroyed in a matter of minutes by the hailing bullets of Nikolas Cruz’s AR-15.
The details trickled out.
The FBI received a tip last year about a YouTube comment that could have linked suspicious activity to Nikolas Cruz. No actions were taken.
The security guard, trained and armed to respond to this kind of attack, never entered the building to stop the massacre. Instead, he sought cover outside as young teenagers lost their lives.
After leaving a trail of blood and bodies, Cruz discarded his rifle, camouflaging with fleeing students and got away. After escaping, he walked to Walmart, bought a drink at Subway and even stopped at a McDonalds.
He was arrested at 3:41pm, an hour and thirty minutes after his mass murder — one of the deadliest in American history.
Two seconds is how long police officers took to fire on Tamir Rice, a 12-year playing with a toy gun, when they arrived on the scene.
The officer who shot Laquan McDonald 14 times was on the scene less than 30 seconds before opening fire on the young teenger.
After Parkland, the President of the United States said he would work with the nation’s governor, tweeting he would “Help secure our schools and [tackle] the difficult issue of mental health…” He made no mention of gun violence.
The same President sits in his oval office twitter fingers twitching, screaming to his followers after a raid on his personal lawyer’s office:
“It’s a disgrace. It’s, frankly, a real disgrace. It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.”
Mr. President, what the actual f*** are you talking about?
Where was your denunciation of Nikolas Cruz and his disgraceful attack against his fellow classmates with an AR-15 that left 17 dead?
Here’s another scenario.
Three years ago Dylan Roof opened fire on a historical all-black church in South Carolina. He killed nine in cold-blood. At 9:30pm on June 17th, he walked away from the massacre.
He told authorities that he “had to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go.” He wanted to start a race war. After killing the black church-goers, he calmly walks from the scene.
He was arrested by authorities at a stop light at 10:44 am on June 18th, 245 miles from the scene. No shots were fired. A .45 caliber was found in the car. He was given a bulletproof vest, for his safety. According to several sources, an officer bought him a hamburger because he was hungry.
Looking at these scenarios, I can’t help but think of all the black men and women who have died at the hands of police, many of them in custody, while these two criminals continue to live. While they are behind bars, they have the luxury of breathing, eating and sleeping.
If either one of these men were black, Muslim or Latino, they would have been killed instantly. Arresting him “nicely?” That option would never exist. If they were hungry, officers would most certainly not buy them a cheeseburger.
They would be labeled thugs and criminals. Rapists. Bad hombres. Terrorists unfit for American society.
But why?
Well, it’s simple.
The treatment of the white body in custody is astonishingly lenient, and in comparison to the treatment of the black of body in custody, it is treated royally. They are two bodies in the same space, with totally different treatment.
If Dylan Roof had been black, he’d probably be gunned down on sight. If Nikolas Cruz was a shade darker, the security guard may have shot him right away. Neither would have been spared, I guarantee you that — police officers have proved my hypothesis correct.
On March 18th, Stephon Clark was not spared.
Calls went out to the Sacramento Police department that someone was breaking windows in the Meadowview neighborhood. Clark, a 22-year old African American man stood in his grandmother’s backyard, heading home to his daughters.
Officers emerged unannounced from the depths of darkness. Clark started running. Maybe out of fear.
Police chased him. He turned, hands outstretched. Fearing for their safety, police opened fire. They had been on the scene for less than 20 seconds.
They shot him twenty times.
Twenty Times.
A 21st century execution.
No CPR was administered. For five minutes, he lay on the ground bleeding from eight gunshots wounds. As the life seeped out of him, officers screamed to see his hands. They eventually handcuffed him.
He probably had a weapon on him right?
He did not.
His only “weapon,”a cell phone.
Why couldn’t they use a taser? What if they fired once? How about warning shots?
These officers should try to learn from their European counterparts. Most officers across The Pond carry out their duties without a gun. They rely on things that can still subdue a suspect — mace, batons and the occupational Tasers. I even read at times they will throw heavy fishing nets to overpower suspects. Can America’s police force control its trigger fingers?
When it comes to black and brown people in America, police officers shoot to kill.
Dylan Roof, who had killed nine people out of hatred and Nikolas Cruz, who opened fire on his classmates, killing 17, were not fired upon once. Both are white.
If he was white, Stephon Clark would likely still be alive. Officers would have asked to see his hands, “slowly get on the ground.” If he was white, his daughters would wake up to see him. Instead they are attending his funeral.
If Tamir Rice was white, the police officers would have coaxed the toy gun from his tiny 12-year old hands as he played with it on that wintry, Cleveland day.
If Philando Castile, who was exercising his Second Amendment right, was white, the officer would have respected his right to carry. Castile, explicitly said, “I have a firearm in the glove compartment,” and was shot anyways. His girlfriend and her daughter were witnesses of his murder.
If Laquan McDonald was white he almost surely would have been subdued by police officers carefully. Not a single round would have been fired. They’d calmly ask him to the concrete sidewalk. Instead he was shot sixteen times, several bullets penetrating his body as he lay on the ground, the life seeping out of him.
Freddie Gray in 2015 was arrested and placed into custody on a Baltimore street corner. So of course he was treated the same as Dylan Roof and Nikolas Cruz, right?
No. Instead of a safety vest, Freddie Gray was given a broken spinal cord on the way to the police station. He fell into a coma and later died from his injuries.
This piece originally appeared in the online publication Blurring Boundaries.
(04/19/18 1:10am)
MIDDLEBURY — Located fifteen minutes north of Middlebury’s campus is a small farm called Treleven, where many Middlebury students have spent long nights. Why? For a process called lambing.
Annually, each night during a multi-week-long stretch, students leave the College and make their way to the farm, returning early the next morning in dirty shoes, fatigued, smelling and exhilarated. They spend the hours in the Treleven barn, keeping the farm’s flock of sheep company, watching the pregnant ewes—female sheep—and assisting when one goes into labor.
However, the story begins much earlier. Just over five decades ago, two Swarthmore College students headed West, stopping only when they reached the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. It was 1967 and Cheryl and Don Mitchell were chasing the Summer of Love. They were avid readers of the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture magazine preaching what Cheryl describes bluntly as, “that ultra purity” lifestyle. While at Swarthmore, Don was set on becoming a writer, Cheryl a high school English teacher, and they were growing up in a place where people experienced nature by “riding around and mowing the lawn and having a small yard.”
Despite this, and against all odds, hippies on the West Coast swept them up with the Back-to-the-Land Movement—a campaign to reinvigorate appreciation of nature and rejection of rampant consumerism—inspiring them to move back to the opposite coast and buy a farm. That farm is known today as Treleven.
Recruiting students to assist with lambing was Don’s idea, or as Cheryl described it, “Don’s wonderful gift to all of us.” When the couple moved to Vermont, they were young and without any farming experience. “We [were] not your prototypical family farm,” Cheryl said. “We had to work off the farm.”
Participating in the dairy industry is how many Vermont farms profit, but the Mitchells explained, “We knew we would never have the capital or wisdom to be dairy farmers.” They bought two sheep instead. The following year they expanded their flock to ten. They would shear the animals, drive the wool to Maine and have it spun into yarn for sale. However, this was not enough. “It’s very, very difficult to make a living with just the farm,” the Mitchells said.
So in 1984, Don got a job. He became a Middlebury professor and taught the class now known as “Contested Grounds”. Don found that discussion in this class always circled back to grappling with the construct of the idyllic family farm lifestyle, so eventually he decided to add a component to the syllabus: a night at Treleven during lambing season. He hoped the hands on experience would allow his students to complicate this myth themselves.
Though Don retired as a professor in 2009, the Mitchells have continued the annual lambing process with Middlebury students for the past nine years. Since Don first conceived of the idea, nearly a thousand students have spent a night in the barn. It was ironic; the mantra of the Back-to-the-Land Movement that led him to Vermont in the first place was something he was now, in a way, a tempting to deconstruct for new generations.
Indeed, the couple brought a young lamb to the lambing orientation they hold in Weybridge House, and over oohs and ahs of on-looking students, Cheryl provided a disclaimer: “It may happen. A lamb might die while you’re there. And that’s okay.”
Life at Treleven isn’t perfect, they insist, but it’s natural. Some of the young are even sold for meat. That doesn’t mean the farmers don’t connect with the animals. “I still don’t do it very well,” Cheryl admitted of her ability to cope with the death of a newborn. She explains that other aspects of her life, the non-farm related parts, have helped her along in this—and vice-versa.
Cheryl was a founder of the local Addison County Parent-Child Center, an organization dedicated to providing support for families. While there, she focused on a program that worked with children with serious disabilities of all sorts. Gradually, her two professions began seeping together.
“We would do everything we could to keep a lamb alive, that the mother knew wouldn’t make it,” she explained. Later, her parents moved onto the farm, and she was there as they passed away. It was after this loss that she began to see the lambing process—even when the lamb didn’t make it—as part of a larger process of life and nature, “something that’s bigger.”
Whether it was this revelation, Treleven’s roots in the wider Back-to-Land Movement or something else, the Mitchells approach their life and work through a holistic lens. On their fridge is a flyer titled: “Actions for the Earth.” Next to their front door is a white board with musings and deliberations. The farm is not merely a place for cultivation of all sorts. The Mitchells host camps for young children to learn about the environment, they welcome artists for retreats and residencies and they hire a summer intern through Middlebury College.
Cheryl and Don are uncertain whether they will continue lambing next year. While they do not want to end the tradition, they are aware that continuing to run it on such a scale could become too taxing. In the barn, alongside sheep and hay, is a shelf with a stack of journals dating back to before 1998. Each is filled with entries written by students, late at night or early in the morning, some before, and others after, ewes had given birth. Even if the Mitchells decide to move on from the job, it certainly won’t be forgotten.
(04/19/18 1:08am)
MIDDLEBURY — You can generally expect a distinguished professor from a neighboring university to headline the Environmental Studies Department’s Woodin Colloquium Series, a weekly forum for conservation research and discussion. Chris Kiely, last Thursday’s guest, doesn’t fit that description: he’s a licensed acupuncturist and founder of a Tai Chi school now based in northwest Connecticut.
His recent visit, which included a Tai Chi demonstration at the Knoll’s spring opening last Friday, represents the College’s small but growing recognition of Traditional Chinese practices of wellness (also called Eastern medicine in this article) in academic and student life.
Traditional Chinese Medicine includes practices of acupuncture, martial arts (Tai Chi among them), herbal and dietary therapy, among others. This article focuses on Tai Chi and acupuncture as Eastern practices that are making their way onto the fringes of campus.
During his Colloquium, Kiely asked his audience in the Franklin Environmental Center’s Orchard to reimagine wilderness as being within the self. He presented English definitions of wilderness and nature, highlighting the abstraction and disconnection that the words have undergone, forbidding us from linking our humanity and that which is wild in us and all around us.
His message reflected themes of Daoist thought: if the individual can achieve balance with their nature (wilderness) through cultivation and practice, the natural world will benefit equally, given that the individual and the “environment” cannot be separated. Achieving this unity at the level of humans, communities and societies is key to correcting the obvious environmental imbalances in our world today.
That’s a very different proposal for environmental solutions than past and future Colloquium talks about plastics pollution in the sea or urban redevelopment. It’s logic that’s easy for students and faculty alike to push aside, but Kiely wants to see subjective thinking be more welcomed. “Chinese medicine, for example, has just as good a track record of cure—but as far as most doctors are concerned, it’s just another sort of hypothetical, alternative medicine based on nothing . . . Even though it has 3,000 years of experience and research and development,” Kiely told this reporter after his lecture. “But a lot of that science is based on subjective findings: what you feel inside yourself.”
For years, Kiely taught a devoted group in a Mill Street studio in downtown Middlebury and in Bristol. Since moving to Litchfield County, CT, he continues to teach constantly and also provides acupuncture. He feels that our emotions get unfair treatment when they enter scientific conversation. “As a culture [we are] insanely subjective in a way—we love our opinions and thoughts. Yet at the same time we don’t give it any real power.”
Kiely’s life has been profoundly influenced by Qigong (chee-gong, “energy work”), attending his first Tai Chi class when he was in high school. “It interrupted, it gave me another path, another option,” he said. He slowly learned where that path led to a community of practitioners, and he had found his place. “It’s their life’s work, they’re happy, and they’re my neighbors.”
The life-altering possibilities at hand with Tai Chi are only available to those with intense commitment to both a practice and paradigm. “You can’t be looking outside yourself while you’re doing the movement,” so it requires effort to learn the physical sequences of slow arm movements, weight shifting and choreographed steps called “forms” that make up the practice.
The physical practice is one thing: “It’s that commitment to an ideology, a paradigm or philosophy of cure, that’s difficult.” That said, it doesn’t need to be your life’s work to be beneficial. “Most generally, people come to Tai Chi for healing or just relaxation in general. A little bit of tranquility.”
Rachel Edwards, a Provider of Acupuncture at Mountain Health Center in Bristol, stewards the slow integration of Chinese Traditional Medicine into the local system, and has specialized training in treating patients in addiction recovery. “[Acupuncture] has been around for so long, and there’s been enough studies done, and it’s so effective, that doctors are [referring patients to acupuncturists] all the time now.”
Acupuncture is a traditional Chinese practice of healing that, Edwards says, “uses needles to tap in to the body’s own natural mechanism for balance.”
Integrating Eastern practices with standard Western medicine means more than using different treatments; it embraces a new philosophy of care. “It’s a shift away from, ‘Give me the drug and I’m good to go,’ to ‘How can this medical center support you in your own self care?’” she explains. It’s all part of “empowering people to be their own agent for change.”
Edwards laments the absence of these values from Western medicine today, which is, according to her, “vacuous of mind-body connection.” Acupuncture is preventative at its best, and you don’t need a specific problem to take advantage of the care. The practitioner’s focus is bringing balance to imbalance wherever they may find it.
“I often liken a practitioner to a detective. So I’m looking for clues that will help me determine how I’m going to work with you. It’s looking at all of your system . . . your whole life really.” This imbalance may be physical or emotional; to the provider, it’s all connected anyway.
“There’s nothing that’s untouched by acupuncture, because everything’s connected. So for example, if you come in because you have headaches, the needles aren’t necessarily going to go into your head—you’re using points that will enhance the flow of a balanced energy to the head. If you’re having gynecological problems, digestive issues, different pain in the body—you’re addressing the pattern of imbalance to bring the body back to homeostasis.”
How do they do it? Oh, right, the needles. “The needles are tapping in to specific points along meridian channels that is a network of the whole body’s energy, of movement, of blood, fluids, nourishing, every cell in the body.” They are small, and you can feel them, but pain is not the right word to use. “There is sensation with the needles, and that’s good because you want to feel an experience of your body in a different way.”
The numerous college students suffering from very common mental health problems may find some relief with acupuncture. “Acupuncture is extremely effective for mood disorder. It depends on the nature of the depression/anxiety, if it’s long term, short term, episodic, we’ll vary the treatment, but it’s very effective.” It’s possible that regular treatment can help patients cut back on prescriptions with high costs, undesirable side effects, and other drawbacks.
Edwards is able to accept a good amount of health insurance plans and charges a discounted student rate at the Illuminate space in MarbleWorks on Tuesday afternoons, 3-6pm. Under the Daoist teaching of interconnectedness, the patient-provider relationship becomes one. “Keeping you healthy is keeping me healthy, and that is just how it is, it’s a principle of nature.”
The treatment takes about 45 minutes and, unlike Tai Chi, which requires immense focus, “you don’t have to ‘do’ anything.” Patients lie down with the needles in them for 20 or so minutes. Edwards explains that “it’s a time to rest, and tap in to your body’s own capacity for healing, and own desire for balance.”
The College has made small efforts to integrate Traditional Chinese practices into its offerings for students as part of general wellness and health services. Graduate Counseling Intern Brian Tobin offers Thursday night Relaxation and Meditation sessions in the Mitchell Green Lounge. Sue Driscoll, a Falling Waters instructor with Chris Kiely, offers an open Tai Chi hour on Fridays at noon.
According to practitioners in the College community’s periphery, there is earth-shattering potential for Traditional Chinese Medicine to alter one’s perception of reality. “You realize that you’re becoming closer to some authentic self that is beyond the world, actually,” Edwards describes. “You are transcending the world, the mundane, in order to experience a more cosmic connection.” Both hail the philosophy of a self-guided path to health.
Chris Kiely says to just try. “The description of it never really does it justice,” he says of Qigong. No matter your level, however, “you’re getting centered, you’re learning about yourself, you’re healing.”
(04/11/18 11:35pm)
Film and Media Culture Librarian Amy Frazier is liaison to Film and Media Culture, Dance, Theatre and American Studies.
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, 2010
386 pages
RATING
4/5 cardigans
The What
Sometime between the time I started this novel and now, Afrofuturism went from being an established literary/artistic subculture with a history and a growing canon, to becoming The Hottest New Trend in Everything. I feel an impulse to congratulate Nnedi Okorafor for finding herself well-positioned to be a major beneficiary of the trend, but then, she has been here for quite a while, waiting for the rest of us to catch on.
Nnedi Okorafor is Nigerian-American, and her fiction is very much rooted in African, and particularly Nigerian, culture and mythology. She is one of the emerging cornerstones of new Afrofuturist literature, and as such, is especially relevant to the moment. (And yes, she’s the author of a few recent issues of the Black Panther comic book series. You know I couldn’t write this review without including a Black Panther connection, right?)
The Why
Shocker: this librarian is a huge nerd. I like a lot of nerd stuff. I’ve read more than my share of science fiction (both hard and soft) and graphic novels, and while I’m not all that into fantasy, the fantasy novels I do like, I really like. After reading enough of this stuff, though, if you have any awareness at all you start to notice that it’s all very… Eurocentric. There may be spaceships and unicorns and strange alien species, and maybe even Captain Kirk kissing Lieutenant Uhura, but basically, everyone in the future and/or fantasy realms is white. And speaks English. And apparently comes from Iowa, or the Shire, or some other comfortably-familiar-for-white-people place.
So I made it a project for myself to seek out some nerd-ish lit by people whose experience of the world is different from my own: Chinese fantasy novels, genderqueer science fiction (SF), and “Who Fears Death” by Nnedi Okorafor. Also, full disclosure: the reason I chose this Okorafor novel over her many others, is because I read that it got optioned for development into a TV series for HBO, and I wanted to read the book before I watched the show. I’m not necessarily proud of that as my selection criteria, but there it is.
The world of “Who Fears Death” exists an undetermined number of decades/centuries in the future, and the story takes place in an nonspecific part of Africa. That world is connected to ours through history (our present is their distant past) and something, we don’t know what, happened to utterly change our world into theirs. Our technology still exists as semi-functional, repurposed scrap material, but the world is not technologically-advanced in the usual SF mode. Magic is very much a living force, but the human condition seems relatively unchanged. Our protagonist is an adolescent girl named Onyesonwu, translated, meaning “Who Fears Death,” who is living with her mother and adoptive father in a reasonably peaceful small town.
Also, she can bring the recently-deceased back to life, among other things.
Note: this is not a gentle book. There is harrowing brutality and suffering visited upon female characters from very early on. It has narrative and thematic purpose, but it’s there, and Okorafor does not smooth over the rough parts. There is also real friendship and righteous vengeance and a long arc about love and sexuality as conduit for magic and power.
As a middle-aged white woman, I have to recognize that in reading a novel rooted in African culture, by an African-rooted author, I’ll inevitably miss some of book’s nuance and depth. Nnedi Okorafor and I come from very different figurative places, so I don’t always feel confident that my understanding of her story aligns with her own. But I wanted to open up my ideas about well-worn, familiar genres to genuinely different perspectives, while honoring the fact that my “genuinely different” might be someone else’s “finally, something I can relate to.” And all to the good, because if faraway worlds and fantastical settings can’t make room for perspectives outside the white, heteronormative, European norm, then what is even the point?
(04/11/18 9:46pm)
This Wednesday, Governor Phil Scott signed Senate Bill 55 into law. This landmark gun control legislation moved rapidly through the Vermont legislature following the shooting in Parkland, Fla. and a near-miss at Fair Haven Union High School in Rutland County. The bill includes extended background checks to private sales, an under-21 age restriction, a bump stock ban and magazine length restrictions.
During this process, many legislators underlined the need to keep students safe in school, some arguing to prioritize “school safety” legislation. On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony on House Bill 675, known as the “school safety bill.”
No reasonable person opposes the intention behind school safety — and certainly no politician wants to be heard saying “I oppose school safety!” — but we should be critical of the forms school safety legislation takes.
In response to the Parkland, Fla., shooting last month, President Trump announced the creation of a commission to explore school safety, chaired by education secretary Betsy DeVos. In her confirmation hearing last January, DeVos infamously voiced support for guns in schools to “protect from potential grizzlies.”
Placing guns in schools isn’t only bad for grizzlies — it’s incredibly dangerous for students. And it is often a major part of “school safety” legislation.
School safety in its current form is the militarization of schools. It involves placing armed guards and law enforcement in places of learning. In some schools around the country, it means that faculty members teach English or algebra while wearing a concealed firearm. Right now, H.675 does not include any policing provision, but that could change as it moves through committee. According to VTDigger, an online news outlet covering Vermont politics, legislators have voiced support for increased policing of campus including hiring retired police officers as School Resource Officers.
Policing schools perpetuates discrimination against young people of marginalized identities. The ACLU of Vermont points out that increased law enforcement presence in schools is especially hard on youth of color, youth with disabilities and LGBTQ youth. In their testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, they provided data that shows black students are more than twice as likely to be arrested at school than their white peers. Additionally, students with disabilities represent a quarter of students arrested and referred to law enforcement, while only comprising 12 percent of the national student population. LGBTQ youth represent 15 percent of youth in the juvenile justice system, while only comprising 7 percent of the nation’s population. This is what “school safety” looks like.
There are already comprehensive security measures in Vermont schools. The Agency of Education, the Department of Public Safety and the Vermont School Safety Center offer extensive resources, trainings and practices for schools implementing emergency and crisis response procedures. We don’t need security measures in the form of police or armed guards.
What we do need is a more complex and holistic approach to safety, extending beyond crisis management to encompass the emotional, intellectual and physical wellbeing of students in school.
If we truly want to make school safer for our most vulnerable students, we should focus on primary prevention and extending counseling services, not bringing more deadly weapons into schools. School social workers operate from a strength-based perspective — they look for the strengths in troubled students — to bolster community support. They work with families, educators and students to de-escalate situations and mitigate risk. The strength-based approach helps build the kind of support systems that a 2003 study by the Search Institute shows increases pro-social behavior in children.
We should also work to implement restorative justice practices in our schools and support legislation like House Bill 675 in its current form, which seeks to ensure that disciplinary measures are applied fairly to students based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and sexual orientation. We should fight to prevent similar legislation from being co-opted by a misguided gun rights agenda.
We must make school spaces as safe as possible for students to fail, to learn and to grow. We must nurture stronger ties between schools, families and communities and work to deconstruct violent structures, rather than perpetuate them.
That’s a version of school safety I think we can all get behind.
(04/04/18 11:10pm)
Sitting in the audience section at Robison Hall on Wednesday March 1, I couldn’t help but smile at the reality of Chunhogarang performing on our campus, 6,657 miles away from Seoul, South Korea. The first Korean ensemble to play at Middlebury, Chunhogarang is an all-male gayageum ensemble. Their name is a combination of their mentor’s pen name Chunho and garang, which, in English, translates into “beautiful men.” Visiting four colleges as part of their New England Tour, the six members of Chunhogarang aimed to teach and share Korean culture and traditional music with students in the United States.
Gayageum is a traditional Korean instrument, originally composed of 12 strings but now made up of 21. With each pluck comes a beautiful and harmonious sound completely different than Western string instruments. Generally performed by women, gayageum is known as a female-focused instrument because of its graceful playing style and sound. As I listened to these men dressed in colorful, and to me, familiar, Korean traditional attire, known as hanbok, artfully share their passion and music to a predominantly non-Korean crowd, I felt proud. Proud of my culture. Proud to see my culture being shared. And proud of these men for breaking stereotypes surrounding the gayageum. One of the members, Junae Kim, noted that beyond their shared love for music, Chunhogarang came together to show the distinct beauty of men playing the gayageum as well. He was not wrong.
Throughout the performance, the ensemble presented many styles of Korean traditional music. They shifted from a trio softly playing the gayageum with grace and ease to a loud, energetic sextet composed of various traditional instruments: the gayageum, the piri (a traditional wind instrument), the janggu (a traditional drum) and the kkwaengari (a traditional brass gong). My favorites were the gayageum solo and the gayageum trio. Both performances displayed the distinct beauty Kim mentioned, being melodious and graceful yet with a sense of strength supporting the song in the background. From fast-paced to soft and steady, Chunhogarang showcased the charm and variety of Korean traditional music and successfully brought the audience to admire and, hopefully, continue to listen to this genre. When asked why they chose to pursue traditional music rather than contemporary, the members of Chunhogarang remarked that while contemporary music follows trends and fads, traditional music is constant and preserved.
“To this day, we listen to Mozart, Beethoven and Bach,” Kim remarked. And like Director Sahie Kang of the Middlebury Language School of Korean, who presented the concert, said, “this is the original k-pop.”
Standing up with the rest of the audience, I fervently applauded them for their amazing performance but also to thank them for building up a warm sensation in my heart. Having heard my grandfather play the gayageum for me a few times as a child, their performance brought a little bit of home back to me. For those short two hours, it almost felt like I was back in my grandparents’ home, sitting cross-legged by my grandfather, carefully observing his calloused fingers pluck and press the strings. During midterms, when sunny weather seemed to be something of a fantasy, home was just what I needed and they brought that to me.
So, as a Korean student who always longs for authentic, non-instant Korean food and who always tries to convince her friends to visit her in Seoul, I want to say thank you, Chunhogarang. You have not only shared with us your passion for music and Korean culture and broken any stereotypes on who typically plays the gayageum, but you also took us on a quick trip to Korea. You took me on a quick trip back home. 감사합니다 (thank you) and please come again soon.
(04/04/18 11:07pm)
User Experience & Digital Scholarship Librarian Leanne Galletly is liaison to Classics, English & American Literatures, French, Italian, Studio Art, and Russian.
Umami
by Laia Jufresa, 2014,
translated by Sophie Hughes in 2016
“Nobody warns you about this, but the dead, or at least some of them, take customs, decades, whole neighborhoods with them. Things you thought you shared but which turn out to be theirs. When death does you part, it’s also the end of what’s mine is yours.”
― “Umami,” p. 34
The What
“Umami” is largely the characterization of life after loss; acknowledging that the world goes on after you lose someone, but is forever changed. Author, Laia Jufresa animates the lives of five neighbors whose homes are connected by a courtyard in Mexico City. Twelve-year-old best friends, Ana and Pina are the central characters to the story and frequently pop in and out of the other narrators accounts. Ana’s younger sister Luz unexpectedly died while on a family vacation a few years earlier, while Pina’s mother left her family without saying goodbye; the girls frequently reflect on and grapple with their missing loved ones.
The other narrators include: six-year-old Luz, Ana’s sister, who narrates her part almost up to the time of her death; the neighborhood landlord, Alfonso who is perpetually grieving the loss of his wife to cancer; then there is Marina, a 20-something who struggles with loneliness, lack of support and unstable mental health. Each character handles survival differently and every one of them is relatable, whether you have experienced the loss of a loved one or dropped your ice cream on the sidewalk. Jufresa utilizes an unusual pacing, where each chapter is associated with a year in the lives of the characters, the chapters do not align chronologically, which can be a little confusing for the reader.
“Umami” is the first novel from Laia Jufresa, who grew up in the Veracruz Cloud Forest, Paris, and now lives in Edinburgh. The book won the English Pen Award, which honors outstanding books in translation. After reading Umami, I learned that Jufresa first wrote the book in English, then upon finishing, she translated the book back into Spanish!
There is also a lot of wordplay and word creation in Umami, which reads very well in English. An impressive process coming from my monolingual brain. I thought this was particularly interesting given that the English version of the novel, which we have at Davis Family Library, was not translated by Jufresa. (I have now ordered the Spanish version!)
The Why
I found the book from the “Indie Next” reading list which I obsessively steal from every bookstore I visit. I am also very interested in visiting Mexico City, so I was excited to read some fiction that is set there. For future travelers to Mexico City, this book is not by any means a travel guide, through reading you will learn the lives of five individuals who live in the same community, as well as some insight into ancient Mexican food production through the expertise and curiosity of some of the narrators.
This book is an engaging read, but not for reasons related to the plot, which I have been struggling to remember and had a lot of trouble following due to the chronological disruptions. What I really loved about the book was Jufresa’s ability to reflect on and put words to the existence of losing a loved one.
The characterization of Ana and Pina was also expertly crafted, never feels childish, but also not too grown-up. Reading about these girls at the start adolescence while, coping with their respective loss is truly engaging. Not lost me is the intentional umami-ness of the book itself, inherently hard to describe, the rich and savory flavors of umami aptly describe this book. If you like character-driven, deep, poignant stories this book is for you; this book is not for those who need action, adventure or plot resolution.
