1000 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(01/17/13 5:44pm)
The garage sits on the edge of the fields to the west of campus along Rte. 125. “Henry” the tractor is parked inside. The years have only slightly tarnished the fire-truck red paint job on the 1950’s Ford 8N. It was the top selling tractor in North America in its day, the “tractor that replaced the horse.”
The tractor was originally repurposed to run on hydrogen gas fuel in the spring of 2008. It was the brain-child of Dick Catlin ’56, a businessman, and Mark Benz ’56, a former engineer with General Electric. They worked with four students over the course of the 2008 spring semester to develop a tractor engine to run on gaseous rather than liquid fuel. Associate Professor of Physics Noah Graham was on board as an advisor.
“I act as a sounding board,” Graham said. “Each week the team would present to me, and I’d give them feedback, try to find holes in their proposals, help them clarify their ideas.”
Last year, after a four year hiatus from the project, a Winter Term class took the 2008 product – an engine that would turn over with hydrogen fuel and run roughly on propane gas – and further refined it with the assistance of mechanics at Champlain Valley Equipment in Middlebury. But one of the major problems with hydrogen is storage and accessibility. The initial thinking was that farmers could generate their own hydrogen fuel using a windmill to generate the energy necessary to split water. They would then use the hydrogen fuel to power their tractors. But a large tank of hydrogen would only run the tractor for about 20 minutes. So this year’s team has begun to explore an alternative fuel: methane.
Henry Philip ’13, a Physics major who has been working on the project for the past year and heads up the student team, explains that “the drive to use methane over hydrogen is mostly practical. How could a farmer get the fuel? They could make hydrogen. But they already have access to methane. What we’re trying to do is create a tractor where the farmer has complete control over the fuel supply and its price.”
Numerous dairy farmers around Addison County already use manure digesters to convert cow manure into fertilizer. A product of this process is methane gas. Some farmers burn the methane to generate electricity that they pump back into the grid. But could it be used as a viable fuel for farm vehicles, instead?
That’s what Benz, Catlin, Philip and seven other students are working to determine this Winter Term in INTD 1138: Methane as an Alternative Fuel for Agricultural and Transportation Applications. The challenges are two-fold. First, they are struggling with the fuel delivery system. According to Philip, each fuel injector (of which there are two) delivers fuel to two cylinders in the four-cylinder engine. Ensuring equal fuel levels in each cylinder has proved to be a headache. The timing is also difficult. The team is working to optimize engine performance by finding the right balance of methane fuel and air. A huge component of that is determining how much time each fuel injector should be open, letting methane into the cylinder.
The other problem with methane fuel is storage. The sizable tank currently strapped to the back of the tractor could run the tractor for an hour, estimates Philip. But ideally, the tractor could run for much longer on a single tank.
“It’s borderline practical to compress the methane and run [the tractor] off of compressed methane,” he said. “There’s some potential in liquid storage, but an issue is the amount of energy it takes to pressurize methane to keep it in liquid form. Another potential alternative is storing it on metal hydride — storing the gas molecules on a metal that are released when heated. The Department of Energy has gotten the concept to work with hydrogen. But not yet with methane.”
So for now, compression seems to be the best bet.
But the potential benefits — both economic and environmental — of a methane-burning tractor are well worth the effort of trying to solve these problems. If dairy farmers could use methane extracted from their own cow’s manure, they would cut fuel costs and have complete control over their fuel supply; an attractive option. Furthermore, the EPA estimates that the global warming potential (GWP) of methane is over twenty times greater than that of CO2 when not burnt as a fuel. And on the flip side, methane produces less CO2 when combusted than conventional diesel or gasoline fuels. By burning the methane, the farmers directly reduce their atmospheric impact on multiple levels.
The class of eight — first years and seniors, English and Physics majors — spent the first week of this winter term intimately acquainting themselves with the inner workings of the tractor. They are dedicating this week to examining the practicality of methane and natural gas as a fuel source. Next week, they’ll spend time on farms around Addison Country asking the question: how can this be feasible for local farmers?
“We’re trying to improve the economics and sustainability of farming. What’s great about the methane is that it brings [the fuel supply] back to Addison County, back to Middlebury,” said Philip.
By the end of Winter Term, the class hopes to have determined whether it is feasible for dairy farmers to fuel their tractors with methane produced from manure. In the future the Green Engineers, a student group on campus, hopes to continue to refine this process with the hope of helping develop methods for farmers in Addison County to become more environmentally and economically sustainable.
(01/17/13 1:11am)
Research conducted by Associate Professor of Psychology Matthew Kimble found that female undergraduates who study abroad are significantly more likely to experience rape and other types of sexual assault than women who remain on campus. Specifically, Kimble’s study found that women abroad are over four times more likely to experience nonconsensual sexual contact, such as groping, over three times more likely to experience attempted sexual assault and are five times more likely to experience completed sexual assault, or rape.
The study, conducted in 2009, consisted of a survey filled out by 218 junior and senior females at the College who had studied abroad within the previous two academic years. Of the 218 women, 83 reported having some sort of an unwanted sexual experience while abroad, 60 reported at least one incident of unwanted touching, 13 reported an attempted sexual assault — either oral, anal or vaginal — and 10 women reported completed sexual assault.
Additionally, Kimble’s study found that the majority of any type of sexual assault was done not by students, but by non-student local residents, who accounted for 86.8 percent of nonconsensual sexual contact. The remainder was done by either fellow students from the study abroad program or local resident students. Similar percentages were found for attempted sexual assault (77.8 percent) and completed sexual assault (67.7 percent).
The initial research only surveyed female students, as women are statistically more likely to experience sexual assault than men, but Kimble said the samples at Middlebury and Bucknell now include men and have been expanded to include other types of trauma, such as accidents or natural disasters.
Kimble’s research, first published in Oct. 2012 in the journal Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy, began in 2009 when Professor of Psychology at Bucknell University William Flack approached him about collaborating on research analyzing sexual assault on students while they studied abroad. Flack conducted a tandem study at Bucknell, which found results comparable to Kimble’s.
Kimble and Flack’s study was printed at a critical moment; sexual assault has become increasingly relevant as a topic of discussion on campuses across America, particularly in the aftermath of a controversial publication this past fall in which an Amherst student recounted her experience with sexual assault on campus and the way in which the situation was handled by her college’s administration.
Kimble said that he believes this research is part of a much larger discussion addressing the issue of sexual assault on college campuses and abroad.
“This work falls within the broader context of the body of work over the years that has emphasized the prevalence of sexual assault on women and the extent to which the rates are typically higher than what people would guess, largely because it is crime that tends to go unreported,” wrote Kimble in an email.
Vice President of Language Schools, Schools Abroad and Graduate Programs and Professor of German Michael Geisler is currently grappling with this exact issue of unreported incidents. While Kimble’s study found that 10 women reported cases of rape, Geisler cited that only one official report of sexual assault has been made to the College in the last three or four years, perhaps even longer.
“This study has actually been very helpful in telling us that there is this gap between what students have reported and what they have experienced,” said Geisler.
Currently, the College’s study abroad office dedicates a section of its handbook — available online and distributed in hard copy to all students going abroad — to sexual assault and harassment. Directors on campus also speak with students about sexual assault during a pre-orientation meeting, and directors of the programs abroad speak with students about sexual assault again during an orientation once students arrive in their respective countries.
According to Associate Dean for Judicial Affairs and Student Life Karen Guttentag, Kimble first shared his preliminary research with her and the study abroad staff last summer. Since then, Geisler said the College has been working on various ways to address the issue of sexual assault abroad and minimize the discrepancy between reported cases and students’ actual experiences.
Some options that Geisler said the study abroad office has been considering and will most likely implement in the near future aim to put tighter regulations on attending the pre-orientation meeting. While the meeting is currently mandatory, Geisler said many students still do not attend it due to other commitments. In the future, students may not be allowed to go abroad until they attend the pre-orientation meeting. Another plan is to bring in local students to in-country orientations to give abroad students a more authentic sense of how to conduct themselves in certain scenarios that could get them into trouble. Lastly, Geisler said that the study abroad office is thinking of revamping their general warning on sexual harassment and sexual assault in their handbook to become a country-specific warning, in order to address varying cultural cues and customs that students should be aware of more clearly.
Guttentag, who is also the head of the Sexual Assault Oversight Committee (SAOC) at the College, deals with similar difficulties in getting students to report cases of sexual harassment or sexual assault. She said that while there are many reasons that students may pause before reporting cases while on campus, these are probably compounded by other factors when students experience sexual assault abroad.
“There are certainly many factors that play into a student’s decision to report sexual assault in general, including fear of backlash, stigma, self-blame, an attempt to cope by minimizing the significance of the assault and an inability at the time of the incident to recognize it as an assault,” wrote Guttentag in an email. “When we consider an assault that occurs during a study abroad program, I can imagine that several additional factors might come into play.”
While the study abroad office is trying to work to encourage students to feel comfortable reporting cases of sexual assault despite these factors, Kimble and Flack are now working to identify the elements that may lend themselves to the increase in cases of sexual assault while abroad.
Kimble said that at the start of their research, he and Flack “hypothesized that the risk might be higher while abroad because of factors such as the lack of familiarity with the culture, limited fluency in the language and legal access to alcohol for the first time.”
Kimble admitted that the goal of the initial study was not to identify the risk factors, but he said that there were some noticeable trends in the information he received. The first was that fluency did not seem to have an effect on whether or not students did or did not experience sexual assault. Kimble used a self-rated measure of fluency on his survey and found that it did not differ among students that experienced any type of sexual assault. Kimble wrote in his study that he would need a larger sample size in order to confidently state that fluency plays no role in the risk of sexual assault.
One factor that does appear to play a large role in the risk of sexual assault is based on the region students visited. Kimble’s study was too small to assess country-specific risk, but he did find that all regions except for English-speaking Europe and Australia posed additional risk for sexual assault. In addition, the Americas and Africa had the most significant increases in the more severe forms of sexual assault. Risk for completed sexual assault was higher in the Americas than any other region.
Finally, Kimble stated that factors that often play into higher risk for new college first-years while on campus may also result in higher risk while abroad: “lack of familiarity with local culture, legal access to alcohol and being targeted by perpetrators who see new students as vulnerable.”
Kimble said that he and Flack “hope the work leads to better prevention strategies, in part by increasing awareness of the possibility of these types of experiences while studying abroad.”
Geisler has been using the research for just that purpose, and his goal now is to get more students to report incidents of sexual assault.
“The more we know about the kinds of situations where this happens, the more we can anticipate and warn other students about it,” said Geisler. “That’s why we need that data, and so if students could help us by reporting this in whatever way they see fit, that would be really wonderful. The directors are trained in dealing with these kinds of situations, the counseling center is standing by to help out, but we need to know what’s going on.”
(01/17/13 12:49am)
The Imperfectionists, the bold debut novel from Tom Rachman, appears to be a story about a failing English language newspaper in Rome, destined to fade away like so many other print publications in the 21st century.
At second glance, it becomes apparent that the work is really about people, and as the title suggests, flawed people.
The novel is actually a collection of 11 short stories, linked through the newspaper, but also capable of standing on their own as distinct pieces of short fiction. Rachman had no lack of inspiration, working for newspapers in eight countries around the world before beginning his fiction career.
The Imperfectionists is steeped with commentaries on staff hierarchies, struggles to obtain proper funding and the pressure reporters face to consistently find compelling and marketable content.
One freelance writer discovers that the paper no longer requests quality in stories, but shock factor. “You know our money problems, Lloyd. We’re only buying freelance stuff that’s jaw-dropping these days. Terrorism, nuclear Iran, resurgent Russia — that kind of thing. Anything else we basically take from the wires. It’s a money thing, not about you.”
Exploring the complicated world of newspaper production in modern times, Rachman allows the reader to watch the slow decline of the publication through the perspectives of characters from every area of the staff, and this is where the power of the novel lies.
The characters are charming, frustrating and incredibly real.
From the young publisher who is only capable of having a conversation with his dog, to the reporter so desperate for a story that he blatantly copies from other papers, to the reader who insists on reading every daily edition of the paper cover to cover, the quirks and struggles of the characters involved with the newspaper are what make the novel shine.
They manipulate, make mistakes and are sometimes blind to reality, much like people we all know.
There is something of everyone in at least one of the characters, whether the reader likes to admit it or not.
Frequently, the characters make decisions so disgusting that they are tattooed in the reader’s mind for days.
Are these shocking behaviors simply effective fictional plot developments to lure the reader, or brilliant portrayals of real human characteristics?
Readers are forced to realize that people have imperfections, little cracks in carefully crafted facades that may never be seen by the outside world.
Some of the stories are weak and may have been better left out, like the stereotypical editor-in-chief who has neglected her personal life for work, or the old, single copy editor who is still the lowest copy editor at the paper because of her painful insecurities.
These scenarios have been portrayed countless times before and offer no original ideas about human nature.
Much preferred is the story about the business reporter who is so desperate for love that she allows a robber into her life, permitting him to live in her apartment and proud of herself for finally having a “boyfriend,” never mind that her possessions seem to frequently go missing.
This originality is what really captures the desperations of the characters, who are all fundamentally longing for something, whether it is love, success or a new start.
Rachman’s prose is extremely readable, with a simplistic, no frills style that drags in readers. “If history has taught us anything,” Arthur muses, “it is that men with mustaches must never achieve positions of power.”
The novel is filled with the kind of sentences that beg to be read repeatedly and marveled at for sheer individual power, like “They had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words provided it didn’t include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.”
Darkly humorous and insightful, each word is necessary and carefully chosen. The work is so technically flawless, with prose, structure and human analysis perfectly interlocking, that it is hard to believe the author is only 35.
The Imperfectionists is a novel about individual lives, and how one small newspaper influences so many.
It makes fun of the modern media, the way we treat each other and how often we don’t see the things that are right in front of us.
Though some of the stories are more worthy than others, it is still an eye-opening journey to trace the history of a small paper through a prism of views.
A film version of The Imperfectionists is expected in theaters in late 2013, produced by Brad Pitt.
Since the original publication of the novel in 2010, Rachman has written multiple short stories, and a new novel is expected in the spring of 2014.
Recommendation: If you need action or a fast-moving plot in a novel, this is not for you, but if you’re willing to delve into characters, read The Imperfectionists now.
(12/09/12 2:54am)
Middlebury's International Students Organization recently published its inaugural issue of Translingual, a biannual journal featuring photographs from around the world and writings in nine different languages (in addition to the English translations). Editor-in-chief Winnie Yeung '15 explains, "[O]utside of language classes, we recognize a need on campus for a platform for experimentation, imagination, and expression in different languages ... With the plethora of of writing and artwork, not only will you find a variety of styles, but also a variety of perspectives."
(12/08/12 9:10pm)
Middlebury College employs several in-residence professionals. Whether it’s a scholar-in-residence or an artist-in-residence, these people function as resources for the students and other faculty. Writer-in-Residence Julia Alvarez, described these professionals as people with their feet in two worlds, one in the professional world and one in the academic world. These professionals offer their expertise in their fields to students and also help put Middlebury on the non-academic map. Francois Clemmons greatly contributes to the College’s programs in the arts. Jeffrey Lunstead, a long-time diplomat in South Asia, brings real experience to the classroom setting. Sue Halpern, a writer in narrative journalism, spearheads the College’s journalism fellowships and offers her real world experience in an ever-important field. These professionals “in-residence” work both on and off campus to help the College offer the resources necessary to be an institution of the highest caliber.
Jeffrey Lunstead:
Jeffrey Lunstead brings a different element to the international and global studies department — years of experience in the Foreign service.
Before coming to the College to teach a winter term course in January of 2008, Lunstead spent 29 years as a dedicated Foreign Service officer, living and working in
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia. Additionally, Lunstead acted as the ambassador to Sri Lanka and Maldives from 2003 to 2006.
After many years abroad, Lunstead decided it was time to return to his original career plan and work as an educator.
“I had actually thought I was going to go into teaching, but I didn’t have a job right [when I graduated],” said Lunstead. “I got a job offer from the Foreign Services right at that moment, so I thought I’d try that for a while. And 29 years later, I thought maybe I would go back to my Plan A.”
Lunstead now teaches one course per semester in the international studies and political science departments, and most of his courses deal with his specialty — South Asia. In addition to teaching, Lunstead also advises students who are interested in careers in international relations and others who are working to set up seminars or symposiums. He also works with the Career Service Office, giving talks on international careers to students interested in working overseas or in international affairs in the United States.
Lunstead was originally attracted to the position at Middlebury for his familiarity with the area. His family has vacationed in the Adirondacks for many years. Other than Middlebury’s ideal location, Lunstead was interested in the importance that the College places on global perspectives.
“Middlebury is a funny place,” said Lunstead. “We have this small liberal arts college in rural Vermont with this very strong international emphasis, in terms of international students, students who study languages and students who study abroad.”
To expand upon his experiences, Lunstead connects his classes to the real world using simulations and role-playing exercises. For example, students can play out different scenarios during class by taking on the role of Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Through these kinds of hands on learning experiences, Lunstead believes that his experience can bring a new frame of mind to the classroom.
“Both enjoy it because it’s a different perspective on the thing that they’re studying,” said Lunstead.
As a diplomat-in-residence, Lunstead’s position is based on “term appointment,” which means that his length of stay is an agreement between him and the College. Currently, Lunstead is scheduled to remain at Middlebury for another three years. Lunstead wants to continue teaching down the road in hopes of sharing his interests and experience with future students.
“I love interacting with the students here because I find them not only smart, because everyone knows that Middlebury students are smart, but [additionally] students are also extremely engaged and interested in finding out about the world,” said Lunstead. “I love South Asia … and the opportunity to [educate] other people so that they can also be interested is a great opportunity.”
Francois Clemmons:
Francois Clemmons first came to Middlebury in 1980, and observed “the leaves were so beautiful. The weather was so beautiful, and I walked and I thought this is like a magic kingdom. I just love it.”
In the 15 years that Clemmons has been artist-in-residence, he has been given generally free reign to define his position.
“The College really doesn’t tell me what to do,” explained Clemmons. “I make a chronology of what I’ve done throughout the year. And I’ll never forget Robert Shine was the Dean of the Faculty and I had a meeting with him and he said [upon seeing the chronology] ‘if it aint broke, we’re not going to fix it.’”
Clemmons has been prolific with his involvement in the school. Some of his long-standing contributions include teaching a winter term course titled “American Negro Spirituals,” popular among a less-likely musical crowd of first-years and athletes. Another project of his is the Martin Luther King Spiritual Choir, which developed out of the American Negro Spirituals course.
“I’ve got this rag-tag group choir,” said Clemmons, “… through [which] I like to encourage people who are not musicians to have a musical experience before they graduate from Middlebury College. Ninety percent of the kids who sing with me don’t read music, they’re introverts … and they come and I encourage them, I nurture them … to try and help them to contact that deep emotional part of themselves that will allow them to sing.”
The flexibility of Clemmons’s position allows him to move among major departments and share his expertise across various fields of study — from the dance department to literature programs.
“[The College has] just been so receptive, I’ve explored parts of my personality that I don’t think I would have done in New York City.”
Clemmons is also responsible for the conception of the annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration, which he delights in, as a lover of Irish music and musicians such as world-renowned Irish-tenor John McCormack.
“I don’t think if I lived in New York they would tolerate an openly-gay black man doing a St. Patrick’s Day celebration,” said Clemmons. “They wouldn’t! … But here in Vermont they let me do it. And I think that’s a huge honor that no one is saying you couldn’t do that because you’re not Irish and you’re black. …They understand that I’m doing it because I love Irish music.”
One of Clemmons favorite undertakings has been singing the national anthem at basketball games.
“I am so patriotic and a lot of the boys are in my class,” said Clemmons. “I have a legacy that goes back 10 to 12 years of [supporting] basketball players.”
However, after years of dedication to the school and community, Clemmons has made the decision to retire at they end of the academic year — to slow down, finish his autobiography (already at an unedited 700+ pages) and of course, continue enjoying a life of music.
“The College has been very generous to me all the years that I’ve been here,” said Clemmons. “I hope to continue when I retire to be a part of the College.”
Sue Halpern:
Sue Halpern came to Middlebury seeking a balance between her career as a writer and her life as an academic.
Halpern is a published writer who focuses on “narratives of all forms.” Her most recent book, Can’t Remember What I Forgot, came out in 2012. The book chronicles Halpern’s exploration of the world of modern memory science and neurology.
At the College, Halpern is a member of the department of English and American literatures.
“I was an academic in an earlier life. I realized that I wanted to focus on writing and not so much on being an academic. Then for a while I didn’t do any teaching and I wasn’t affiliated with any academic institution,” she said.
Since coming to Middlebury, Halpern has been very active in promoting narrative journalism at the College. In 2003, Halpern helped to create Meet the Press, a program which invites journalists to give lectures at the College.
“[Meet the Press] brings journalists into our midst and lets us have a go at them to help us understand what they’re doing in the world,” Halpern said.
Halpern also helped create the Middlebury Fellowships in Narrative Journalism in 2008 along with Matt Jennings, editor of Middlebury Magazine. This program produces the “How did you get here?” audio slideshow series, which recounts students’ pre-Middlebury histories.
Halpern mentioned that she enjoys collaborating with students on this and other projects.
She said that she thinks Middlebury students are “very adventurous both intellectually and academically. They’re really willing to try new stuff; they want to be entrepreneurial and be out in the world. I find that really refreshing.”
Halpern frequently engages with students, providing students interested in narrative journalism and storytelling in general with an outlet for their interest.
“Right now I’m working with a group of students on ... producing podcasts for a project that I’m working on for the New York Review of Books,” she said. “We read books together and talk about them and do background work on them and then we interview the authors. We then do digital editing and make audio slideshows.”
Halpern also mentors students participating in independent study projects.
Halpern’s husband is Bill McKibben, an environmental author and activist who also works as a scholar-in-residence. Halpern said that while she and her husband both enjoy working at Middlebury, the divergent nature of their work doesn’t allow for many opportunities to collaborate academically.
Overall, Halpern said that her experience working at the College has been immensely positive.
“It’s a great place to be for all sorts of reasons,” Halpern said.
“The facilities are unparalleled, [and] the faculty is really welcoming. People here are doing interesting work, and they’re working collaboratively as well,” she said.
“Then you’ve got this incredible student energy as well, which I think is just remarkable.”
Julia Alvarez:
Julia Alvarez first set her eyes on the green mountain state when she came here in the summer of 1969 to attend the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference after winning a poetry prize at Connecticut College for Women.
“I came up to Breadloaf and fell in love with the place,” said Alvarez. After attending the conference Alzarez decided that she had to transfer to the College.
“I walked into the admissions office and I said I have to come here,” she said.
Her enthusiasm threw the admissions officer at the time for a loop. He tried to tell her there was a whole process to which she had to apply to transfer.
After hearing this, Alvarez responded, “I’ll just move to town and work until I can get in.”
With her persistent attitude, Alvarez received a call a week later and enrolled in the College. Alvarez explained that she loved every minute of her time at the College, but that the teachers were really what made the difference in her undergraduate education.
“Excellent teachers really nurtured what I called my calling,” said Alvarez. The calling to which she refers is writing, especially poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction.
“I call myself a migrant poet,” said Alvarez, who earlier in her career worked as a teacher, travelling from place to place teaching whenever she could and always writing. When Alvarez got a call from the College asking about whether she would want to have a temporary teaching position at the College for one year she immediately said yes. Her one-year gig quickly turned into a 10-year commitment, and soon after that she was being considered for tenure.
The one problem with granting Alvarez tenure was that she needed to have published work in order to be considered. Alvarez quickly compiled her writing and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents was published in 1991.
“I got tenure and I thought of this as my tenure book,” she said. Yet, with the great success of Garcia Girls, Alvarez became overwhelmed with the great task of both teaching and writing.
“I gave up tenure to be a full-time writer,” she said, but I had also fallen in love with the classroom.” Wanting to remain involved with the College, Alvarez worked with the administration to create a role for her on campus. The College’s only writer-in-residence, Alvarez expressed how grateful she is to the College for being so accommodating.
“I really get a lot out of it because it gives me a community that keeps me thinking and learning and growing,” she sad. Alvarez just finished her first creative non-fiction book, A Wedding in Haiti.
“I’m really interest in creative non-fiction. The older I get, the world becomes more and more baffling,” said Alvarez.
Alvarez enjoys remaining connected to the College and acts as the adviser to the Alianza student group and is also a thesis adviser as well. Alvarez credits the College with keeping her constantly engaged and continues to ask questions about the nature of her work.
“The quandary now for me as a writer is, what is the role of the storyteller in the circle of transformative change?”
LAUREN DAVIDSON, MICHELLE SMOLER, and JOSH KRUSKAL contributed to this report.
(12/05/12 6:42pm)
On Tuesday, Dec. 5 President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz sent the following email to students, faculty and staff with a subject heading, "On the College's Endowment":
This fall, several student groups on campus have raised questions surrounding the College’s endowment, specifically with regard to holdings related to fossil fuels. One group, the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI), has been meeting regularly with Patrick Norton, the College’s Vice President for Finance and Treasurer, and one of its members attends Investment Committee meetings of the Board of Trustees. Other groups, some part of a national movement on college campuses, have also engaged the College administration and community, hoping to learn more about the College’s endowment, how it is invested, and whether we should divest of our investments in fossil fuel companies.
As an academic institution, the College administration and the Board of Trustees are interested in engaging our students’ interest in the endowment. Such engagement, however, must be serious and be based in responsible inquiry and research. It must also be respectful and inclusive of all opinions. A look at divestment must include the consequences, both pro and con, of such a direction, including how likely it will be to achieve the hoped-for results and what the implications might be for the College, for faculty, staff, and individual students.
With input from several groups on campus, including ACSRI, we will set up and host panel discussions with experts in endowment management and divestment. It will include, for example, representatives from the firm that manages our endowment (Investure), veteran investment managers, and our own Scholar-in-Residence, Bill McKibben.
The management of Middlebury’s endowment is complex and has evolved over time. We are part of a consortium with other colleges and foundations whose pooled resources are invested in a number of “fund-of-funds” and therefore the College is very limited in either selecting or deleting any particular investment within its overall portfolio. Despite such limitations, the Investment Committee, the Administration, and Investure have been working with ACSRI to ensure that socially responsible investing is discussed and reviewed as a regular and ongoing part of the investment process. We have instructed Investure and the managers they engage to follow the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) principles that align investors with broader objectives of one’s mission and society at-large.
At the same time, the primary fiduciary responsibility of our investment committee is to maximize its investment returns to support vital programs including financial aid and staff and faculty compensation, while managing risk. Currently, the endowment finances approximately 20 percent of the College’s annual operating cost —approximately $50 million this past year. It is vitally important to understand both the risks and rewards of one’s investment decisions as we are the stewards not only of the endowment for the current generation of Middlebury students, faculty, and staff, but for future generations as well.
At present, approximately 3.6 percent of the College’s $900 million endowment is directly invested in companies related to fossil fuels. For those interested in the amount directly invested in defense and arms manufacturing, the share of our endowment in those companies is less than 1 percent—approximately 0.6 percent. I have included an explanatory note at the end of this communication to provide information on the methodology used to determine these percentages. I encourage you to contact Patrick Norton if you have any questions about this methodology or about the College’s endowment.
As President Liebowitz indicated, the email ended with a note on the utilized methodology:
Investure Managed Funds
Data on investments in fossil fuel and arms for Investure-managed funds (the “Investure Funds’) were provided by Investure, LLC (“Investure”) to Middlebury College upon request and only covers the underlying long holdings of the Investure Funds in those circumstances when information was available as described below. This information is presented on a lagged-basis, and does not include any underlying holdings in a client’s legacy fund portfolio. Moreover, this information is not based on a comprehensive review but rather is based solely on available information on the underlying long positions of the Investure Funds of which Investure has actual knowledge from third-party managers and/or reporting on the exposure of those underlying positions.
As a result, underlying positions may be missing from this analysis that, if included, could be material to an understanding of the College’s portfolio’s underlying positions in fossil fuels and arms. In those cases where Investure had actual knowledge of underlying holdings from managers and/or reporting on an Investure Fund’s exposure, Investure utilized a combination of third-party classifications, at its discretion, including but not limited to certain Standard Industrial Codes and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, to help identify investments in fossil fuel and arms companies. This information is solely for informational purposes, is not complete, and does not contain material information about the Investure Funds and a client’s portfolio. This information should not be relied upon in any way in making an investment decision. Investure reserves the right to make changes in a client’s portfolio at any time and Investure is under no obligation to update the estimated information included herein. With the aforementioned in mind, of the Investure Funds approximately 3.75% is invested in fossil fuels and 0.8% is invested in arms.
Non-Investure Funds (“Legacy Funds”)
For its Legacy Funds the College used the exact methodology to determine percentages invested in fossil fuels and arms as is described above for the Investure Managed Funds. With the aforementioned in mind, of the Legacy Funds approximately 3.2% is invested in fossil fuels and 0.1% is invested in arms.
Students received a forwarded version of the original email after "the all students address fell off." In what one can only assume to be a quip about the Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee's (DLWC) hoax email, Liebowitz continued, "I guess I needed to get permission."
Media outlets quickly picked up the story, with Seven Days posting:
While the announcement isn't, by any means, a firm commitment to divest, the email sparked encouragement among students on campus campaigning for divestment. The divestment movement is spreading to college campuses across the country as climate activist and Vermont resident Bill McKibben headlines a bus tour to encourage schools, churches and foundations to strip their endowment funds of investments in the 200 top fossil fuel companies. McKibben told Seven Days last month that while divestment won't financially cripple the powerful industry, it could represent an "inherently moral call, saying if it’s wrong to wreck the climate, it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage."
McKibben, who also serves as a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, responded to Liebowitz's email on Tuesday with a statement through his environmental group 350.org. "President Liebowitz used just the right tone and took precisely the right step," McKibben's statement read. "It won't be easy to divest, but I have no doubt that Middlebury — home of the first environmental studies dept in the nation — will do the right thing in the right way. It makes me proud to be a Panther."
The article continued with student reactions:
It's a step in the right direction, says Greta Neubauer, a junior history major at the college from Wisconsin. Neubauer is part of a new campus group called "Divest For Our Future" that has been pushing for divestment this fall. The group is asking the board of trustees to release a statement that they recognize divestment as a priority, and are working toward that goal.
"We think that this is really an unprecedented opportunity for Middlebury to lead in this movement," says Neubauer, citing the college's early creation of an environmental studies program and its pledge for carbon neutrality as previous examples of leadership. "We really hope that they continue in that leadership role, and recognize that this is a chance to do something exciting ... and be seen as a leader in a movement that could potentially create real change."
Sophomore Teddy Smyth of Georgia, an environmental studies major, applauded the college for unveiling some concrete endowment numbers. While he and Neubauer both admitted that actual divestment would likely be a slow process, he says the fact that the administration is talking about this "is a huge first step."
VT Digger featured another quote by Neubauer '14.5:
“We are excited to see the college commit to continuing the conversation about divestment begun this fall,” said Greta Neubauer, one of the organizers of Divest for Our Future, a student group on campus. “We are also appreciative of the work they have done to provide greater transparency and believe that this is a positive step. “We look forward to continuing this community-wide dialogue and working to make fossil fuel divestment a reality at Middlebury.”
The Montpelier-based online publication also discussed the larger impact of President Liebowitz's statement:
The Middlebury announcement could have ramifications beyond the college because the college’s endowment is managed by Investure, a firm that also helps manage the endowments of a number of other colleges, including Trinity College, Smith College, Barnard College, and major foundations, such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Carnegie Endowment. Students at Middlebury have already connected with students at other Investure managed schools to discuss how to work together to push the firm in a more sustainable direction.
“Every college in the country should be, at least as transparent as Middlebury about how much money they have wrapped up in the fossil fuel industry,” said Dan Apfel, Executive Director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition. “Students deserve to know how much of their education is being paid for by companies that are wrecking the planet.”
The announcement will also help build momentum for other fossil fuel divestment campaigns across the state of Vermont. This November, students at the University of Vermont asked their board of trustees to divest its $346 million endowment from the oil industry. The Vermont Public Interest Research group is currently analyzing what percentage of Vermont’s pension fund is invested in fossil fuel companies. Two state legislators, Rep. Kesha Ram (D-Burlington) and state Sen.-elect Chris Bray (D-Addison) — who both serve on the UVM board of trustees — are currently discussing divestment policies with the State Treasurer’s office.
The Burlington Free Press and Middblog commented on the announcement. On Wednesday, Middblog continued their coverage through interviewing Student Liaison to the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees Ben Chute '13.5 and Nathan Arnosti '13 of ACSRI. Chute and Arnosti provided some explanation for the more complicated aspects of the announcement:
MiddBlog: 3% of our endowment invested in fossil fuels, and less than 1% in weapons industries doesn’t sound like a lot to me. Is it less than you guys expected too? On the other hand, does that mean it will be more feasible to divest such a small part of our endowment? Or is it actually not that small?
Arnosti: I was also pleased to see that, according to Investure’s estimates, only 3.6% of Middlebury’s endowment is directly invested in fossil fuels, and .6% is directly invested in defense and arms manufacturing. These figures, certainly at the low end of SRI’s estimates, suggest that Middlebury’s endowment is not solely reliant on the fossil fuel industry for financial returns. Though our investments are spread across many vehicles – thus complicating the picture significantly – divestment from fossil fuels is more feasible when it comprises 3.6% of our portfolio than it would be with a larger percentage of these investments. That said, 3.6% is not trivial: with a $900 million endowment, that equates to around $32 million of investments in fossil fuels.
MiddBlog: Can you translate all the jargon at the end of his email into plain English? Where exactly do these statistics come from and what do they reflect? Are they showing the whole picture in your opinion?
Arnosti: To clarify the specifics of Investure’s reporting, Investure states that they have used “available information” from their many investments, meaning that these figures are approximated. It would be helpful to know what percentage of Investure’s investments were included in this approximation, as that would better indicate the potential margin of error. Also, it is important to note that these figures refer only to direct investments in fossil fuels and defense manufacturing. Thus, while Exxon Mobile might count as part of the 3.6%, a company that manufactures machinery for offshore oil rigs might not. Where we, as a community, draw the line with these industries is a crucial topic of discussion.
The New York Times also published an article about both divestment and McKibben, but made no mention of Middlebury or President Liebowitz's announcement.
Advocacy groups and activists similarly discussed the announcement. "Go Fossil Free," a project coordinated by a coalition of groups including 350.0rg, Energy Action Coalition, Responsible Endowments Coalition, the Sierra Student Coalition and As You Sow, reblogged VT Digger's summary. In the meantime, the DLWC also released a statement on their blog:
Liebowitz confirmed that Middlebury currently has at least $6 million and $32 million invested in industries of violence and environmental degradation respectively. Members of the College are working to reduce those numbers to zero, which would put Middlebury at the front of the pack in the growing national student movement calling for ethically invested endowments.
“One dollar invested in death, is one dollar too many,” says Tim Schornak of the Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee (DLWC), an organization of Middlebury students, faculty, parents and alumni working to align Middlebury’s endowment practices with its professed values.
Last October, the DLWC made national headlines for releasing a satirical press release claiming the College had chosen to divest from war in honor of the Dalai Lama’s visit to campus. Their action led the Middlebury College community to embrace the idea that investing in violence and environmental destruction is no joke. Alumni are weighing in with their agreement, pledging not to give a dollar more to the College until it does not go to war. Liebowitz’s remarks indicate that such a day may not be so far off.
(12/05/12 4:18pm)
Religious vocations used to be a big deal at this school. At the beginning of the 1800s, the majority of Middlebury graduates became ministers, who were required to read the Greeks and probably had to wash their own dinner dishes. I don’t blame us for forgetting these origins — we were a little caught up creating gender, racial and socioeconomic diversity, figuring out how to accommodate the ice-skaters, the oboe-players and the aspiring architecture-neuroscience majors. These are all good things. I am fully for combating bigotry and fostering equal opportunity. But I want to know where the clergy went. When did Midd say goodbye to all its chaste, God-fearing, Latin-learned dudes?
To most of us here today, a religious vocation sounds like the last absolute call on earth we would hear. But education, at its earliest, was not about figuring out what color your parachute was. It was largely about the cultivation of self-discipline.
My friend Ian said something a couple weeks ago that is still rocking my brain — that essentially, our educations at Middlebury are defined by how we choose to spend our time. The liberal arts system enables and complicates this simple sort of characterization, as it creates the space and opportunity for myriad different choices and establishes systems to make the process and consequences of those decisions act as another kind of educational experience. Now we have more vocations than doctor, lawyer or minister to choose from, but we also have to cooperate with the negotiations of a community based on more than one canon and learn the bureaucratic intricacies that continue post-grad. But the theory is eye-glaze-inducing until you apply it to your personal situation.
Ian’s example was the recent episodes of “activism” on campus. One way to distill those students’ activities — or the way they choose to spend their time — is to reframe their self-proclaimed protest as their “education in activism.” We could envision the same for people who engage in all kinds of extracurriculars, formal and deliberately informal. The members of WRMC are educated in audio production and sexy radio voices. The yoga-practitioners are educated in flexibility and energetic harmony. The guy who crafts the most insightful advice for a pair of feuding housemates? An education in peer mediation. All these different, unofficial disciplines are part of the project of learning how to be a human being. It’s an education in the field of self.
We have to respect the fact that everyone is straining to hear a vocational call. We can disagree on what is a useful way to spend our time, but we can’t go condemning anyone for getting it wrong. In college, the activists may throw a tasteless protest. The girl who wants to be a publicity agent may throw a terrible party. But it’s generally okay, because the chemistry kids over there are definitely screwing up that experiment, and I definitely failed an English paper this semester. We are 20 years old and we are just trying to get it right. (Though “generally okay” doesn’t validate an educational program that alienates the community, breaks laws that protect human dignity, etc. You may wonder — will she ever stop using parentheses to avoid taking a stand?!)
In a zoomed-out world, as we take an honest look at the history of the human race, it is just era after era of people making the wrong decisions about how to spend their time. We run around trying not only to do the right thing, but to do our right thing, to find our calling. It’s funny, though, how hard we try and how repeatedly we miss the opportunity to be humble. I feel like I would be more impressed by a student who chose to make his or her point by scrubbing the stones on the Proctor Terrace rather than the one who drew graffiti on a wall. Somehow, when you zoom in on the day-to-day, you start to see that the choice to do something classically “good for you” — often code for gross and boring — actually results in good things. Your mother doesn’t tell you to eat broccoli for no reason, just like they didn’t make Middlebury students read Aristotle for no reason. People wouldn’t keep making sacrifices, big or small, if they were just empty promises. The people who make their way towards Mecca on their knees are answering a call, and doing so with a lot more passion and sincerity than I will ever know.
I took on the project of visiting one church of every faith during my remaining time here at Middlebury. Believe it or not, church is not always a fun session of enlightenment for me. It can be a dry, tedious, meaningless discomfort. I will be thrust into new discomfort when I leave for Turkey next semester and have to patiently learn a new set of unspoken cultural laws. But I think if we are unafraid of adding calculated effort to our educations, if we challenge ourselves to listen closely to all the little lessons in the ways we spend our time — the good, the bad, the spectacularly boring — something miraculous just might happen.
(11/30/12 10:32pm)
On Wednesday, Nov. 28 the Middlebury African Music and Dance Ensemble performed in the Mahaney Center for the Arts under the direction of Assistant Professor of Music Damascus Kafumbe. The performance is the culmination of Professor Kafumbe's African Music, Dance, and Performance. "With emphasis on technique, style, and form, we will get hands-on experience playing various types of East African musical instruments," Professor Kafumbe writes in the course description. The sample above, entitled "Ennyana Ekutudde" ("A Calf Has Escaped" in English), features some of these instruments with Professor Kafumbe and his students playing four types of drums and many twelve-slab xylophones.
(11/29/12 6:01am)
The Fall Dance Concert, “Mosaics from the Underground,” will open tomorrow night in the Dance Theater. The concert is a promising creation that aims to spark conversations about one of the College’s most emphasized values: diversity.
A collaboration involving 10 students and two professors, the concert features nearly 30 student performers and offers a strikingly intimate evening of creative work. The choreographers have created an accessible and relevant experience for audience members by integrating their own interests from across a variety of academic disciplines, including environmental studies and literature.
This concert is the product of a highly academic process, yet it speaks to everyone. It becomes an emotional experience once the viewer stops trying to read it cognitively. The creators of the show engage in conversation, not necessarily through “talking,” but through “showing” their thoughts, experiences, opinions and feelings.
By combining ideas from dance and environmental studies, Jessica Lee ’13 created a piece that evokes the excitement of foolish exploration, the difficulties of growing up and the challenges of college life.
“I danced my whole life and home for me became the dance studio and that involved following directions and discipline and following others in high school and doing what you think you have to get to college,” Lee said.
Doug LeCours ’13, a dance and English double major, turned to literature for inspiration. Citing the style of a favorite Virginia Woolf book, To the Lighthouse, his piece reflects a “stream of consciousness” through movement.
“The body moves as a whole, from the center, beginning from one place, and develops from there,” said LeCours while demonstrating a simple arm movement. But in this way, by constantly focusing on intentionality, simple gestures such as the movement of an arm can become graceful and powerfully moving.
These two choreographers take purposefully different approaches to beginning their work, yet both methods produce beautifully intimate kinesthetic experiences. Diversity emerges as a motif from the concert not because each piece is the same, or even similar, but because each of the 11 pieces focuses on what individual creators can relate to best — the self.
“We really thrive on the raw vigorous excitement of spontaneity,” explained Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Catherine Cabeen, who guided the students through her Dance 460 class this semester. She continued to detail the creative process she shared with her students.
“We started by using language to explore individual ideas that the students were very passionate about,” she said. “Then we examined how different movement qualities and compositional strategies can embody those ideas. The resulting collection of works is diverse. There are many different movement languages at play . . . I see dance as a form of public scholarship that aims to inform as many people as possible about ideas that we feel passionate about.”
Noting that each choreographer comes from a different training background, Cabeen described how today most dancers must be comfortable using many different styles of dance. This necessity echoes another long standing college tradition — that of teaching and communicating across languages. Students share parts of themselves in their creative work using different movement traditions.
Diversity also emerges when considering the performers’ education and artistic backgrounds, as LeCours pointed out.
“I’m working with three people of incredibly different training backgrounds, which is really exciting,” he said.
His fellow dancers all have different levels of experience in performance and have trained differently as dancers and artists. In addition, their height difference also makes for some fascinating visual humor.
Dance, especially as these students use it, is a communicative language for sharing that which is touching, instinctive and fleeting. As LeCours observed, audience members, performers and even creators engage in the learning experience together.
“Secretly, it’s a process for all of us to discover what we’re dancing about,” he said.
“Mosaics from the Underground” opens Friday, Nov. 30, at 8 PM, with a second show at the same time Saturday evening.
(11/29/12 5:51am)
Two major problems of rhetoric occur when a contemporary director chooses to put on a Shakespeare play. One problem concerns the comedy itself; what an audience found funny 400 years ago may fall flat today. But, surprisingly, this particular issue rarely plagues Professor of Theater and Women’s Gender Studies Cheryl Feraone’s As You Like It. A mix of Ben Orbison’s ’13 well-timed physical humor as Touchstone and Christina Fox’s ’13.5 intentionally over-articulated lines as Rosalind served to enliven a cliché comedy.
The second rhetorical problem (and this unfortunately presented greater, though not crippling problems for this performance) concerns the language. No matter how well the actors speak and understand the lines, an unfamiliar audience must pay extraordinary attention in order to understand plot and jokes. Despite these actors’ competent locution of Shakespeare’s English — Sarah Lusche ’13 as Celia performed particularly well in this regard, speaking the lines with both fluency and comprehension — demanding this extra attention for two and a half hours seemed excessive, especially for a generation and audience so accustomed to constant entertainment. Here, I do not condemn difficult and time consuming works of art; rather, I expect a greater reward at the end of such work. And quite frankly, Shakespeare’s often-interchangeable comedies do not quite provide that recompense.
The plot of the comedy involves brotherly conflict, an exiled Duke, a court-and-forest opposition, a woman dressing as a man and a ridiculous amount of marriages. Sound familiar?
The strengths of this solid performance did not lie in plot. Nor did they lie in an artistic unity of set, plot and costumes. The set of this rendition struck me as rather beautiful in its simplicity: an abstract single metal chair that changed, later, to a swing, and scores of white umbrellas floating from the ceiling jellyfish-like, reminiscent of Magritte paintings. But this design unfortunately added nothing to the thematic interpretation and was, at times, dazzling to the point of total distraction from the play.
This went double for the fascinating costumes, co-designed by Artist-In-Residence Jule Emerson and Annie Ulrich ’13. The beautiful three-piece suits, vintage dresses and capes all suggested an early 1900s Edwardian silhouette, but, again, this had nothing to do with the plot. They were, however, impressive. All of the costumes adhered strictly to a palate of beige, cream and brown, with dark green and copper accents, but somehow they seemed elegantly profuse, a kind of bland near-decadence that was unified rather than needlessly restricted by the colors. For such a limited color scheme, the sheer abundance of various outfits was miraculous.
But it is too bad that more was not done to marry the text of a comedy with World War I and Dada costume and set design; post WWI disillusionment cannot and does not speak with what is fundamentally, by definition, a comedy.
Speaking of dissonance, one should also note the unnecessary plethora of singsong in this play. Moments when characters suddenly broke into dance or song felt divorced from the play, separate in an almost alien-like manner. Aside from this being highly confusing, I found the singsong pointless, never once working with the notion of revelry which we are supposed to feel in the forest scenes. And how, I ask, can one take singsong seriously in a play anymore? Television has satirized this to a point at which it’s impossible to enjoy it smirklessly. This criticism comes despite, again, formal beauty in the singing, and a stunning orchestration of such a large group of people.
What did hold the play together, though, were some of the smaller details: Oliver de Boys’s (Teddy Anderson ’13.5) eerily realistic black eye and dirtied suit, the blood on Orlando de Boys’s (Jake Connolly ’13) arm and the acting itself. Although Fox seemed to struggle in the early scenes to find a way to match her words with her actions, her later scenes, often when paired opposite Connolly, were riveting, funny and tension-filled. Fox had a way of suddenly and dynamically switching from romantic and swooning to formal and reserved that fit her character perfectly. Connolly played his part, reacting to such dynamics, with sincerity and believability to counter her volatility.
That is not to mention Daniel Sauermilch’s ’13 sassy, haughty interpretation of Duke Senior, which was unexpected and somehow perfect. Orbison’s Touchstone, mentioned surpa, was also unexpected, funny not just in lines but in body humor. Though Touchstone became shrill at times, Orbison’s physical humor, particularly mimicking Charles the Wrestler, was masterful.
(11/14/12 11:27pm)
“I disdain green eggs and green ham.” Easy enough to simplify this sentence down to the classic Dr. Seuss: “I do not like green eggs and ham.” The leap from complexity to simplicity is easy for the human brain. But it’s an entirely different story for a computer, which has no “first language.”
To grasp the scope of the computer’s problem, imagine this scenario: you only speak English, you’re handed a complex sentence in Chinese and you’re told to simplify it to the level of the average Chinese kindergarten student. Not so easy.
This is the problem that Assistant Professor of Computer Science David Kauchak has been working on for the past two years. He works in the field of natural language processing on a problem called “text simplification.” Patrick Adelstein ’14, who worked with Kauchack on his research this past summer, explained that natural language processing is basically “equipping computers to understand language spoken by humans.”
“It’s computer science with linguistics really,” said Kauchak. “The basic premise is this: you give me a document and I’ll try to create a program that automatically simplifies it, in the sense of reducing the grammatical complexity and reducing the complexity of the vocabulary.”
Written material is generally composed at the reading level of the author and not the reader. Communication breakdown occurs when a document is simply to complex for the reader to understand. This can create real communication challenges in the realm of politics, medicine and education.
“There’s a lot of applications for this,” Kauchak said. “One of the most interesting is in the medical domain. There’s a lot of information out there on diseases, treatments, diagnoses. But there have been a number of studies that show that a lot of people don’t have the reading ability to comprehend most of the literature that’s available. There’s a study that said 89 million people in the US — that’s a little over a quarter of the population — don’t have sufficient reading skills to be able to read the documentation that is given to them.”
One solution to this problem would be to simply have the authors of the literature write the material at a lower reading level. But that would require a massive systemic overhaul of medical writing standards.
“That’s a non-trivial overhaul, and that’s just not going to happen in the near future,” said Kauchak. “The goal of this project is to be able to do that sort of simplification automatically. For example, one could take a medical pamphlet about cancer or diabetes, and be able to produce similar content but in a way that’s easier to understand for somebody who doesn’t have that higher reading level.”
According to the 2010 United States Census, a little under 40 million residents in the United States (over 12% of the total population) are foreign-born, and of those 30.1 percent speak English “Not well” or “Not at all” Text simplification technology has incredible potential to facilitate communication for U.S. residents with English as a second language by creating simplified documents. To automatically generate content — official paperwork, online news articles, information pamphlets — for these audiences is undeniably beneficial.
But going back to the earlier scenario: how does one train a computer to simplify a document in a language of which it has no fundamental understanding? It all comes down to statistics, probability and creative programming.
Kauchak used a language translation analogy — easier to understand than the text simplification explanation — to explain the process. If there is a list of sentence pairs — one sentence in Chinese and its English equivalent — you would tell the computer to use the list to establish a probability that one word will translate to another.
“I see this word in Chinese in let’s say 100 sentences, and in 70 of the English sentences I see exactly this other word,” said Kauchak. “And in the other 30 English cases, there’s a different word. Based on these ratios, I can establish the probabilities of how a word will be translated. Then you try and “teach” your model these different types of probabilities. So there’s two steps: the training, where you try and learn these probabilities from your data that’s aligned, and the translation step, where you take a new sentence, and based on what you’ve seen before, ask: what are all the possible ways I could put the words and phrases in this sentence together, and which of those is the most likely? It’s all about probability, establishing numerical relations. You can’t do this manually. Because from a decent-sized data set you’re going to end up with a few hundred thousand, maybe a million words. And so for each of those words, you’re going to end up with maybe 10 or 20 — it depends on the word — possible translations. It’s not something you’re doing manually. It’s a lot of data.”
That’s how to train a computer to translate from one language to another. Training it to simplify a complex sentence is a little trickier, and it involves analyzing the grammatical structure of the sentence, and determining what is superfluous and what isn’t.
Kauchak was attracted to natural language processing because of its intuitive nature.
“It’s easy to get excited about,” he said. “People do it on a day-to-day basis. It’s very tangible, very human. And being able to look at a problem and understand the input and the output. It’s very satisfying.”
Listen to Professor David Kauchak discuss his work with the Campus’ Will Henriques.
(11/14/12 11:26pm)
Alfred Hitchcock and randomized clinical trials seem like two entirely separate topics. The former is considered to be one of the greatest directors of all time, and the latter is necessary to make sure a certain medical treatment is safe and effective. It may seem preposterous to compare the two, but on Friday, Nov. 9, Dr. Richard Legro ’79 gave a lecture on how similar they actually are.
Legro has an illustrious academic and medical history: he went to medical school in Germany, got his clinical degree at Mt. Sinai, did a residency at the University of Pittsburgh and had a fellowship at the University of Southern California. However, during his time at the College, Legro was an English major and did not take any of the pre-med requirements.
Rather, he was fascinated by literature and film.
Legro opened the lecture by asking the audience if they knew who Alfred Hitchcock was. After the laughter died down, Legro explained that his talk would describe why randomized clinical trials are important and what Hitchcock can teach us about clinical trials.
Before diving into the meat of the lecture, Legro first touched upon the misconception that “great art and science are the work of individual geniuses working in solitude.” He noted that we tend to over-romanticize medicine, providing examples of “solo” scientists such as Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin. However, no one person achieved these breakthroughs alone — for instance, once penicillin’s use was discovered, there were hundreds of people mass-producing the penicillin mold to extract the antibiotic.
Randomized clinical trials (RCT) decrease biases from both investigators and subjects. The randomization aspect prevents such biases. Legro then explained another reason why RCTs are needed — to “eliminate common but ineffective, established treatments.”
He then delivered the gist of the lecture: RCTs are analogous to films such as Hitchcock’s because they are costly and time intensive, and require planning, expertise and complex interactions between stakeholders. In addition, both films and experimental results can be interpreted in many ways. Legro gave the example of silent movies, where the lines in the dialogue box could change the tone of the moving images from dramatic to satirical. The same can be done with experimental results — the “producers” can choose to show the “audience” what they feel the audience wants to see. He explained that this is not science, but rather, marketing.
Legro gave the example of a hormone treatment for menopause. It was widely advocated based on “perceived health benefits.” However, pharmaceutical companies were advertising this treatment before all of the clinical trials had been completed. Legro made a dark comment: “How could they know [the pros and cons] when the facts weren’t in yet?” Companies were advertising a product that had unknown side effects. Finally, a RCT was done, and found that there were many problems with the hormone treatment, including blood clots, heart disease, breast cancer and dementia. Expectedly, prescriptions decreased.
In addition to the “selling point” aspect, Hitchcock’s films can teach scientists about the importance of cooperation, planning and having a team of experts working in tandem to produce the best results. Legro noted that “scientists must lead trials from conception to completion by developing protocols, analyzing results, presenting and publishing data and publicizing it to colleagues and laypeople.” Also, Hitchcock chose important, captivating themes such as death, love and sex. Legro drew scientific comparisons to these themes: respectively, survival from cancer, infertility treatments and erectile dysfunction, all of which are important to either survival or quality of life. Legro also said that Hitchcock’s films were produced efficiently and swiftly because of all the meticulous planning that went into the storyboarding. By focusing on the planning stages and putting effort into a storyboard — or a scientific protocol — the filming (or experimenting) can go much smoother. Lastly, Hitchcock’s famous MacGuffins (the thing that everyone is chasing after in the movie) also make appearances in the scientific world. Researchers may think they are pursuing one goal, but could end up finding an entirely different result.
At the end of the lecture, Legro encouraged students to think independently and “turn off the internet.” He emphasized the importance of planning and preparation as the keys to realizing project goals. He also made clear that, as scientists or doctors, standing on the “shoulders of giants” is essential to scientific prowess.
Finally, Legro called attention to the success of scientists who build on other people’s work and work with others who are doing great work.
“There is no I in auteur,” he said.
(11/07/12 11:32pm)
This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz’s latest work of fiction since his widely-acclaimed, Pulizer-Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, consists of nine beautifully interrelated, confessional short stories. They do not disappoint.
Most of the stories occur at different points in the life of Yunior, a Dominican who immigrated to the United States at an early age. As one can gather from the title, these stories illustrate the capacity for men to act horribly and disrespectfully in relationships. The first story, “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” begins with this confession from the narrator: “I’m not a bad guy. I know how that sounds — defensive, unscrupulous,— but it’s true. I’m like everybody else, weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.”
This is an honest account of Yunior, who cheats on and sleeps with as many women as he can. And while the reader feels a certain disdain for this character, Yunior’s self-deprecations and deeply honest lamentations elicit well-deserved sympathy. Perhaps the crescendo of the collection comes as Yunior, astounded by the depths of his own “mendacity” finally calls himself a coward, and believes without doubt that his previous girlfriend did the right thing in dumping him.
Make no mistake, though, this collection, imbued with regret and loss, provides little redemption. As the title suggests, these stories involve losing women, not gaining them back. Diaz displays a great talent in this collection for pinning down that horrible, tension-filled moment when you realize your relationship is dead or dying: “your heart plunges though you,” he writes, “like a far bandit through a hangman’s trap.”
Constantly on the periphery, and sometimes in the center spotlight, Diaz explores problems of race, and coming to America from the Dominican Republic: Yunior often mentions the racism that immigrants encounter with a horrifying casualness. Living in Boston later in his life, he writes without commentary or reflection “on the walk home a Jeep roars past; the driver calls you a … towelhead.” The insouciance with which the narrator drops these details reveals the frequency of such moments.
While these are all sad stories, the reader can rely thoroughly on one thing to carry him through to the end: Diaz’s language. He writes with a beautiful, unaffected blend of Spanish slang and elevated English; describing Pura, a woman whom his brother is dating, Yunior writes: “guapísima as hell: tall and indiecita, with huge feet and an incredibly soulful face, but unlike your average hood hottie Pura seemed not to know what to do with her fineness, was sincerely lost in all the pulchritude.” Diaz’s sentences have an immense rhetorical authority, written neither for flare nor flash, but just because this is how the language speaks itself.
The other stylistic trait worth noting is Diaz’s habit of narrating in the second person singular, “you,” used in four of the nine stories, totaling about 84 pages. This technique both gives off the feeling of an older narrator chiding his younger self, (“You , Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma,” one story begins), and at the same time addresses the reader, assuming that he too has committed these acts of selfishness. While Diaz deploys this POV to near perfection, more naturally than one might imagine possible, he overuses it too, limiting its oddness and, in this reader’s opinion, testing his audience’s patience.
Another complaint concerning an element of style: Diaz relies heavily on a voice that tells and does not show the stories; rarely does he build up pieces of a scene. Similarly to the use of second person singular, this technique has its benefits, the natural conversational feel. But it also reduces some narratives to wispy, fleeting memories, as light and sheer as one girl’s tank top “that couldn’t have blocked a sneeze.”
But with overwhelmingly beautiful sentences and descriptions, like “shiny ice that scars the snow,” and with such deep and precise engagement with the difficulty of relationships and race in the U.S., these problems are hardly the defining characteristics of this strong and honest collection.
Recommendation: This collection isn’t a must read, but if you like Junot Diaz, or have any interest at all in race in the U.S., or if you feel particularly strongly about relationships, I fully suggest it.
(11/07/12 10:15pm)
On Nov. 29 Professor of Economics and Director of the Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship Jon Isham will teach an hour-and-a-half long online course for alumni called “What is Social Entrepreneurship?”
Isham was approached by the Alumni Office in September to lead a course on social entrepreneurship. He quickly modified the subject matter to address social entrepreneurship in the liberal arts, specifically, as the topic has been a focus of his recent research.
“It’s a topic that people are talking about and thinking about and are curious about,” Isham said of the course’s material. “Alums […] will be curious based on their own experience […] how social entrepreneurship fits in at Middlebury.”
“That means asking 'What are the goals of the liberal arts?’ and ‘How can social entrepreneurship enhance and complement those goals?’” wrote Isham in an email.
According to Isham, social entrepreneurship is the use of business practices to enact social change, an approach different than traditional charitable or philanthropic tactics.
“It takes the civic engagement model and brings in approaches that have been developed, say, in the business sector,” said Isham.
Ian McCray, director of the alumni and parent program, said that this topic is on the minds of many students and recent alumni.
“The idea of social entrepreneurship is one that we get a lot of questions about from alums who come back,” said McCray, who works to organize programs for alumni across the country.
Thanks to help from several professors, the College is able to keep alumni actively involved and intellectually connected to happenings on campus. This engagement has recently become even more readily available to alumni around the world through the employment of online courses.
“We’ve dabbled [with online courses],” said McCray. “It’s something that we’re exploring more and more, as a lot of our peers are.”
Amherst College offers an online book club for alumni and Williams College has established an Alumni Online Community group.
“The ability to do this and to do it in interesting ways online is really the new [issue] here,” said McCray. “And it’s a way for us to expand our outreach to alums.”
The Alumni Office has offered online courses in the past, but they are not a commonplace occurrence.
Last year, John Elder, professor emeritus of English and American studies offered an online course on the poems of Robert Frost for 15 alums. Through Adobe Connect software, the class offered video and audio connections and allowed students to type in comments or personal notes to Elder.
“It didn’t work so well,” said McCray. “[The course] was relying on a lot of back and forth because it was a discussion class, and there was some delay in the software.”
The participants ended up continuing the discussion over a conference call with Elder, which proved a better method.
Isham’s course has a higher capacity, fully registered at 90 people, and will therefore use the Adobe Connect software. Isham will be broadcasted through video to all of the participants, who can type in questions during the lecture. Though he does run the risk of being delayed, this way Isham can communicate more directly to a larger audience.
“People will be able to see me talk, and at the same time, we’ll be able to show PowerPoint’s or links online,” said Isham. “It’s a very flexible approach.”
Alison Byerly, former provost and executive vice president who is currently on academic leave at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, feels that online courses open the doors to continue education with members of the college community.
“An online course for alumni would in most cases not be replacing an in-person seminar,” she wrote in an email. “It would be making participation possible for people who would otherwise not be able to take part.”
She added that communication through technology can extend the possibilities of engaging alums from locations around the world, no matter how far they might be from Vermont.
The Alumni Office does not have concrete plans to increase the number of online courses offered, but hopes to keep experimenting with new ways to reach alumni through technology.
McCray said he could see the College holding online courses two or three times a year, but added, “I don’t see this as something that we plan on scaling up to the volume that some of our peers do.”
“We’re treading cautiously,” he said of future pursuits into online courses. “I think it’s something that for us is going to contribute around the margins, but we’re not going to become the University of Phoenix. But we’re trying to take advantage of the technology that is available to be able to reach more people.”
The College does not allow professors to take time away to pursue other for-profit teaching, but alumni courses do not fall under this category.
One other educational venue in which participants are charged is when members of the faculty give lectures in locations they travel to personally. Every year, about 20 to 25 professors will participate in such lectures. The College charges a registration fee for most of these to cover costs such as venue, refreshments, travel, and a small honorarium for the professor.
Elder’s course cost $25 per person; Isham’s will charge $15.
“It’s our policy to compensate our professors for their time,” said McCray.
According to McCray, the “crown jewel” of the Alumni Office’s work is the Alumni College, a program open to all alumni that is held annually at the end of August.
The typical turnout is about 100 alums, who spend four days at the Bread Loaf Campus taking a course from one of the College’s professors. The program costs about $400 or $500, which, according to McCray, “barely breaks even.”
“They’re not money-makers,” said McCray of alumni courses in general. “It’s really just another way to help alumni engage with the College and engage with the professors.”
(10/31/12 8:39pm)
Last week, the College’s Board of Trustees approved the school’s first study abroad program to India. Starting next year, the school will send eight students, current sophomores in strong academic standings, to New Delhi. The school will be operated as a C.V. Starr Middlebury School Abroad.
The school will begin accepting applications from students this year, and the first group of students will go abroad during the fall semester of next year.
Classes will be offered through the University of New Delhi’s St. Stephens College and Lady Shri Ram College for Women, two of India’s top institutions. Students who participate in the new school will also take Hindi classes at the American Institute of Indian Studies. Those who stay in India for a full year will be able to participate in an internship to recieve course credit.
This program pioneers a form of international study with considerable differences from the school’s usual offerings. To begin, it is the school’s first program in South Asia.
While all divisions of the International Studies program have offered programs in their specific region, South Asian studies has been an exception. Their program in Delhi promises to correct this issue.
For Anis Mebarki ’15, who plans to major in either South Asian or General Asian history, this provides an essential opportunity to enrich his class room studies.
“I thought it would make sense for me to go to a place where I can actually live that culture”, said Mebarki, “and not just study it from an outsider’s perspective and objectify and make it this country that’s just in books with these far away people.”
While all South Asian studies majors are encouraged to apply for the program, the college also urges student’s outside the department to apply and is even recruiting qualified candidates outside the College, according to Acting Dean of International Programs Paul Monod.
That the school offers no instruction in a South Asian language has been a major impediment. Students in this program will attend classes in Hindi through the American Institute of Indian Studies. No prior knowledge of the language is assumed.
Some, like Stephanie Ovitt ’15.5, who plans to apply for next fall, see learning the language as a valuable asset in today’s era.
“A lot of times in communications between the U.S. and India, things get lost and misunderstood, [and] that damages relationships,” said Evans.
Mebarki believes that using English will enchance students’ experiences, allowing them to approach Indian culture from a more open-minded perspective.
“I feel this will allow student’s to more deeply involve themselves with the material they are studying ... It is going to be in the language that most of us are pretty comfortable in so you can’t really use the excuse ‘Oh I can’t write this paper in [this foreign language],” said Mebarki.
For Professor of History and History Department Chair Ian Barrow, the time for better cultural understanding has became increasingly important.
“I think this program has really dovetailed very nicely with increasing student appetitive and interest in India, and also [the] increasing geopolitical importance of India,” said Barrow.
For Monod, this experience represents a new, open, opportunity for student’s to enrich their understanding of the world.
He mentions the program’s lack of a language prerequisite and acceptance to student’s outside the South Asian Studies programs as ways of opening the opportunity to a wage range of student’s.
“It gives you an experience that combines the cultural experience of studying abroad — which in India is one that you are aware of everyday when you wake up — but on the other hand the educational experience of studying at such great institution,” said Monod.
The Middlebury C.V. Starr School in India is the lastest addition to the Collge’s now nearly 40 official overseas programs in 17 countries.
The second-newest school, offered in Cameroon for French-speaking students, was approved by the board of trustees last year.
(10/31/12 8:32pm)
For many students, MiddExpress transcends the services of a basic convenience store. Or maybe it is the bone-chilling excursion on a Vermont winter night that can turn a simple toothpaste run into what makes MiddExpress a true staple. Be it the offering of a wide variety of chasers on a Saturday night, a fuel stop — when 4:00 Proctor seems an impossibly distant future — or a provider of overpriced toiletries, MiddExpress is at your geographically monopolized convenience.
“There are students that come in three, four, five, times a night,” said Doug Shivers who, if you frequent MiddExpress, you proably already know. For those of you who don’t hit that tally on an average night and therefore don’t have the opportunity to become closely acquainted with the staff, Shivers is the late night guy curating your shopping experience with classical music.
“I always remember individual Reese’s cost fourteen-cents,” said Shivers, after ringing up a modest purchase of one Reese’s peanut butter cup (cherry-picked out of the bulk candy bin, a popular move according to Shivers) and a Mango Tango Naked juice. Shivers has been ringing up Reese’s and playing classical music at Midd Express since June of 2011: language school students were his first customers.
“A lot of people who came in here didn’t say anything. And then there were some who knew the rule about going into stores and would talk to me in English for five minutes,” said Shivers. “I know a little Hebrew so sometimes I would surprise them with that.”
The academic setting was not new to Shivers, though. Before coming to Vermont, he taught children at a Montessori school in Portland, Ore. for 22 years.
“Children are very, very excited about learning and they’re very creative,” he said.
Shivers detects the same curiosity amongst students at the College. With his teaching days behind him, Shivers can now enjoy a balanced lifestyle in which his work life remains separate from his personal life.
“I like to cook things. I have to really fix my own things because I’m vegan and gluten free,” said Shivers. He’s been a vegetarian since 1970 when a bunch of his friends all moved into a house together and someone proposed, “Hey, why don’t we be vegetarians?” He’s the only one who’s still a vegetarian. In the midst of my conversation with Shivers, he paused to troubleshoot with the finicky cash register.
“This is our 1998 technology,” he said. He took his time to rewrap and reload the spool of receipt paper.
“I guess the slow cooker is kind of my approach to life,” he said. “I do the same thing when I run or go swimming. I’m not trying to race anyone. I look at all the beautiful fall colors and just enjoy the experience.”
The slow cooker approach doesn’t always exist in the traditional academic environment. Having held two jobs that sandwich the typical educational trajectory, Shivers finds that the need for speed starts young.
“[At Montessori school] it’s always getting ready for the next step and here it’s getting ready for a job,” he said. As for the newly displayed tiny packs of Orbit for just 69 cents: “what word do you think every woman thinks of when they see that? Cute. It’s all marketing.” Shivers knows what he is talking about.
(10/24/12 11:15pm)
Lately professors all over the country and here at Middlebury have been trying to answer the question, “Why liberal arts?” Although the answer is complex, it’s also quite simple. A good liberal arts education produces critically engaged citizens. In other words, people who can get information, analyze it and yes, think about it. As civically engaged citizens, students of the liberal arts are then very often moved to action.
This is exactly what happened last week when a group of Middlebury students decided to push the College to think about how we make our money. The students did this by sending out a fake press release stating that in conjunction with the Dalai Lama’s visit, Middlebury would be divesting itself from all companies that make a profit from war.
The press release was not a joke, but a protest. It pointed out the contradiction of saying we support peaceful solutions and simultaneously taking money from weapons’ manufacturers. It also points out the contradiction between being “carbon neutral” and getting dividends from Big Oil.
This action occurred not because Middlebury is more hypocritical than other institutions. It’s not. But because Middlebury is incredibly good at producing critically engaged citizens.
We the undersigned would like to publicly share our support with the students for pushing all of us to put our money where our mouths and our values are. We also want to applaud them for highlighting the power of a liberal arts education in producing critically engaged citizens.
Submitted by ROBERT COHEN, Professor of English and American Literatures; LAURIE ESSIG, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies; PETER HAMLIN, Christian A. Johnson Professor of Music; PETER MATTHEWS, James B. Jermain Professor of Political Economy; SUJATA MOORTI, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies; KEVIN MOSS, Jean Thompson Fulton Professor of Modern Language and Literature; MARGARET NELSON, A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology; MIKE OLINICK, Professor of Mathematics; LINUS OWENS, Associate Professor of Sociology; ELLEN OXFELD, Gordon Schuster Professor of Anthropology; JAY PARINI, D.E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing; DAVID STOLL, Professor of Anthropology; YUMNA SIDDIQI, Associate Professor of English and American Literatures; STEVE SNYDER, Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies; HECTOR VILA, Assistant Professor of Writing; GREG VITERCIK, Professor of Music.
(10/24/12 10:50pm)
In exchange for my willingness to do any miscellaneous tasks necessary for Scott Center Administrative Program Coordinator Ellen McKay and College Chaplain Laurie Jordan, I was given an all-access pass and permitted to join the organizers at every stage of the Dalai Lama’s third visit to Middlebury. Of all the unforgettable moments from the weekend, I was most profoundly shocked by how much the Dalai Lama reminded me of my grandparents. The first time he shook my hand, the marginal part of my mind that wasn’t being overwhelmed by the intensity of physical contact and the swarm of security guards and photographers was ripped back by sensory memory to one of the last times I held my late paternal grandfather’s hand. In the same way the smell your living room reminds you of home, everything about this grasp — from the weight of his hand to the velvet plush of his palm to his half-open mouth, vaguely pinched at the corners into a smile — evoked my “halabogi.”
Onstage, His Holiness morphed in likeness to maternal grandparents, as he spoke with their exact cadence, body language and humor; even his accent bore a strong resemblance. If my maternal grandparents merged into one form (mom?!), inhabited the body of my dad’s dad, spoke better English and had a marvelous translator at their/his side, we would have been the Dalai Lama. For example, His Holiness shared that his greatest regret was not studying harder when he was young, only wanting to play with his toy trains. Over lunch this past summer, my grandfather shared the exact sentiment. He lamented how he had spent too much of his twenties out late with his friends, drinking and carousing when he could have been establishing his career.
In another moment reminiscent of my grandparents, His Holiness didn’t ask, but rather commanded Senator Patrick Leahy to sign a photo that the latter was gifting him backstage before their speeches on Saturday morning. Senator Leahy exclaimed, “My signature? I want your signature!” The Dalai Lama shook his head and explicated in a deep and rationalizing voice with the help of a waving arm and a pointed finger, “No. You give me the pitchuh, so you put signachuh.” Then he laughed, presumably at how obvious this process should be, and Senator Leahy had to oblige to the pure sensibility. My grandmother would have acted the same — un-intimidated and armed with the truth.
The Dalai Lama echoed years of my grandparents’ and parents’ advice with his perspectives on spirituality, compassion, work ethic, happiness and so forth. What His Holiness says is true: his wisdom is everywhere and all education starts at home. I’ve seen the Dalai Lama speak a thousand times, just only from the mouth of my mother. Watching him this past weekend deepened my appreciation for the wisdom that I have been wrapped in, and sometimes beat over the head with, by my own kin. Even more, I realize how much there might be to learn from anyone, if I’m willing to open up a little bit. Ginsberg writes in the footnote to Howl: “The bum’s as holy as the seraphim, the madman’s as holy as you my soul are holy.” During his Saturday lecture, His Holiness proclaimed, “My blood is your blood. My bones are your bones.” And in just the same way, my grandma is the Dalai Lama.
Written by RYAN KIM ’14
(10/24/12 8:49pm)
Course: Multi-Ethnic British Literatures
Professor: Visiting Instructor in English and American Literatures Benjamin Graves
Department: English and American Literatures
Credits: CMP, EUR, LIT
Location: Axinn 100
Meeting Time: M, W 2:50-4:05
Professor Perspective:
Aiming to give a wider perspective of literature, Visiting Professor of English and American Literatures Benjamin Graves teaches books that lie outside the usual English reading list.
“The course is about black British and Asian British writing,” said Graves. “Some of the books are pretty high profile, like The Satanic Verses, but a lot of them have not figured into the ‘canon’ of British literature yet.”
In this course, students read books like The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta, analyze poems and watch films related but not limited to national belonging, multi-identities and race.
“Some of these novels and poems are great pieces of art, but they do a lot more than offer themselves up for aesthetic appreciation,” said Graves. “They work through complex questions about national belonging, ethnic and racial identity and more. That’s what we’re trying to explore in the class.”
The course will also work through writers from different generations and will analyze the changes in authors’ viewpoint of Britain and British identity. “By working through authors from different generations, we can see the disagreements forming between them,” Graves said. “It’s really fun to see these different books come into historical focus.
Student Perspective:
Graves’s class is full of students ranging from senior English majors to undeclared first years and everyone else in between. Many students of this course voiced their appreciation of how the course allows them to expand their perspective on Britain. “The class really opens up Britain to more than just the queen, tea and Shakespeare,” said Katie Pett ’13.5. “It’s interesting to read the variety of voices and perspectives.”
Catherine Corbett ’14 was interested in the course after visiting Britain.
“In looking for a class that fulfilled the EUR distribution requirement, I stumbled across Graves’s class and it immediately piqued my interest because I spent this past summer in London,” said Corbett. “I also took Professor [of Political Science] Bleich’s Politics of Diversity in Western Europe class last spring, which focused on the politics of citizenship, immigration and integration of minorities in Great Britain, so I thought it would be cool to expand my understanding of these topics through an entirely different channel. I really enjoy the class and find the novels and poetry we read to be fascinating as we explore them through a lens of race, culture and identity.”
(10/24/12 8:47pm)
Celebrities like Madonna may have helped popularize the general understandings of Kabbalah, but on Monday Oct. 22, a reading and lecture in the Abernethy Room in Axinn Center at Starr Library brought the long history of Jewish mysticism to light.
Sponsored by the program in Jewish studies, the department of religion and the department of English and American literatures, poet and translator Peter Cole spoke on and read from his new book The Poetry of Kabbalah.
A seasoned writer, in 2007 he received the MacArthur Fellowship award, or “Genius Grant,” given for exceptional merit for continued and enhanced creative work in addition to authoring four other books.
Cole is no stranger to the College. His first visit was in 2000, and he has since been a visiting winter term professor.
Curt and Else Silberman Professor of Jewish Studies Robert Schrine believes that Cole’s work is critical in introducing mystical materials to the English-speaking world.
“Aside from being a major contemporary poet, [Cole] has opened up the world of Hebrew poetry of late antiquity and the Middle Ages for the English-speaking world,” said Schrine. “For what it’s worth, I would say that his work gives the lie to the old adage — attributed to Frost — that poetry is what is lost in translation. In Cole’s hands, poetry is also gained in translation. I regard his work as a great gift to us professors of Jewish studies because I can engage students in the discussion of these liturgical and philosophical poems.”
The lecture focused primarily on the history of mystical poetry in the Jewish tradition.
Formed from Jewish thought in the 12th through the 13th century, the practice of Kabbalah focuses on what lies beyond the scripture, revealing a veil that aims to explain the relationship between the mysterious and the universe.
Cole explained that over the years, the practice has gained its fair share of skeptics, and oftentimes he is included, adding “[There is] a skeptic in me. I’m a poet, not a mystic.”
The lecture focused on the strong power of language in the Kabbalah tradition. Much of Cole’s professional work is translating the original poetry of Jewish mystics and combining their works into poetry anthologies.
In addition to his scholarly work, Cole is a poet himself, composing verse on similar topics.
Cole spoke of the importance of language in the tradition, calling Kabbalahists “language obsessed.” This feature of the tradition emphasizes the importance of his work in translation. Reading from what is believed to be the oldest texts from Palestine, Israel and Babylonia, many of the translated poems describe the desires and rituals of spiritual seekers to rise to heaven.
Many of the audience members were unfamiliar with Kabbalah, despite being educated in Jewish studies. Adina Marx-Arpadi ’13.5 went to a Jewish day school but did not have a background in this aspect of the Jewish tradition.
“[The lecture] revealed a whole new world of Judaism that I didn’t know much about,” said Marx-Arpadi. “I came because I was interested in how [mysticism] manifests contemporarily.”
Others came for their general interest in religion. Blake Harper ’15, a religion major, came to hear a new perspective on a topic he had previously studied.
“I don’t focus on Jewish studies, so it was really great to have that dimension,” said Harper. “But I do focus on studies in mysticism, so to hear about the Jewish tradition of that was really captivating. I think that there are some really exciting and clear differences you can see between these various mystical strands.”
