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(04/14/11 3:58am)
On April 14, the College will kick off its fifth annual Spring Student Symposium. This year, 268 students from all classes will present their work across 24 disciplines.
Led by the Center for Teaching, Learning and Research (CTLR), this year’s symposium will be even larger than previous years. The events will open Thursday evening at 7 p.m at the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts with a keynote address by Brad Corrigan ’96, followed by various arts presentations.
“[The evening] will be like a festival of the arts,” said Kathy Skubikowski, director of the CTLR and co-chair of the 2011 Spring Student Symposium Committee.
Following the arts presentations Corrigan, a founding member of the band Dispatch, which was founded at the College in 1996, will give a special performance. The concert will, which will last roughly 45 minutes, will start at 10:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
On April 15, the symposium will move to McCardell Bicentennial Hall and Johnson Memorial Building for the other student presentations.
“[At the symposium] students from all disciplines come together [to showcase their work],” said Yonna McShane, director of learning resources, lecturer in psychology and member of the symposium committee.
The range of topics and the enthusiasm present throughout the community is “stunning,” added McShane.
This year’s presentations will showcase work across various disciplines, including one presentation on “Evaluating the Performance of Multiple Model Estimation Algorithms” and another on “Vincent A. Jones IV: A Sociological Analysis of the Matrix of Domination on Middlebury’s Campus.”
Carla Cevasco ’11, who will be presenting her senior English and American Literatures thesis, “From ‘It-girl’ to Forgotten Poet: A Cultural Reading on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Reputation,” also helped organize this year’s event as the symposium’s project manager in addition to her work on her presentation.
While this will not be her first time presenting at the Symposium, Cevasco said, “This is my first time actually working for the symposium so it’s been fun to see how the event is put together.”
The organizers of the symposium have been working since early September and they are excited for the event to take place.
“I don't know much about the classes my friends are taking on a daily basis, but the symposium is a chance to see what everyone's been up to this year,” said Cevasco. “It’s like a buffet; I'm going to go see presentations and posters on Chesapeake Bay children's literature, medieval punctuation, honor killings in Turkey, neurotransmitters and [more].”
“For presenters, the symposium lets you present on subjects you care about to a cheering section of your friends and faculty, plus probably quite a few people you don't know,” Cevasco added. “That's what makes the Middlebury symposium so unique — where else can you do something like this as an undergraduate?”
Both Skubikowski and McShane share Cevasco’s enthusiasm for the possibilities that can come from the symposium, for both presenters and audience members alike.
Skubikowski hopes that students will be inspired by the work that their peers have completed. In addition, she hopes that attending the symposium will get other students excited about the potential to present at next year’s symposium.
“I’m excited for that general buzz [present at the Symposium],” Skubikowski said. “This is a moment where the student is the expert.”
“[The Symposium] is wonderful modeling for students,” added McShane. “It allows students presenting to feel like they are moving towards a professional setting.”
In preparation for event, Skubikowski and McShane encourage students who are presenting to send out some form of communication to fellow students, professors, deans and anyone else who is important to them to tell them where and when they will be presenting.
Cevasco also encourages member of the College community to attend the symposium.
“Don't just sleep in on your day off from classes — you'll miss out,” she said.
(04/14/11 3:55am)
BORDEAUX — It is a commonly held American stereotype that the French are snobby. Before arriving in France, I wasn’t sure what to expect from les français, and whether this generalization would turn out to be true. However, from my very first day here, I began to realize that this stereotype was perhaps more myth than reality. On my first day in France, as I was making the voyage from Charles de Gaulle airport to Bordeaux, I entered the wrong car of the TGV train, towing my two oversize suitcases all the way to the wrong seat. Overwhelmed, sweaty and exhausted from eight sleepless hours on the plane, I was saved by the kind young man who recognized my problem and gently said, Je vais vous aider, “I’m going to help you.” Taking one of my suitcases himself, he led me to the right car, hoisted both of my justunder50 pound bags up into the baggage rack and left me to sink into my seat with a sigh of relief and gratitude.
Once I got to Bordeaux, I met Julie Clair, my conseillère, or adviser, at the local bank where I opened an account. She was warm and welcoming from our very first meeting, patiently answering all of my questions, and even asked me how I was liking the university and adjusting to life in Bordeaux. And when I had to return to the bank with several more random questions, she always recognized me with a smile on her face and made me feel like maybe I was less of a bungling American than I thought.
Later, on the plane going to visit some friends over February break, I met a wonderful French family on their way to spend the vacation in London. I spent nearly the entire plane ride talking to the mom, who explained that she was a middle school English teacher, had lived abroad in England when she was young, and was very excited for her two young sons to see London for the first time. When we landed, she wished me a wonderful vacation, and hoped that we would run into each other sometime in Bordeaux. While I haven’t seen them again, and probably won’t, I will always remember our conversation and the mint that she offered me as the plane descended and my ears started popping.
Riding the tram every day to get to the university provides another slice of Bordelaise life and has become the setting for many touching examples of kindness. On countless occasions, I have seen young people give up their seats to older women or men who enter the tram, who accept with a gracious smile. When the cars are particularly crowded and no one can reach the yellow boxes to validate their ticket, someone squished close to the box will offer to take a stranger’s ticket and punch it for them. And if anyone ever steps on your toes, which is inevitable in the morning rush hour on line B, they usually turn over their shoulder and offer a shy yet genuine “pardon.”
So while there are certainly French people who are brusque, unfriendly or not particularly welcoming to visitors, there are also Americans who could be described in just the same way. Over the past three months, I have encountered more than my fair share of people who have showed me that this country is full of generous people who are willing to help a complete stranger, who are interested in learning about others and who even offer the American girl sitting next to them on a plane a piece of candy to suck on during the landing.
(04/07/11 3:14pm)
Chris Waddell ’91, the most decorated male skier in Paralympic history and founder of the nonprofit One Revolution, will address the class of 2011 as the commencement speaker on May 22. Waddell is one of six honorary degree recipients, including economist Padma Desai, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), volunteer service activist Dottie Neuberger ’58, geneticist Edward Rubin and civil rights activist Maxine Atkins Smith.
In past years, the commencement speaker has been announced as early as December, but according to President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz, the administration was waiting to release the commencement speaker with all of the honorary degree recipients.
“We wanted to wait until we heard from the full slate of honorary degree recipients, and some honorees needed more time to get back to confirm their ability to attend our commencement,” said Liebowitz.
Dean of Planning and Assessment, Director of the College's Self-Study, Professor of Psychology and Liaison to the Ad Hoc Honorary Degree Committee Susan Campbell pointed to the challenge of arranging for all of the honorary degree recipients to be present at commencement.
“It often takes quite a while to finalize the full list of honorary degree recipients,” said Campbell. “Given the busy schedules of those we seek to honor, individuals sometimes need time to arrange their lives so that they are able to attend commencement.”
This year, the honorary degree recipients will play a larger role in the commencement weekend as students, their families and the Middlebury community will have a chance to interact with them in a series of “Conversations with Honored Guests” scheduled for Saturday, May 21. Traditionally, Liebowitz has hosted a private dinner on the eve of commencement to honor the degree recipients, and Vice President for the Administration and Professor of American Studies Tim Spears said that the idea for a less structured event grew out of the dinner.
“The idea for having these conversations on Saturday afternoon stemmed from everybody’s awareness that this event that takes place on Saturday night is really special,” said Spears. “There was the sense that we bring these extraordinary people on campus, they come up on stage, they get their degrees and off we all go. It’s been a missed opportunity.”
The plan for these conversations has not yet been finalized, but each degree recipient will likely give a short speech followed by open discussion according to Spears.
“In particular we want our degree recipients to talk about how they came to the position they now have, how they’ve made their way in the world — the kinds of things that you think that graduating students would want to hear about,” said Spears. “We wanted to create a chance for people to get to know these honorary degree recipients.”
The Honorary Degree Committee, made up of the Board of Trustees, Stephanie Halgren ’11, Sara Cohen ’12, Assistant Professor of English and American Literature Dan Brayton and Professor of Japanese Studies Stephen Snyder, selected the degree recipients from a pool of nominees recommended by the College community.
“We try to choose individuals whose accomplishments are significant and who have contributed to society in a meaningful way, and to select a Commencement speaker who can speak to the challenges facing today’s Middlebury graduates,” said Campbell. “This year’s slate of honorees represents all of these qualities and will be inspiring to all those in attendance.”
The extent of the recipients’ accomplishments is not the only factor in the selection process; the diversity of professions and fields of interest among the degree recipients is also important, and it is meant to reflect the diversity of interests among the student body.
“Middlebury students graduate with different interests and different aspirations —there are lots of different ways to make an impact and change the world — and that’s what’s cool about the honorary degree recipients,” said Spears.
Commencement speaker Waddell was a talented skier at Middlebury when a 1998 skiing accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. He was back on the slopes again a year later, and two years after his accident he became a member of the United States Disabled Ski Team. He has since won 12 medals over four games in his 11 years on the U.S. Disabled Ski Team, and in 2009, he became the first paraplegic to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro unassisted. In 2010 he was inducted into both the Paralympic Hall of Fame and the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame.
Waddell frequently speaks about the resilience of the human condition; his signature motto is: “It’s not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”
“I think that it is implicit in the [Commencement] ceremony that honorary degree recipients at a place like Middlebury are there to inspire graduates to go off and make the most of their lives,” said Spears. “The commencement speech itself — it’s job is to send people off with a message and even a mission, and I think we’re definitely going to get an inspiring one from Chris Waddell.”
Liebowitz agreed in his statement for the official press release.
“Chris Waddell has lived his life in an inspiring and thought-provoking way,” said Liebowitz in the release. “He has demonstrated that practically anything is possible as long as one remains determined and open-minded. It is an honor to have him speak at commencement and we are proud that he is a Middlebury alumnus.”
More than 5,000 family and friends are expected to attend the commencement ceremony, which will be held on the quad behind Voter Hall at 10 a.m. on Sunday, May 22.
Look for extended coverage of the honorary degree recipients in our April 14 edition of the Campus!
(03/24/11 4:01am)
Eight years ago, in one of Middlebury’s many attempts to bring the outside world to campus, Scholar-in-Residence in English and American Literatures Sue Halpern established “Meet the Press,” a program designed to bring members of the media to campus. Middlebury students have heard lectures from reporters, authors, editors and producers of publications and programs including British Broadcasting Corporation, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Washington Post. This past Wednesday, March 16, for its third speaker of the year, Middlebury welcomed Jay Allison, producer of NPR’s “This I Believe” to discuss the “the power of telling something true.”
Allison attracted a crowd too large for the planned venue, Bi Hall 220, so to accommodate the groups of people gathering in the aisles, faculty and students of all ages were ushered into a larger room, still barely big enough to seat the crowd.
Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben, a longtime friend of Allison’s, introduced the discussion by highlighting, along with Allison’s many accomplishments and talents, his unique ability to “bring other people’s voices into the public realm.”
“As with all professions, the people who go on to do great things at the highest levels of them, at root share in common the fantastic ability to do the basic thing right, the basic thing of communicating, in this case with your voice invisibly across the ether,” said McKibben.
Allison’s talk was, in essence, an homage to the communicative abilities and emotional capacity of the human voice.
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what gets my attention anymore,” Allison said. “My god, it is such a flurry and it’s worth thinking about and I wish I could ask all of you what captures your attention, what makes you stop and what makes you stop for more than a minute. One thing that still does for me is the voice and it’s partly its strange power of our senses; we are vulnerable to sound because it can pass directly into us. We can’t shield ourselves, we don’t have earlids. A voice can get inside and slip right past our brains and touch our hearts, which is an astonishing kind of power.”
Allison relayed an example of this kind of power in a program he used to run called “Lost and Found Sound,” where people would call in to a voicemail line and tell what sounds they had saved. People would call in with all kinds of sounds, examples went from lacquer discs to sounds saved on paper that could only be played with cactus needles. Oftentimes, people also called in to discuss voices they had saved of ones who had died.
“They would say, ‘It’s all I have left’ and it was as if it was an actual part of the person that was gone. They wouldn’t talk about [the voice] the way they’d talk about a photograph,” said Allison. “They’d talk about it like it was a ghost.”
Allison lamented that the tendency for radio nowadays to focus on news, headlines and concision has resulted even in the cutting of sighs and pauses from story recordings.
“To me that’s the human being,” said Allison. “The playwright Marsha Norman talks about how her husband died, going to a closet some months later and finding a balloon and realizing it contained his breath. It feels like that to me.”
As he has done his whole life, Allison left much of the speaking to others by playing recordings of “This I Believe” essays and clips from other programs he has worked on in this past.
“I tend to hide behind other people’s voices,” said Allison. “I also champion them but I am also in some sense hiding and discovering my own voice through theirs.”
One of his favorite projects was what he referred to as “filling the broadcast day with clean slices of life.” Every hour the broadcast would cut from a news story to a 30- to 60-second clip of a local saying something about his or her life.
“It is so unsettling because it’s so real,” said Allison.
Allison explained how much of what he finds comforting about real life and truth through local radio is the sense of intimacy and neighborliness conveyed through the idea of an immediate community connected through air waves.
“The lovely thing about having a local public radio station is that that’s the one thing that ties us together — that we’re here and that we’re fundamentally neighbors,” said Allison, “I do a lot of international work and I still think of it in the sense of trying to create a sense of neighborliness. I’m working on a project now that I’m hoping to get started sharing stories around the world and making big spaces feel small.”
An essential characteristic of the Meet the Press lecture series is the extensive question and answer session, which allows students to truly interact with the speaker.
One relevant issue raised was language barriers in international radio. Allison conceded that it is nearly impossible to express and embody the voice and essence of someone delivering a story through translation.
“It would be an interesting task at a school like [Middlebury], which is known for its languages, to figure out how to inhabit the vocal space of a primary speaker and translate it for something like this,” said Allison.
Allison’s poignancy and obvious devotion to his work touched a chord with much of his audience.
“It was really inspiring to listen to Jay’s talk. His work is a testament to the power of good listening and good storytelling,” said Sarah Harris ’11.
“It was one of the best talks I have been to at Middlebury,” said Logan Brown ’11. “His voice and the voices of others he played for us certainly made me stop and reflect long after he was finished speaking.”
Some, however, felt Allison was too enthusiastic about the recordings and the idea of the human voice and did not address the key issue of the talk — not simply the power of telling but the power of telling something true.
“I loved listening to him play sound bytes that resonated with him, but I didn’t feel like he connected them all under one overarching theme,” said Astrid Schanz-Garbassi ’12. “The talk was titled ‘The Power of Telling Something True’, and I think I was expecting to come away with some sense of how to harness that power, or at least what that power is.”
(03/24/11 3:53am)
VALPARAÍSO — Since I first started studying Spanish I’ve had this passion for it. Spanish is fluid, Spanish is round; in my mouth Spanish curls loosely yet precisely, blossoming like loops drawn in India ink. I’m a synesthete, so for me words are colors, and Spanish is rich, vivid; Spanish is bright reds and oranges and yellows, a basket of heirloom tomatoes.
I came to Chile to study Spanish. Or rather, the line of thinking that led to my being currently in Chile began with a vague but wholehearted resolve to study Spanish. I think I’m realizing more and more that things are never quite how we expect them to be. I filled out some applications my sophomore spring, I bought a plane ticket, and now I’m living with a Chilean family, taking classes at a Chilean university, working for a Chilean governmental program and I’m studying Spanish, all right. I’m breathing Spanish, thinking Spanish, dreaming Spanish, eating Spanish. I don’t even speak English with the gringos.
And I’m frustrated. Words are who I am. When I signed up to study abroad in Chile, I didn’t, and couldn’t, understand what it would mean — that I was signing up to experience the sensation of being unable to express myself fully, of failing over and over again to match intention with verbalization, of constantly missing the nuances of everyday life that we use language to capture. My Spanish is very good but language is culture — I wasn’t born in Chile, I wasn’t raised here and a semester here will get me close to fluency but nowhere near the ineffable ease that characterizes my relationship with English.
In Spanish, I can be pleasant, friendly, agreeable. I can be silly, fun and occasionally witty. But I can’t fully be myself in Spanish, at least not yet, though I doubt I will ever use Spanish to most articulately and precisely represent my ideas, opinions, emotions and other elements that make me who I am. Every word we speak contains innumerable layers of meaning inscribed upon innumerable more layers of experience and understanding. Here, when I want to say that I like someone, I can’t; I can say that they are una buena onda, nice or agreeable, or I can say that me llevo bien with them, that I get along well with them. Both phrases approach what I want to say but neither embodies the idea satisfactorily enough to make me feel completely assured that I have expressed what I wanted to express. The frustration and uncertainty lie in the nuances.
A few days ago my host brother told me that my voice sounds more relaxed when I speak English. Perhaps that’s what I miss the most: the relaxation that comes with knowing that I can explain myself in precisely the manner that I want, that the words will never feel exotic or alien. In English, every word I use comes with a history of experience and familiarity. With Spanish, I have to rely more on the definitions that I have studied or have been told.
I still love Spanish. But I’m learning something that has only fully revealed itself to me here, in a non-English speaking country: language is complicated and frustrating, and as often as it approaches the truth, it also withdraws, leaving speaker or listener dissatisfied. My romance with Spanish at the moment is fitful. Words are slippery.
(03/24/11 3:52am)
Every decade, American colleges and universities must go through a rigorous examination to prove their effectiveness as an institution. The College is now in the midst of this reaccreditation process.
For the past 18 months, the Reaccreditation Steering Committee and numerous subcommittees have investigated all aspects of the College. The results were put into a 114-page draft self study emailed to students March 18.
Dean of Planning and Assessment, Professor of Psychology and Director of the College's Self-Study Susan Campbell said the self-examination is beneficial in two ways.
“It’s not just a process where we’re meeting the requirements of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC),” she said. “It’s also an opportunity for us to think about how we want to get better as an institution.”
Campbell says the draft was released to students to solicit their opinions, which will be included in the final report.
“Now is the moment for people who haven’t had a big role to weigh-in and say ‘that looks like the institution I know’ or ‘wait a minute, here’s an issue you haven’t highlighted but I think is a concern and I want it addressed,’” she said.
Gus Jordan, executive director of Health and Counseling Services and chair of the subcommittee charged with student life, feels that students don’t need to read the entire draft to get involved.
“I hope students will read chapter six regarding student life — it’s only 12 pages — and give us feedback on how authentically the chapter reads,” Jordan wrote in an email. “Does it match reality ‘on the ground’ from student’s perspectives?”
Campbell also recommends students read the five-page institutional overview section — which she says gives a good overview of the themes and issues that run across the College.
“I bet students would recognize some themes and be interested in others that they weren’t so familiar with,” she said.
The draft also covers student services at each of the College’s affiliated schools — the Monterey Institute for International Studies, the summer language schools, the Bread Loaf School of English and the C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad.
“All of our affiliated schools offer a variety of student services appropriate to each setting and we attempted to address aspects of each school,” he said, “though the undergraduate college here in Middlebury gets most of the attention.”
Campbell stressed that student participation will not only help the College’s self-study, but also benefit student life in the future.
“We [the administration] think we have identified some issues, but we want to hear what students have to say,” she said. “If there are issues that students think we could do better about, we want to hear what students have to say.”
Many students embrace the opportunity to become involved in shaping the future of the College.
“Oftentimes it is difficult to weigh in on issues that you believe are important to the improvement of the College, but this study gives you the rare opportunity to voice an opinion on student life,” said Robert Shimasaki ’13. “With such a small student body, every voice matters, and I feel that by participating in this study you receive the rare opportunity to speak out on campus issues that concern you.”
According to Campbell, students will get two chances to voice their opinions. A general meeting open to all will be held on April 11 at 12:30 p.m. in the McCullough Student Center and a students-only meeting will be announced via email after spring break.
(03/23/11 4:11am)
Sometimes I get fed up with this place. There may be better reasons to dislike Middlebury, but so often I come back to the same restless discomfort: I am always surrounded here. I am always watching. I am always being watched.
Maybe you can relate — you know those days when the perky girl on your hall is up in arms with her snow kayak, or whatever it is, and she’s giddily torn about how exactly to finger paint her new sneakers? Perhaps you’ve been unable to even begin an essay in the library due to the frantic anxiety of just having seen too many people you’ve made-out with? If you’ve ever fallen asleep crying, or gotten too drunk, or watched three episodes of reality TV instead of reading the genuinely interesting article you were meant to and walked ashamed into the dining hall the next morning to the greeting of one hundred pairs of eyes that seem to say hey, good morning, we can tell that you’re feeling like shit — I get it.
But even with the releasing hallelujah of spring break on its way, a funny thing happened to me. I decided to write a love letter to Middlebury.
Let’s begin with the men’s ice hockey game I went to a few weeks ago. I don’t know any men’s hockey players. I prescribe to some strange social code stating that we are not meant to be friends. At the hockey game however, when some obnoxious Castleton St. player slammed a Middlebury player against the glass, I became immediately furious. I wanted to yell like a heavily-bosomed mother in her son’s old jersey, don’t you dare mess with my boy ever again.
Then I went to the Middlebrow improv show. I have a few friends in the group, but the members I felt most fascinated by were students I only kind of know, a little bit, not really. That’s the point — I’d only seen some of them from afar, only admired one’s thick red hair and another with his cute, accented girlfriend. Every member of the group felt familiar, tangible and adorable.
After the improv show, I anxiously watched the men’s basketball game in McCullough. I wanted them to win so badly — perhaps mostly because Jamal has such a great laugh and Ryan Sharry still says “hi” to me and I still secretly wish that Jake Wolfin would come to Hillel and the other day I saw Andrew Locke put a plate down in Proctor with a fork stuck straight out of his mashed potatoes. After the team lost by a heart-wrenching two points, all I wanted to do was hug the shit out of each of them.
I don’t mean to focus my glorified love on only the most admired groups of campus. I’ve experienced more subtle moments too. Like seeing a girl singing to her headphones while toasting a bagel, or the quiet girl from my English class breaking it down at the bar or discovering that two seemingly disconnected people I know are friends, or better yet, dating. Even the knowledge you’ll probably understand any joke I make about the Bunker or Proctor vegetable stock feels reassuring.
I spend a lot of my time at Middlebury comparing myself to others. I dare you to admit that you do too. We are all lazy, crazy, hung-over, failing, ugly and fat on our most miserable days here. But we are also thrown together in these tight spaces in ways that sometimes makes me feel almost breathlessly appreciative of others. So to everyone, before you go on a liberating road trip or return home or take some crazy island adventure, I want to thank you — for surrounding me, for watching me, and for allowing me to watch you.
(03/23/11 12:17am)
Recently, I was lucky enough to be one of the 200 people to attend a Monday Atwater dinner. In this case the theme was French Cuisine. As a lover of any sort of French fare, I was hoping for a feast of steak and frites, baguettes with decent cheese, coq au vin, ratatouille, savory crepes, chestnut soup, boeuf bourguignon, and pate. And, after listening to friend’s raving reviews of the Local Foods Night, Greek Night, and Chinese Night in Atwater, I was anticipating quite the experience. Yet sadly, I was a bit disappointed when I arrived. Perhaps it’s my culinary snob coming through, but I found that the fare was nothing more than typical dining hall offerings with extra butter and cream slopped in. And, while the food was tolerable and sometimes tasty, I was frustrated with Atwater’s interpretation of such an avant-garde world cuisine. In reality, it seemed that the dining staff had more fun renaming the dishes with fancy French words than actually putting effort into the production.
I consumed the greasy potatoes lyonnaise and iceberg lettuce salad without much complaint, but when I got to the dessert I was wishing for something more. I have quite the sweet tooth, and when dreaming up French delicacies I picture rich chocolate mousse, creamy crème brulee, little Madeleine cookies, buttery chocolate éclairs, and scrumptious miniature profiteroles. And so, as I walked up to the tray with high hopes of some sort of tasty pastry or tart to redeem the meal, I was disappointed to see bland squares of dry chocolate cake. To add insult to injury, the label underneath pathetically read “German Chocolate Cake”. Last time I checked my geography, Germany and France were not the same place.
And so I walked away from the cake fuming, deciding that I needed to compensate for Atwater’s attempt at a French meal by creating the most delectable pastry possible. For me, this meant the tarte tatin, perhaps the most rich, buttery, and delicious of all French desserts. The tarte tatin translates to apple tart in English, and consists of a layer of caramelized apples in a buttery pastry crust. Sounds simple at first, but after scouring the Internet for recipes it seemed that I had a bit of a difficult task on my hands. The pastry had to be caramelized then flipped artfully from the skillet to a plate. Could be trouble.
Yet I was determined, and so began the process of “borrowing” apples from the dining hall, snatching one or two at each meal in order to avoid looking suspicious. I swiped some butter, asked the chefs in Proctor for some flour and sugar (under the pretense of baking a cake for a friend’s birthday), and got to work. After two hours of melting butter, mixing in sugar, whipping up a crust, and tossing in lots of crisp apples, I had created a dish that I believed was worthy of a true French feast. And yes, it did have an absurd amount of butter and perhaps too much sugar to be healthy, but it tasted like every French dessert fantasy I’ve had. And I didn’t even mess up that much when flipping it. Success.
Tarte Tatin (adapted from Smitten Kitchen)
Crust
1 stick plus two tablespoons cold salted butter (5 ounces) cut into cubes and chilled in freeze
1 tablespoon sugar (optional)
1 1/2 cup flour
3 to 6 tablespoons ice water
Filling
7 medium apples
1 stick (4 ounces) salted butter
1 cup sugar
Prepare Crust:
Pre-mix the flour and sugar in the food processor container, and cube the butter on a plate. Then put the dry ingredients and the butter in the freezer for a while.
After you’ve chilled everything for at least 20 minutes, add the cubes of butter to dry ingredients and pulse until the largest pieces of butter are no bigger than tiny peas.
Add the ice water a little at a time, processing just until the dough starts to come together into a mass. Turn out onto well-floured surface and pat together into a ball. Don’t handle the dough too much, or the warmth of your hands will start to melt the butter. Flour the top of the dough and use a rolling pin to quickly press and roll the dough out into a 10 to 11-inch circle. Keep turning the dough as you do this to make sure it doesn’t stick to the rolling surface. Throw more flour underneath the dough if necessary. Check the crust to make sure it’s just big enough to cover the top of your tarte tatin pan. Move the crust onto a piece of parchment paper or onto a floured rimless baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate.
Prepare filling:
Preheat oven to 375° F.
Peel, core and quarter the apples.
Over low heat in a heavy, ovenproof skillet measuring 7 to 8 inches across the bottom and 10 to 11 inches across the top, melt the stick of butter. Remove from heat, add the sugar and stir until blended.
Arrange apple quarters in pan, first making a circle inside the edge of the pan. Place them on their sides and overlap them so you can fit as many as possible. Then fill the center of the pan; you may have some apple left over. Keep at least one extra apple quarter on hand–when you turn the apples over, they may have shrunk to the extent that you’ll need to cheat and fill in the space with an extra piece. This one piece won’t get quite as caramelized as the other pieces, but don’t worry–it will still cook through and no one will notice.
Return your pan to the stovetop on high heat. Let boil for 10 to 12 minutes or until the juices in the pan turn from golden in color to dark amber. Remove from heat. With the tip of a sharp knife, turn apple slices over, keeping them in their original places. If necessary, add an extra slice of apple to keep your arrangement intact. Return to the stovetop on high heat once more. Let cook another 5 minutes and then remove from heat.
Place the crust on top of the apples and brush off excess flour. Tuck edges under slightly, along the inside of the pan, being careful not to burn fingers. You can use your knife.
Bake in oven until the top of the crust is golden-brown in color, about 25-35 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool on a rack about 30 minutes.
Run a sharp knife along the inside edge of the pan. Place a plate or other serving dish on top of the pan and quickly flip over the whole pan so the Tarte Tatin drops down onto the plate. Peek under the edge of the pan to see if the Tarte came out. You may need to bop the bottom of the pan with your potholder-encased fist for this to happen. If there are any pieces of apple left behind in the pan or otherwise out of place, carefully put them back where they are supposed to be. Voila! C’est magnifique! A beautiful TREAT!
(03/17/11 4:15am)
On International Women’s Day at the Chellis house, Associate Professor of English and American Literature Marion Wells announced that Colleen Carroll ’12 had been unanimously chosen to receive the prestigious Fraker prize from a pool of 12 nominees. The prize was conceived in honor of Alison Fraker, who died in a tragic car accident just before she graduated from Middlebury. Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty Chair, and Professor of Anthropology Ellen Oxfeld described Fraker as a “moving force behind getting women’s studies established in Middlebury.”
The Fraker Prize, established in 1990, is designated for essays on topics that pertain to either women’s or gender issues from any concentration in the Middlebury curriculum. The only restriction for the prize is that senior thesis work is not eligible for consideration. The openness of the criteria for this prize led to a wide range in the years and majors of nominees. These nominees ranged from a first-year who wrote her essay for her first year seminar to an essay from a senior neuroscience major’s first sociology class.
A committee of four faculty members is responsible for choosing the recipient of the Fraker Prize from the 12 nominees. In the first round, each essay had two committee readers. Then, each committee member chose two essays to proceed to the final round of deliberations. For the final round, the committee members read the final essays and discussed which should receive the prize. According to Wells, also acting as prize committee chair, the final deliberation lasted approximately one hour.
Oxfeld described the decision as “difficult because there were so many excellent entries [that were] not always easy to compare.”
Wells also commented that “all of the essays were extremely impressive,” but at the end of the committee’s meeting, Carroll’s essay titled, “Continuity and Rupture: Community-building and domesticity in missionary China,” was unanimously chosen to receive the prize.
Carroll wrote this essay for her winter term class “Innocents Abroad: American Travel Writing, 1818-1918.” Carroll, a joint American Studies and Geography major, chose this class because it was tailored to her academic interests and seemed “to fuse the two [departments].” She was looking forward to working in special collections, and travel writing also appealed to her because she had also just returned from studying abroad in Chile.
Andrew Wentink, curator of special collections and archives, taught the American travel writing course for the first time this winter. Wentink created this course to, “give students the opportunity to work in depth with primary source materials.”
He designated the final two weeks of his course as time for the students to work with their chosen primary source document and conduct research for their final assignment. Wentink estimates that “the average [amount] of work per week was easily 15 hours.”
Carroll described the research process as a “really fun [and] hugely different” experience because it involved starting with a primary source document rather than secondary sources. She knew from the beginning that she wanted to write a paper based on a woman’s diary. In the class Wentink had emphasized how “missionary manuscripts…were a great resource.” As a result, Colleen chose the diary of a female missionary, Mary Martin, as the core source for her paper.
Carroll’s topic evolved throughout her research process. Her original plan was to compare Martin and Martin’s husband’s diary. However, as she read the diary, Carroll “was struck by how a lot of entries could have been written by any woman at that time period in America.”
This observation led her to concentrate on the theme Carroll described as “transplanted domesticity as a way to create normalcy.” Her essay highlights the gender differences in missionary life, with the women isolated in their domestic spheres while the men traveled throughout China to perform their missionary work. She also addressed “points where [Martin] became aware of the outside Chinese environment” that changed Martin’s writing style and the structure of her life.
After reading Carroll’s essay, Wentink felt that the writing “had to be recognized” — that the spirit of the essay represented key feminist theories and had the advantage of being based on original primary source research. Wentink believe that it was Carroll’s original analysis of unpublished primary source material that “put her over the edge,” of the other nominees.
Carroll described being nominated as “an incredible honor,” and she learned that she was the recipient of the Fraker prize somewhat unconventionally. While she originally intended to miss the prize ceremony for a van licensing class, she received an e-mail telling her that she should attend the ceremony as she had won the prize.
Carroll described winning as “humbling” after hearing the other nominees presenting their work. Committee members were quick to emphasize the strength of the pool of nominees, but when it came to announce the prizewinner there was no contest. According to Wells, the unanimous decision to award Carroll the prize was based on “her original research [which] offered a sophisticated analysis of primary source material [and] the gender issues involved.”
(03/17/11 4:13am)
In many ways Kevin Moss is the very picture of a Middlebury scholar. As professor of Russian and chair of the Russian department, he is by no means limited to russkiy yazyk. (It isn’t only Pushkin, Tolstoy and Bulgakov who haunt his office.) A polyglot true to the Middlebury spirit, he proudly commands a colorful palette of languages, from the aforementioned Russian to French, Hungarian to Serbo-Croatian.
Moss attributes his knack for languages to a bilingual upbringing of sorts.
“I grew up in New Orleans, where there are lots of dialects,” he said. “At home we spoke a southern dialect of English, and at school, where people came from all over, we would speak ‘television English.’”
Growing up in New Orleans, which boasts a rich fusion of Créole and American traditions, Moss naturally gravitated to French, his first foreign language of study. But it was Russian that would ultimately prevail. Armed with a rebellious streak, as well as a fascination with the exotic, the Louisiana native embarked on his study of Slavic languages at Amherst College.
“I started Russian because it was the 70s, the Soviet Union was the ‘evil empire,’ our enemy, it was harder to get people to go and I wanted to be rebellious,” said Moss. “Russian also seemed more exotic to me.”
It was at Amherst that he “went crazy” with Slavic languages, including Russian, Old Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Serbo-Croatian and Polish. There he crafted his own interdisciplinary major — much in the vein of Middlebury’s Independent Scholar Program — combining his language studies with history and history of art.
Afterwards he went on to pursue his Ph.D. in Russian Literature at Cornell University, and began teaching at Middlebury in 1983 after graduation. Following a brief stint as a lecturer at the University of Virginia, he returned to Middlebury in 1985, where he has been teaching since.
For Moss, teaching is both a job and a source of pleasure.
“I love teaching, because I can do what I really like doing,” he said. “I enjoy the research side, I enjoy being able to continually read books and investigate things and having that as part of my job. Once I started teaching, I discovered that I really liked it.
“The first time I realized I loved teaching was when I was studying abroad in (the former) Yugoslavia, helping students alongside me with the Croatian language and enjoying it,” he continued. “It just felt right and interesting.”
But how exactly did Moss end up at Middlebury, a small town astronomically distant from the likes of New Orleans, Zagreb and Moscow?
“I had almost finished my Ph.D., when the job turned up,” he replied. “I went to a small liberal arts college, and knew I wanted to continue working at a small liberal arts college.”
His favorite part about teaching?
“The students,” he answered enthusiastically. “When you see people making progress from the beginning — when you first get them into your hands — to when they leave and come back from Russia, catch the Russian bug … They are immediately talking about, ‘how can I get back?’ They really do get excited about all kinds of Russian things. They come back knowing things I don’t know anything about, which is what should happen.”
As chair of a department that is shrinking in size, Moss cannot emphasize enough Russia’s important presence on the international scene and the value of knowing its language.
“The unfortunate thing about Russia is that people do not realize to what extent it is an extremely important country on the world stage,” he said. “It’s the largest country in the world, hugely wealthy right now … It has more weapons than anybody else,” he added on a facetious note.
The sweep of the Russian language is quite impressive, too. “It isn’t only in Russia, but countries in the former Eastern bloc where a lot of people speak Russian,” he continued. “There are 125 million people who speak Russian as a non-native language, more than those who speak German, Italian or Japanese.”
His favorite courses to teach?
“Second-year Russian; I love grammar,” he said. “It’s a toss up, just because my mind works that way, and it is always interesting to think about.”
Moss also teaches the occasional women and gender studies course, which allows him to work with a very different pool of students.
“First-year seminars around diversity of different kinds get a totally different group of students,” he said. “When you’re talking about race, sexuality and nationality and how all those things interact, I get some really interesting students, not just from the Russian pool.”
Aside from teaching and research, Moss has also advised the Middlebury Open Queer Alliance and served as an active member of Gay and Lesbian Employees at Middlebury (GLEAM), the gay and lesbian organization for employees. In 1990, Moss stood up on the faculty floor to introduce a change in the college’s non-discrimination clause, which culminated in the addition of “sexual orientation” in 1991; he later spearheaded the addition of “gender identity and expression,” which was adopted in 2003.
“In terms of these political things, my goal is to make Middlebury a more comfortable place for everybody,” said Moss. “The thing you realize working in this area, talking to students, is they all go hand in hand. If it’s good for African-American students, it’s going to be good for gay students. If it’s good for gay students, it’s going to be good for students with disabilities.”
Moss has noted a positive development in student body diversity over the years, but sees room for even more representation on campus.
“When I first came in 1983, it was amazingly more uniform,” he said. “Coming from grad school, it all looked very white, preppy … That’s all changed a lot for the better.
“Middlebury is getting better,” he continued. “It’s a little bit slow, but it is getting better. How can you continue … to try to make Midd more diverse? … You have to keep doing it, somebody’s got to do it.”
(03/17/11 4:10am)
What Middlebury student has never experienced the platonic professor crush? It’s hard not to become enamored with our various instructors’ talent, enthusiasm, kindness and quirks. And what is the only thing better than finding one great professor whom you admire? Discovering a faculty couple, a dynamic duo that works and lives together at the College and in the community.
One such couple never imagined they would wind up in rural Vermont.
Visiting Lecturer in Italian Ilaria Brancoli-Busdraghi was born in Switzerland and grew up in downtown Rome. Pieter Broucke, director for the arts, associate curator of ancient art and professor of history of art and architecture, was raised in Bruges, a small Belgian city steeped in medieval and renaissance history. After college, Pieter came to the Unites States to get his P.h.D in History of Art and Architecture from Yale University. While at Yale, he spent a summer at the American Academy in Rome. There, a mutual friend introduced Broucke and Brancoli-Busdraghi. Broucke recalls at their first meeting, “looking over to Ilaria, and deciding I wanted to marry her.” The couple will celebrate their 15th wedding anniversary this June.
Brancoli-Busdraghi and Broucke speak to each other in English at home despite the fact that it is neither of their native languages. With their children Simon, 13, and Tobias, 11, they speak English and Italian.
Broucke attributes his skill in speaking Italian to his father-in-law, a “gregarious and generous Italian” who, according to Broucke, “was not going to sit at the dinner table for a couple hours speaking anything but Italian.” Brancoli-Busdraghi admits to knowing some Flemish phrases and children’s songs and asserts, “I love to say them!”
Broucke joined the Middlebury faculty in 1995, and Brancoli-Busdraghi moved to Middlebury with him. Brancoli-Busdraghi had never lived anywhere but Rome, so the transition to Middlebury life was “a real shock.” Similarly, Broucke had grown up in an urban area, and according to him for a while they “disliked Middlebury a bit for everything it was not,” but “once we had children we began to like it for everything it does have.”
The couple cites skiing, hiking, seasons, great food and the close-knit community of colleagues, students and friends as the things they love about the area. The couple also appreciates the beauty of the landscape and the relatively small amount of time they spend in the car (Broucke explains this is a sharp contrast to his five siblings who live in European cities).
With regard to working at the same place, Broucke and Brancoli-Busdraghi have few complaints. Their similar calendars allow them to travel extensively. When time permits they have lunch together, “usually in the lounge of Johnson,” said Brancoli-Busdraghi, or off-campus (“Like a date — fun!” said Broucke).
Their shared workplace also allows them to be a one-car family (with some organization as they have “resisted” getting a cell phone).
“I love our shared commute,” says Broucke.
In the end, Brancoli-Busdragi says that it is important to, “love what you do, and do it with the person you enjoy.” Brancoli-Busdraghi and Broucke are a couple who does just that.
(03/17/11 4:02am)
Danielle Boyce is ready for yet another adventure. On March 21, she and her husband, Steve, will become the owners of American Flatbread in the Marble Works. Having been manager of the restaurant for the past five years, Boyce is knowledgeable about the business and has worked closely with many of the current employees. She is enthusiastic about her new role, and suspects the transition from manager to owner “will not be that dramatic.”
“The way I manage people is to empower them to be able to run things on their own without me meddling,” she said, adding that her new, more administrative position “means that I am just going to have to continue to strengthen the team.”
This mentality has proved successful for Boyce, a New Jersey native who has worked in the restaurant business since her years at North Carolina State University, where she majored in English. She met her husband working at a restaurant in Raleigh, NC; he was taking a break after graduating from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, “goofing off and waiting tables,” according to Boyce. They both grew up in the Northeast and wanted to return, so the pair moved to Vermont in 1999. Boyce became the manager at the Four Seasons Garden Center in Williston, Vt. After working there for close to five years, she realized she preferred the restaurant business.
American Flatbread was the perfect opportunity, as Boyce has both management and restaurant experience, but had not yet combined her skills. Plus, she said, “my husband and I knew we wanted to open up our own restaurant.”
As manager, Boyce fully embodied the company’s mission: “to produce good, flavorful, nutritious food that gives both joy and health.”
“The fact that we have the food first in the mission is not a coincidence,” she said. “The food is the center of what we do.”
Another central tenet of American Flatbread is the belief that “food remembers the acts of the hands and the heart.” Boyce believes that how everyone, from the farmers to the chef, feel when making the food “is going be a direct representation of what you taste when you have it as a customer.” This notion is what drives Boyce to create a supportive, positive atmosphere for all her employees, each of whom, she believes, should be actively involved in the food-making process.
Boyce also values the restaurant’s connection to the College.
“The College is a significant part of who we are,” she said. “It keeps it vibrant and fresh. We get to know the students over four years and sometimes longer, then the freshmen come in and it starts all over again.”
Though Boyce and her husband are not planning any major changes for the restaurant, she wants to continue to hold events for student groups. For the past two years, American Flatbread has hosted a graduation party for Febs; in previous years, the restaurant also hosted a party for graduates in the spring. It has also held benefit dinners for various student organizations, including an auction event to raise money for relief after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.
“[We] are always open to connecting in that way with the students,” said Boyce, who is happy that the restaurant has a space large enough to accommodate all kinds of groups.
In the coming weeks, the restaurant will also host a wedding reception and a rehearsal dinner.
Though she loves the restaurant’s Dancing Heart pizza with butternut squash on the side, Boyce said that her favorite part of the job is seeing the restaurant functioning smoothly on its own.
“What brings me the most joy is to have a night where were packed full of people enjoying themselves,” she said. “Seeing the staff work with such synchronicity together as a team and just completely have it handled and also having fun and enjoying themselves, that’s what I love about working here. It’s very satisfying.”
Boyce’s ascent to ownership marks the second franchise of American Flatbread; there is another independently run restaurant in Burlington, Vt. The company’s founder, George S who began the original restaurant in Waitsfield, Vt., currently own the Middlebury establishment, which will mark its ninth year of operation this June.
While she misses the diversity of authentic ethnic food that New Jersey has to offer, Boyce loves a good flatbread — and for more than just its taste.
“The very nature of it, the fact that you share it, [and that it is] served family style … is pretty cool,” she said. “It’s nice to work in a place that offers that in a way that is still pretty healthy.”
Customers agree wholeheartedly. Boyce said that she often hears positive feedback from customers, who are able to forget the troubles of their workweek and enjoy good food with friends and family.
“[We want to have] a really comfortable, warm place where people can just leave their cares here,” she said.
(03/10/11 5:25am)
As it is now de rigueur for every serious news publication to publish an evaluation of James Franco’s career, I decided it was high time for The Campus to pass judgment. Franco, now ubiquitous in the cultural sphere, is an actor, artist, writer, Oscar host, Oscar nominee, television daytime soap opera star, student at Yale’s PhD program in English and professor at Columbia College, Calif. James Franco is 32. His highest-grossing film is Spider-Man 3, and he has played James Dean, Allen Ginsberg and himself (numerous times). Next year, he is adapting and directing films based on novels by Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner. I have spent long hours wondering — as I’m sure you have — after reading profiles of him in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and many others: what is James Franco, and is he actually good at anything?
His first and most evident strength is in his looks, a combination of classic Hollywood twinkle-eye and toothy grin, with the slightest hint of charming sleazeball in his greasy hair and cocked eyebrow. His career was launched with a role in the short-lived Judd Apatow cult television series Freaks and Geeks. He is successful and arguably quite good at his primary career (acting) with an ability to deftly shift from absurdist humour (30 Rock, Pineapple Express) to understated performances in realist dramatic roles (Milk, 127 Hours). If anything, however, he is most skilled at the art of self-reference, constantly mocking his own Renaissance man public image and rumored proclivity for getting high.
His recently published book of short stories, Palo Alto, received mixed reviews — it reads, in this reader’s opinion, like a 14-year-old trying to channel bad Ernest Hemingway, except on purpose — but it is generally agreed that he “has potential.” His artwork, consisting of short films, photography, and installations, has been exhibited in Berlin, Los Angeles and New York. Whether or not these pieces are different in their basic content from the short films (okay, video clips) and photography that he takes on his smartphone and tweets — @jamesfranco, get at it — is uncertain. He has a recurring role on the soap opera General Hospital as an artist and potential serial killer named James Franco. The real Franco is using footage from this role for an art exhibition later this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A.
Many Hollywood stars dabble in other arts, such as music and fashion, or more accurately, “music” and “fashion” (see: Lindsay Lohan and friends), but Franco’s dabbling feels more authentic, perhaps by dint of the fact that he has an MFA from Columbia University, a graduate degree in film from NYU and a graduate degree from Brooklyn College in creative writing. He was also enrolled in a poetry program in North Carolina, which to Franco, I imagine, is like adding a side of fries to a four-course meal. All of these programs, incidentally, were undertaken at the same time. If we are a generation of academic overachievers, Franco is our patron saint.
What keeps Franco from being utterly insufferable is, I think, his self-awareness, which is evident in every kind of art he produces. The interest in self-reference, it turns out, is not just a clever comedic device deployed for Funny or Die, SNL or 30 Rock, but, befitting the intellectual obsession of our generation, a meta-exploration into what an actor’s “art” is in the 21st century: not his roles, but himself. Franco takes this conception to new heights in producing, reproducing and deconstructing every element of his own image. For example, the class that he is teaching is called “Master Class: Editing James Franco … With James Franco,” and the final project is to compile a 30-minute documentary on him. What method was to Marlon Brando, meta is to James Franco. With a sharp awareness of multiple facets of the media as an interactive outlet for self-expression and examination, Franco is representative of the 21st century youth ethos: create your own brand, and get good at marketing it. Except, of course, he is much better at it than anyone else. Franco, stop making the rest of us look bad. We’re already less attractive than you.
(03/10/11 5:05am)
Jim Naremore, a widely-known and respected film scholar and professor emeritus of communication and culture at Indiana University, made a visit to campus last week. He gave a lecture on literary adaptation in film titled “Chandler, Hawks and The Big Sleep,” referring, of course, to Raymond Chandler’s titular 1939 hardboiled crime novel and Howard Hawks’ beloved 1946 film adaptation of the same.
He also paid a visit to Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture Chris Keathley’s class “Film & Literature,” and engaged in discussion with the class, which touches on many of the same subjects and read the novel and watched the film earlier in the week. Finally, the Wonnocott Commons House hosted a small dinner following the lecture, with Naremore, Keathley and a handful of students from “Film & Literature” in attendance, as well as Visiting Assistant Professor of English & Film & Media Culture Ed Smith, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture Jason Mittell, Ellis Professor of English and Liberal Arts John Bertolini and Professor of American Studies and Wonnocott Commons Head Will Nash.
The lecture touched on Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of the archetypical private detective Philip Marlowe, as well as issues of gender, sexuality and orientalism that arise from the way the novel’s story was changed in order to fit the censoring restrictions of the Motion Picture Production Code, which remained in action until 1968.
A self-described “bridge burner,” Naremore has written books on a vast array of cinema-related topics because of his tendency to deeply engage with one subject, write about it, and then move onto something new. This has contributed to his prominence in the field, but it is not the only factor. “He was for many years a professor at Indiana University,” said Keathley, “which was one of the midwestern schools that, in the 1970s, led the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline.”
“He is obviously very smart,” added Keathley, who worked to bring Naremore to campus, “but also unpretentious and unintimidating.” He continued, “these qualities of approachability came through clearly when he visted our ‘Film & Literature’ course and talked to students.”
This quality also certainly showed through at the dinner following the lecture.
“He’s a die-hard cinephile,” noted Keathley, “ready to talk with students or whomever about what films he’s seen recently and what he thought of them. In addition to being able to speak about cinema in a very sophisticated way, he is also more than ready to talk to students and other film loves in a way that they can easily relate to.”
(03/10/11 5:02am)
A Boulder, Co. native, Tamara Chase’s favorite mountain in Vermont is Sugarbush, though she does have a “nostalgic love” for Winter Park and Mary Jane, two Boulder peaks. Chase, a body pump and spinning instructor at Vermont Sun Fitness Center, leads an active life. While she enjoys spending time in the classroom on the spin bike, a 26-mile loop that weaves from Cornwall, Vt., where she resides, through Vergennes is a favorite ride for her and her husband, an ardent cyclist himself.
Chase attended Scripts College, but later transferred to the University of Vermont, where she majored in English and Philosophy. Graduating a semester early, Chase spent her spring months at sea, traveling from west to east. She visited 10 countries, including Japan, Israel, Turkey and Greece, before heading back to school again. Chase chose Northeastern University for law school, despite her dad’s position as dean of Vermont Law School.
Now a lawyer, Chase has a quaint office that overlooks Otter Creek in the town of Middlebury. Here she practices family law. She enjoys the location of her office, as she is an avid fan and frequenter of 51 Main and Storm Café. She feels for a small town, Middlebury is lucky to have such a wide variety of restaurants and shops.
Chase moved to Vermont in 1998 and said her classes keep her “sane.” She began leading lessons when she was in college.
In 1996, Vermont Sun held its first spinning class. At the time, it was the only sports club in the state to offer the activity. Chase said spinning is “one of the fitness fads that has not faded out.” While classes were initially packed, the activity continues to draw crowds, and Chase is especially pleased that men attend, as well.
“In Vermont, it seems that only women go to group fitness classes,” she said. Though her two sons, one a freshman at Ohio Wesleyan University and the other a junior at Middlebury Union High School, and her husband, the sports and marketing director for Rossignol, do enjoy the classes.
Chase credits her love of exercise and teaching to the people and the energy that each individual brings to the class.
“If I did not have the interaction from the participants that I do, I would not teach,” she said.
Though she has been spinning for several years now, Chase values the importance of engaging in an array of physical activities. She says that spinning is now muscle memory for her, and is probably not as hard as it should be. Chase’s spinning classes are on Wednesdays at 12:10 p.m., Saturdays at 8:15 a.m. and Sundays at 11 a.m.
Lady Gaga and techno beats comprise the core of Chase’ spinning playlist. She also adds a few old rock n’ roll tunes to cater to the older generation in the class.
“If it [a song] makes you want to move then I add the song to my list,” she said. “It has been an evolution.”
Les Miles started his body pump classes in New Zealand, and now the program has spread to over 60 countries, including the US. Recently, Vermont Sun invested in the course, too. Chase calls it an “endurance-based strength training class” or simply “weight lifting to music.” She believes it is particularly important for women, especially if they do not enjoy lifting; the class uses small, light weights, but nonetheless helps build endurance. Each song targets a different area of the body, from the thighs to the triceps.
“I love having the college kids in my classes,” she said. “This would be a great class for a team to take together.”
According to Chase, the most essential component of any exercise class is the instructor. She appreciates good teachers, those who are passionate and invested in the activity and get energized. Body pump classes, led by Chase, are on Thursdays at 3:45 p.m. and Saturdays from 9:15 to 10:15 a.m.
“I continue to find inspiration from my classes because of the way I feel after,” she said. “It keeps me happy.”
For the past seven years, Chase, along with her fellow exercise gurus, has organized the Tour de Vermont Sun. The event, which raises money for cancer, asks all participants to pay a registration fee of $300, and in return each is invited to ride a spin bike for six hours. Many form teams and split the riding, but this year Chase, in addition to five others, rode for the entire six hours. The event has raised well over $100,000 since it started, and added another $14,000 from this past January’s spin marathon. Next year, Chase hopes to expand the organization statewide and encourage a Tour de Vermont at gyms across Vermont.
Chase encourages everyone, especially college students, to attend her classes, as she promises all will enjoy an “endorphin high.”
(03/10/11 5:01am)
As a school recognized for its exceptional language programs and support of positive international, it is no surprise that the Middlebury-Monterey lecture series talks are greeted by an attentive audience. This was no different last Thursday, March 3, when students and faculty gathered to hear one of this year’s speakers Barry Olsen, assistant professor at the Monterey Institute Graduate School of Translation, Interpretation and Language Education address the importance of foreign language acquisition.
The annual lecture series is “a way for Middlebury and Monterey faculty to come and see each school while sharing expertise and providing learning opportunities,” explained Dean of International Programs Jeff Cason.
Olsen, who joined Monterey’s faculty in 2007, cited Monterey’s recent merge with Middlebury as part of the reason why he entered academia.
“I thought it was a wise step to join the two schools,” he said. “It showed foresight from both institutions.”
Olsen, who has worked as an interpreter since 1993, spoke to the audience about why foreign language acquisition is so essential.
“I believe that English is important, and it will continue to be so,” he said. “But it isn’t enough anymore.”
Beginning his lecture with a quote from A Tale of Two Cities, Olsen painted the modern world as one experiencing both the best of times and the worst of times.
According to Olsen, because technology is now much easier to access, we are in the best of times. It is much simpler now than ever before to be engaged as a global citizen. Consequently, the need for multi-lingual speakers is great.
Simultaneously, Olsen holds that this is the worst of times — the demand for Chinese and Spanish speakers is going up rapidly, but the United States is not producing enough citizens who can speak those languages.
And while both Chinese and Spanish are currently languages in demand, Olsen also urged students and faculty to pursue other languages as well.
Jon Brach ’13 found this aspect of Olsen’s lecture particularly motivating.
“He was very knowledgeable, and the lecture encouraged me to continue with German,” he said.
After stressing the importance of language acquisition, Olsen continued on to outline various reasons for why people of different languages communicate with one another. The first reason Olsen cited is conquest.
“After World War II, the Allied powers needed a way to bring the Axis powers to justice,” he said.
According to Olsen, this drive, which led to the Nuremburg trials, is one of the major reasons why there are jobs for interpreters today. To allow different powers to speak with one another, the United States saw the necessity of having well-trained interpreters.
The second reason interpretation became necessary was religious conversion. Olsen described how, when missionaries wanted to convert others, they had to speak the indigenous language.
Most recently and as global industry has developed, Olsen described the importance of communication to drive commerce.
“This reason is, by far, the most powerful,” he said.
Asked later, Olsen said that commerce has the capacity to be the most powerful educational incentive to learn new languages to satisfy the business world’s needs. For instance, if an industry wants to sell products to a Chinese clientele, their advertisements must be in Chinese and they will employ more Chinese speakers, both native and foreign.
For Maureen Wise ’13 this idea was the most thought provoking.
“I like learning languages, and language education is interesting to me,” she said. “I thought that … the [idea that] business world could effect education … was really interesting.”
Olsen also laid out 10 rules that a student learning a language should follow. These rules included exposing oneself to as much media as possible in the target language as well as developing writing skills and are sent to every incoming Monterey student.
“The list of 10 things that students are sent before going to Monterey were really helpful,” said Peter Moore, ’14. “So many people are studying languages here now, and the rules seemed useful.”
At the end of his lecture, Olsen explained that because the world is becoming increasingly “globalized” and not everyone speaks English, the United States needs to produce multi-lingual citizens
Kevin Thorsen ’11 found the lecture enlightening.
“He was incredibly knowledgeable on how language learning relates to the larger world,” he said. “He was a very precise and eloquent speaker.”
“It used to be almost impossible to find authentic native speaker material when learning a language,” Olsen said. “Now, it’s incredibly accessible. The technology is there. And the need now for cross-cultural, cross-linguistic communication is greater than ever before. English is great, but it isn’t enough.”
(03/03/11 5:20am)
Have you ever had an argument with a friend and wished there was someone there to settle it for you? Well now thanks to two Middlebury alumni, you can use Squabbler.com to share your side of the argument over the Internet and let viewers declare a winner.
The creators of Squabbler, Matt Bijur ’97 and Mike Bender ’97 — now based in Los Angeles, California — have been best friends since they met in Battell North in 1993 as first-years at Middlebury. They joined forces around their tendency to squabble with one another, as most friends do, and hence came up with the idea for Squabbler. On Squabbler, “the challenger” and “the responder” each presents his other side of the debate in a video of 30 seconds or less, and then over the life of the squabble, viewers cast votes, leave comments and decide on a winner.
Bijur and Bender’s original squabble back in Battell was over something as simple as air conditioners: “Matt was convinced that air conditioners can’t make you sick, but I absolutely believe that they can,” said Bender.
Bijur and Bender stress that squabbles can be as lighthearted or as serious as you want.
“There is no squabble too big or too small. It could be a debate over fraternities versus social houses or two roommates talking about classes, teams, whatever it happens to be,” said Bender. “It could be political debates, or a discussion about love and relationships. We encourage people to be creative about their squabbles. Everything’s debatable.”
Bender and Bijur have been working on the website for about a year. Since its launch at the beginning of February, Squabbler is already averaging close to 500,000 impressions per month. The site has already received a bigger response than its creators expected, and they hope that its popularity will continue to spread across college campuses.
“Our vision for the site is that it will become deeply embedded within universities and colleges across the country, but given the fact that we’re both Midd alums, we want Middlebury to be the first and we expect it to spread from there,” said Bijur. “We hope to have Midd Kids squabbling about everything from Middlebury sports, to dining halls, to roommate issues, to Midd’s carbon footprint. We have big aspirations for this website. It’s an enormous web property, and we want it to spread much like Facebook did, with Middlebury acting as the catalyst for it taking off.”
The creators of Squabbler did not always envision themselves working in the Internet business, as the Internet was not even available in their dorm rooms when they were at Middlebury. Bijur, who majored in architecture and economics, worked in the sports arena after college and then transitioned into the Internet business. He is now an employee of KIT Digital, where he works with video delivery, social media and applications.
“I think my work with KIT will help us see the direction of where Squabbler will go in the future, with mobile devices, TV shows, interactive tweeting and things that will help us maintain a connection with the viewers,” said Bijur.
Besides working in the Internet business, Bender, an English and film major, has primarily worked in the film industry as a screenwriter for corporations such as New Line Cinema, Disney, Warner Brothers and Comedy Central. Bender wrote “Not Another Teen Movie,” and more recently launched a website called www.awkwardfamilyphotos.com, with a tagline of “Spreading the Awkwardness.”
This site was launched about a year and a half ago, after Bender realized that the awkward family photos his family had were something central, relatable and something to which everyone could connect. He wanted to create a friendly place where everyone could come together and share uncomfortable family moments. Awkward Family Photos has received press hits from outlets such as CNN, the CBS Early Show, Hollywood Reporter, the New Yorker, GQ and Entertainment Weekly. However, Bender says that this press attention comes from the fact that everyone has a family and uncomfortable moments. He does not go out and seek press, but prefers to let it come in organically.
There are many rewards to working in the Internet business, according to Bijur and Bender.
“There’s so much freedom right now to create something original and different. The beauty of it is that there is no one telling you what you can and cannot do. You can break the rules and bring something original to people,” said Bender. “With TV and film, you know the format well and generally know where they’re going, but the web can go anywhere. It’s about figuring out what can inspire you.
“The most rewarding part of [working on Squabbler] is the creative challenge, building something people enjoy,” said Bender. “We want people to be entertained and to think about issues.”
In discussing the business aspects of Squabbler and Awkward Family Photos, Bender and Bijur explained that most of the revenue is derived from advertisements, campaigns and contests built around their advertisers. Awkward Family Photos also raises revenue through merchandising, books, and it even has a television show with ABC in development.
“Our first priority is to create something that is fun and that is a good experience for the people. If we can do that, the revenue will follow,” said Bijur. “That is what I believe makes for a successful business.”
Much like Facebook did years ago, Bijur and Bender are looking to hire Middlebury representatives who are interested in earning some money and introducing the Squabbler platform to the student body.
“We want Midd reps to talk about the site, explain what it is. The more the merrier,” said Bender. “We want Squabbler to be introduced to campuses because college students are the kind of people who will use it. At our age [of 35], people are like, ‘Wait a minute, explain to me again how this works.’”
Interested students can contact Bijur and Bender at reps@squabbler.com. The creators indicate that they are open to acting as resources and talking to students who are interested in social media and web business, and they also have some advice to share with Middlebury students about career paths and life in general:
“When I was at Middlebury, I thought I had to remember everything from every class. But you look back, and it’s really the experience and the people that are important. It’s about being around smart people, the respect for learning you develop and the interactions you have at Middlebury,” said Bijur.
“You don’t have to be on a set track at Middlebury or even after graduation. Your 20s are a great time to experiment and not just get caught in one path.”
Squabbler.com
(03/03/11 5:16am)
As Visiting Assistant Professor of Education Studies, Tara Affolter’s time at Middlebury neared its end, the Keep Affolter movement took off. After President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz received a letter from education studies minor Jay Saper ’13 on behalf of the Institutional Diversity Committee (IDC), of which he is a member, and the subsequent campaign demonstrating student support behind her, Affolter was offered and accepted two more years at Middlebury, with interest in making her a part of the community for as long as is reasonably possible. Affolter completed her PhD in 2006 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and then “inched her way into academia” teaching English to high school sophomores during the day and education courses to college juniors and seniors in the evening.
Affolter came to Middlebury because at the time the education studies department was looking for a leave replacement for two professors and she was looking to move closer to her sister in Montpelier. Affolter’s background was a good fit with what the department was looking for. During her time here, Affolter has been impressed by the provisions made for visiting professors, the scholarship and engagement of Middlebury students and the ability to teach with rather than to students.
“Coming from a big university to a little place like this there’s no way in most other places that visiting people are treated the way that we’re treated here,” she said. She was “nothing but pleased” with the support and respect that she and students working on her behalf have challenges our community.
“We make a shorthand reference to the administration or Old Chapel but would like to see a more nuanced decision of seeing the humanity in all the people that are involved in these struggles,” she said.
All parties involved were impressed by the positive tone maintained throughout the deliberations around keeping Affolter and the lack of resistance to the move.
“It was pretty great to learn how receptive the administration was to students who were really passionate about a professor and dedicated to keeping her here,” Saper said. “Energized students can make anything happen on this campus if they’re really dedicated toward pushing and persisting that what they want is really in the best interest of the college.”
“The College listens to students in the hiring process, through student evaluations, references, and other feedback and this was a part of that,” said Dean of Faculty and Rehnquist Professor of American History & Culture Jim Ralph.
Though the extension of Affolter’s contract does not set a precedent for such appointments in the future, Shirley Collado, dean of the College and chief diversity officer, said, “The College strives to be as creative as possible when we are trying to retain talented faculty who contribute to the classroom, scholarship, mentoring students and certainly to diversity goals at the College,” and that attitude will continue to prevail in the future.
Among the essential components to the package allowing Affolter to stay at the College were her appointment as mentor to the Posse Scholars in the Class of 2015 and the inclusion of a first year seminar in Affolter’s course load. With the biggest group of Posse members that Middlebury has ever seen scheduled to hit campus in the fall, Affolter’s excitement about the program could not have come at a better time. While the administration approaches most Posse mentors with the request, Affolter’s interaction with Posse scholars in her classes at UW- Madison led her to request to be a Posse mentor within her first weeks at Middlebury. Until this time, the brevity of her term appointment prevented her from being a Posse mentor, and she is thrilled to be a part of Posse in a formal capacity.
“One of the most exciting pieces of [staying at Middlebury] is being the Posse mentor for the incoming class,” she said.
In the next couple of years, Affolter will be offering new courses including this semester’s popular “Social Justice and Education” and a class on inclusive education that she is still crafting. Her first year seminar is yet to be defined but will likely focus on race and inequality in U.S. schools. On a larger scale, the addition of another professor in Education Studies frees up all of the department’s professors to introduce new classes as they shift into new positions. Courses in environmental education and peace education are in the works for next year to be offered by the other members of the department.
Affolter will also be involved in the programming of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) next year as the center’s theme will be race, ethnicity, and education. She will continue to share her belief that “peoples’ lived experiences and stories matter” and she will try to push students to break down the neat barriers that they erect between life and theory.
She hopes to be seen as “an ally and a person that can use [her] privilege of being a professor as a way to draw attention to issues of diversity and inclusion,” but Affolter reminds us all to remember that “this work is much bigger than any one person and as soon as we decide that we have this chief diversity officer or go see that professor in education studies, it’s her work — we’ve actually lost the bigger picture. That’s problematic. It’s just another way to marginalize the issue.”
Additionally, Affolter would like to see an increased awareness of diversity of abilities and the way that disabilities — both visible and invisible — play out in people’s lives.
“It’s about using universal design to create an environment that invites everybody into the learning,” she said.
(03/03/11 4:52am)
The Center for Teaching, Learning and Research (CTLR) has recently created a new resource for academic advisers that brings necessary information together into a single website, accessible by both faculty and students.
Conversations regarding its development began in fall 2008 at meetings held before the school year at the faculty meetings at the Bread Loaf Mountain campus. The site was constructed primarily by CTLR Director and Professor of English Kathy Skubikowski, Associate CTLR Director Mary Ellen Bertolini and Director of Learning Resources Yonna McShane. The development also included feedback from students, deans and faculty to make the available advising resources more widely accessible and concentrated in one space. The website, according to Bertolini, was made available during September 2010 and was used most recently by advisers for the newly matriculated Feb class of 2014.5.
The website is now available to the College community, although Dean of Faculty and Rehnquist Professor of American History and Culture Jim Ralph noted that “it is still a work in progress and has potential to evolve into a gateway for academic advising information and resources.”
Bertolini seconds Ralph, adding that more focus needs to be put on creating resources for upperclassmen advising.
“We still have a lot more work to do — for juniors and seniors, especially,” wrote Bertolini in an e-mail. “We hope to enlist the help of the Study Abroad Office and the Education in Action Office as we develop more areas of the site.”
The website provides information that ranges from reports on distribution requirements and major fulfillments to course catalogs. Not only are advisers able to access information regarding regular courses, but they can also view key details to aid sophomores in the study abroad application process.
The website states that “students’ advising needs to change over their four years at Middlebury,” and provides a relatively detailed outline that traces the evolution of students’ advising needs through their career at Middlebury. As Ralph noted, “advising can come from anywhere: coaches, professors, fellow students, but having academic advising knowledge concentrated in an accessible and organized space could provide more direction for student-adviser relationships.”
The outline begins with first-year requirements, such as selecting courses, mastering the transition to college and pre-advising, and ends with senior research, capstone work, completing the major and graduate school and employment advice.
The new site also contains links that enable users to directly access CTLR resources, First-year Seminar information, Academic Policies, the Registrar’s Office and BannerWeb. The future expansion of the site would include academic advising that extends to planning for graduation and beyond into real-world professions.
The site is not intended to replace “face-to-face interactions between students and advisers,” Ralph said, but rather that it should be used as a supplement for both students and advisers to expand their academic advising relationship. As Bertolini commented, the site should make the student-adviser relationship more productive and focused with regard to Academic Advising scope.
Bob Cluss, dean of curriculum and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, added that the site can also be a way to help students in transition between their original first-year seminar adviser and their major adviser.
Vivian Cowan ’14 noted that her adviser relationship would have been much improved if her adviser “had more knowledge about the course catalog and potential classes.”
For others, having a less involved adviser can be a plus.
“[My adviser is] more of a mentor and sounding board than life planner,” said Kathryn Miller ’13. “I like the way our relationship works because it gives me guidance without being controlling.”
(02/24/11 5:15am)
After a brief introduction, Rick Bass walked up to the podium and turned to his audience, taking a long look at the white board. Disconnected words, circles inside circles, arrows, lines and a quote had been scribbled all over the board from the previous class.
“Gosh,” he said in his coarse southern accent. “I wish I could still be a student like y’all.”
In a way, Bass is still a student. Though he has already accomplished a great deal in his 53 years, he still says he has a lot left to learn and to do until his work is complete. While critics have dubbed Bass a “nature writer,” he calls himself an environmental activist. One would think it would be tough to lead this double life — activist by day, writer by night. For Bass, however, these two worlds intersect in a simple passion for wilderness. By writing about the beauty and wonder of nature, Bass passes on his own passion for wilderness to his readers, making them care about the nature he holds so dear.
Bass took an early interest in the natural world. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, and earning his Bachelors of Science in geology from Utah State University, Bass spent much of his early life working as a petroleum geologist in the South and Southwest.
“It was like being in a war,” he said.
His mission was to search for the buried treasure — oil — and though it was cutthroat and perhaps seen as unethical to some, Bass, “wouldn’t trade [the experience] for the world.”
Though Bass was born and raised in the South, his oil stint made him yearn for the world out West. So Bass gave up oil and moved to Missoula, Montana, where he began to explore the Yaak Valley’s wilderness, both on foot and in his writing. Bass had never seen anything like the Yaak and he thought people should know about it.
But Bass soon realized that the Yaak wilderness was slowly disappearing. Heavy logging devastated entire forests. With no choice but to protect his adopted home, Bass decided to fight.
There had never been an environmental activist in Montana quite like Bass. The logging industry ruled the local culture; the treasuries were funded by how much timber they could cut; logging mills dictated the accounting system. No one had ever stood up to the logging authority until Bass.
“What the opposition needed was a smack in the mouth,” he said. “They were bullies and they never expected me to fight back.”
What Bass brought to Montana was the power of language and the power of the idea. He wrote fictional stories about the Yaak wilderness, its innate beauty and the unique unknown. Though he never specifically spoke about his activism in his stories, it demonstrated his love and advocacy of the wilderness. Writing stories was one form of environmental advocacy but for Bass, that was simply not enough.
After only a few years in Montana, Bass began the conservation campaign in local and state governments. Forming the Yaak Valley Forest Council, his first step was overcoming the locals’ distrust and fear; to the loggers of Montana, Bass was a threat to their industry and their economy, and they would do whatever it took to keep Bass out of power.
“To make real change, you must have a champion of the heart,” Bass said. “The legislation must be heart based.”
Bass threw his whole heart into breaking down the local logging culture and making the people of Montana see what their industry was doing to the precious wilderness.
In the final few minutes of his lecture, Bass compared his legislative efforts to hunting: “To get a good shot at the animal, you have to put in the miles, the hours, the bad weather — all those obstacles, just for one shot,” just like he gets only one shot for a bill that would permanently protect the last remaining roadless cores in Yaak Valley, which total nearly 180,000 acres.
Bass is still working towards this opportunity. His efforts have a come a long way in 20 years. There is now a conservation educator in Montana schools and the people are learning about how to protect their home at a young age.
Still, Bass said, “It’s a hard gig. You must navigate through the territory of despair.”
“Most environmental activists are in your face with their views or opinions, but Bass weaves his environmental advocacy into his stories in such a subtle way that you can’t not be persuaded,” said Tara Doyle ’11
“I found his personal story about the politics of environmental activism eye-opening and somewhat alarming,” said Assistant Professor of English & American Literatures Dan Brayton. “It’s interesting to see a writer wear two different hats — a creative hat and an advocacy hat — and wear them so well.”
