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(09/18/13 11:15pm)
It can be intimidating to step into a professor’s office. With complex computer algorithms scribbled on black boards and overflowing shelves filled with worn books, the causes of intimidation are vast. Speaking with PhDs about their area of specialty and intense focus can be a daunting experience for undergraduates. But at every turn among the mountains of textbooks, the professors here at Middlebury College greet students with warm smiles and a patient explanations. The College distinguishes itself from larger institutions with both the brilliance of its professor and the enthusiasm of these instructors to engage with students and transmit their immense knowledge.
The five new professors in McCardell Bicentennial Hall continue in this tradition and gladly introduced themselves and their research. Their work ranges from black holes and ultra-luminescent galaxies to the neurons of earthworms, and their experiences traverse the world from remote Indian villages to observatories on the summits of Hawaii. Below is a bio of each professor, although these few paragraphs do little justice to the subject. Students should feel encouraged to seek out these professors, give them a warm welcome, gape in wonder at their scientific projects and discoveries and maybe even take one of their courses.
To meet with Assistant Professor of Physics Eilat Glikman, one must climb to her office on the 7th floor of Bicentennial Hall, appropriately situated closest to the observatory and the stars. This fall Glickman is teaching Intro to the Universe (PHYS0155). After a conversation with Glikman and her enthusiastic elucidation of the universe’s mysteries, it is difficult not to marvel at the magnificence of the cosmos. Glikman researches a certain type of galaxy called a quasar. They are the hottest and brightest objects in the universe — one reportedly radiates 100-times as much energy as the entire Milky Way galaxy. Large clouds of matter surround the black hole at the center of these galaxies. Matter is pulled by gravity into the black hole and as it falls it radiates intense bursts of energy and heat. In the course of her research, Glickman has used the Hubble Space Telescope and traveled to Hawaii to use the observatory atop mount Mauna Kea. Prior to coming to the College, Glikman taught at Yale University for two years. She has also participated in a local outreach program called Girls Science Investigation, which works to garner interest in the sciences in middle school girls.
The computer science department has hired two new professors this year, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ananya Christman and Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science Christopher Andrews. Christman is teaching two courses this fall, Data Structures (CSCI0201) and Opearting Sysytems (CSCI0314). Christman focuses her research on computer algorithms for graphs and networks. At Wake Forest — where she taught for three years prior to being hired here at the College — she worked with students on several projects including a computer algorithm to determine the shortest and most reliable route into downtown Washington D.C. She worked for a community organization in Harlem that helped underprivileged women learn basic computer skills required for employment. She also traveled to India and taught English to women in rural villages.
Andrews is teaching The Computing Age (CSCI0101) and Computer Architecture (CSCI0202) this fall. Andrews recounted that although he grew up around computers and his father’s software company, his primary interest had been in theater. In college, he doubled majored in theater and computer science. For several years after college he was employed as a theater and event technician. He worked on a number of projects that included theater productions, boxing matches, corporate meetings, and television shows. Andrews previously taught at Mount Holyoke for two years and Knox College for four years. His research focuses on information visualization. Specifically, he works on facilitating the use of large, 50 foot high resolution screens and he developed a new analytic environment for large displays called Analysts Workplace. Andrews is also interested in Generative art, and would one day like to possibly teach a J-term course in computer-generated artwork.
Assistant Professor of Chemistry AnGayle Vasiliou, new to the chemistry department this year, is teaching General Chemistry II and Quantum Chemistry this semester. Before coming to Middlebury, she taught at MIT while finishing her Post Doctorate. Her research focuses on the chemical processes behind clean and renewable biofuels, which are anticipated to be an important energy source in the next century. While at the University of Boulder for her Ph.D, she worked at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and worked with the particle accelerator at Berkley. Vasiliou also participates in local outreach to interest kids in chemistry called explosions days and hopes to possibly host an event on campus for students.
Assistant Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Professor Glen Ernstrom taught for a year at two fellow NESCAC schools, Bates and Bowdoin, before coming to Middlebury. Ernstrom researches the neurogenetics of round worms. He first became interested in round worms while researching them under Martin Chalfie at Columbia University, who later won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Ernstrom analyzes how individual genes are linked to the function of the round worm’s nervous system and biological clock by mutating genes and observing the behavioral changes.
“After working with students in these first few weeks, and thinking about the possibilities about what I can do as a teacher and researcher, my walk to work turns into an all out run,” Ernstrom said. “I am so happy to have landed here.”
Each of these professors promises to be valuable additions to the faculty in Bicentennial Hall.
(09/18/13 10:49pm)
It was not until I came to America that I began shaking hands with other people. I have navigated a diverse species of hands since I came here - the massive bear paws of big football players which engulf mine like the sea to newly-hatched sea turtles. There are small willowy fingers, cold and clammy hands, hands that feel like cold concrete, and hands that feel like shrouds of dry leaves. Yet, what intrigues me most were the handshakes where the other person jolts you into another paradigm of communication with his iron grip, leaving you half floating on the verbal surface of meaning, wondering what he meant by that alarming squeeze.
I think it is the paradox between menace and warmth that intrigues me. Handshakes embody the formal (and trite) exchanges of “how do you dos” and names, and yet the action itself is bodily – not only are you introduced to the person, but also introduced to his living skin and his body, which conveys another message. Does the degree of strength with which you grip another’s hand indicate an invitation to a challenge? Or rather, reassurance? In the past, I’ve used a handshake to stealthily tip the cook during my trekking expedition in India. What is the message a handshake is trying to tell? How do the nuances of the gestures alter its meaning?
I think there is an inherent frigidity to the gesture because of the formality. Perhaps connections one can easily make with just a jolt of the wrist dilute the significance of a relationship. Or maybe the arcane semantics of the ritual just make me feel too uneasy for me to decipher its meaning, although it is very interesting at the same time.
At Middlebury Uncensored, Associate Professor of English Jonathan Miller-Lane mentioned America’s “hyperbole culture” in communication. He meant that people here tend to respond in an exaggerated fashion – “Awesome!” “Really?!” “Oh my God!” To some extent, I think shaking hands is a part of this overstatement. This friendly gesture of welcome overstates your pleasure at being introduced to another person and is misleading because it misrepresents your opinion of that person at the moment of introduction (that must be why politicians always shake hands on television). I feel the same way about people here – people are so nice to each other, I always feel like it is disingenuous in a way. Aren’t humans supposed to be inherently selfish, and how can they exhibit such unlimited altruism to such a wide range of diverse life forms? This tolerance touches upon godliness, which is frightening because it defies the definition of being human.
Sometimes, I feel more at home in the city because you can freely express your intolerance, whereas here niceness is social etiquette you are supposed to follow. I think I prefer knowing a person honestly through knowing their real feelings - no matter how obnoxious they might be - instead of a person limited by social etiquette. It is a bit like looking at a candid photograph versus a posed portrait, the latter of which is the handshake, so beautiful and inviting it makes you ponder whether you are falling back upon a lie.
(09/12/13 1:01am)
There has been a long-standing myth at the college: in halcyon summer days on an idyllic campus, chatter in Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish twirl in the open air like dandelion seeds dance across campus. Students fill the campus with passion and curiosity for a language, entering a new world but still remembering an old-aged rumor. In the corner of their eyes, they are on the lookout for tall men in black shades, trailing behind their combat boots, suspicious that they might disappear into revolving bookshelves in Axinn—yes, they are on the staking out the mythical FBI and CIA recruiters.
“It is true that the CIA and FBI have recruited at Middlebury,” Associate Director of Career Services Tim Mosehauer said. “They are interested in students for their language skills, including Arabic, Russian and Chinese — what you would call critical languages.”
“There is no cloak-and-dagger story here,” Vice President for Language Schools Michael Geisler said. “No special opportunity courses,” where agents are stowed away secretly in dark underground classrooms.
Dispelling the myth takes away the James Bond dramatizations. Yet mystery and intrigue remain in the question this debunked rumor left behind: what is it about learning a second language that makes a student so worthy?
“It is important for anyone working in a global society to acquire intensive-immersion linguistic and area studies skills,” Geisler said. “We don’t teach language. We teach culture broadly with classes on linguistics, media studies, art, history, the social system, the political system.
“The real connections you need to make as a journalist, government employee or business [partner] are connections that can’t be made in English or university classroom,” Geisler said. “It’s in the pubs.”
The Middlebury Summer Language schools has a long history of attracting students who come to learn a language having caught a fever for a culture from a song or historic event. But there has been a quiet but noticeable shift in the kind of students that enroll in the Middlebury Language Schools.
“Traditionally, language school has served students who are curious about a culture—we still have those students and they may be the majority,” Geisler said. “But a growing and strong minority of people come to language school with a more utilitarian approach, interested in adding business and journalism skills. People realize they need cultural and language skills in an economic global society.”
Applications surged in recent years, namely in the critical languages. The increased demand comes as the Language Schools are adjusting to predict how many more spaces they should add to the language schools of high interest and determine the faculty they will hire to teach additional courses to accommodate increased enrollment, while keeping the student-teacher ratio low.
Just in the past five years, the Hebrew School doubled its size of enrollment, according to School of Hebrew Coordinator Tania Bolduc. In 2013, the language school broke the record for most students ever enrolled with 1,533 students.
“For schools like Portuguese that enrolled beyond projections, we managed our yield by particular demands, and supplemented our offerings with additional faculty and courses,” Assistant Dean of Middlebury College Language Schools Elizabeth Karnes Keefe said. “The director of the school would in such a case expand the scope and offerings of the school to accommodate particular levels and academic interests.”
The changing marketplace and diversifying economy hastens the demand for spaces at foreign language education institutions.
“I see linguistics, language and ESL not in the field of teaching, but in the world of business,” Chinese School Coordinator Anna Sun said. “I guess it’s a good trend. I have two kids who graduated from the liberal arts colleges and knowing a second language gives them grounding and real life application. My son stepped into the job market as a religion major but was able to get a career as a union organizer (because of a second language).”
It used to be the case that multi-lingual competency wasn’t all about material payoff. It wasn’t even about speaking. It was about transporting yourself into the mind of a nation. It is a mosaic of history and culture on a language that, the more you build your vocabulary and idioms, forms a running, constantly expanding world.
But the passion-over-payoff trope is dying. Students, like it or not, will enter a marketplace, forced to compete against other graduates emerging out of the talent pool, or they fail to get a job.
But for some language school officials, there is no division between the students who come to learn a language for professional reasons and those who come for personal reasons. Their reaction: so what if you do turn to a language because of its emerging economy or political conflicts?
“Their professional reasons are resultants of personal reasons,” Sun said. “They are one in the same, if not just more practical.”
“When talking about why students come to the Language Schools, you can’t necessarily separate personal and professional goals,” Keefe added. Even if you are a student who wants to learn Chinese in order to gain entry into the financial community in Beijing, for example, “you also want to develop personal relationships and cultivate language skills along with cultural understanding.”
Of course, the Language School depends on students who come for professional reasons. The very fact that the job market is shifting in favor of graduates with language skills is what prompted the steady rise in applicants.
While the federal government and other universities funnel money to launch programs for the day’s critical languages, in the past, it was Japanese; now Arabic and Chinese, language schools at Middlebury, according to Geisler, have long established these programs before it became a popular language. When created, “these languages are here to stay,” he said.
But the fact that language school officials are jumping in with talk of expanding the studies to include Korean, Farsi and Swahili indicates that the Language Schools is itself changing. The brand of the school is changing with the pace of its students toward marketable languages: Swahili—a language with growing popularity in the west, Farsi—a language in high demand by federal agencies, and Korean—a language with South Korea’s economy on the rise and culture breaking into Western markets.
The growing trend of students coming to the Middlebury Language Schools to become marketable, in turn, leave that spirit with the administration, now interested in expanding its languages to ones that appeal to students with professional purpose.
Whether good or bad, the trend exists and carries with it the drastic potential to change the philosophy of education not just in language schools but educational institutions across the board: With the emphasis on professional outcomes, might we run the risk of teaching students to put a premium on money over pursuing their ideals? Or can passion and profession really be inseparable?
Perhaps, it is not enough anymore to do something simply for the love of it. Most would like to think that in an increasingly specializing setting, there is still be a place in the world where learning something gave one a fever, where learning is not a means to something but an end to itself. But maybe, for a student in a globalizing age, the follow-your-passions orthodoxy, is now something of the past.
(05/09/13 3:52pm)
Soon the campus will empty. Dorm rooms will be stripped down and cleared out, cars will be packed, Commencement caps will fly in the air and the academic year will be done. The custodial staff will busy themselves scrubbing the campus from top to bottom, and then Language Schools will open their doors. Along with the Language School students, more than 100 Middlebury students will remain on campus to do summer research.
In McCardell Bicentennial Hall, research students will be working on projects that extend across the disciplines. Nicholas Caminiti ’15 will be working in the lab of Burr Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Rick Bunt’s lab, continuing the thesis work of Eric Roberts ’13. Roberts “was able to prove that [a] catalysis [reaction] proceeds through a reversible mechanism. [This summer] I will be testing the reaction under a variety of different conditions — different solvents and different temperatures — in order to further understand this reversibility,” wrote Caminiti in an email.
David Stillman ’14 will also be on campus this summer in the lab of John G. McCullough Professor of Chemistry Sunhee Choi, studying the biochemistry of Amyloid-ß, “a small peptide that aggregates into neurotoxic oligomers and senile plaques, which are diagnostic of Alzheimer’s,” explained Stillman in an email.
Choi and Stillman will be studying the interactions that occur between several metal ions and Amyloid-ß to elucidate the processes behind the development of Alzheimer’s disease. “We are currently investigating the effects of Cu(II) and Zn(II) on the kinetics of glycation of Aß with ribose-5-phosphate. This summer, we hope to continue to learn more about the relationship between Aß and its possible co-factors and rates of glycation and aggregation, while also characterizing the Aß metal-binding active site,” wrote Stillman.
Stillman and Caminiti will be working full time for a significant portion of the summer on their respective research projects. They will work side-by-side with faculty mentors, but over the course of the summer the project will begin to feel very much like their own.
The Office of Undergraduate Research notes on its website that “research has been identified as one of the top successful practices students can participate in during higher education. The in-depth study and implementation of a research project develops advanced skills that will translate beyond college.”
Research is such a valuable experience because it forces students to take the initiative and develop ideas independently. They take ownership over the project. As Caminiti noted, “research involves actually doing chemistry as opposed to simply learning about its various aspects [in the classroom]. The research involves [a process of] discovery. In the lab, we’re experimenting to learn about aspects of chemistry that are not currently understood. We’ll actually be contributing to the body of scientific knowledge, which is an incredible thing [to be able to do as an undergraduate].”
As rewarding as it can be, research during the academic year can be challenging. It’s difficult to balance the host of other commitments that come with being at Middlebury. The summer is a time to engage with the research full time, without trying to juggle classes and extracurricular activities too. There’s a different mindset on campus during the summer. “The chemistry department fosters a really close, supportive community and a relaxed, creative atmosphere. And Middlebury [has the] resources, equipment and mentors to allow undergraduates to truly contribute something meaningful to our knowledge of the world,” said Stillman
But summer research has an added bonus: Middlebury in the summer. Stillman is an enthusiastic proponent of the experience: “It’s gorgeous every day – it literally rained twice last summer – and the English-speakers on campus are really tight-knit. You get to experience all Middlebury has to offer without the constraints of [academic work].”
(05/09/13 3:42pm)
This past Thursday through Saturday, May 2 through 4, the College’d theatre program presented the play “The Castle: A Triumph” by contemporary British playwright Howard Barker in the Seeler Studio at Mahaney Center for the Arts. The college website says the play is “blasting with humor, bawdiness, violence, and the limits of desire, pain and sexuality.”
In “The Castle,” a group of 12th-century English Crusaders return to their homeland after a long period of time, but find that the civic, agricultural and religious practices they were familiar with have been turned upside down while they were away. The women who were left behind in the village had radically changed the government and religion into an egalitarian culture. With the return of these reigning crusaders, they brought back an engineer who plan the largest castle in the region in order to regain control over the women. As the construction of the castle went on, they not only transformed the landscape of the village, but also the power dynamics manifesting in gender, sexuality, race and age. The play is serious, mature but yet comical in its exploration of gender and love.
Director Richard Romagnoli, the Isabel Riexinger Mettler professor of theatre at the College, is an authority on the work of Howard Barker. He has directed six of Barker’s plays and a few poems for the theatre department, PTP and companies in Boston and New York City since his first year at the College.
In Director’s Notes, Romagnoli viewed “The Castle” as “a story about love – love rejected – love betrayed – love pursued – the inability to love.”
With inciting action, a series of compelling conflicts and a resolution followed by an ironic denouement, the play formed the theatrical polarities of humor and sadness, a beautifully structured story.
Telling Barker’s story, conventional exchanges between characters were interrupted by direct addresses to the audience, inviting the audience to participate in the dramatic dynamic. The direct connection between the audience and the performer was not only engaging, but also challenged the imaginative boundaries of the audience.
Limited by the space and the budget, set designer Jon Crain and the director decided to have curtains dyed and painted shades of green, furnishing the landscape at the beginning of the play. The castle was revealed through the abrupt, violent tearing down of the curtains. The walls of the Seeler Studio became a part of the castle as the plot unfolded. In addition to that, the set provided the literal embodiment of a forbidding and dehumanizing structure in the space where the show finally took place with concrete columns and cinder block walls.
Instead of using traditional music scores as a melodramatic device to intensify the emotional scenes, the sound designer Cormac Bluestone used construction sounds to underscore some of the emotional moments. “The Castle” starred Christina Fox ’13.5 as Skinner, a witch, Meghan Leathers ’13.5 as Ann, a changed woman, and Noah Berman ’13 as her husband Stucley, a knight, embattled lord of the land.
Tickets sold out for all three performances. Students, professors, parents of the cast and friends of the production crew came and watched the two-and-a-half hour play.
“This play is not likely to leave the audience unaffected and indifferent and that makes for a potentially productive evening in the theater,” said Stephen Donadio, Fulton professor of humanities, sharing his experience in an email after the performance on Saturday night. “For what it is be worth, my own sense is that “The Castle” reveals the nature and scale of Barker’s dramatic ambition, which is Shakespearean, and that the changeable, conflicted texture of the play reflects Barker’s uneasiness with such an ambition, which he cannot help but find suspect, because it may be associated with pretentiousness and a will to power and domination.”
“As Romagnoli’s production makes clear,” he continued, “the playwright’s handling of this bleak assessment involves a lot of humor — subtly ironic humor and humor of the broad, loud, vulgar music hall variety. So, in the end, ‘The Castle’ seems to me unstoppably exploratory and genuinely unsettling.”
Unsettling seems to be a frequently mentioned adjective after the performance. Some of the students refused to leave any comment on “The Castle” because they do not know how to respond to this dramatic theatre work and were not sure if they got the underlying meanings of the work right.
Jack DesBois ’15 said that it was helpful for him to understand “The Castle” better with the experience of learning about Howard Barker in class. He said the abstract concepts of conflicts, domination and power might be hard to get out of the play if the audience came without knowing what to expect.
Precise construction of the castle, demolition of nature, betrayal in love, doubts in religious belief and conflicts in power; there are so many themes discussed and explored in “The Castle” that the general audience had a hard time grasping them all.
From a techniqual perspective, Sumire Doi ’13, who did her senior acting thesis “17 ½,” one month ago, thought “The Castle” was a brilliant project.
“The wall of the Seeler Studio was always standing there,” Doi said. “It’s nice to see the crew use it as a part of the castle, so the studio itself represents the castle. Besides, I really appreciated the poetic dialogues in the play.”
This summer, “The Castle” will be a part of summer shows in Season 27 of the PTP/NYC project off-Broadway.
(04/24/13 4:38pm)
Today, April 25 eminent scholar of Russian literature and history, author and translator Rosamund Bartlett will visit the College. Bartlett most recently published a biography called Tolstoy: A Russian Life, which was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize — the UK’s most prestigious non-fiction award. Her next book release, scheduled for 2014, will be an important, new translation of Anna Karenina. Eagerly awaited by the literary studies and Russian departments, Bartlett will present a lecture titled “Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in Context: The Cultural and Political Dimensions” at 4:30 p.m. in Robert A. Jones ’59 Conference Room.
Fulton Professor of Humanities and Director of the Department of the Program in Literary Studies Stephen Donadio, who is responsible for inviting Bartlett to Middlebury, described Bartlett’s future presence at the College as “an extraordinary opportunity.”
Bartlett is a life member of Wolfson College, Oxford, in England and a Fellow of the European Humanities Research Center at Oxford. She was awarded the Chekhov 150th Anniversary Prize in 2010 by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. She has written biographies of other important 19th century authors such as Anton Chekhov, and also translated other notable works, like a collection of Chekhov’s letters, into English. Oxford’s new edition of World Classics will feature Bartlett’s translation of Anna Karenina and the translation has already been named a selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club.
In her lecture at the College, Bartlett will discuss some of the challenges of translating Tolstoy’s masterpiece into English. Furthermore, she will describe the influences of Tolstoy’s life, which she researched for her new biography, and Russian history on Anna Karenina.
“I’m certain that what she will have to say to us about the larger implications of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina — and the difficulties that that work presents to the English translator — will be fresh and memorable,” said Donadio.
Literary studies major Brita Fisher ’15 is excited about learning of the implications of translation on meaning in Anna Karenina.
“Since I cannot speak the language, I have to read all Russian works in translation, which of course removes some of their power, since language and meaning are often intertwined,” Fisher said. “I love hearing [such] scholarship on literature, especially since it always opens up new ways to see texts.”
There have been many past translations of Tolstoy’s famous Anna Karenina, including the current translation of choice by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Donadio predicts, however, that Bartlett’s translation will bring something new to the table.
“My expectation is that Bartlett’s new translation will effectively demand a thorough reconsideration of that of Pevear and Volokhonsky,” explained Donadio. “It’s not likely that Bartlett would have taken on a project of this scale unless she thought that a new translation of the work was called for, a translation that would take into account aspects of Tolstoy’s writing that are not adequately reflected in that other translation.”
On this trip to the United States, Bartlett will also speak at the Hillwood Museum in Washington D.C., on the Culture of Imperial Russia. Her next book will be on the cultural history of opera in Russia.
(04/17/13 10:39pm)
“We cannot be the anti-illegal immigration party. We have to be the pro-legal immigration party,” Marco Rubio emphasized to fellow Republicans at a 2011 rally. “We have to be a party that advocates for a legal immigration system that’s ... good for America and honors our tradition both as a nation of immigrants and as a nation of law.”
Growing up in an extremely diverse Seattle suburb, some of my best friends and closest neighbors were green-card holders or first-generation immigrants. I remember going to friends’ houses and hearing stories of grandparents who worked their entire lives with the single goal that their grandchildren – not even their children – could live in America. Other neighbors told stories of sending money to the other side of the world as they waited for their family to get visas or green cards. Some of my neighbors and friends’ parents work several jobs and still can hardly afford monthly international calls home; some have entry-level jobs at Microsoft that they studied for 40 years to obtain; some received great job offers while studying in American colleges. But despite their different paths, my neighbors have something in common: they worked hard to give their children access to American education and freedom, and they are now among the proudest Americans I know, regardless of the languages they speak at home.
Our strength as a country depends on the ingenuity and labor of our citizens. Since its inception, the United States has attracted the best and brightest minds with the promise of work and freedom. Generations of intelligent, hard-working immigrants from every corner of the planet have travelled here and assimilated into American culture, learning English, studying for citizenship tests and becoming active members of their new communities despite the roadblocks.
Today, our immigration system is clearly broken, with 81 percent of Americans believing that America needs to reform its immigration strategies and policies. In some states like Texas and California, one in every 15 people is undocumented, with the majority of these illegal aliens speaking “little to no English” and living in highly segregated communities without any pressure to assimilate into or contribute to American society.
Though not all illegal immigrants are from Latin America and almost 40 percent of undocumented workers arrived legally and simply refused to leave when their visas expired, illegal immigrants are largely disconnected from American society even while benefitting from American jobs and federal programs. Few illegal immigrants participate in federal programs, yet American taxpayers still lose an estimated $113 billion each year providing education, healthcare and other services to undocumented workers and their families. $53 billion of this tax burden goes towards education alone.
Furthermore, while the 11 million illegal immigrants benefiting from our freedoms and rights while evading taxes and strict immigration procedure certainly hurt all taxpaying Americans, illegal immigration is most harmful to the millions of intelligent, hard-working foreigners attempting to legally immigrate to the United States each year. Many politicians have voiced their frustration at our broken immigration system by declaring that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from Americans, but in reality, most of the jobs they are taking are the jobs sought by other immigrants – many of whom have spent their entire lives working for the chance to find employment in the United States. These are the real victims of illegal immigration.
We need to ensure that it is easier to immigrate to America legally than illegally, while also finding a viable solution for the 11 million illegal immigrants already here. Mass deportation, surprisingly expensive and indiscriminating between undocumented families that have lived in the United States for decades and those who just arrived, is not the answer. Besides, we do not want illegal immigrants to leave. Economically, they present potentially great benefits to our country – we merely need to ensure that they become assimilated into our society as taxpayers and English-speakers. Indeed, if all illegal immigrants became citizens, the United States would make between $5.5 and $10 billion more in annual taxes and working-class wages would dramatically increase.
On the other hand, granting amnesty to immigrants neither invested nor participating in American socio-politics will intensify American social divisions and encourage further illegal immigration. We need to encourage foreigners to immigrate legally, and this must be achieved through a defined and easily navigable route from temporary visa to permanent citizenship in conjunction with a difficult and long process for illegal aliens. It is absurd that our government turns away 40 percent of American-educated, foreign-born math and science graduates after their graduation. Our priority must always be to attract and keep the best immigrants, but we must not forget to help undocumented workers assimilate into our society through education, hard-work and a demonstrated commitment to America through taxation.
(04/17/13 4:13pm)
As I sauntered through the seemingly endless aisles of the grocery store today, a Faith Hill song blared from the loudspeaker. In the United States, Faith Hill might seem like a strange choice, but in Brazil it goes unnoticed. I even overheard someone saying “Eu adoro Faith Hill,” [I love Faith Hill]. In Brazil the constant reminders of American culture are inescapable. In fact, I walk by a billboard-size advertisement for an all-inclusive Disneyworld trip every day.
On the university campus I see at least 10 people dressed in clearly labeled Abercrombie or Hollister shirts every day. American brand names are buzzwords in Brazilian small talk. They just sound a little different with a Portuguese accent.
I came to Brazil expecting to watch dramatic daytime Brazilian television with my roommates and hear the sounds of samba in the street. Instead, I’ve watched dubbed Sex and the City with my roommates and heard Rihanna played at almost every club I’ve been to. I ask my classmates what music they listen to and they tell me they love Florence and the Machine or the Black Eyed Peas.
Even though a Brazilian classmate of mine might be wearing a Pink Floyd shirt and talking to me about “Game of Thrones,” the Brazil mindset is almost incomprehensible to an American liberal arts college student. What Brazil, Florianópolis in particular, does best is relax, a laughable word for many Middlebury students. There is no rat race; there is no rush to do anything. Many college students decide to complete one major and then complete another one for four more years.
In Brazil everything closes at two p.m. on Saturdays because Brazilians all go home to have churrasco with their family. For those who don’t know, churrasco is grilled Brazilian meat usually on a stick and always well seasoned. A Brazilian “churrascaria” typically lasts six to eight hours. Proctor isn’t even open for that many consecutive hours.
My initial reaction to everything being closed in Brazil from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning was that the Brazilians are sacrificing great business hours; they would make so much more money if they stayed open for just a few hours more. Yet, I realized that my reaction perfectly explained the difference between the American and Brazilian mindset.
Why would the Brazilian want to work two more hours on a Saturday when they could be eating freshly grilled meat and drinking beer with family and friends? My capitalistic conditioning associates making more money with a better quality of life, but a Brazilian would tell me I’m wrong to think that way. Leisure isn’t a negative concept here.
It took me a month to understand that lying in a hammock watching the sun set on the ocean’s horizon with a beer in hand isn’t a reward for a long week of work, it’s a part of life. Middlebury students work hard all week to “deserve” a couple of Keystones on the weekends. In Brazil what you deserve is the choice between working and relaxing.
Aproveitar is a verb that loosely translates to “take advantage of” in English. I’m constantly being told that I need to “aproveitar” my time in Brazil because life here is better, or, more objectively speaking, slower.
While I was initially put off by the amount of American culture in Brazil, I’ve come to realize that it signifies something completely different here. It reminds me that I’m immersed in a culture with similar taste, but different values.
Brazil has taught me that although we live in an era of cultural globalization, it is not one of a global culture.
Written by Stephanie Roush '14 from FLORIANOPOLIS, Brazil
(04/10/13 8:16pm)
On April 4, aspiring classics majors and other reading aficionados gathered in Axinn Center at Starr to hear from Princeton University’s Andrew Flemming West Professor of Classics, Emeritus, W. Robert Connor. The hour-long lecture and subsequent discussion session surveyed the practice of reading from the perspective of the ancient world. Connor’s lecture, entitled “Reading: Then and Now,” sought for the audience to “rethink our own notions and practices relative to this art of reading.”
According to Pavlos Sfyroeras, associate professor of classics who introduced the speaker, Connor is well known for his “field-changing” work in classical scholarship, which has “altered the way we imagine” antiquity, as well as the liberal arts in general. But as Connor took the floor, his friendly, informal demeanor ruled out any notions of academic dryness or pedantry. The lecture was as engaging as it was informative. Connor began by describing the tap code system invented by American prisoners-of-war in Vietnam, and how soldiers such as John Borling, who served in Vietnam, wrote poetry to keep themselves sane in the depths of terrible suffering. As an example of an unconventional system of non-verbal discourse, this story showed the fundamental importance of reading in human life, the thread that tied the rest of the lecture together.
Connor also described the ancient equivalents of modern “books” – papyrus scrolls with narrow text columns, all in capital letters, with no punctuation, spaces or paragraphs. In addition to the inherent inefficiencies of the text itself, these volumes were incredibly time-consuming to produce and expensive to purchase, all conditions that are anathema to our modern conception of reading.
To further illustrate the obstacles that stood in the way of what we might think of as “reading comprehension,” Connor called up a student who presented the results of an experiment undertaken by students in three classes that were taught in the classics department. Specifically in preparation for this lecture, students had each taken a text or passage in English, Latin or ancient Greek and transcribed it by hand in the papyrus style. With only 15 to 25 characters allowed per line, the process was laborious. Students’ average numbers of lines per hour generally fell between 60 and 120, with one transcriber clocking it at a mere 34. The effect on the reader was equally profound. As Michael Russo ’16 wrote in an email, “Even in English, the language of the work I transcribed, I had trouble differentiating one word from another.”
However, Connor pointed out that since the Greeks were an incredibly innovative people, this outwardly obtuse system of communication was not for nothing: “they must have liked it!”
In fact, the benefits were numerous. As a result of the built-in difficulty, reading progressed in stages. First, the reader would read to figure out word divisions. Then, he or she would have to reread for comprehension, probably multiple times. Connor described this method, attributed to the Greeks, as “go-and-stop reading.” By forcing the reader to pause to decipher the text itself, reading was made slower and more contemplative, in contrast to the “skim, scan and search” style we tend to use today. The more time we spend reading, the more we truly come to understand a given text.
Furthermore, the sheer unavailability of books perhaps contributed to a more vibrant social context for reading. Instead of circulating among friends or from libraries, people actually had to meet in person and read in groups if they wanted to hear what the latest literary figure had to say. Reading from historical accounts of group reading, Connor illustrated how “the social act of reading” could constitute its own type of communicative process, which he termed “friendship reading.” In addition, since books were so difficult to obtain, reading for memorization and performance became common.
By the end of the lecture, Connor had identified six types of reading: go-and-stop, staged rereading, friendship reading, performance reading, “extractive reading” and memorization. He encouraged the audience to apply these neglected methods to their own lives, to see if they could lead to a richer understanding of written material.
“Sometimes things that are so old-fashioned come back … and are revolutionary,” he said.
For his part, Russo stated, “I do plan on trying out … reading with friends and memorization. These two spoke to me the most because the former allows friendships to grow and the latter allows you to keep some of the most beautiful texts in your heart no matter what happens.”
(04/10/13 4:41pm)
On Wednesday, April 3, Andrew Forsthoefel ’11 and his co-producer Jay Allison held a listening event in Woods Hole, Mass. for the release of their hour-long radio documentary, which follows Forsthoefel’s 4,000-mile walk across the country through the voices of people he met along the way. The radio piece is published on Transom.org, along with a map of the route Forsthoefel walked and more details about the project.
Forsthoefel started walking from his home in Chadds Ford, Penn. in October 2011, and traveled through Virginia, Louisiana, New Mexico, and every state along the way until he reached the Pacific Ocean in Half Moon Bay, Calif. on September 8, 2012. His parents were waiting for him along with a circle of friends he had met along the way. When Forsthoefel arrived, he had with him over 85 hours of audio, capturing various perspectives on life, death, fear and age.
When Forsthoefel set out, he did not have any plan of how long he would walk or where he would end up. He knew that he would record conversations and that he wanted to ask people about transformation, but he did not know what he would find nor what would become of his journey. He wanted to learn, to listen and to spend time with people — and so he chose to walk.
“For [the period] after graduation, I hoped to find some ingredients in an experience that would give me a potent learning experience. And I thought walking might have some of those ingredients,” Forsthoefel said.
Forsthoefel set off from his home with a mandolin and a 50-pound backpack holding a tent, beef jerky, maps and a few other necessities. He also wore a sign that said “Walking to Listen.”
The documentary narrates Forsthoefel’s travels across America, from voice to voice, linking each new location with a person who has something that needs to be said. The comments range from stories of lost loves and skydiving, to those that provide advice on how to live.
The second half of the documentary explores the idea of age, as well as the fear that Forsthoefel encountered and overcame during his walk.
“Finally it hit me. I could actually die out here [in the desert]. From then on, I was fear-walking,” he said. Later in the piece, he added, “But I am in the forest, and I know it’s not a scary place. And the fears of death I had been carrying with me, in that moment, were gone.”
Even when Forsthoefel finished walking, he did not know what the stories would become. He thought of creating an archive, of making a series, of setting up a gallery to combine photos with voices and of incorporating walking in the presentation of his work.
Allison, who worked closely with Forsthoefel to create the piece, believed that the medium of radio was perfect for this project.
“Andrew captured audio on his walk — not video. He is an amazing listener. What could be better for radio?” he said.
Allison also explained the impact Forsthoefel’s journey has already made on the town of Woods Hole, Mass.
“It’s a testimony to [Forsthoefel] that, in his short time here, he has come to know so many people. The town hall was overflowing. People who didn’t know [him] before we played the piece certainly knew him afterward, and they gave him a prolonged standing ovation. It was a lovely night.”
Forsthoefel agreed, saying, “It felt great to be in the room hearing people hear the piece, which is a representation of my year [and] of me. I was very humbled to see so many people show up. I couldn’t have dreamed of a more perfect way to end it,” he said. Forsthoefel added that he was very thankful to Jay, his family, and everyone he was met throughout all areas of his project.
The piece has also been well received by online listeners. Zak Rosen, one of the many people who have commented on the piece on Transom.org, explained why Forsthoefel’s piece resonated with him.
“There’s so much wisdom here, without it once feeling didactic or patronizing,” he wrote. “And the bit at the end — about being in the dark forest, as opposed to looking into it — if only all our work could shed such light on the human existence with so few words and artifice.”
Daniel Brayton, associate professor of English and American literatures, was also impressed by the piece.
“Here’s a young man who had the courage to throw himself to the winds, putting himself at the mercy of all kinds of strangers as he walked across this country,” he said.
“Very few have the courage to pursue adventures like this one, and even fewer have the talent to record and convey their experiences so compellingly.”
Sue Halpern, a scholar-in-residence at the College who introduced Forsthoefel to audio, added, “It reflects precisely who Andrew is. It is, as he is, honest, searching, sincere, and I think that because he is all of those things, people opened up to him all along the way,” she said. “It’s the best audio piece I’ve heard, hands down. I think it should be required listening for anyone who aspires to grow up.”
In making this radio piece, Forsthoefel created a way for listeners of any age and stage in life to access the stories he unearthed during his walk and to take from them whatever each listener needs the most. As Allison noted, “This is a great piece for young people about old people, and this is a great piece for old people about young people.”
Next, Forsthoefel intends to write something about his walk, telling the stories that cannot be captured through audio. Beyond that, though uncertain of his next move, Forsthoefel wants to keep listening.
(04/10/13 4:21pm)
On Sunday, my buddy Trent tried to teach me how to surf. He kept an eye on the surf reports all day, and the swells were most forgiving at about five in the evening, so my roommate Joey and I piled into Trent’s orange Honda Element and we drove about 10 minutes to Asilomar State Beach. As we drove, Joey and I peppered Trent with questions about his surfing experience and learned that he returned from working in Guatemala with the Peace Corps about a year ago, where he taught the children of his Guatemalan host-family how to surf. When Trent left the country he left his surfboards with them so that they could continue to enjoy the passion he had shared with them.
There weren’t many people on the beach — the weather had alternated between partly-sunny, mostly-cloudy and partly-cloudy mostly-sunny all day — and most people just pull over to the side of the road that hugs the outside of the Monterey Peninsula and look at the ocean from the climate-controlled comfort of their vehicles.
We squeezed into wetsuits (I borrowed one of Trent’s old ones — it fit surprisingly well), we grabbed a few boards and waded into the surf.
Trent is an excellent teacher — he patiently explained not only how to transition from paddling a board to standing on it, but also how to read the water for the right waves and for dangerous, strength-sapping rip currents. While Trent worked with Joey, I sat on the beach and watched the sun slowly sink behind a thick bank of rain clouds gathering over the Pacific Ocean. Eventually the clouds outnumbered the rays of sun, and the waves became choppier and broke further from the shore, making them more difficult to surf. Trent decided that the coming darkness and the lousy waves rendered surfing impossible for a beginner, so we called it a day and adjourned to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant for dinner.
While chatting over dinner Joey and I learned more about Trent’s passion for surfing and for the ocean. Joey talked about his passion for social entrepreneurship — using business as a vehicle for bettering the lives of others. As an aspiring defense policy wonk, my academic and professional interests varied significantly from either of my companions’, and I started to think about the many people with such varied passions I have met out here in Monterey, Calif.
To me this kind of diversity is different from that found at Middlebury. It is not manufactured through an admissions process, but rather it materializes as people vastly different in age, expertise and passions happen to converge in Monterey. Several weeks ago I enjoyed an Easter dinner with some friends — our group included an Egyptian woman pursuing an MBA, a French woman pursuing an MBA, a woman working towards a Master’s degree in teaching English, a Minnesota native who enlisted in the Army immediately after high school and was assigned to the Army’s Defense Language Institute (DLI, also located in Monterey) to learn Pashto and an Army officer and an Air Force officer, both French students at DLI.
When I left snowy Boston for Monterey, I didn’t expect that I would experience anything vastly different from Middlebury — after all, the Monterey Institute is “A Graduate School of Middlebury College.” But I have. I’ve made friends with people from far-flung corners of the globe — some married, some divorced, some surfers, some military, some veterans, some from the United States, some not — and that kind of broadening experience has been, to me, one of the most valuable yet unanticipated aspects of my time “abroad.”
Written by NATE SANS '14 in MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA
(03/20/13 4:09pm)
Today the world faces a water crisis of unprecedented gravity. According to the U.N., 85 percent of the global population lives on the driest half of the earth and water is estimated to become scarcer with the projected increase in population. Yet as population expansion and development raise the demand for water, climate change rapidly diminishes its supply by melting the glaciers and snowcaps of the planet’s greatest freshwater reservoirs at record rates.
In light of this crisis, from March 14 to 16, the College’s Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs hosted its First Annual International Conference, titled “The Politics of Freshwater: Access and Identity in a Changing Environment.” The event brought together interdisciplinary scholars from national and international institutions to speak from varying perspectives regarding the processes that affect access to freshwater, such as climate change, land use, damming, privatization, commoditization and pricing. The symposium also focused on strategies to improve human interaction with vital freshwater around the world. The talks aimed to analyze these matters historically as well as with a view toward successfully addressing them in the present.
The symposium was co-sponsored by the Christian A. Johnson Economics Fund, C.V. Starr Middlebury Schools Abroad, the program in environmental studies, Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest, the departments of English and American literatures, classics, geography, political science and the Rohatyn Center.
Professor of Geography and Director of the Rohatyn Center Tamar Mayer, identified five reasons that the politics of freshwater was selected as the topic for the inaugural symposium. First, water is the source of life for all organisms on earth. Secondly, water serves as an important aspect of different cultural and national groups across the world. Third, the politics of water have sparked a great amount of conflict in recent years, and the possession of water has become an economic commodity as well. Fourth, the access to freshwater is an unmistakable source of conflict across boundaries and cultures as well as within local and regional situations. Finally, the UN has designated 2013 as the international year of water cooperation.
In her opening remarks, Professor Mayer elaborated on the purpose of these conferences.
“The idea is to have an annual conference on a global theme that can be discussed from multiple disciplinary perspectives and can both contribute to our International and Global Studies (IGS) curriculum and connect our campus to C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad,” she said. “To this end, we have invited scholars from the social sciences and the humanities as well as policy makers and engineers in the field of water management.”
The symposium welcomed scholars and academics from Dartmouth, Oberlin, Wellesley, Colgate and Universidad de La Rioja (La Rioja, Spain).
The water symposium ties into one of the IGS spring capstone seminars concerning water, as well as to a teleconference on the same subject that Arabic students on campus have had with Middlebury students studying abroad in Jordan.
“We want to bring the entire campus to the Rohatyn Center through these events,” said Mayer. “We want the arts, social sciences and humanities to come together to talk about these issues.”
In the four days preceding the three-day conference, Middlebury students and faculty participated in presentations pertaining to water, featuring representatives from non-profit organizations and Middlebury and Monterey Institute of International Studies students and faculty involved in water research. Robert Hoesterey, Director of Strategic Development of The Eden Projects, spoke on Wednesday about his work in Ethiopia and Madagascar decreasing povery through deforestation projects.
On Thursday, photographer Edward Burtynsky gave a lecture about his exhibit “Nature Transformed,” currently on display in the Middlebury College Museum.
On Friday, the Robert A. Jones House hosted three different panel discussions, titled “Water Divided,” “Changing Water and Land Use” and “Water Territories,” with a number of visiting professors.
Two more panel discussions were held on Saturday, “Sustaining Multiple Uses of Water” and “Access to Water and Resistance.” The conference came to a close on Saturday afternoon with a summary and concluding discussion.
The organizers of the symposium, Mayer and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Catherine Ashcraft, began planning for the event last July. They envision that the College will continue holding such annual interdisciplinary international conferences, and have chosen other global themes to discuss in subsequent years.
Professor Lina Abu-Ghunmi, from the University of Jordan, who gave a talk called “Grey Water Concept Toward Mitigating Water Shortage” and specializes in wastewater treatment, noted the significance of the symposium.
“We’re focusing on different scientific fields and bringing together economists, sociologists and engineers and looking at different situations all over the world,” she said.
Monterey Professor Pushpa Iyer spoke about “The Politics of Muddled Waters in Gujarat, India: Environmental, Economic, Social, and Cultural Influences.”
Iyer, whose expertise includes identity conflict and South Asia, said of the symposium, “This is wonderful. It’s the right size for meaningful interaction to happen. It gives us the opportunity to connect with scholars and really get to know their research.” With respect to the freshwater problems confronting the planet, she stated, “Sociocultural and political challenges dominate. Water is not just a resource that needs to be managed. It involves layers of complexity that make arriving at one solution hard, but these difficulties have to be analyzed to effectively deal with the issue.”
Marjeela Basij-Rasikh ’15 attended the symposium and believed that the conference was a crucial event to take place, especially in a liberal arts environment.
“It was very inclusive, encompassing even the social and spiritual aspects of water,” she said. “We care about the environment a lot on campus, so we need such insights from people who are experienced in the field. It allowed me to understand how individual participation matters and how I could take action. I encourage more students to take advantage of future conferences.”
(03/06/13 5:00am)
Walk into the basement of Forest Hall these days and you will find a transformed space. Thanks to the efforts of a few inspired students, this once stark, industrial area is now the site of an open-ended art project that aims to turn the basement into a viable social venue through weekly Sunday night painting sessions.
The project started out of a desire to reclaim what was once an inviting alternative space, home to dance parties and other late-night gatherings. In years past, it was chiefly the presence of student artwork that set “LoFo” apart from other social areas on campus. But in the summer of 2011, the hall was renovated, and the process destroyed the art that had become a hallmark of the space. When it became clear after the renovation that students would no longer be allowed to decorate the basement, a spate of graffiti protesting the loss of Lower Forest Hall aroused controversy among students and the administration. The conflict was never satisfactorily resolved — since the unauthorized tagging was painted over in early 2012, the walls have remained bare.
Earlier this year, Christopher Batson ’13 and Katy Smith Abbott, dean of students, began to shape the current effort to make use of the area once again. In an email, Batson described his vision of “‘black box’ spaces — common spaces that would be transformed into dance hall-like spaces, where all the walls would be painted black, there’d be strobe lights, black lights and a sweet sound system,” places students could host dorm parties and DJ events.
This notion is part of a broader attempt to expand Middlebury’s weekend scene, and give those who want a different place to gather more chances to create their own events. Though Lower Forest’s walls will not be black, the art that adorns them (currently ranging from a painting of a beach scene to abstract shapes and human figures) serves to create the same kind of “alternative space” that can be used as students see fit. Batson added that the project is not related to last year’s controversy, but is rather a fresh attempt to reclaim the area.
Painting is done from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Sundays, and all are welcome to participate. Individuals may express themselves as they wish; the only rules are “no profanity, English words, or inappropriate references.” Students hope to have the space ready for use before the end of the semester, and Dean Abbott has been striving to obtain A/V equipment for Lower Forest and several other places around campus. A year and a half in the making, Lower Forest is close to being fully restored as a special place dedicated to students looking for something different on a Friday or Saturday night.
(02/28/13 5:00am)
Last Saturday night, Feb. 23, words flew in the McCullough Social Space as the American Sign Language (ASL) poetry troupe, the Flying Words Project, took the stage. The event was hosted by Middlebury’s ASL club and sponsored by a variety of campus organizations and departments.
Two poets performed at the event, Deaf Poet Peter Cook and his hearing coauthor Kenny Lerner. They create poems together in ASL and then add words to them so that their performances are accessible to both deaf and hearing communities. Susan Burch, director of CCSRE, taught at Gallaudet University and has strong ties to the deaf community; she described the Flying Words Project as “hands down the most important Deaf poetry artists in America.”
Middlebury’s ASL club first saw the Flying Words Project perform at Dartmouth College in 2010 and since then has been trying to get Cook and Lerner to perform here. Saturday’s event was free of charge and open to the greater community. While Middlebury students made up a majority of the audience, there were a number of town residents in attendance. A handful of members of the University of Vermont’s ASL club also made the journey from Burlington, and the performance was delayed briefly in order to give extra time to people making their way through the inclement weather.
As soon as the pair came on stage, Cook and Lerner captivated the audience, performing a series of poems that pulled from real life events ranging from the recent fire in a Bangladesh factory to their experiences performing in various countries. Many of the poems were quite funny and portrayed the versatility of the duo’s performance style. They also orchestrated a poem about climate change that the whole audience came together to perform.
ASL, as its own language entirely independent from English, does not translate directly into English but instead focuses on using visual signs and gestures to convey meaning. In Lerner’s words, it is “a picture language.” As a hearing person unfamiliar with ASL, seeing the Flying Words Project performance was an experience unlike any I’d had before. Words are very powerful, evocative and arguably taken for granted by most people. Then suddenly during the performance I found that the words Lerner was saying were not enough to truly capture what was happening before my eyes.
Instead, I had to take Lerner’s words and Cooks actions and create a new understanding of my own in order to appreciate the performance. While this was slightly disorienting at first, my brain soon adapted. Seeing Cook’s signs translated into words in real time slowed each poem down into a series of moments. “We play with language,” said Lerner of his work with Cook.
The performance was followed by a lengthy question and answer session in which the duo elaborated on their creative process and the intricacies of performing in other countries. Most nations in which the Flying Words Project has performed have their own official or unofficial sign language, and navigating the differences can be challenging, though Cook is able to pick up the new sign languages with relative ease. Cultural differences also often come into play; what entertains the audience of one nation will not necessarily entertain the audience of another. Cook and Lerner are constantly writing new poems and adjusting established ones.
“Their performance was very impressive,” Jiayi Zhu ’14 said. “It has made me more interested in ASL and Deaf culture. It’s something that should spread and can be shared with other cultures.”
Middlebury’s ASL club hopes to work with the college administration in the near future to create an ASL department that will offer a major and a minor and provide extended language tables.
“The success of the Flying Words Project event shows the obvious interest and need for the development of an American Sign Language academic department here at Middlebury,” said Ada Santiago ’13.5, president of the ASL club. “We [the ASL Club] hope that the administration and the Middlebury community at large will support us in this endeavor to help make Middlebury a more diverse and progressive institution.”
The club also hopes one day to have ASL offered at Middlebury’s Language Schools. So far a petition asking for this expansion of ASL has garnered over 200 signatures. With this growing support, events like Saturday’s are likely to become a more common occurrence on campus.
(02/27/13 11:20pm)
Mackenzie Stewart ’13 returned from a semester abroad in Valparaiso, Chile disappointed and looking for answers. Student strikes, communication issues among staff and a lackluster program director led her to try to change the program for future students.
“The girls who went to Chile and I took a long time to layout all of our experiences and our criticism, but got no feedback,” she said. “The program was a huge mess.”
Stewart met with Vice President of Language Schools Michael Geisler and even President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz to express her concerns, but still received no response.
It took the cumulative effect of Stewart’s parents withholding donations and a similar threat from a second family before Geisler acknowledged that the concerns had been brought to the program director’s attention.
“It was six months of nothing,” she said.
Stewart’s abroad experience is certainly extreme. But through numerous interviews, common fundamental concerns surfaced about the study abroad experience of future students.
Middlebury vs. Other Programs
It is widely accepted by both students and faculty members that the 15 Middlebury Schools Abroad are far more academically rigorous than the 40 or more externally sponsored programs to which the College sends students.
“Non-Middlebury programs expect less — it’s as easy as that,” said Ted Netland ’14, who spent the fall at a Middlebury program in Bordeaux, France. “It seems from visiting friends across Europe who studied at non-Middlebury programs that they had it easier [academically].”
But Julia Deutsch ’13 — who studied in Kunming, China — pointed out that the Middlebury programs are all non-English speaking, which makes them naturally more challenging.
“It’s such a hard language [Mandarin] that if you really want to become fluent you will have to spend a certain amount of time studying — there just isn’t really a way around that,” she wrote in an email.
Acting Dean of International Programs and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of History Paul Monod said that the uneven academic playing field between abroad programs is a concern.
“It’s very difficult to level the academic playing field,” he said.
Studying abroad in Australia has become a specific hotbed of criticism from both faculty and some students. Monod said that the study abroad office used to only allow biology and other specific science majors — areas of study in which the country is very strong — to go to Australia. But after interminable student complaints, the restriction was lifted.
One of the problems is that many of the popular programs — such as Australia — offer a wide range of courses, which include many challenging courses, but more often many easy ones.
“Usually, it isn’t hard to find the easy classes,” he said. “We can limit the programs, but we can’t limit the choices.”
One way the College combats the academic disparity is by not, in most cases, extending financial aid to students studying abroad at non-Middlebury programs.
“If a student goes to Australia and decides to waste their time, they’re not wasting my money or your money, they’re wasting their own money,” Monod said.
Another way Monod and his office try to combat the differences is by constantly monitoring externally sponsored study abroad programs.
“If we get a kid who goes abroad with a C average and get’s straight A’s, that’s going to be something that makes us suspicious of a program,” he said. “We have to be very vigilant, and every year we are looking for the weak programs.”
For students who go on SIT (School for International Training) programs and complete final projects, their work is graded by both professors abroad and a College professor.
Integrating faculty into the process is crucial to ensuring high academic standards abroad, according to Monod.
“Faculty need to be more involved,” he said. “If a student comes back and tells their adviser that they didn’t do any work and got straight A’s, we need to know about that.”
But Monod said that there has been improvement in the academic disparity over his tenure at the College.
“When I first got here, it was generally understood that if you went abroad, your GPA would go up. Now it’s thought that if you go abroad, your GPA is going to go down,” he said.
Despite the widely-held belief that studying abroad at a non-Middlebury program is an easy GPA boost, students studying abroad on average got within a third of a grade of what they get at the College, according to studies done by Monod’s department.
But even with the study abroad office’s best efforts, Monod concedes that there is only so much he can do, crafting the problem as a student-choice issue.
“A student who chooses an easy program is saying, ‘I’m not good enough to go to a program that is more demanding,’” he said. “It’s fundamentally sad.”
But Vivian Cowan ’14, who spent the fall semester in Prague, Czech Republic, argued that a less academically rigorous schedule opened up different possibilities.
“The teachers didn’t expect much because a lot of the other students were taking their classes for pass/fail,” she said. “Being able to travel without the stress of worrying about doing work at a hostel or scrambling to find Wi-Fi to submit an essay allowed us to travel more.”
A unique aspect of the College’s abroad programs is that all abroad grades transfer in full. Many institutions simply put “study abroad” without grades, while others put the courses taken abroad on student transcripts but don’t factor them into cumulative GPA.
“We go the whole way here,” said Monod. “It makes us different, but it makes for a more meaningful experience.”
But Stewart said that what makes the College’s programs “different” also makes the academic disparity more important.
“It’s crazy that someone who goes to New Zealand or Prague isn’t doing any work, and you’re in a non-English speaking country doing a lot of work, but both programs grades transfer and are weighed equally,” said Stewart, whose final paper in Chile was 56 pages long. “The equity in the work of a common standard isn’t there.”
Even Liebowitz joined the discussion in a recent interview published in Middlebury Magazine, acknowledging the “mixed emotions” among students about the “potentially frustrating” experience abroad.
“It’s not what you see in the movies: junior-year abroad in Paris, enjoying the finer parts of French culture while still studying in English,” he said in the interview. “For some, the trade-off can be the enjoyment factor. We’re wrestling with this feedback we’re getting from our students.
“They typically attain a far greater degree of linguistic growth and competency than students in other programs, but a number of them, to be honest, will say that their time abroad is not as fun as others.”
Study Abroad Evaluations
When Netland arrived in Bordeaux, he found a different picture than that painted for him by the students he spoke with in a group meeting organized by the study abroad office prior to his departure.
“[The pre-departure meeting] felt censored, like it was run through the administration,” he said. “It didn’t seem that we got to hear all of the experiences, especially the ups and downs.”
An inherent problem with past students who give testimonials or meet with perspective students through the study abroad office is that their experiences are usually all positive.
“The problem is that a student who had a bad time abroad usually isn’t willing to come in and talk to a bunch of perspective students,” said Monod.
While Stewart said that kids need “a fuller picture” of studying abroad, she decided not to give her testimonial to perspective students.
“I didn’t want to go in there and complain,” she said.
Monod agreed that disseminating unbiased information from past students to current perspective students is a challenge.
“We take student evaluations seriously,” he said. “But we need to do more to get information out there to perspective students planning on going abroad.”
Each returning student is given the opportunity to fill out an abroad evaluation, but in many cases, that information never reaches students looking to follow in their footsteps.
For Middlebury programs, the evaluations are on the specific schools’ websites. But upon further investigation, in the area dedicated to “what advice would you give to future participants about the program?” only a fraction of the responses are viewable.
Stewart said that her evaluation was posted on the study abroad website, but that “a lot” of her responses were omitted.
Evaluations on non-Middlebury programs are housed on an external website called “abroad101.” The site has a swath of anonymous student reviews, but lacks any categorization by country.
Could Middkid.com be the Answer?
One possible avenue for circulating anonymous study abroad evaluations is through middkid.com, which has published anonymous course evaluations on their website for the past 13 years.
“Middkid.com is an ideal place for evaluations of schools abroad to be made public,” wrote the site’s campus manager, Thomas Bryenton ’13 in an email. “It’s a terrific idea.”
But Bryenton cautioned that it would take time to implement any new section to the website.
“We recently finished a complete overhaul of the site, so going back in to set up these changes is going to take time,” he wrote. “Realistically, a section of the site devoted to study abroad is still a couple months away.”
Monod cautioned that anonymous study abroad evaluations on middkid.com might give students a slanted picture.
“If that kid who hated their abroad evaluation gets on [middkid.com] and puts a blistering report online, it can give a very wrong impression,” he said.
Both Netland and Stewart said they would hypothetically share their experiences if middkid.com dedicated a section to study abroad evaluations.
“I love the idea of some kind of candid, anonymous review board,” he said. “I would be willing to tell kids exactly my experience, and if that is an online forum, then so be it.”
Read a response by Vice President for Language Schools, Schools Abroad and Graduate Programs MICHAEL E. GEISLER.
(02/24/13 9:48pm)
Tito Heiderer '14.5 traveled to Bali over the Winter Term to conduct research for his independent study.
"I don't know if there is one thing in particular that I can point to that really sparked my interest [in going]," he said.
Though once his sister moved to the Indonesian province, he "had" to visit. In Bali, Heiderer studied street art. He crafted a multimedia video-and-blog project under the guidance of Visiting Assistant Professor of English & American Literature, Peter Lourie, who also taught Adventure Writing & Digital Storytelling in January.
(02/20/13 9:38pm)
Last Wednesday night, Meghan Laslocky ’89 presented her first book, The Little Book of Heartbreak: Love Gone Wrong Through the Ages at 51 Main. At the event, which The Vermont Bookshop touted as “Anti-Valentine,” Laslocky discussed her new book and read from her recent Middlebury Magazine article, “Whither Courtly Love,” in which she explores courtly love and her experience with love (or lack of love) at the College.
“I was really fascinated by why we suffer so when our hearts get broken, from a physiological and bio-evolutionary perspective,” said Laslocky in a phone interview after the event.
The Little Book of Heartbreak is a history of heartbreak in which she explores the phenomenon from 12 Century Paris, Ernest Hemingway, to modern day romances.
“I’m fascinated by breakups,” said Laslocky during her talk. “The texture and complexity of them [is interesting].”
One aspect of her book which she needed to address but which she is skeptical of is courtly love, a subject that comes up frequently in literature and has played a roll in shaping peoples’ ideas of romance. Courtly love is the idea of love based of chivalry and nobility. It is a skepticism that she has harbored ever since her days as an English major at the College.
“I loved being an English major but every time courtly love came up I was like, ‘not again,’” she said. “But, in order to be responsible and talk about heartbreak I had to look back on courtly love.”
One of the reasons for her dislike of courtly love is because she believes it is so far from the reality of life at college as she experienced it.
“No doubt part of the reason why I found courtly love so irksome lay in the fact that it was so at odds with what I was experiencing as a young woman at Middlebury in the 80s — or thought I was experiencing,” Laslocky quoted from her essay in Middlebury Magazine.
As she continued her study of courtly love after college, she discovered that she isn’t the only skeptic of courtly love and that, even though images of Mr. Darcy wooing Elizabeth Bennett are evocative, courtly love may never have been a reality outside of the pages of books like Pride and Prejudice. After this discovery, Laslocky felt vindicated that she seemed to have inherently known that courtly love was “bogus.”
But, the question of why finding love at college is so difficult for so many people — including her — kept nagging her. At the event at 51 Main, she suggested that “tribalism” and “fear of crossing social boundaries” could be one reason. Also, she put forward the idea that “‘hooking up was cool, walks of shame were cool, but unabashed love [was not cool].”
At the event, one audience member — a student at the College — commented on how, even though Laslocky’s experience at Middlebury was in the 80s, in many ways it looks very similar to the dating and “hookup” scene at the College today. The main difference, though, now is the overbearing presence of technology.
“I think that that [technology] is obviously very seductive but very tricky,” said Laslocky. “A real concern [is] communicating face-to-face, that that skill is going to be lost.”
Being able to text and be in constant communication with people as well as smart phone apps like Tinder make options for romance seem endless and can get in the way of more meaningful connections, Lasklocky suggested.
But, really, it could come down to one thing, whether in 12th century Paris or the hyper-connected world of today. When an audience member asked Laslocky if she had any regrets regarding her college experience and love, Laslocky said, “I regret not expressing myself.”
(02/20/13 5:59pm)
“Guiri” is a colloquial term used in Spain to describe what is considered to be the stereotypical tourist or foreigner, and it is associated primarily with people from Northern Europe, the U.K. or the U.S. While I’ve heard it used in an endearing or light-hearted manner — “Of course you two finished your drinks before me, you’re both guiris!” — I’ve found that it is more often than not accompanied by derision or condescension — “Of course you went to Kapital and Joy this weekend, only guiris go to those clubs.”
While being referred to as a guiri doesn’t particularly bother me, I do find it a bit odd that almost all of my classes and social encounters seem to revolve around this common theme: how NOT to look like, act like or sound like a guiri. In my obligatory seminar on Spanish culture, we were told on the first day that the purpose of the class is to “accept cultural differences,” “adopt Spanish behavior” and “use appropriate gestures and body language,” so that by the end of the semester we would all be bona fide madrileños. Since then, it seems as though what is more important than learning “how to be” a Spaniard is learning “how not to be” a guiri. Our professor will caution us with warnings such as, “Only guiris take the metro, real madrileños use the bus” or “Only guiris would eat paella on the western coast of Spain.”
I have also encountered these informal lessons in social interactions with Spaniards: “I can spot that North Face-wearing guiri from a mile away.” “You WOULD know all of the lyrics to Pitbull’s verse in ‘International Love,’ you guiri.” “Ordering water at a restaurant? What a guiri.” As I can recognize the truth underneath the assumptions, I am able to laugh along. It is only when guiri is used in a negative way that “lacks merit” that I am resentful toward the label.
Before my program in Madrid started, I went to a Real Madrid game with my mom at the famous Santiago Bernabeu stadium. The score was tied 2-2 in the second half, and an offensive play was building up for the home side. As Cristiano Ronaldo was winding up for the shot, everyone in the stadium lifted themselves from their seats in anticipation. When the shot did go past the keeper to give Real Madrid the lead, the crowd roared and everyone jumped out of their chairs, including my mom and me. As we sat back down, two elderly men grabbed our shoulders and yelled at us for standing up before the goal was scored, and that our thoughtlessness prevented them from seeing the shot go in. Assuming that we couldn’t understand them, they continued whispering nasty things to one another in Spanish about “those stupid guiris,” and ultimately concluded that we “must be Americans.”
Had we been the only people to stand up in the stadium perhaps I would understand their frustration; however, as this was obviously not the case, I was offended by the accusatory use of the word guiri. Not only was Ronaldo one-on-one with the keeper (of course a goal was about to be scored), but we were also not acting alone in this apparently guiri behavior. “Those damn Americans, always standing up right before the goal is scored” just doesn’t seem like a justified insult.
It was never my intention or expectation to completely assimilate to Spanish culture, or totally “fit in” in Madrid. I’m taller than a great deal of the men, kind of Asian-looking, and I wear athletic shorts outside in the winter — I don’t think I’m fooling anyone, nor am I trying to. Yet, I still feel this internal tug-of-war between embracing the fact that I’m a foreigner and rejecting it, between embracing the word guiri and rejecting it. Even though I take the bus to school instead of the metro, sometimes when I go to a store or restaurant and order in Spanish people will still respond to me in English. It seems as though regardless of what I say, what I do or how I do it, I can never be a true madrileña, so I may as well just continue wearing sweatpants outside of my apartment and receiving dirty looks. Why bother?
Written by EMILY DUH '14 from Madrid, Spain
(02/20/13 5:01pm)
Last week I experienced the curious feeling of missing someone. I actually didn’t realize I missed this person (who I will call Django) until I made what I then thought was an arbitrary and mindless decision to call him. When I hung up the phone I was overcome by an unexpected sensation of loss and surprised myself by applying that precious term of missing to the situation.
The curiosity surrounding missing lies in the duality of its nature. First, it is an emotion that we cannot experience independently. Unlike sadness or anger which can be internalized, missing needs a direct object whether it be a time of life, a person or a favorite red beanie chock-full of sentimental value (last seen 02/16/13, Palmer House).
The second aspect of missing’s duality is that it functions as both a remedy and a solution. The phone call serves as a perfect example. I called Django because I missed him; I missed him because I called him. Often missing is identified only in the past tense. “I missed you guys!” has become my opening one-liner upon returning home and seeing my parents. But what does that really mean? I missed you, but I’m only realizing it now. I was actually fairly competent on my own. It seems like a complete waste of emotion. But that’s only for the emotionally dehydrated.
I believe that missing, even in its retrospective form comes from a genuine place. It’s not easy to generate an organic missing from scratch. And why should it be? Social as humans may be, we’ve still got an evolutionary battle to win and it wouldn’t make sense for us to be wired in a way that roots us to things we can’t have. Adaptable individuals that we are, we busy ourselves with the present and the immediate.
But it’s not fail-proof. Just listen to the song “Hey There, Delilah.” As we go about our lives we subject ourselves to an onslaught of stimuli, some of which may pluck you tick-off-the-back-of-a-dog, arms-flailing style right out of the happy present moment. In this uncomfortable state of free fall down Memory Lane, which turns out to be sloped at a sheer 75 degree angle and coated in black ice, we tap into survival mode. Your body computer runs a series of algorithms in an effort to fuse the past and present and get you to some underground railroad installment on Memory Lane. The product manifests itself subtly in a phone call or a well-drafted Facebook message. Eventually it resolves in a simple acknowledgment that takes a variety of linguistic forms including, “I miss you” or maybe “I meeeesssss youuuuuuu.” All that just to pull the trigger to start the cycle again. Perhaps aspiring vegetarians can identify with this phenomenon. Eliminating such divinities as BLTs or chicken parmesan from your diet is an all or nothing kind of deal. Pacifying the cravings with an infrequent “treat yoself” kind of day only refuels the fire and each subsequent craving will come back with increasing desire. In the least cannibalistic way, we have to keep the taste of what we know we miss fresh in order to miss it.
Facebook provides bountiful quantities of these tastes in its Costco-free-sample-formatted newsfeed. So often we are reminded of the things we miss that it’s possible we’re becoming habituated to that unsettling, my-skis-are-coming-apart feeling of straddling the past and present. Mr. Zuckerburg taunts us by refusing to take things out of sight and therefore out of mind, but also treats us by offering an emotional shortcut.
The result is a bloated and somewhat distorted version of missing. French and other languages preserve the weightiness of the verb “to miss” with vocabulary and sentence structure. In English we can miss both the nine o’clock bus and the granola that is no longer available at Proctor dinner. The French came up with two distinct words that more accurately reflect the vastly different emotional states of these scenarios. With regards to the granola, where Anglophones would say, “I miss you,” francophones say “Tu me manques,” which literally translates to “You are missing to me.” Clumsy and indirect as it may sound, it implies a kind of missing puzzle piece image that I think more earnestly conveys the emotion. You were a part of me and now you are gone and I feel emptiness where you once were, it says. A New Yorker comic’s depiction of yin sitting on the edge of a hotel room bed puts it nicely too. Yin is on the phone and there’s a speech bubble reading, “I miss you too.”
I don’t blame Facebook. I don’t miss missing people. Missing is an evolving emotional field. Maybe it’s only the appropriate language distinction that is missing, so that we can better account for the emotional disparity between missing the 9 o’clock bus, missing high school (but only after revisiting a Facebook album titled “STUUDDYY HALLL ’09”) and yin missing yang.
Written by MEREDITH WHITE '15 of Orinado, Calif.
(01/24/13 12:39am)
As France embroiled itself in battles against Islamist extremist rebels in Mali last week, a hostage crisis broke out in nearby Algeria. Last Wednesday, the al-Qaeda linked terrorist group Brigade of the Masked Ones seized a natural gas facility near In Amenas, located 30 miles west of the Libyan border. They held hundreds of Algerian and foreign workers captive, supposedly in response to Algeria’s acquiescence to the use of its airspace for French forces fighting in Mali.
Algeria’s state oil company Sonatrach owned the facility and jointly operated it with British Petroleum (BP) and Statoil, the national oil company of Norway. By the end of last Saturday, the crisis had been resolved after 72 hours of standoffs between the captors and the Algerian military and two chaotic rescue missions, but at a bloody cost.
According to Algerian government reports, 37 hostages and 32 captors are dead after the three-day crisis. On the other hand, 107 foreign nationals and 685 Algerians were rescued. During the final rescue mission on Saturday by the Algerian military, seven hostages and 11 Islamist fighters were killed.
As the foreigners taken hostage at the plant came from many different countries, world leaders and diplomats urgently sought to account for their citizens. Colombia, Romania and France each lost at least one citizen. Three Americans, six Britons, five Norwegians and six Filipinos are confirmed dead or missing. Japan has at least seven nationals unaccounted for. Seven of the dead have not been identified. During Saturday’s Algerian assault on the plant, two Americans, two Germans and one Portuguese were rescued. In the confusion and chaos of this crisis, the numbers of those missing and dead are bound to fluctuate.
Initially, the terrorists attacked a bus carrying foreign workers at the gas facility. They were well-equipped with machine guns, AK-47 rifles and rocket launchers. According to early accounts from survivors, many of the foreigners were gagged and blindfolded and had explosives strapped onto them. Some hid themselves from the kidnappers, hoping for the best but expecting the worst. A few hostages escaped amidst the chaos of the crisis.
Survivors also said that not all of the kidnappers were Algerian, with conflicting reports of the captors originating from nearby Niger, Libya or even Syria. One terrorist reportedly spoke perfect English and facilitated communication between the hostages and their captors.
The militant group responsible for the attack reportedly attempted to negotiate a prisoner-exchange with the United States, but was rejected immediately by the State Department.
The Algerian military moved swiftly on Thursday to try to dislodge the terrorists from their positions. The move prompted concerns from other world leaders, who complained of a lack of consultation given the vulnerability of their citizens. Nevertheless, no country outwardly criticized the Algerian intervention.
“When there is a hostage-taking with so many people involved and such coldly determined terrorists […] a country such as Algeria has had […] the most appropriate responses because there could be no negotiations,” said French President François Holland, praising the Algerian government after the crisis ended.
Defense Secretary of the United Kingdom Philip Hammond said he was still “pressing the Algerians for details on the exact situation.”
Algeria is an Arabic-speaking country in West Africa that gained its independence from France in 1962. Large swaths of the country lie within the Sahara Desert. After the secession of South Sudan in 2011, Algeria became the largest nation in Africa. Until the Arab Spring, the country had been under a state of emergency since the start of a civil war in the 1990’s.
