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(11/01/18 9:55am)
The student group MiddVote has led the charge to increase voter participation on campus this election season with the goal of doubling Middlebury students’ 14 percent voter turnout in 2014. Abby Dennis ’21 and Nora Bayley ’21 are spearheading the initiative as co-organizers.
MiddVote is a non-partisan organization that strives to increase civic engagement and informed voter participation. The group has provided resources and hosted events to help guide students through the voter registration and absentee ballot application processes.
“It’s hard to tell people what to do and how to vote because it’s different in every state,” Dennis said.
Hazel Millard ’18 founded MiddVote with help from the college’s Center for Community Engagement (CCE), which provides funding. Thanks to Millard, MiddVote has a master document detailing voter registration and absentee ballot instructions and online application links and due dates for each state. At MiddVote’s voter drives, students can find stamps, envelopes and copies of each form for states that use a non-electronic system. MiddVote even mails student’s forms. MiddVote and the CCE worked together to provide the Center for Careers and Internships, Mail Center and Residential Commons offices with stamps to give students for free.
Since the beginning of the school year, MiddVote has helped more than 60 students register to vote and more than 160 students apply for an absentee ballot.
“Even if students don’t stop, simply seeing our table in Wilson reminds students to register on their own,” Bayley said.
Along with drives, MiddVote has organized a shuttle that will run from Adirondack Circle (ADK) to the polls every hour on Election Day, Nov. 6.
A #VoteTogether Celebration organized by MiddVote and the CCE will also be held at College Park across from Shafer’s Market & Deli on Election Day from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. Free pizza, hot chocolate and face-painting by college student volunteers will be provided. The event is a local celebration under the national #VoteTogether initiative, which aims to host 2,000 similar events across the country to bring community members together to vote and celebrate civic engagement. Bayley and Dennis won a grant from MTV’s +1theVote campaign, which selects one application from each of the 50 states to receive funding for a voting celebration.
This event is especially important to MiddVote’s organizers because in Vermont, citizens can register to vote on Election Day, and all Middlebury students registered to vote in the U.S. are eligible to vote in Vermont.
“A lot of students have been registering in Vermont, especially people who missed the registration deadline in their home state. This event allows students to get to the polls, register and vote on Election Day,” Dennis said.
In addition to posting reminders on its social media account, MiddVote has reached out to President Laurie Patton and the Student Government Association President Nia Robinson to send out campus-wide emails with voter participation reminders. MiddVote volunteers are also taking a grassroots approach by announcing reminders in classes.
The Middlebury College Democrats and the Middlebury College Republicans have left the voter participation push to MiddVote.
“I have huge respect for what MiddVote does. The Middlebury College Democrats have resisted pressure to do partisan registration out of respect for MiddVote,” said Grace Vedock ’20, the president of College Democrats. Although some members within the Middlebury College Democrats have pushed for encouraging voters to support Democratic candidates, the club’s leadership has decided not to facilitate partisan voting. This has translated into club members volunteering at MiddVote drives rather than operating under the Middlebury College Democrats banner.
Dennis, Bayley and Vedock noted that the country seems more tuned into this election than in previous non-presidential election years.
“It is easy to get frustrated with government and feel like your voice isn’t being heard, but the solution to that is not to not vote,” Bayley said.
“If everyone says that their vote doesn’t count, then their vote won’t count,” Dennis said.
(03/01/18 1:23am)
Winter term, colloquially referred to as J-Term, affords both students and faculty unique opportunities for learning and study. It is a time when each student may enroll in only a single academic, credit-bearing course and each instructor, similarly, teaches only one course. It is possible for students to study at the college or away from campus, independently or as participants in a course.
This J-Term, associate professor of sociology Rebecca Tiger extended Middlebury’s classroom to include the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility in Rutland, Vermont. The “Sociological Imagination” course that Tiger taught to 16 male inmates at the jail examined what it means to think “sociologically” about the world around us. The students used short theoretical readings by classical sociologists to understand current affairs in the U.S. They also studied short stories, audio, video and journalistic essays to think through fundamental sociological concepts like status, power and social control. In developing “the sociological imagination,” they sought to understand how individual experiences reflect the society we live in.
“Being able to teach a course in a correctional facility is one way to bridge the divide between spaces of freedom and spaces of constraint,” Tiger said. This is an important goal to her and her colleagues who teach about the sociology of punishment.
Tiger has been planning this course for over two years, which included her attendance at numerous training workshops and conferences on higher education in prison. Middlebury’s Fund for Innovation financed this preparation, and the course itself was fully funded by Middlebury through the dean of faculty’s office. Tiger advertised the class within the jail through a flyer, and community educator Chris Cosgrove selected students to participate based on who showed the most interest
Many inmates eagerly joined, and Tiger’s course thrived because of their willingness to participate and voice their opinions. “This is not an environment where there is a lot of critical thinking, so [the class] gave them something to get up in the morning for,” Cosgrove said.
Tiger said that the inmates were eager to talk about the course’s central topics of power, social control, inequality and social stratification because they hit so close to home for them.
The class culminated in a personal essay in which students applied the sociological lens to their own lives. This assignment was difficult because many of the students struggled with writing, but with encouragement and one-on-one tutoring they were able to conquer their insecurities. “The students were surprised at what they could do when they applied themselves and pushed through their frustrations,” Cosgrove said.
He explained that many of the inmates struggle with personal relationships because of underlying misconceptions about masculinity and gender roles they encountered in their upbringing. This class gave them an opportunity to confront these issues. Cosgrove added that his job focuses heavily on helping students learn new social facts to better equip them for life after incarceration.
Originally, Tiger had been told to expect inmates to become disinterested and drop out as the course progressed, but aside from those who got released, all of the students finished the class. “It was great for me to see a lot of the students’ enthusiasm about the class and to be reminded of everything that excites me about sociology,” said sociology major Julia Shumlin ’17.5, who worked as Tiger’s teaching assistant for the class.
Both Tiger and the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility are excited about continuing to collaborate in the future. Cosgrove, Tiger and Shumlin all hope that the next step is for the course to adopt an “inside-out model” in which half of the students are inmates and half are Middlebury students. Shumlin believes both Middlebury students and inmates could benefit from the variety of personal experiences an inside-out classroom would bring together.
“Because this class depends on using a theoretical framework to understand the links between individual circumstances and broader structures, the experiences of the students are so critical,” Shumlin said. “Middlebury clearly has some amazing resources and brilliant professors, and I think that [an inside-out classroom] could be a great way to expand that access and to build a really engaging class environment.”
(03/01/18 1:13am)
On Wednesday, February 21, over 40 students, staff and faculty members gathered in the Axinn Center’s Abernathy Room to hear black faculty members speak about their experiences navigating primarily white spaces, including Middlebury.
The panelists included literatures and cultures librarian Katrina Spencer, computer science instructor Jason Grant, associate professor of history William Hart, assistant professor of American studies Jessyka Finley and artist and J-Term professor William “Kasso” Condry.
Middlebury’s fall 2017 student body profile reported that only 4.1 percent of the student body identifies as black or African American, and Data USA reported that 0.73 percent of the town of Middlebury’s residents are black. But for many of the professors who spoke on Wednesday’s panel, Middlebury was not the first predominantly white space they had faced. They bring the influences of these past environments to their work here.
Spencer spoke about the significant impression left on her by her undergraduate experience, which she said had a similar environment to Middlebury. “ I felt very unseen,” Spencer said. “I was a human body in the class, but people didn’t see me as a human being, so it definitely affects how I interact with students because I try to see them as whole people.”
Grant discussed being a minority among students pursuing Ph.D.’s in Computer Science. He described an incident that occurred in his last year of school, when his senior work professor told his adviser that he couldn’t reach Grant or his black classmates because of the “cultural gap.” That ostracizing experience led Grant to a new pedagogical outlook.
“I try to find any type of way to connect to my students because once that professor said he couldn’t teach me, I felt like I no longer belonged there,” he said. Grant also added that at Middlebury he feels “extreme pressure to represent the black community.”
Professor Hart said that he and his siblings were the only black students at their high school and explained that at Middlebury he feels subjected to a similar “uninvited hypervisibility.” Hart also said that people in the community outside his department see him as a “black person interested in only black things.” He recounted an interaction with a well-meaning colleague who presumed he had read a book because it was by a black author and also described an encounter with someone he ran into on the street who told him that reading the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” had made him think of Hart.
While these professors are working to positively influence Middlebury through their work, they are also still facing the challenges of living and working in a predominantly white community here at Middlebury. However, it is not only words, but also the lack of discussion, that some of the panelists find problematic about Middlebury.
“There is a lot of silence around race and social justice,” Spencer said. “There is a fear white people have about talking about race. They don’t want to say the wrong thing, so instead of the wrong thing they say nothing, which creates another silence.”
Professor Finley emphasized that despite these challenges, the ability to teach at places like Middlebury is an amazing opportunity that black professors want to take advantage of, and that the administrations at rural schools like Middlebury should be aware of this. “
There is this assumption on the part of a lot of people who are doing the hiring that people like us don’t want jobs here, can’t hack it here, can’t get our [hair cut here], and [that] we’re city people, but we want jobs, and this is a good job,” Finley said. She added that extending more faculty job offers to people of color, as well as increasing financial aid, will help to increase diversity at places like Middlebury.
“This institution is over 200 years old — it’s probably going to take that long, if not longer, for it to be equal as far as white and black here,” Condry said. “But that’s where it comes in with the type of teaching you’re doing, to hopefully inspire that next person to inspire the next person.”