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(11/14/19 11:03am)
YouTube has long been known as a platform for user-created video content. Nearly 15 years after the website launched, a recent survey by toymaker Lego found that one-third of kids between 8 and 12 aspire to be either a vlogger or a YouTuber. I’m fairly certain this desire to be seen and heard isn’t just limited to kids. We all have that one friend from high school who started their own food blogging or make-up channel, and let’s be honest — who doesn’t secretly want to be a YouTube star?
For Rocket ’14, one of the two co-owners of the freshly minted YouTube channel “Love Town,” storytelling (or more appropriately, outing details of his personal life) is nothing new.
In 2012, he gave a speech as the first student speaker at TEDxMiddlebury on his summer traveling the country using the Amtrak system, and later spoke at Moth-Up, Middlebury’s version of the nationwide storytelling platform The Moth, on the same subject.
In 2013, he started a column in The Campus called “Dining, Dating, and Dashing,” whose content is exactly what it sounds like. The biweekly column’s goals were threefold: Rocket dated, ate free food and chronicled his experiences and musings for all to see in the pages of the paper. Each article chronicles a date with a different person at a different restaurant in the Middlebury area, which he persuaded in advance to provide free meals for him and his date. It seems like a pretty sweet deal, especially if you’re looking at it from Rocket’s perspective. As he writes in the inaugural article, “I get a date, the girl gets a story, we both get fed, the restaurant gets publicity and hopefully we all get a good laugh.”
A little over a year after graduating, in October of 2015, he changed his name legally from Ryan Kim to “Rocket, no last name.”
[pullquote speaker="Rocket" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Coming from Love Town means I want to live a life in pursuit of love... not a romantic or sexual love; it’s a love to live.[/pullquote]
“It just popped into my head,” said the 27-year-old self-described conceptual artist. What started out as something of “a secret stage name” eventually became a part of his identity. “If we as adults are required to take responsibility or ownership of all of our actions, then it is my right to own the actor,” he said. We choose the clothes we wear, the food we eat, with whom we spend our time, Rocket pondered — so why can’t we choose our own name? Legally changing his name to Rocket, then, seemed to be both a statement of his identity and an assertion of his autonomy.
Three weeks ago, “Love Town” released its first video, titled “Welcome to Love Town!” In the video, Rocket, sporting all black clothing, a slightly overgrown mohawk and gold-rimmed lens-less aviator glasses, introduces himself and the channel’s co-owner and producer Marshall Hodge, who he identified as “my adopted brother.” They sit side-by-side, arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders in front of a gorgeous mountain range speckled with autumnal patches of green and orange. Right behind them is their black Tesla Model X, parked on the lawn with its wings up, batmobile-style.
“We’re living in Rex, this Tesla behind us,” Rocket said, “just out on the road, adventuring and just figuring things out as we go.” According to the channel’s description, the two are “on a journey of discovering the most authentic, dopest version of ourselves and overcoming any obstacles along the way: personal fears, expectations from others, cultural norms, etc.”
Bringing his background as an Economics major to the table, Rocket did some number-crunching to explain the rationale behind this recent lifestyle change. Previously, he had been commuting into Los Angeles and paying over $500 per month in gas, in addition to rent, utilities and other living expenses that plague the electronic checkbooks of many a working millennial. When he analyzed the costs of living in a car, monthly payments on a Tesla turned out to be cheaper than what he had been paying in rent and gas. “Well,” he said, “if I’m willing to live in a vehicle, I could have a pretty sweet vehicle to live in.” It actually seems quite practical, once you can get behind the idea of living in a sedan.
From a more conceptual standpoint, “Love Town” for Rocket is also a personal project that grew out of his “rabid curiosity” about the full range of human existence and experience. Love Town is a metaphorical place, according to Rocket. “Coming from Love Town means I want to live a life in pursuit of love,” he said. “And it’s not a romantic or sexual love; it’s a love to live.”
His goal is “not to be celebrities or heroes,” as he said in an interview, nor is it to be an influencer, a term he rejects because of its reputation as a provider of simple entertainment. “Entertainment is cheap,” he said, “and it can go anywhere.”
Rather, he’s exploring what he calls “radical candor,” an effort at authenticity in a world of perceived fewer human connections. This is all part of his path to becoming a “real and dope person.” What is a “real and dope person,” you ask? According to Rocket, “a real person listens to the song of their soul” and “goes the distance for people they care about.”
For Hodge, who serves the roles of content producer, video editor and (adopted) younger brother, “Love Town” is about “pushing past this bitch named fear.” Before joining “Love Town,” Hodge was a video editor at Yes Theory, an adventure-travel YouTube channel that makes videos like “Asking Strangers to go Skydiving on the Spot!!” and “SAYING YES TO EVERYTHING FOR 24 HOURS (ended up in a dress in Mexico).” He admits that, even in a Tesla, life on the road can take some getting used to. “The shower part’s a little tricky sometimes,” he said in a video. “We can go a few days, sometimes a week before showering; it’s a tradeoff of this lifestyle, honestly; like if you wanted to have another lifestyle where you could shower everyday you’d have to get an apartment or something.”
The channel’s only three weeks old, but has already amassed a following of 16.2K subscribers at the time of this article, with videos that range from 10K to 283K views. In a video released last week, titled “I Lost My Virginity in a Tesla,” Marshall documents his first sexual encounter (“everything but the sex”) with a woman Rocket had matched with on Tinder. Another video recounts their 7000-mile road trip from California through Vermont and back and in a third viewers are invited to follow along Marshall’s “First Date Ever.”
Internet fame aside, however, “we don’t want to place any of our personal value on what this view count is or what this subscribe count is, ’cause it doesn’t fundamentally affect any of our inherent worthiness,” Rocket said. “The only thing we can do is to be as real of a person and as dope of a person as you can. That’s it.”
Here’s to becoming “real and dope” people.
(09/26/19 10:00am)
Here at Arts & Academics, we spend our time in the newsroom covering the cultural happenings on campus. But what about the latest phenomena in the online world?
These topics often enter our conversations while editing the section, and we thought it was about time to let you all in on the fun. Each week, one of us assigns a current pop culture moment, whether it be a music release or fashion style, and we’ll each share our thoughts.
This week, Elsa brought us to a CrossFit class on campus.
EK: What better bonding activity for our section than mutual suffering? CrossFit has been part of the repertoire of fitness Instagram and lifestyle magazines for some time now, so when a source in my Russian class encouraged me to join CrossFit, I knew it belonged in this column. The setup of the workout is simple: first, a group warmup, then 10 to 20 minutes of hardcore working out. It can’t be that bad, right?
False. By the last round of our glute-focused circuit, I was mentally going through every swear word in the Finnish language (of which there are a lot). Even so, all the frustration vanished the second time was called. The post-workout endorphins hit hard. Special thanks to the coaches for the high fives and can-do atmosphere — this was a good introduction.
SB: I’ve never been more sore in my entire life. As someone who doesn’t ever lift weights, I was really nervous about this workout. “Doing CrossFit” is a status marker that some really athletic people wear like a badge. As we headed over we joked that we wanted to stand in the back the whole time, “for journalistic purposes,” but really because we were scared of standing out. However, I felt very supported and encouraged by all the student trainers and never felt judged. For anyone who is nervous about their fitness level and being judged by other students in the class — don’t be! Every- one else is in so much pain during the workouts they don’t even notice what anyone else is doing. I think I’ll go back, but only once my body recovers.
AQ: There’s a certain stereotype I think of when someone mentions CrossFit — images of intimidating muscle-men and women double sting protein shakes come to mind. The atmosphere of rapport in the class, however, convinced me otherwise, though the class was definitely challenging. But who would’ve known — doing box-jumps brought out a competitive side in me that I never even knew existed. What can I say? We’re converts.
Classes take place weekly on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday at 4:30pm and 5:30pm in the indoor tennis courts in the Nelson Recreation Center.
(09/12/19 10:05am)
Drive down scenic Route 125 and you’ll find, situated across from the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail, Middlebury College’s Breadloaf Campus in Ripton, Vt.: home to the Breadloaf School of English graduate programs during the summer as well as various MiddView groups during first-year orientation week. What’s lesser known, however, is that for 44 consecutive years, Breadloaf has welcomed back hundreds of alumni, their friends and spouses, and parents of students for an annual four-day program called Alumni College.
From Aug. 29 to Sept. 1 this year, 139 alumni came to Breadloaf to reconnect with friends, soak in the Vermont scenery and explore one of the weekend’s five course offerings. Most hailed from the New England area, but many others traveled from California, Texas and the UK to participate in the program.
According to Associate Director of Alumni and Parent Programws Lori Mackey, classes filled within the first few weeks that registration was open.
Professor of Psychology Matthew Kimble taught a course on happiness at Alumni College in 2001, and has since 2013 overseen the program’s course programming as its faculty director.
Courses for Alumni College are typically decided upon in February. Generally, Kimble looks for a program of five courses that span the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences. One Alumni College tradition is that there is almost always a field class offered, so that students have the opportunity to take full advantage of Alumni College’s pastoral setting in Ripton.
Kimble said that one of the major attractions of Alumni College is its location at the Breadloaf campus. “I don’t know what percentage of people we would lose if we were like, ‘Oh, we’re going to have classes in BiHall this year,’ but I’m feeling it would be a lot,” Kimble said. “I think people would be very disappointed. There’s something special about being up [at Breadloaf] at that time of year; it’s so beautiful.”
Despite being relatively unknown among current students, news of Alumni College travels fast through word of mouth among alumni friend groups, and the program welcomed its largest group in its 44-year history this year.
Often, classes and friends will come back regularly, using Alumni College as a reunion. “Some of [the participants] are real regulars,” Kimble said. Participants this year ranged from individuals in the class of 1951 to those in the class of 2007. Of the participants, the Class of ’55 has been known for attending Alumni College together as annual mini-reunions. They will be celebrating their 65th reunion in June of 2020.
[pullquote speaker="Bruce Byers '55" photo="" align="left" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can’t overestimate how important it is for our group to be sitting together, three times a day.[/pullquote]
Sue Byers ’55 and Bruce Byers ’55 have been attending Alumni College for 18 years. “We became kind of famous, the class of ‘55, because we had so many of our class come. And then their spouses would come, and they just loved it, as we did,” Bruce Byers said.
This year, 14 members of the Class of ’55 cohort attended Alumni College. “These people came with us in 1951, and we’ve been pretty close with all of this group for all that time. We’ve lost a few last couple of years, but that’s one reason why we come,” Bruce Byers said.
“The setting is number two,” Sue Byers continued, echoing Kimble’s sentiments about the beauty of late summer in Vermont. “You can hike after your class, or you can play tennis after your class, or you can sit in the wonderful Adirondack chairs anywhere around and catch up on your reading for the nexwt day,” she said.
And sometimes, the pure pleasure of seeing old friends and familiar faces is enough to keep people coming back. “Breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Bruce said. “You can’t overestimate how important it is for our group to be sitting together, three times a day.”
This year, Bruce took a course with Associate Professor of Geology Will Amidon on Geologic Controls on Human History in the Champlain Valley, which took the class on field trips to the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail and to Port Henry. He noted the difference in age between students at Alumni College and undergraduates at Middlebury College. “From the professors’ point of view,” he said, “they’re talking to people in their 60s and 70s and 80s instead of teenagers.”
Sue, however, pointed out that “because of their age, [Alumni College participants] can draw on experiences that are pertinent to what the course is about.” She said that in her course with Associate Professor of Philosophy Martha Woodruff on Socratic Legacies Today, there were about four teachers or school counselors in the class, who were able to provide input about their experiences with the Socratic method in K–12 education.
“The one thing that’s different about Alumni College is that students bring so much experience to the table,” Kimble said. He said that most attendees of Alumni College have “fairly recently retired” and estimates the average age of a student at Alumni College to be around 70, which made for interesting discussions in courses like his on Happiness, which had “individuals with a lifetime of experience” and “will comment on ways that are really different than what you’ll see in undergraduates.” The insights that can be gained from the wealth of experiences of students at Alumni College can often be rewarding for faculty as well. According to Kimble, most faculty who have taught at Alumni College describe it as one of their most rewarding teaching experiences.
“Most alums don’t know about [Alumni College] until they’re older,” said Alumni College participant Bobo Sideli ’77, P’08, P’13. Sideli had been curious about the demographics of the program’s participants, and did a little analysis of his own. “You can get the attendee list online,” he said, “and I sorted it, and 99 out of 140 people are alumni; the rest are spouses or parents. And then I looked at it in excel, and the peak is in the class of ’67. Thirty-five percent of the attendees are from the classes of ’63 to ’68, so they’re in their seventies. It’s a bell curve.”
Sideli is trying to convince friends from his class to come to Alumni College. “They still haven’t gotten around to it. In their mind it’s an old people’s thing,” Sideli said. “They’re still – you know – the go-go. I’m the early group.”
Despite a generally positive experience at Alumni College, however, Sideli also noted a lack of racial diversity in the program’s attendants. “One thing that bothers me is the total lack of diversity — it’s so obvious.” Sideli said. “You look at the Middlebury student population and you come here, and it’s like — what the hell is going on? But you also have to remember, you’re thinking about mostly people who came to Middlebury in the mid-60s. When I came to Middlebury in ’72 I think we had a dozen or 20 African Americans. I always joked that because I’m an Italian from South Shore, Long Island, that I was diversity.”
Sideli took a course titled James Brown, Bob Marley, and Beyoncé: Protest Music as Political Mobilization Across Countries taught by Associate Professor of Political Science Kemi Fuentes-George. The course was based on a J-term course Fuentes-George had taught in the past, and included numbers from a variety of genres and origins and ranged from songs that celebrated subaltern identities, to those that were more provocative and explicit. Fela Kuti’s “Lady”, Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright”, and NWA’s “F**k the Police” were among the songs on the syllabus. “We didn’t just do hip hop music, we did music from Jamaica, we did music from Nigeria, we did Pussy Riots from Russia, and we did music from Egypt and Tunisia as well,” Fuentes-George said.
Fuentes-George went into the weekend with some reservations of his own: “I’ll be honest,” he said, “I was a little bit — I don’t know if nervousness is the word -- but I was a little bit concerned: how are these retirees, older white people, going to deal with Tupac and Kendrick Lamar? But if this is material that’s new to them and subject matter that’s new to them, I think that’s probably even better than just — ‘Oh, here’s more of just stuff that you’ve already read.’”
To prepare his students for the program, Fuentes-George sent them a video in June about the technical construction of rap music, background on the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the involvement of certain music in that movement, “stuff coming out from Beyonce and Kendrick and so on.” It was Fuentes-George’s attempt to “situate this so that people who might not have a familiarity with hip hop and rap music see that, not whatever their stereotype of it was.”
“It was an opportunity for me to get people to think about things that they ordinarily wouldn’t have thought about,” he said. “The way to do that is to have people do readings and make them engage with material that they ordinarily wouldn’t have engaged with. I didn’t want it to be just a dog and pony show.”
“I think they engaged with it,” Fuentes-George said when asked about how his students had responded to the course material. “I know that there were some who came away from it with a not just a better familiarity, but a better appreciation for some of the artists that they didn’t necessarily know.”
“I know protest music from the civil rights movement, but I didn’t know any other protest music, and I had no knowledge of rap,” Sideli said. “And hip-hop — I mean, that was foreign to me. So I thought it would be good exposure, and it is.”
A recent retiree, Sideli had worked in healthcare for most of his adult life. Now he “does” music, he said. He plays, reads about and studies music, and sees Fuentes-George’s course as a further exploration into the “larger macro level of music.”
Though Sideli doesn’t typically write protest songs, “’cause I have nothing to protest about,” he made an exception for the last night of Alumni College: putting his own spin on James Brown’s iconic 1969 song “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Sideli and his classmates serenaded the Alumni College with “I’m Old and I’m Proud.”
“We’re so sick of our culture that’s so youth-oriented — and so this is our protest song,” he said.
Sideli is one of many participants for whom Alumni College was an opportunity to rekindle interests and passions they had temporarily set aside in life post-Middlebury.
“For anyone who’s gone to college, there’s just always part of you that misses that environment and longs to go back, and so many do,” Kimble said. “To some extent, my worst fear is that people will learn what an amazing thing Alumni College is and we won’t be able to accommodate everybody. I do feel like it’s a bit of a secret.”
Correction: A previous version of the article suggested that Professor Matthew Kimble assumed the role of faculty director of Alumni College immediately after teaching a class at Alumni College in 2001. Kimble assumed the role in 2013, taking over from Jim Ralph, Dean of Faculty Development & Research and Rehnquist Professor of American History and Culture, who was faculty director from 2008 to 2013. James Jermain Professor Emeritus of Political Economy and International Law Russell Leng was faculty director of Alumni College from 1993 to 2008.
(04/25/19 10:00am)
On the fifth floor of BiHall is a glass-paneled enclosure where many students of physics can often be found, socializing, snacking and collaborating on problem sets. A sign on the exterior of the glass wall serves as a friendly reminder to onlookers: “Please don’t knock on the glass. It scares the physics students.”
“I’m not sure [the sign] casts the students in the best light,” Professor of Physics Anne Goodsell joked as we walk towards her lab, which is further down the same hallway.
The signage here in the lab is considerably more serious. “Danger,” it warns in large text bolded for emphasis. “Visible and/or invisible laser radiation. Avoid eye or skin exposure to direct or scattered radiation.”
Professor Goodsell’s lab works in the cooling of atoms using laser light to study the interaction between highly excited atoms and electric fields. Put simply, the Goodsell lab has been assembling a laser-cooling system: that includes the lasers themselves, a source of atoms (Rubidium, in this case) and the vacuum chamber, optics and electronics for these experiments.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]According to Goodsell, these rubidium atoms are the “coolest atoms in Vermont.” [/pullquote]
Multiple lasers are shot and intersect at a point, forming a magneto-optical trap where rubidium atoms will cool to 200 microkelvins and launch upward in discrete clouds. This cooling process slows the atoms’ movement in midair. For reference, room temperature is 293 kelvins, or 293,000,000 microkelvin. According to Goodsell, these rubidium atoms are the “coolest atoms in Vermont.”
Why cool atoms in Vermont, of all places, where average temperatures go down to 10ºF in the winter? (That’s 261 kelvins, in case you were wondering). Cooling down atoms slows their movement, which allows the lab to more accurately measure the atoms’ trajectories to investigate their interactions with external electric fields and forces.
Goodsell’s study of the laser-cooling of atoms began as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College and continued into her graduate and post-doctoral research at Harvard.
Goodsell’s experience at a liberal arts undergraduate institution allowed her to explore her different academic interests, which was ultimately what had led her to embark on her journey of becoming a physicist.
In fact, her first research experience had been in a laser-cooling lab in between her sophomore and junior year in college.
“Being in a lab made me feel like there were things I could build and feel and see,” Goodsell said.
“It was the first time when I spent some time reading about science work that other people had done. I read a whole bunch of papers — some of it I didn’t understand.”
She showed me a box of papers that she had collected that summer. Each paper was folded neatly in half, organized chronologically and tagged by author, title and date.
“I printed out all these papers that talked about laser cooling. There weren’t PDFs yet at this point,” she said.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]For a lot of the topics in science, the work that you do is really connected to the work that other people have done.[/pullquote]
“There’s my electron,” Goodsell pointed affectionately to a small diagram in the margins of one of the papers. “It absorbs some energy and spits out some light.” She laughs. “This [box of papers] is, in some ways, just a relic. I feel like I just couldn’t discard them. This was a set of papers that was recommended by a faculty member that I worked with and there’s stuff that’s like the foundations of the field.”
“I think that [summer is] when I started to understand things,” Goodsell reflected.
“That was also the first time where I was really learning a bit more about the community of science and science people,” Goodsell said, commenting on the collaborative nature of research in the sciences.
“For a lot of the topics in science, the work that you do is really connected to the work that other people have done. It’s not just connecting with ideas in a textbook,” Goodsell said.
When new fields of research first begin to materialize, experimental procedures can often encounter various glitches and challenges so that initially only a few people are able to carry out the relevant experiments successfully.
“A lot of work in science starts that way,” Goodsell said. “A few people do something successfully, compare and confirm, argue about it, come out with either one general outcome — or sometimes two — and from there these ideas get picked up by a larger group and then at a later time there may be as many people who have done that experiment as people who have run the Boston Marathon in history or have served as a congressperson or have bought hamburgers.”
After joining the Middlebury faculty in 2010, Goodsell has taught courses from Newtonian Physics to Experimental Physics to a first year seminar called Light: Metaphors and Models.
[gallery ids="44643,44644,44645"]
Goodsell has taught the Experimental Physics course at least once every year since 2015. “I still very much enjoy doing experimental physics, so getting to teach that class is — sort of — like getting to take it again.”
“For me, [teaching and doing research] was a really desirable coexistence,” Goodsell said. Teaching and doing research simultaneously at a liberal arts college, however, comes with its own set of challenges.
Though the process of research and formulating questions works really well during the summers, maintaining that mental connection to research during the school year is harder, Goodsell said. During the school year, Goodsell splits her time between her teaching and research responsibilities, but central to both is her passion for sparking in her students the same joy of experimental physics that she maintains.
“[My undergraduate physics courses] was the experience that I had that helped me decide on doing research, so it feels like one way to offer other people that same kind of opportunity,” Goodsell said. “Not like, ‘You must do physics because I loved it and you will, too,’” Goodsell said, but if you’ve never had the opportunity to explore the field, “how would you know?”
Sasha Clarick ’19, Amanda Kirkeby ’19 and David Cohen ’20 presented on their work in the Goodsell lab in the Spring Symposium two Fridays ago.
Clarick stayed at Middlebury over the summer to do research in the Goodsell lab. “I am modeling atoms as they fly upwards towards a charged wire, visualizing their behavior in different circumstances,” she said.
Visualizing such behavior allows various aspects of the atom cloud, such as its velocity and size, to be measured and characterized.
Though the research initially ran into hiccups over operation of the laser apparatus, Clarick described a “feeling of accomplishment” when they were able to successfully trap the cloud of atoms for the first time, after getting the lasers working and properly aligned — but lasers aside, the entire process was “also just really cool” Clarick said.
“That’s just kind of mind boggling, isn’t it? That you can take lasers, which you’d think would heat things up, and cool it down and physically condense it into this cloud,” Kirkeby said, sharing Clarick’s and Goodsell’s enthusiasm, “...the perplexity and the counter-intuitiveness of it.”
(01/24/19 11:00am)
After 44 years of teaching at Middlebury College, Tom Beyer will be retiring from his teaching responsibilities after the 2019-2020 academic year. As of this past Monday, Jan. 21, he is one of 23 faculty members who have signed agreements to participate in the Faculty Retirement Incentive Program (FRIP).
In an email to all employees last June, President Laurie L. Patton announced the introduction of a set of elective, incentive-based retirement and separation plans for faculty in Middlebury and Monterey as part of the college’s workforce planning effort for both faculty and staff. This later developed into FRIP.
The college will save money from FRIP despite the total number of faculty remaining largely the same over the next few years. Because new, tenure-track faculty can be paid lower salaries than long-tenured professors, this series of faculty replacements will result in significant savings. According to Dean of Faculty Andi Lloyd, if all of the retiring faculty members were replaced, projections suggest that savings from this program could fall between $2 million and $2.5 million over the next several years.
The 117 members of the college faculty eligible for the program all have contract end dates later than July 1, 2021, and have worked in a benefits-eligible position for at least 10 years after age 45, according to the Office of Finance and Administration. The FRIP package will include a year’s salary and the establishment of a Health Reimbursement Account, as well as funds for scholarship and research for up to three years after retirement.
In general, Beyer, the CV Starr Professor of Russian & East European Studies, is pleased with the program. In comparison to a similar incentivized retirement program offered in 2008, which offered “one date, one payout,” and carried with it potentially “adverse tax implications,” the current program is “very flexible and thoughtfully cast,” Beyer said.
Beyer opted for the latest of his three options for retirement dates under FRIP: June 2019, December 2019 and June 2020. He explained that the program’s relatively early announcement relative to its implementation gave faculty enough time to examine the program’s “implications for their teaching, the implications for their scholarship and also the financial implications of the program.”
Assuming most departments hire new faculty to replace retiring faculty, the FRIP process is not expected to decrease overall teaching force at the college. As faculty leave Middlebury at a staggered pace, college officials expect that within three years, the total number will remain about the same as it is today.
Having advance warning of a faculty member’s retirement six to eighteen months ahead allows a department to “re-examine its own missions, goals, and possibilities for the future,” Beyer said.
[pullquote speaker="Tom Beyer" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]“So much of our lives at Middlebury is defined by our relationship with and our connection with students. So of course, student interaction is something that I’ll miss.”[/pullquote]
In the Biology department this year, for example, students received emails requesting their participation in the department’s hiring process for a new faculty member to replace a retiring tenured professor in aquatic ecology. This process began a year in advance of the professor’s retirement and involved a series of research talks and teaching demonstrations by visiting candidates for the position throughout the fall semester.
“I think that [FRIP] gives an opportunity in particular to younger colleagues who aspire to tenure, to feel like there is a place for them,” Beyer said.
Newer faculty fresh out of graduate school “are aware of the latest and most up to date research in a whole variety of areas,” Beyer said. When Beyer first received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures, he was “much more of a generalist and was aware of the latest work in critical theory and writing.”
“After tenure, one becomes a bit more specific in the area in which they look at,” he said.
The ability to “teach the courses I really want to teach, one more time; to read the books I want to read, one more time,” was important to Beyer, who plans to teach a course on the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and another on 20th century Russian writers in the coming fall term.
“So much of our lives at Middlebury is defined by our relationship with and our connection with students,” Beyer said. “So of course student interaction is something that I’ll miss.”
For Beyer, however, ceasing his teaching responsibilities in the classroom also provides an opportunity to focus on his own research agenda, which he calls his scholarly “bucket list.”
“We were aware that the decisions that faculty make about retiring reflect both financial considerations and, in many cases, an interest in continuing to be productive scholars and to remain connected to their scholarly communities, here and elsewhere,” Lloyd said. FRIP’s enrichment fund, she said, was designed to allow faculty to continue their scholarly endeavors after retirement.
Continuing research after retirement, for Beyer, also means that “my connection with the college, with my scholarship, and with the projects that I have doesn’t come to an abrupt end.” Continued office space for one year after retirement, Beyer said, was “particularly important for me and, I suspect, for my other colleagues who exercise this option, to put their scholarly life in order and in perspective.”
“All things come to an end at some time,” Beyer said. “Here the end comes, as it were, as a choice.”
For full staff issue coverage, click here.
(11/29/18 11:00am)
As Professor of Computer Science Daniel Scharstein sees it, writing a computer program requires just as much intellectual creativity as writing an English essay or proving a mathematical theorem.
When Scharstein first encountered the discipline as a teenager, “that was the thing that blew me away,” he said. “You have this power — you have this computer that does your bidding.”
“You can concoct whatever you want,” he said.
With boundary-pushing innovations in computer science filling headlines every day, the role of computer science (CS) as a means of bringing about change seems both exciting and endless. And at Middlebury, surging interest in the discipline has caused the department to grow rapidly, and prompted the institution to begin remaking the campus to accommodate it.
On Middlebury’s campus, there are around 160 declared CS majors. This statistic is even more impressive when compared to the previous decade when there was an average of seven graduating CS majors per year. This ranks CS as the second-largest major on campus, after Economics.
Course enrollment has grown tremendously, too. A decade ago, the computer science faculty taught an average of 210 students per year. This past year’s total enrollment rose to over 1000 students, with an additional rise to about 1150 expected by 2020.
Middlebury students and faculty have designed complex computer programs capable of drawing and animating pictures on the screen, solving computational puzzles and detecting dangerous and abnormal crowd behavior using computer vision techniques. But Middlebury faculty also emphasize the basics — Scharstein reasoned that, far from being a vocational field of study, computing is a basic skill, just like reading, writing and arithmetic.
“I honestly think everyone should take an intro to CS class,” said Aiko Hassett ’20, a computer science major. “Technology is becoming such a huge part of our daily lives,” Hassett observed, that simply knowing the basics of computer science can help one gain “some fresh creative insights” and a better understanding of how our society works.
“[Programming] trains your brain in another way of thinking,” Scharstein said. “You learn how to put lines together that put these computations together for you. [Computing] teaches you precision — one missing semicolon and your code won’t run,” he said. “But it’s also an art.” A single code could be written in a hundred different ways, each resulting in a different solution with its own unique pros and cons.
“Coding, for me, is like a completely new language,” said Emely Zeledon ’20. “When I approach a problem, I have to first stop and plan out every single step that I'll have to take to get to the final solution. You have to be methodical yet concise and that's a skill that is valuable in many careers.”
A Molecular Biology and Biochemistry major, Zeledon noted that CS is integral in the field of molecular biology and biochemistry, as it is in many others, because of “its ability to make algorithms, predict patterns and [organize and interpret] data.”
Professor Matthew Dickerson, who has taught in the CS department at Middlebury for almost 30 years, echoed this view.
“[Computing] doesn’t just mean sitting in front of a terminal writing computer programs,” he said.
Students of CS are discovering an exciting field with computational aspects that extend into not only the sciences, but also art, music, history and economics, Dickerson explained.
The data supports this observation, too. In the Fall 2017 Student Profile released by Middlebury’s Office of Assessment and Institutional Research, more than a third of the 101 declared computer science majors also double-majored in another discipline.
Thea Bean ’19 took one of the department’s introductory courses, Computing for the Sciences, because she wanted to become a more well-rounded scientist. She believes that her background in both biology and coding was what had helped her get a job this past summer.
With larger enrollments, however, come changes in dynamics both in the classroom and in the department. In introductory classes, for example, faculty are tasked with accommodating students with vastly different levels of CS experience. Some have taken advanced computing courses in high school, while others have next to no prior exposure to the field.
“The professors somewhat struggled to teach in a way that challenged every level,” Bean said.
Compared to students with previous knowledge and experience in CS, for whom the introductory classes may be only mildly difficult, students without background in the field can find the introductory classes to be quite challenging.
“Success in the class can depend on the student's ability to attend office hours as well as T.A hours,” said Zeledon, citing a common problem faced by students whose packed class and extracurricular schedules get in the way of seeking help outside of the classroom.
Zeledon felt that the level of difficulty in introductory computer science courses has “increased in comparison to past semesters as a function of the spiked interest in CS majors,” reflecting that taking a CS course helped her “feel more comfortable with failure being part of the journey to success.”
The department now has eight full-time faculty on campus, with three joining the team in the past academic year. Even with three new tenure-track lines granted in the last two years, however, the computer science department remains severely short-staffed.
Middlebury’s average faculty to student ratio is one to eight. With more than 1000 students enrolled in CS classes last year and only eight full-time professors on campus to teach those classes, the faculty to student ratio for the CS department is higher than one to 50. Naturally, the department is currently searching for its 11th full-time faculty member.
“We want to serve all the students,” Dickerson said. “But it’s hard with that many students.”
“It’s harder for me to get to know the names of students when there are 30 of them instead of 12,” he admitted. “In a bigger class, there may be students who feel less comfortable asking questions. [During office hours,] if there are 10 students waiting in line for help, one student might not get as much individual help or attention.”
The department employs a full-time Assistant in Instruction, Ruben Gilbert, to aid students — a system that imitates the teaching assistant model commonly found at larger research universities. According to Bean, Gilbert’s help was crucial to her success in the class. “I learned most of what I know from Ruben,” she said.
A larger faculty brings the possibility of offering more electives, and larger student enrollment brings energy to the CS scene at Middlebury, Dickerson said. However, he noted, “it’s easier to create energy when you have a lot of people but harder to create community.”
Student organizations such as Middle Endian and wiCS++, as well as summer research experiences and group projects in classes help build community, Dickerson explained. Middle Endian, whose name is a play on the concept of endianness, the order in which numbers are stored in bytes, aims to foster a sense of community within CS at Middlebury. wiCS++, which stands for women in computer science, aims to create a culture and space for historically underrepresented groups in the field.
The percentage of women CS majors at Middlebury wavers at around 33 percent. Hassett said that the gender distribution in the CS department was better than she originally thought, but noted that “as a woman in STEM, and especially CS, it’s so easy to feel doubtful of your ability,” calling for a community of “females who support, encourage and inspire one another.”
“TIGHT FOR SPACE”
The department’s growth was a major factor behind the construction of the new transitional building on the south side of the parking lot behind Wright Memorial Theater. The new building, expected to be completed in June 2019, will house the CS department and provide office space for other departments, giving the CS department more room to grow and freeing up much-needed lab area for other science departments in McCardell Bicentennial Hall.
“There’s a certain exciting event energy in Bihall,” said Dickerson, but “we are tight for space up there.”
It turns out, however, that this move might bring a couple drawbacks of its own.
“It’ll be a huge blow, as far as I’m concerned,” said Professor of Biology Jeremy Ward of the anticipated relocation.
For Ward, the physical presence of the computer science department in Bihall fosters collaboration between the scientific disciplines.
“I’m not going to see Michael in the elevator again,” he said, referring to Professor Michael Linderman, whose research in genomics overlaps with Ward’s. “Computer science is now fully integrated into every science discipline — I couldn’t do any of the work I do now without computer science,” he said. “But there’s always email.”
Dickerson said he also regrets the move away from colleagues in the sciences. “I will miss the collaborations with other science disciplines and seeing students from other majors in Bihall,” he said. “It’s nice to walk up and down the stairs and see my colleagues in geology or chemistry, and I think it’s nice for students in computer science to interact with other students in other majors.”
A white paper report from the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 suggests that an increase in demand for graduates with quantitative skills is a possible reason for the increase in demand for CS majors.
According to data from the Center for Career and Internships, 11 percent of Middlebury students who graduated in 2017 pursued careers in technology.
“It’s not that there’s ten times as many students who are interested in computer science,” explained Dickerson. “You also get students who do computer science because they think it’ll get them employed.”
But the notion of learning for learning’s sake, a foundational principle of a liberal education, remains alive within the CS department. Dickerson noted that it is not unheard of for students to declare a CS major for practical reasons, only to discover a passion for the discipline further down the line
“I don’t judge their motivations,” Dickerson said. “I’m just here to teach whatever they want to learn.”
(11/15/18 10:59am)
Since leaving China to attend college in the United States, I’ve come to associate foreign news coverage on my home country, perhaps unfairly, with something that resembles a skeleton. I’m referring to those plastic skeletons most high school biology teachers keep in the back of their classroom (the ones that, you might recall, were given names like Neil or Albert and wheeled out for the occasional educational digression on someone’s dog’s fractured femur) — the kind that is structurally correct in the information it conveys, but lacking in the flesh and blood of the stories it tells.
Occasionally, however, something comes along and turns this analogy on its head. As most of my understanding of China had been based on the narrative of state-sponsored media, stories told about China from outside of the country sometimes draw back the curtain to aspects of Chinese society that I was previously blind to.
Such was my experience last Thursday evening, when I sat down in Axinn 232 for the screening of director Hao Wu’s boldly-titled documentary “People’s Republic of Desire.” Its Chinese title translates roughly to “Your Virtual Life,” a title that seems a touch more generic than its English counterpart.
Reviews of the film have compared it to a real-life “Black Mirror” story.
“It is sort of dark,” Wu said jokingly of his third documentary feature, “but that wasn’t how I had intended it to be.”
A Chinese filmmaker and a fellow at the Washington-based think tank New America, Hao Wu hopes to “explain China to people outside of China.”
In a Q&A session after the screening, Wu discussed his motivation for the film.
“I wanted to capture the changes in China,” he said. To Wu, the online phenomenon of live-streaming is a reflection of the real, offline human desires that run rampant in the rapidly modernizing country.
As the film opens, we are introduced to what seems like an office space for live-streamers, who sit in undecorated cubicles, singing and speaking to strangers in online chatrooms. Such is what Shen Man and Big Li do for a living.
The film is driven by its two protagonists — 21-year-old Shen Man and 24-year-old Big Li, two of the Chinese live-streaming platform YY’s highest ranking stars.
For her monthly income from YY of $40,000, Shen live-streams her videos from the comfort of her own desk at home, where she performs karaoke and responds to comments in her chat room, which regularly hosts over 10,000 viewers.
Shen explains what she calls the “Love Triangle of YY,” which connects live-streaming hosts to two very different types of fans. The diaosi viewers, usually young men of mediocre appearance, financial means and social standing, idolize the hosts. The tuhao, or nouveau riche, patrons shower the hosts with virtual gifts of roses, diamonds, cars and planes that materialize into real financial boons.
A graphic of an awards podium at the upper left corner of her chat room lists her most generous viewers.
“Fans follow you if you spend a lot,” one of Shen’s high-profile tuhao viewers says. “People chat with you.” He admits that he used to have a spending problem, but has since dialed back his spending to the more “rational” sum of $35,000 a month. Where does this absurd pool of funds come from, you ask? “I’m a profiteer,” he divulges nonchalantly.
In Shen Man’s chat room, another user by the handle of “YY Fish” gifts Shen a considerable amount of money, signified by a virtual car that whizzes across the interface, stirring up an excited flurry of viewers’ comments. “Who is this [patron]?” They ask. “He must be rich,” the comments speculate.
“F-ck, all that money…” Shen Man’s father muses as he watches one of his daughter’s live streams. “If only any of it were mine.”
YY capitalizes on these desires, too. Later on in the film, we learn that the platform takes a whopping 60 percent share of the virtual gifts’ monetary value.
While the tuhao patrons certainly have the upper hand in visibility, the diaosi viewers dominate the online live-streaming platform in numbers. The film explains that just as the tuhao get a kick out of the virtual social recognition brought by their extravagant virtual gifts, the diaosi followers become addicted to watching the large gifts occur online as a glimpse into the lifestyle they no longer dream of having.
The slang term diaosi grew in popularity as a self-deprecatory term for millennials to jokingly refer to themselves. In Chengdu, where the documentary was filmed, as in many Chinese cities, this demographic likely encompassed most of the migrant workforce who left their hometowns in search for a better future. Separated from old friends and family, many migrant laborers lead isolated existences.
Yong, one of Big Li’s many fans, is an 18-year-old migrant worker who makes around $400 per month packing motorcycle parts in a factory. “Sometimes I really want to find someone to have a heart-to-heart, but it’s very difficult,” he admits. “But I’m not lonely. I can watch Big Li on my computer.”
For those like Yong, live-stream hosts like Big Li are not merely sources of entertainment. Yong sees Big Li as a role model, as perhaps proof that even those from humble beginnings like himself can eventually come into fortune and fame — a prospect that seems increasingly unlikely under China’s steeply declining social mobility.
Off screen, Shen Man holds no illusions about what she calls the “hidden rules of this world.”
“You think [the big-spending patrons] are idiots, spending all that money for nothing? They will ask to meet in person, or something else,” Shen says matter-of-factly. “In front of money, family, love, friendship — they are all bullsh-t.”
Formerly a “poor nurse,” Shen Man is now her family’s sole breadwinner. “The whole family depends on me,” she tells the filmmaker with a mixture of pride and resentment. Shen is buying an apartment for her father and her stepmother, who both live with her, has purchased a house in her hometown for her grandfather and also plans to pay for her younger sister’s college tuition.
Like many of her viewers, Shen Man lives in social isolation. “When I think about it,” Shen says, “I’m disconnected from society. I don’t go out. I don’t even see the sun.”
In an interview with a local television station exploring the social phenomenon of internet streaming stars like Shen, a television producer asks Shen a question that throws her off guard.
“Are you happy?” he asks.
“In what sense?” Shen redirects the question.
“In every sense,” the producer replies.
“Yes, I am,” Shen answers almost automatically. After a pause, she seems to reconsider her answer.
“Compared to many others,” she says, “I think I should be happy.”
(09/13/18 10:00am)
Have you ever wondered what makes the music that so often drifts across campus from Mead Chapel?
It is the sound of the carillon, a bell instrument that plays Bach, Lady Gaga and everything in between.
This summer, Middlebury College hosted its 33rd Summer Carillon Series.
College carillonneur George Matthew Jr. explained that carillons are defined as instruments with 23 bells or more. Matthew played the third and last concerts of the series. When summer language schools are in session, he also plays music from the respective origins of the Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian schools for their graduation ceremonies.
“We all know each other,” Matthew said, “the carillon players throughout the world. People in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia.”
It is through these friendly relations that carillon artists find their way to Middlebury for the long-running Summer Concert Series and through these same networks that Matthew is invited to play at concerts all over the world.
Between the Summer Carillon Series and Matthew and his students, the carillon at Mead Chapel averages over 100 playings a year.
According to Matthew, the bell corresponding to the lowest note on the carillon, an E one octave below middle C, is 2,300 pounds and weighs more than the Liberty Bell. Playing this note on the wooden manual keyboard requires about as much force as stapling together a ten-page paper. After the keyboard at the console is pressed, a clapper connected by wire to the keyboard strikes the corresponding bell in the tower above. Though the bells of Mead Chapel ring clear over almost all of campus, inside the tower, the music of the bells above ismuted and sounds far away.
During the school year, pieces such as Middlebury’s alma mater, various Bach chorale preludes, Hedwig’s Theme from the Harry Potter movie franchise and even a few of Gaga’s billboard hits can occasionally be heard.
Though he doesn’t name favorites, Matthew says that ragtime is a genre for which the carillon works surprisingly well — his European debut, in fact, was an all-ragtime program in Ostende, Belgium. In addition to pieces written for the carillon, any pieces he plays were originally written for the organ or piano and arranged for the carillon, sometimes by Matthew himself, to adjust to the monumental instrument’s unique characteristics.
“Just think of a piano transcribed down a fourth or an octave,” Matthew says. “You wouldn’t want to play very fast on that.”
Matthew’s carillon repertoire ranges from Bach to ragtime to music from around the world, and his students come from a similarly diverse range of musical backgrounds and experiences. Despite varying degrees of exposure to the instrument, most found their way to the carillon at Middlebury serendipitously. When he plays, Matthew leaves to door to the bell tower open and unlocked as an implicit invitation for students to come see the carillon for themselves.
Benjamin Feinstein ’20, who started playing in his freshman year at Middlebury, discovered the carillon “a bit by accident.” Wandering up to the bell tower one day, he found at the carillon Mr. Matthew, who was “super enthusiastic about getting more people involved with lessons and concerts.” Feinstein has been taking lessons on the carillon ever since.
One of Matthew’s accomplishments in teaching the carillon is to help his students see the variety of expressions and possibilities in the carillon. Feinstein said“a giant, echoing contraption” such as the carillon, pieces such as Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” sound “particularly ridiculous” in a good way, but even more contemporary works such as “Into the Unknown” or Harry Potter tracks can feel “very satisfyingly powerful, emotionally.”
As a freshman, Hannah Blake ’21 had been intrigued by the variety of pieces played on the carillon bells throughout the day and wondered, “What the heck is going on up there?”
Though her three years of playing the clarinet in elementary school gave her limited musical background in keyboard instruments, Blake enjoys her weekly lessons with Matthew.
“It’s quite an experience when you play the real one in Mead Chapel knowing the entire campus can hear you,” Blake said.
“There’s something a little nerve-wracking about knowing you’re guaranteed to be heard, but it’s honestly pretty exciting for the same reasons,” Feinstein said.
Coming from a background in English handbells, he is familiar with the dynamics of “working together as an orchestra of sorts,” and “usually prefers to blend in the background” musically, but found the resounding presence of the carillon to be “a fun change of pace.”
Tiansheng Sun ’20 reflects on the nuances of playing an instrument that is meant to be heard from near and far.
“When you inevitably make a mistake,” Sun said, “you can’t panic. You have to smooth it over, and create the illusion that there were no mistakes in the first place.”
The mechanics of playing such a large instrument can present another difficulty.
“The bass notes of the carillon are particularly loud, and sometimes tend to overpower the higher-pitched parts of the melody,” Sun said. “We don’t get this feeling on the practice carillon,” whose sound is produced by a xylophone, he said, so figuring out how to appropriately practice and play in a controlled manner becomes an important issue to resolve.
The only student of Matthew’s with prior experience on the carillon, Abigail Stone ’20.5, had played on a 23-bell carillon in high school as part of a student group.
“We didn’t really have a teacher and we had no idea what we were doing,” Stone says, “but we figured out some basics with our combined music knowledge.”
Stone is thrilled to be playing on Middlebury’s 48-bell carillon, which she views as “a fun challenge to adapt to,” and points out that the larger number of bells means that “there’s a much more diverse array of repertoire that can be played on Middlebury’s carillon.”
Student lessons on the carillon are free, Matthew says, and provided without financial incentive.
Filling the walls of Matthew’s office are posters from concerts in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Russia, where he was the first American to play in St. Petersburg in 2004. Hanging among the posters is a poem by a former student of Matthew’s at Middlebury, which captures the expressiveness and sweeping presence of an instrument that deserves to be heard as more than just background noise.
“Now an evanescent whisper,
Soon a burgeoning cry.
Ever clanging, yet softly shining.
Hark, from on high there
Floats a glorious sound!
Oh, triumphant bells,
Echoing throughout the world.
Breathing, speaking, ceasing not.”
At busy times in the semester when entire days and weeks can seem like a blur, the carillon is a grounding presence. It reminds us to be present, to be aware and to be appreciative of where we are.
(05/09/18 11:52pm)
On December 2, 2001, Houston-based energy company Enron, whose shares once peaked at $90.75, declared bankruptcy. Ironically, the collapse of Enron Corporation, hailed by Fortune as “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years, was partially instigated by an article titled “Is Enron Overpriced?” in the same magazine. Eight years later, Enron’s financial scandal inspired the British playwright Lucy Prebble to conceive a play of the same name, stylized emphatically in promotional material as “ENRON.”
The spring faculty production of “Enron” was presented last weekend at Wright Memorial Theater, starring Sebastian LaPointe ’18 as the brilliant though somewhat egotistical chief executive of Enron Jeffrey Skilling, Madeleine Russell ’19 as Skilling’s business rival Claudia Roe, a fictional figure who is a combination of different Enron executives and who serves as the sole central female figure in the play, Galen Fastie ’20 as Enron’s chief financial officer Andy Fastow and affiliated artist Peter Schmitz as Ken Lay, the founder and chairman of Enron Corporation.
Director Cheryl Faraone, a professor of theater and gender, sexuality and feminist studies, explained her decision to produce “Enron.”
“The story of Enron’s implosion is one which has fascinated and angered people for a long time,” she said. “Multiple books and many articles have been written, documentaries filmed. Even in our community I encountered people whose lives were directly touched by the company.”
Compared to journalistic accounts, Prebble’s interpretation of the Enron incident for the stage offers a fresh and perhaps more sympathetic view towards the mostly male Enron executives who wanted, as the saying goes, to “change the world.”
Prebble’s Skilling, as presented by LaPointe, is both obsessively ambitious and surprisingly idealistic. His vision of Enron as “not just an energy company, but a powerhouse for ideas” with a corporate culture of “less structure, less routine,” where “people’s minds [can] run” bears resemblance to the slogans of more than a few majorly successful contemporary corporations. Skilling’s faith in the power of his idea of market to market energy trading to create “new industries, new economies” was convincing.
The heavy use of gendered language within the play, not least by Skilling, draws attention to Enron’s macho-culture that perhaps lent its executives an overabundance of false confidence. Skilling’s influence over his energy-traders is comparable to that of a god over his reverent followers, or that of a hound-master over his pack of hunting dogs. Skilling questions “why [we] should respect ineptitude” and advises his protégé Fastow to “never apologize.” One of Skilling’s traders declares that the game of the deal is the “closest thing there is to hunting, closest thing there is to sex — for a man, that is,” echoing Skilling’s capitalistic sentiment that “business is nature.”
In a moment of reckless desperation to impress his boss, Fastow pitches to Skilling his idea of special purpose entities, an ingenious series of hedges or partnerships with shell companies where Enron could bury its losses to maintain its high stock value. “F— it.” Fastow says, throwing his origami mathematical models aside. “Two guys in a room. You want my help?”
The special purpose entities, or Raptors, as they later came to be called, were represented on stage by dinosaur-like figures that physically consumed Enron’s debt. Curiously, their relationship to Fastow resembles that between a master and his beloved pets, between a father and his children. “Clever girls,” he coos upon the green-scaled financial vehicles’ first appearance. The later scene in which a mournful Fastow is forced to “kill” his Raptors seemed almost tragic.
The rest of the play makes ample use of caricatures such as the Raptors to simultaneously elucidate and ridicule American business practices. Three blind mice who saunter on stage at frequent intervals refer quite apparently to the company’s board, who have questionable knowledge of the company’s true financial operations, the accounting company Arthur Andersen is played by a ventriloquist and his dummy and financial services firm Lehman Brothers is a weak-kneed pair of conjoined twins who change their rating of Enron from “moderate buy” to “strong buy” after a thinly veiled threat from Fastow.
“There is a huge difference in the forms,” said Faraone, contrasting news reports on Enron with Prebble’s play, observing that the play offers psychological insight into chief executives at Enron. “Though the playwright relies heavily on actual statements, the play constructs an interior life for Skilling that does not show up in much reporting. For theatrical purposes, complex, flawed, fascinating characters like Skilling are utterly compelling. Whether or not we would personally ever like or trust them is not really relevant in the story that’s being told. This isn’t the story of just one man, is it?”
In a rare moment of vulnerability in his final court hearing on stage, Skilling reveals the true purpose of his actions at Enron, as interpreted by Prebble. “I’m not a bad man,” he insists. “I’m not an unusual man. I just wanted to change the world.”
“Theatrically,” Faraone said, “Enron” is “a terrific piece, epic in scope, with humor, song and dance, melodrama, sexiness and outrage.”
(04/18/18 11:20pm)
As the semester draws to a close, so do the three temporary exhibits at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. One of these three, titled “Ten Years: The Cameron Print Project,” chronicles a decade of collaboration in different forms of printmaking between Middlebury students and contemporary artists, including Mark Dion, Tomas Vu, Kati Heck and Rona Yefman.
The Cameron Print Project is overseen by professor Hedya Klein, who teaches silkscreen and intaglio printing in the Studio Arts Program. The format of the program stems from an ancient pedagogical system that trained artists from the Greek Bronze Age to 1648. Each year, Professor Klein makes regular trips to New York and Vienna to view galleries, museums and art fairs to the work of contemporary artists.
“The first thing I look at is the artists’ work,” she said, when explaining her process of inviting artists to Middlebury. “During my last leave when I attended a residency near Paris, I had an opportunity to visit Christy Gast during the installation of her exhibition at the Kadist Foundation. Her work had always interested me but her silkscreened soft sculptures at Locust Projects in Miami and the cyanotypes she made in Paris piqued my interest and prompted me to invite her to Middlebury.”
The exhibit carries a remarkable array of different artistic styles, mediums and themes. Artists such as Michael Jordan and Kati Heck employ styles that drew upon graphic novels, Nicola López displays a permanently constructing and deconstructing urban landscape in multi-layered architectural drawings, Tomas Vu uses abstract combinations of fantastical cityscapes to explore the post-industrial advances of humankind.
“Invited artists work in various media.” Professor Klein said. “Often these artists [who have not used prints as their primary medium] bring a fresh perspective to the print project. Some artists, such as Tomas Vu, exemplify the collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to art-making more directly. Tomas brought a plethora of laser cut elements that students hand glued onto his edition.”
Other artistic media at the exhibit include video animations with original music and laser engraved wood block prints.
For Mark Dion, this year’s visiting artist, the studio chose to make photo transfer intaglio print editions, which would make them look as close to pencil drawings as possible. Dion’s work questions the way in which dominant ideologies and public institutions such as museums shape our understanding of the world around us.
In a lecture on April 12 in Twilight Hall, Dion described himself as someone who has “one foot in science, one foot in magic.”
Much of his work is inspired by the tradition of the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, which he said is the “infancy of science and magical thinking.” Past projects have included “The Amateur Ornithologist Clubhouse” equipped with field guides and extensive equipment for birdwatchers in Essen, Germany, “Den,” a massive sculpture of a sleeping bear hibernating on top of a hill of human material relics from ancient times to the present, and “Oceanomania: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas,” an exhibit for the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, of which drawings for the Cameron Print Project are based.
“The lines of a silkscreen print are flat whereas photo transfer intaglio retains the crumbly nature of his pencil line,” Professor Klein said of the intaglio print technique. “This printmaking technique reveals moments where the line is fully visible and moments where it’s not – just like the line of a pencil pressed with a certain amount of pressure on a piece of paper. One may think he or she is looking at an original drawing if it weren’t for the embossed edge and the penciled-in edition size on the bottom right hand corner.”
The process of intaglio printmaking can be difficult and unforgiving for a beginner. Designs are etched onto a copper plate, which are then processed through a printing press that inks the design onto a piece of acid-free paper. Scattered throughout this relatively straightforward-sounding process are various highly specialized steps that prepare the paper, plate and ink to allow for optimal printing conditions. The studio produced an estimated 200-300 test prints and dozens of test plates this year.
At times, said Jay Silverstein ’19, who worked on the Project this spring, the studio has held more than twenty people working together on different elements of the printing process.
“The shop is really alive,” he said. Depending on the number of people in the studio, the environment can be “hyper-calm or wildly active.”
“Using Intaglio as a means of creating one’s work is no different than any other tool available to artists. Drawing, painting, and sculpture have also been around for a long time,” Klein said. “What matters is how one uses the material. What is the final outcome?”
The time-consuming process of printing an edition of the artists’ work occurs over a period of approximately four weeks, during which students may voluntarily spend up to 12 hours per week in the studio, helping with preparation and final printing, an informal presentation and open studio demo, and the packing and shipping of the finished portfolio.
“Each print is different,” said Silverstein. “As you become more involved in the [printing] process, your eyes become more keen to when things go awry. This is perfect for people who get obsessed over process…. [The project] takes your drafting and drawing levels to the peak.”
“You fall into it,” he said of learning to print, which he said is similar to the process of learning to ride a bicycle. “You wake up one day and you’re like: I know how to make a print.”
“Students’ focus and ambition triple after these projects,” Klein said. “Because students work closely with a master printer and professional artists they learn the ins and outs of how to create a professional print portfolio. They have the chance to speak directly with these artists in an intimate classroom environment. They work on a team which creates an artistic community, an important part of being an artist.”
“We talked about his work while doing the work,” Silverstein, who is double majoring in biology and studio art, said of his interaction with visiting artist Mark Dion. “He approaches art from a scientific lens, which I appreciate a lot.”
According to Klein, some past student participants in this project have gone on to graduate programs or careers as professional printmakers and artists.
“That’s the dream,” said Silverstein. “What I make, that’s small potatoes compared to the other work that I see come out of Johnson.”
For young artists, the importance of exposure to contemporary work cannot be neglected.
“I want to show our students what the scope of the art world looks like,” Klein said on the website of previous visiting artist Christy Gast, “and to introduce them to artists they may not have read about in an art history book.”
An exhibit of works by students in Klein’s intaglio class is on view in the Mezzanine of Johnson Memorial Building until April 24.
(04/12/18 12:24am)
MIDDLEBURY — Two months ago, both the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation and the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Foods and Markets reported a sighting of Emerald Ash Borers in northern Orange County, Vermont. An exotic beetle native to China, eastern Russia, Japan and Korea, the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) is an invasive species that targets all types of ash. First found near Detroit in 2002, the Ash Borer has spread rapidly throughout North America, and its invasion in Vermont has long been anticipated. None of Vermont’s native ash trees are known to be resistant to the pest.
“They’re everywhere,” said Tim Parsons, Middlebury College’s Landscape Horticulturist, of the ash trees on campus. “I can stand on the front steps of the Chapel and point to four, and I can stand on the back steps and point to eight more.” The main campus of Middlebury College has 182 ash trees, constituting roughly 8.7 percent of the campus’ tree community. On the Green Mountains, ash makes up about 10-15 percent of trees, but they are not as congregated as they are on Middlebury’s main campus.
Since 2010, Parsons has taught a J-term class every few years called “Trees and the Urban Forest,” which centers on the ecological and aesthetic value of the forest in an urban setting. In past years, the class has developed emergency preparedness plans against the invasion of the Emerald Ash Borers for both the town of Middlebury and the College. In 2015, the class made a plan to survey all the ash on campus, devise strategies for treatment or removal of ash trees and consider options for replanting. On a website called EAB at Middlebury College (go/EAB), two students from the 2015 J-term class estimated the total cost for the injection, removal, and replacement of ash trees on campus would reach approximately $500,000.
A map of trees on campus, made by a group of students in 2002 but last updated in January of 2014, shows congregations of ash behind Ross commons, a grove of almost exclusively ash in front of the Atwater commons house near the Trail Around Middlebury and a patch of ash behind Proctor, most of which was removed before the construction of the Ridgeline Suites. Other conspicuous spots of ash include three large structures near Forest Hall and several in the northwest corner of Battell Beach, on which many students hang hammocks on warmer days. Though ash accounts for less than 10 percent of the campus’ tree population, small stands of ash trees often serve as prominent landscape features, meaning that their removal will result in noticeable gaps in the Middlebury landscape.
Nevertheless, the position of many ash trees near key structures such as residence halls and dining halls may necessitate their removal. Smaller than a penny, an ash borer will bore through the inner bark and likely result in the death of entire trees. A survey in 2015 by students in Parsons’ class located 658 “hazardous” trees found within 50 feet of roads, sidewalks and parking lots.
Once an ash has been infested, it has on average between two to four years to live. Out of concern for the safety of students and members of the college community, landscape facilities will likely have to remove infested trees before a year has passed.
As Parsons explained with a touch of cynical humor, “One of the definitions of a tree is that it’s a large plant that, when it falls on someone, may kill them.”
When implemented on a larger scale, however, mass-removals of ash may become detrimental to local flora and fauna. Professor Stephen Trombulak, a landscape ecologist, said that a drastic loss of ash trees “will mean that there will be a lot of dead trees in the forest, which will almost certainly alter all aspects of forest ecosystems, including but not limited to nutrient cycling, soil retention, abundance of species that specialize on dead and decaying wood, soil moisture content, soil temperature, fire intensity and frequency and the abundance and density of plant species that do well in forest gaps.”
The loss of large amounts of ash could have unexpected repercussions for other industries as well. For example, most Major League Baseball bats are made of ash because the hardwood is not inclined to splinter and shatter. Middlebury College’s own replicas of Gamaliel Painter’s cane, given out to all seniors at Commencement, are made of ash.
The most abundant use of ash by far is as firewood. It is possible that ash removed from campus in the near future may be burned in the biomass plant to provide energy for campus consumption. The invasion of this pest, however, brings with it quarantines and regulations on the transportation of firewood, which will almost certainly affect log prices in the area.
Parsons’ approach is to wait until it is absolutely necessary to cut down the ash. Neither attempts at eradicating the ash borer nor removing all the ash in the area have been successful in the 31 other states that have been infested. It is estimated that only one percent of ash in an infested area survive, so efforts to regenerate ash seedlings and saplings in Vermont forests are crucial.
“An ash borer’s immediate range is not very far. It could take them five, ten years to get here,” Parsons speculated. “Or they could get stuck to the windshield of a car and get here tomorrow morning.” One of the major pathways of travel for the Emerald Ash Borers is facilitated by humans, through interstate transport of infested firewood.
Key in deterring the spread of the Emerald Ash Borer will be observant and conscious Vermonters. The first report of the insect in Vermont was made by a forest manager in Orange County on the Vermont Invasives website.
Professor Trombulak suggested that “Vermonters should be responding to this issue by not moving potentially-infested firewood from one location to another, reporting sightings of EAB immediately and planting ash trees whenever possible in the hopes that the seed pool for those species can be maintained until an effective management plan can be implemented.”
Another method of response, Parsons said, is injecting infested trees biannually with pesticide, but such a short-term solution is neither cost-effective nor implementable on a large scale under facilities’ current budget. Though some are investigating the use of bio-controls such as woodpeckers or parasitic wasps to control ash borers as a “last-ditch effort” to combat the invasive species, the effectiveness of such measures has yet to be determined. Professor Trombulak says that “there is speculation that an increase in EAB will lead to woodpeckers and parasitic wasps feeding on EAB, which might control their populations.” However, he warned of the unpredictability of such an approach, as he is “not aware of any evidence that predator control has been shown in locations where EAB have been established for some time.”
Since its first sighting in the state on Feb. 20, the Emerald Ash Borer has been found in two additional Vermont counties. Tell-tale signs of an infestation include woodpecker damage to living trees in the form of smooth, light-colored patches on the outer bark, S-shaped galleries created by ash borers weaving back and forth underneath the bark and abundant D-shaped ash borer exit holes on the trunk of a tree.
Trees serve an essential, albeit often underappreciated, role in the Middlebury landscape. Parsons’ enthusiasm for the trees on campus is as clear as it is contagious. “I’d say I have about twelve [favorite trees on campus],” he admitted. “They’re like your kids—you can’t pick just one.”
“It’s heartbreaking,” Parsons said, grieving for the ash that we will undoubtedly lose in the next few years. “I can’t stress that enough.”
(04/05/18 1:31am)
BURLINGTON— A quick walk through the co-op will shed light on the abundant uses of maple sap, which includes but is not limited to maple syrup, maple candy, maple cream, face cream with maple-sap extract and maple-infused water, which is expected to inspire a cult following similar to that of coconut water.
The state of Vermont is one of the world’s largest producers of maple sugar products, second only to Quebec, Canada, a province that produced around 8 times as much maple syrup in 2010 and is about 62 times as large as the Green Mountain State.
The maple sap harvesting season begins as early as late-January, and continues into February and mid-March. In the past, sugar makers (as producers of maple syrup are called) collected sap from either red or sugar maples through 2-inch-deep holes drilled at an upward angle into the trunks.
The sap would flow in a freeze-thaw cycle through metal or plastic sprouts into buckets hanging eagerly below the spout. The weather in northeast United States, with its long spring days and chilly nights, enable this unique business and way of life to thrive.
According a study conducted by the Center for Rural Studies at the University of Vermont, the average maple sugar producer in Vermont has 3,451 taps, a number that makes the traditional process of sap collection, which requires the buckets to be collected every day, a somewhat tedious ordeal.
When local sugar-maker Lew Coty first started his operations at Nebraska Knoll Sugar Farm through trial and error in 1977, he chose a site called Birch Hill, which he described as “an appropriate name as there were many birch trees but the maples were few and far between.”
A tap count in 2012 at Nebraska Knoll tallied 9,778 total taps and eight main lines, or tubes of sap flowing back into the sugarhouse. “When the sap is running well,” Lew said of the rush to collect and process the sap in early spring, “our operation quickly morphs into a state of immediacy.”
On his blog on Nebraska Knoll’s website, Coty describes the sap runs as “relentless and non-retrievable. Waiting for tomorrow to deal with the situation after a good night’s rest is rarely an option. Bouncing between exigencies and sneaking in power naps are part of the game.”
“Having your head bathed in hot steam for long periods completes the separation of mind from body,” Coty said of the physically demanding work of tapping and tubing. Referring to the condition he described as “living in the ozone,” he said, “You focus on the immediate and float while you can over the rest.”
Most larger scale operations like Coty’s now collect their sap by connecting their sprouts to a tubing system that transports the sap to a collection tank. Back at the sugar house, the sap is then filtered and pumped into the evaporator, where its water is boiled away and its sugars caramelized.
Through this process, maple syrup develops the unique flavors for which it is known. At maple competitions, terminology to describe the flavor profiles of various syrup-entries might include roasted, which compares the syrup to chocolate or roasted ground coffee, confectionary, a flavor linked to white sugar, mineral, garlicky, or woody, in a process not unlike that by which chocolate, wine, and cheese are judged.
Factors such as the climate and elevation of the maple trees, the time of year at which the sap was harvested and the boiling process all affect the final flavor of the syrup. Local sugar-maker Matt Davis at little Hogback Farm in Bristol, Vermont said that discerning palates may even be able to taste flavors from microbes in the pipelines and in the stainless steel or plastic tanks that store the syrup.
As a child, Davis had experimented with sugar-making as a hobby, but it wasn’t until eight years ago that he became a professional sugar-maker. According to Davis, syrup made during the colder months in the early sugar season is typically lighter in flavor, while syrup harvested in the later, warmer months is typically more caramelized, with a deeper roast.
In comparison to larger maple syrup productions with out-of-state investment, Davis said, smaller, local producers have “a bit more control over the final product.”
“We do end up having smaller, more distinctive batches,” he said.
“Smaller producers tend to do more direct sales to their customers, so that certainly affects how you’re going to think about the product you’re making,” Davis shared. “A lot of larger producers are just filling barrels of syrup to retailers, so on that end they may not be thinking about [their individual batches] as much.”
“We’re intimate with all our batches,” he enthused.
Coty shares this view towards larger producers, voicing that he “[hates] to see the huge operations that have been recently setting up in Vermont funded by out-of-state corporate money.” Two of Coty’s biggest challenges have been “global warming and bulk prices determined by a Canadian cartel.”
“They are changing the perception of maple syrup coming from quality oriented smaller producers to that coming from a factory,” he expressed.
Davis believes that his customers, mostly locals of Vermont, are looking for maple products with a local, personal touch. “We’re really trying to form relationships with our customers,” he said.
“They’re looking for a story, to know how [the syrup] is made; they want to know that we’re using quality equipment, that there’s no way we can potentially contaminate our product—and that they can actually come and see that for themselves.”
Asa teacher of ecology, Davis is also conscientious of the effect of maple production on local ecosystems. “Historically, sugar-makers have tried to remove other species to encourage maple growth,” he explained.
Maintaining diversity in the forest is important not only for encouraging resilience against different diseases and pests against the maple, but also for the some three-hundred bird species who nest on trees in the area, Davis said. Davis’ “sugarbush” currently houses sixteen tree species, of which two, the red and sugar maples, provide sap to be harvested.
Davis does not sugarcoat the reality of the industry, however. “There’s impact from any extractive activity,” he said. Though he recognizes that the scale of larger productions doesn’t necessarily imply negative ramifications on local ecology, “if those operations are leaning towards maple monoculture over a broad area, that’s certainly going to be a place where disease and pests could be more problematic,” Davis warned. “Especially if their neighbor is trying to maintain more diversity.”
Despite new and old difficulties in the arena of maple syrup production, the enthusiasm both Coty and Davis have for sugar-making is clear.
Various sections on the mechanics of sugar-tapping on Coty’s blog reflect his thirty-seven years as a sugar-maker, and he describes sugar-makers as both plumbers and soldiers in battle.
In an entry in 2008, Coty excitedly described a particular sugar-making. “First run syrup often has an immature quality, but this was slightly later with a pubescent glow. Unlike its later, darker cousins, which are usually clothed in garments of caramel or coffee or chocolate, this syrup lay on the tongue with the raw, naked, seductive taste of pure maple essence,” he said. “Sadly, this stellar flavor burns at both ends and its overwhelming allure will be noticeably diminished in a few months. We learn to indulge in this ephemeral delicacy while we can.”
In addition to selling his maple products at local farmer’s markets, Davis and his family are also avid consumers of the golden syrup they make. “We really like to experiment cooking with it,” Davis said. Two recent favorites of the Davis’ are maple chipotle turkey chili and maple-and-miso-glazed sweet potato tacos.
“I gorge by smothering all my meals with hot syrup right off the evaporator when we are boiling,” Coty confessed, “Unlike wine, maple syrup never tastes better than the day it’s made.”
“In the end,” Davis agreed, “the best part is always drinking it straight off the evaporator in the spring.”
(03/15/18 1:39am)
Professor Tom Root in the biology department spoke on Friday, March 2, to pods of students and professors from a plethora of scientific disciplines, including biology, neuroscience and psychology, about his lab’s prolific work on the California Two-Spot Octopus (Octopus bimaculoide), a species considered to be the white mouse of cephalopod research.
The title of the talk was “Strange Beauty,” a reference to a line in a poem by Arthur Clement Hilton. Titled “Octopus,” the poem intentionally caricatures the “eight-limbed and eight-handed” creature into a cunning marine monster, an entertaining but somewhat anthropomorphic characterization that has limited scientific accuracy.
From a neurobiological perspective, octopuses are of particular interest because the lobes and regions of their brain are remarkably similar to those in mammals, so any insights gleaned from research on octopuses could potentially allow for better understanding of the mammalian and human nervous system.
Research on cephalopod intelligence boomed after an influential 1992 study published in Science Magazine by researchers Fiorito and Scotto on observational learning in Octopus vulgaris, which focused on whether octopuses could learn by observing the actions and corresponding consequences of other octopuses.
Using positive and negative reinforcement associated with white and red balls, respectively, the researchers reported that the octopus learned from the example of an octopus on the other side of the glass to choose the correct ball, despite having been exposed to neither positive nor negative reinforcement associated with either ball.
Unfortunately, though this paper initially inspired much excitement in the field, subsequent follow-up attempts by other researchers, including that of the Root lab in 2008, to reproduce Fiorito and Scotto’s results were found unsuccessful, and the octopuses used in the original study were found to have been raised in unusually competitive and forced social environments, rendering the results unreproducible and flawed.
The Root lab then switched gears to the feeding behavior of Octopus bimaculoide, focusing on their association of preferred conditions or food with visual, auditory and chemical stimuli. The work of alumna Alexa Warburton ’10 expounded upon the ability of octopuses to learn to associate a visual sign such as “x” or “o” to preferred or non-preferred conditions in a variety of paradigms. In just one summer, the accuracy rate of octopuses finding their preferred dark chamber in a T-maze increased from 50 percent to over 80 percent.
Other paradigms such as the round maze and the Y-maze were also used to test how quickly and accurately the octopuses associated different images, sounds, motion and chemicals with their preferred conditions or source of food.
Later researchers in the Root lab tested the same visual stimuli in the tank that the octopuses inhabited to reduce the impact of other variables such as the observer effect. Throughout the past decade, the work of various students in the Root lab showed that octopuses preferred dimly lighted areas and tended to attack prey more often in the presence of red colors, contrasting colors, polarized light and a chemical called proline that is often used in the fishing industry.
Cece Wheeler ’19 started working in the octopus lab this spring.
“Twice a week I go into the lab and tie a fiddler crab to a piece of fishing wire, and then lower that into the octopus tank to see if I can get one of the octopuses to come out overtop different types of substrates that I’ve laid down,” she said. “As [the octopuses] move onto the substrate, they camouflage themselves to it, typically in a uniform, mottled or disturbance pattern in response to the different patterns of substrate.”
A future area of research for the Root lab lies in the development of camouflage in baby octopuses, which often begins immediately after birth.
“The lab has done some past work with learning, but I think the consensus now is that it’s hard to judge how an animal is making decisions without understanding the basics of how they are receiving and interpreting information from the world around them,” Wheeler said. “Right now I’m starting work with camouflage behaviors. I want to know more about what environmental cues initiate different camouflage patterns. There are a lot of different aspects to an octopus’ surroundings, and I’m curious as to which ones it is responding to when it camouflages itself.”
Instead of rationalizing octopus behavior through a human lens, such an approach attempts to understand the decision-making process of octopuses through examining their perception of the world.
“All of the our animals are juveniles right now, so they aren’t full grown, and some are slightly bigger than others,” Wheeler said. “They also like to hide in flower pots, behind bricks, or under pieces of coral, so it’s kind of tricky figuring out how to lure them out effectively. I also record everything on a video camera so I can go back and look at the footage later. Hopefully I will be able to categorize camouflage responses to different substrate patterns, and come up with an analysis of that data this spring.”
(02/15/18 1:45am)
MIDDLEBURY — On Sunday, Dec. 3, members of the local community and the college gathered at the Town Hall Theater for the inaugural film of the 2017/18 Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival (MNFF) Winter Screening Series. Titled “Menashe,” the film was directed by Joshua Z. Weinstein and follows the struggles of its eponymous protagonist to maintain custody of his son Rieven after the passing of his wife. The traditions of Menashe’s orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, require a mother to be present in every home, forcing Rieven to be rehomed away from his father into another household. Shot in secret and based largely on the real life of its Hasidic star Menashe Lustig, the film allows a rare glimpse into a famously private community to explore the weighty bonds of both parenthood and faith.
“Menashe” was the first of six films screened in a series that spans from December 2017 to May 2018. The second film in the series, Doug Nichol’s documentary “California Typewriter,” was screened on Sunday, Jan. 7. The film paints a moving portrait of artists, writers and collectors who stand together against the waves of time, united by their loyalty to the typewriter as a tool and muse. Alternating between the nostalgic and the forward-thinking, the film meditates on the changing dynamics between humans and machines.
The four films that follow in the series are connected by their celebration of women’s experiences and achievements. This emphasis on the female spirit in the selection of the films suggests the festival’s increasing recognition of women in film and echoes the establishment of a new award in this year’s festival: the Clio Visualizing History Prize for the Advancement of Women in Film. The honored film, “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story,” is directed by Alexandra Dean and documents the life and work of Hollywood’s “Most Beautiful Girl” in 1940, whose role in inventing devices that led to secure Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS communications is often overlooked.
The next upcoming film, scheduled to screen on Sunday, Feb. 18, is writer-director Margaret Bett’s drama “Novitiate,” which tells the story of a young woman’s training to become a nun in the Roman Catholic Church amid the changing religious landscapes of the 1960s. As she progresses from postulant to novitiate, the protagonist faces complex struggles between personal faith and organized religion.
Following “Novitiate” will be “I Am Evidence” on Sunday, March 11. The film, directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Trish Adlesic, presents a sharp exposé of a frequently broken criminal justice system through the lenses of four sexual assault survivors whose rape kits went untested for years. “Lady Bird,” a drama written and directed by Greta Gerwig on the turbulent bonds between a California nurse and her teenage daughter, Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, will be shown the following month on Saturday, April 7. The final film in the series, “The Judge,” will be screened on Friday, May 11 and captivatingly chronicles the rise of Kholoud Faqih, the first female Sharia judge in the history of the Middle East.
Founded in 2015 by producer Lloyd Komesar, the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival aims to showcase up-and-coming talent in the film industry. The third annual festival ran from August 24 to August 27 last summer and presented 90 films across all genres, among which were the works of Middlebury alumni Beth Levison ’91, Adam Kritzer ’11, Matt Lennon ’13, and Sasha Whittle ’17. According to the MNFF website, “the emphasis at MNFF is entirely on filmmakers who have completed within the 24 months prior to the Festival either their first or second feature film or first or second short film.” For new filmmakers, MNFF provides a specialized platform to both “offer a level playing field to new and emerging voices in filmmaking” and allow audiences to “discover fresh and engaging talent…in a setting that is all about their work,” as stated on the festival’s website.
Single tickets ($12) and Winter Screening Series Passes ($60 for six films) can be purchased either on the Town Hall Theater website, at the box office in the Jackson Gallery, or at the lobby of the Town Hall Theater on the day of the show. Trailers for the six films in the Winter Screening Series can be found on the MNFF website at middfilmfest.org.
(11/16/17 12:33am)
When Annie Ulrich ’13 describes Atwater Dining Hall, she describes a space that carries a magical dimension mirroring the fantastically bright world of the movie “La La Land.” Ulrich created “Sum of All Parts,” a public art piece at Atwater Dining that fills its high ceiling with more than eight hundred whimsical paper planes made from recycled papers, projects and problem sets.
During regular mealtime hours, lights from the ceiling illuminate the planes’ pages, yellowed with age and exposure and interconnected by cobwebs. The composition of the fleet creates a sense of dynamic movement so that, according to Annie, the planes seem to be in the middle of spiraling forward despite their static position in space.
“When you look at it from the back, through the beautiful large windows at night,” she said, “it feels like that space has something going on after hours, after everyone has left.”
Change seems to be a recurring theme when Ulrich speaks about the installation, which began as a project for her studio art senior independent study course. “Sum of All Parts” was created three times, each time for a different purpose. The piece was remade for Atwater Dining after Ulrich was presented with the CAPP award, a yearly award established by the Committee for Art in Public Places (CAPP) to honor a graduating senior. The most recent recipient of the award is Daniella Silva ’17, whose work is currently on display in the lower lobby of the Axinn Center at Starr Library.
As most CAPP pieces only stay on campus for one to two years, maintenance was not one of Ulrich’s priorities when considering the installation of “Sum of All Parts.” CAPP is now considering either a thorough cleaning of the piece or its removal.
Aided by the liberal use of a hot glue-gun, the paper planes were attached to mechanical wires, which were then attached to hoops that hung from the ceiling of the dining hall. Unfortunately, the same quality that allowed the piece to be easily mounted makes the piece vulnerable to the advances of time. Dust has been collecting in the folds of the paper and a colony of spiders have made their own additions to the piece through a series of artfully interconnected cobwebs.
Richard Saunders, the director of CAPP, says that the installation’s fate has not yet been decided, and sees enthusiasm in the college community to keep the piece.
According to Saunders, the selection process for the recipient of the CAPP award involves an “organic process” that allows members of the community to vote for the work of one of three nominated graduating students to reflect current interests of the student body and highlights of the studio art program. Included in the CAPP award is an agreement that the artwork will be displayed for approximately two years, after which it will be returned to the creator of the piece.
The removal or addition of a new installation is guided by practical considerations requiring a collaborative effort between the Space Management Committee, Campus Facilities and CAPP, which has recently undergone formal reorganization into a bicameral system that Saunders likens to the House and Senate of the American political system.
“There was never a plan to put all the works [of public art] in one location,” Saunders said. “The works are meant to engage, to be placed where people are likely to see them. Many students don’t make it to the Museum in their four years here, and the Public Arts program is an opportunity for unexpected encounters with art.” Often, Saunders added, the public art that seems to fade to the background of our daily lives eventually becomes an integral part of students’ experiences at Middlebury.
Ulrich, who returned to the college after graduation as the college’s associate costume director, echoed this notion. She noticed that other alumni who returned to visit saw the changes in the campus’s appearance as a reflection of changes in the more general campus scene.
“Art transforms a space by its presence but some art is not meant to last” Ulrich said. She points to professional artist Patrick Dougherty’s temporary piece, “So Inclined,” which inhabited the front lawn of the Mahaney Center of the Arts from 2007 to 2011 before practical reasons necessitated its removal. The changes in both Dougherty’s piece and hers reflect a natural process that occurs over time.
“Art doesn’t have to be this monument that just sits there,” Ulrich said. Interactive and accessible, Ulrich’s works are meant to invite viewers not to “come and adore me,” but rather to “come and play with me.”
At the last meeting of the CAPP, Professor Sanford Mirling of the studio art department presented a tri-college public art exchange program with Bennington College and Plattsburg State University. Through this program, three works from the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota will be on loan for two years to each of the three schools, after which time the schools will exchange the works with each other. As permanent acquisition and maintenance works of art can be expensive, the public art exchange program, as Saunders points out, offers a means for the college to less expensively bring new works of art to campus and take calculated risks by bringing controversial works that will spark discussions in the public sphere and update the public art program to become truly contemporary.
Opportunities for student-directed public art are available through the CAPP fund. Saunders cites the murals in Proctor Dining Hall and at the back of Wright Memorial Theater as works which were either executed or proposed by students.
Ross Commons has also made an effort to bring student-created art into living spaces. Professor Maria Hatjigeorgiou, faculty co-head of Ross Commons, says that accessible art takes a special role in humanizing a living space as crowded as that which the “Rossers” inhabit. Near the Ross Commons Office, she points to the wall on which a collection called “100 Daves” had been displayed. The work was curated by senior Andrew Smith ’17 and its name is a pun on the eponymous final 100 days before seniors graduate from the college. The white brick wall is now empty.
“Look at that,” she said, her tone jokingly disdainful. “That is an institutional wall.”
Hatjigeorgiou speaks about her role in “setting an intellectual tone” for the students in a way that is similar to the presence of art in daily life.
“What we do is invisible,” she says, “but it permeates a space.” She refers to the commons in which a student belongs as the “intellectual home” where he or she individuates. In this process of differentiation, Hatjigeorgiou reasons, art is the medium that, “lends voices to people who may be quiet and introspective, who are not speaking out loud, who need art in their lives.”
“We sometimes have to be cautious with the art we display,” Hatjigeorgiou said, “because it might invite disrespect. We have to create a balance between being hopeful and doing what is practical. But I’m an idealist. I believe in art. Art humanizes.”
(11/01/17 10:59pm)
Seldom would a character release the four-letter expletive “f–ck” five consecutive times on stage without drawing a stunned silence from the audience. Such is the language of the play “Glengarry Glen Ross” by David Mamet. The Middlebury Department of Theatre and Dance put on the play, directed by Professor of Acting Richard Romagnoli, last weekend at the Seeler Studio Theatre.
The abundance of profane language in the play, however, does little to detract from its power. The play opens on three salesmen, Shelley Levene (Quincy Simmons ’18), George Aaronow (Sebastian LaPointe ’18), Dave Moss (Kevin Benscheidt ’17.5) and their office manager Joan Williamson (Sophia Donavan-LaFuente ’18) as they’re subject abusive “motivation” from Blake (Galen Fastie ’20), a recent hiree brought on to help increase sales revenue. The audience learns that the winner of the monthly sales competition, who seems likely to be Ricki Roma (Eliza Renner ’18), the most smooth-talking salesman with the most promising leads, will win a Cadillac, while the two with the lowest sales will be fired. The high-stakes, cut-throat portrayal of the corporate sales environment is immediately established.
Director Romagnoli’s recasting of Levene, Williamson and Roma as female characters in a play originally written for an all-male cast introduces a new layer of interpretation of the play. For example, certain insults such as “go home to your children” may be interpreted differently when directed at a woman. This production sought to offer women actors “characters who expressed the full range of initiative, fearlessness, even aggression to achieve an objection, free of the behavioral codes imposed by polite society,” according to Romagnoli. In this way, the student actors were challenged to “liberate themselves from internalized ‘feminine’ behavior… [in] a realm of expression typically denied them in virtually all theatrical literature.”
“We were not interested in dressing the women like men,” said Mira Veikley, a visiting assistant professor of Theatre who designed the costumes for the play. “We wanted to create a world in which power was not related to gender.”
Veikley also said that the clothing of the characters reflected their mental states and status of power in the office. Darker colors emphasized the presence of characters who felt empowered, while characters of lower status in the office, such as Levene and Aaronow, were dressed in lighter colors to make them appear washed out and overwhelmed by their situation.
When Levene, an aging salesman who lives in the faded glory of her past success, finally makes a new sale, she wears dark beige-colored pants to the office. This choice echos the confidence that stiletto wearing Roma projected in the first act when she maneuvered a large sale of her own with pseudo-philosophical statements. Both scenes depict the two salesmen at points of high energy in their careers.
The parallel between Roma and Levene strengthens as the audience learns that Levene was Roma’s mentor in the sales business.
“Roma is a kind of shadow of what Levene used to be, and I like to think that Levene is also a look into Roma’s future if she continues in this cut-throat business,” Professor Veikley said.
One of Roma’s last lines to Williamson concerns Levene: “My stuff is mine, [Levene’s] stuff is ours. I’m taking half of her commissions.” Despite their seemingly intimate mentor-mentee relationship, getting out ahead of one’s coworkers seems to be the ultimate goal. As stated by the chalkboard on stage right, the fundamental rule of the sales world is A.B.C. — always be closing. Manipulative language towards clients seems encouraged and verbal abuse among coworkers is both frequent and tolerated.
“Mamet floats a romantic view of men coexisting in a specific business culture where survival depends on mutual care and collaboration,” Romagnoli said. “The author’s view is illusory. The environment is Darwinian.”
(11/01/17 5:20pm)
What do the Addison County Parent/Child Center, Addison County Farm Worker Coalition, Addison County Dental Care and Alliance for Civic Engagement at Middlebury College have in common? Here is the answer: Cheryl Mitchell is heavily involved in all of them.
Throughout her more than 40 years in the Middlebury area, Cheryl Mitchell has been active in spearheading a remarkable number of social welfare programs, including the four listed above, that continue to make their positive impact in this community. WomenSafe, an Addison County organization that fights domestic and sexual violence, awarded Mitchell the 2017 Kimberly Krans Women Who Change the World Award for her work in and dedication to the community.
Mitchell cited her parents’ influence as one of the main reasons for her lifelong involvement in social justice. As a child, she observed the example of her mother, who taught a preschool class for children with autism and was involved in diverse volunteer work.
“My mother would pick up people on the street,” Mitchell said. “She’d see an old woman struggling with a bag of groceries, offer to give her a ride, and they would become friends.”
Every summer, Mitchell would get her feet wet in a different social justice–oriented program. Because of her experiences in social work, Mitchell initially thought that she would be a sociology major when she went to college. After taking coursework in the sociology department at Swarthmore College, however, she thought, “Well, this is all sort of common sense.” She much preferred reading poetry and literature and graduated in 1971 with a double degree in English literature and religion. She continued her active involvement in social justice in the summers, when she worked for organizations like Ecology Action. After graduation, working in the child care program at the Mary Johnson Children’s Center opened her eyes to the deeper struggles of families in the Addison County area.
“I grew up in a pretty comfortable middle-class family in the suburbs,” she said. “I didn’t have the day-to-day understanding that people’s lives were a lot more challenging.”
This experience prompted her to found the Addison County Parent/Child Center in Middlebury, which serves 1,700 rural families annually and has a special focus on supporting pregnant and parenting teens. The parents at the center were often abused or traumatized when they were children, and they struggle to support their families.
“It changed my perspective to see that it was not that people were incapable of managing their own lives, but that there were big social systems that were making things very difficult for them,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell believes that helping people live better lives takes more than individual help. For long-term, effective progress, it is imperative to address the larger social structures that affect these people.
She became involved in policymaking through her 10-year service with the state of Vermont, where she worked as deputy secretary for the Agency of Human Services under Gov. Howard Dean.
The work is fascinating, Cheryl explained, “but it’s only fascinating for me if it’s still connected to what individuals need.” Mitchell believes that significant and lasting change comes from the people. “It’s that coming-together piece that makes our lives different,” she said. “We all need health insurance, so let’s work on that. We need better housing, so let’s work on that. Policies that start at the government level don’t do very much unless they are a response to what the community wants.”
Mitchell has seen improvements in affordable housing to allow for mixed-income communities, in access to college education through the local branch of the Community College of Vermont, and in graduation rates of high schools and vocational centers.
Mitchell also cited new growth in local agriculture.
“It’s been wonderful seeing new small farms develop. Small farmers have been able to make it, and people are becoming interested in organic food and wellness.”
However, Mitchell noted that more progress is necessary, as migrant workers employed on these farms are still not recognized and embraced as full-fledged members of the community.
“I know that for a lot of people of color in this community, it’s still a struggle just because such a large proportion of the community is white. There is an assumption that everybody is nice, and we’re not all nice. People need to be vigilant to make sure that nobody is feeling excluded.”
That vigilance comes from people’s understanding that they come from a place of privilege. “Sometimes I’m not sure that a lot of people understand that well enough, myself included,” Cheryl said. “You sometimes say, ‘Why don’t they just stop doing something, why can’t they just finish high school, why don’t they just get a job?’ when it’s not that easy. When you’ve had a good education and you’ve had a lot of family support, when things have been comparatively easy for you, sometimes you tend not to pay enough attention. I think that it’s something that we in this community need to work on.”
Part of creating inclusivity for migrant workers is allowing them to communicate effectively with the community around them. “This is going to be my new career, I think,” Cheryl said. “I’ve been teaching English as a second language, and I just love doing it. I’d like to do that more, for more people and maybe in other countries some day. [It’s important] for people to have a grasp of the language and to be able to communicate directly. Instead of me saying ‘This is what they need,’ they are able to say, ‘This is what I need,’ and that is so much more powerful and persuasive.”
Cheryl’s first love is her world of family and friends and people whom she loves, and she channels this love into her passion for supporting families with young kids.
“I continue to work with the issue that people who care for young children are abysmally underpaid and not given the recognition they deserve. I’ve been working to make sure that they can get the training and education they need, and that they can move into a world where they will be recognized and recompensed for the work they do.”
Outside of her social work, Cheryl loves taking care of her two grandchildren and working on Treleven, a working sheep farm that she and her husband, Don, own. Here they host school field trips, writers’ retreats and creative residencies. They have recently received a permit to host summer programs that will allow families to explore the natural environment of their farm and forest.
Mitchell’s current focus is on making the farm open and available, which echoes her spirit of sharing and her all-encompassing love for the community. “I have problems with the idea of private property,” she said. “If you have a piece of land and just put up a fence around it so nobody can get in, it just doesn’t make any sense.”
(10/19/17 12:02am)
Amid the reunions, career talks and campus tree tours of Fall Family Weekend, a storytelling event called Cocoon brought capacity levels of parents, students and community members to Robison Concert Hall on the evening of Saturday Oct. 14. One would be hard-pressed, as co-organizer Jocelyn Zemach ’18 says, to find an audience as supportive and responsive as the one cheering, clapping and chuckling in the concert hall that evening.
The six storytellers of the evening each stood alone in the spotlight of an empty stage, sharing their experiences on the theme of “boundaries.” The setting was reminiscent of the hushed and intimate back-porch beginnings of the Moth, upon which Cocoon and the monthly Middlebury Moth-UP are based. Now a nationwide storytelling phenomenon, the Moth began as a gathering of friends in Georgia on a porch where moths would “flutter in through a hole in the screen” and was later recreated in a living room in New York City.
First to take the stage was former chaplain Howard Fauntroy ’89. An alumnus of both Middlebury College and the Dissipated Eight acapella group, he recalled a story from his preschool years when he channeled the strength of his mother Carmen to stand up against a person of power — his father, in this case — to challenge an unfair judgment on his actions.
“Our spirits and bodies are mixes of both our moms and our dads,” he noted.
Ben Sanders ’18, an aspiring poet and avid hiker, followed with a story about a camping trip with his mom, a “meticulous planner,” his dad, “a metaphysical photographer,” and his two siblings. He shared that despite the points of tension their family experienced on the trip, a conversation with his mother was still able to bring him face to face with the visceral and vulnerable state of “feeling like a baby.”
The process of crafting a story can also be enlightening for the storyteller. Kathryn Bervin-Mueller P’18, the third speaker of the event, expressed afterwards that articulating her story helped her better appreciate parallels between her childhood experiences in foster care and the decisions she and her husband made in building their own family later in life.
Nonetheless, Zemach, who served with Tabitha Mueller ’18 as co-organizer and host for the event, said that the purpose of storytelling, cathartic as the process may be, is not only to appease oneself.
Through storytelling, she reflected, we “move closer inch by inch, to strangers and friends [in the audience] alike.”
“The inclination to want to share a story is step one,” Zemach said.
The production of a relatable and effective story, however, requires extracting parts of a deeply personal narrative to produce a shareable experience that resonates with the listeners. All Cocoon storytellers undergo a workshopping process where producers help the storytellers enhance and refine aspects of their stories while keeping intact the tales’ authenticity, in an approach similar to that of curators working with artists to better present their work to the audience.
After the intermission, Josh Goldenberg ’18 described his first unsuccessful attempt at romantic intimacy, which brought a few knowing chuckles in the audience. Facing the subsequent “wave of insecurities” taught him to “ride [his] emotions,” a lesson he shared with the audience.
Community member Hannah Manley of Homeward Bound, Addison County’s humane society, recounted her physical and emotional struggles with infertility and shared her journey in coming to terms with events in life that are out of her control.
In keeping with the spirit of Fall Family Weekend, all of the stories shared were rooted in familial and romantic relationships. The stories presented family as a common narrative of the human experience that connected listeners and speakers of different genders, ages, personal and political beliefs, and life experiences. The atmosphere of rapport in the auditorium reflected the listeners’ appreciation of the speakers’ generosity and courage in relaying, to an audience of mostly strangers, their deeply personal stories of fear and hope, struggle and belonging.
The last speaker of the night, Brett Millier, a professor of English and American literature, told a serendipitous story about a former student who reminded her very much of herself. She spoke about the chain of kindness that supported her and her student in their own academic and professional lives and in later supporting others in the world community.
“We affect one another’s lives in ways we don’t realize,” Professor Millier said, “even when we didn’t mean to, even when we are thinking only of ourselves.”
(10/11/17 10:46pm)
Professor Emeritus of Music Emory Fanning celebrated his 50 years at Middlebury on Sunday, Oct. 1 with the sparkling musical tones of an organ recital. The program began with Concerto No. 1 in G Major by Johann Ernst, one of wsix concertos transcribed by J.S. Bach for the organ in his earlier years. The lively and celebratory sounds of the first piece were followed by the deeply moving and poetic “Organ Mass” by François Couperin, played from the sections “Gloria Dialogue” and “Offertoire” to offer the audience a glimpse of a variety of musical forms in the different mass elements.
Fanning’s next piece, J.S. Bach’s Trio Sonata No. 1 in E-Flat Major, is one of Bach’s most beloved compositions and was intended as instructive material for the organ studies of his oldest son. Ronnie Romano ’20, one of Professor Fanning’s organ students, admired his crisp rhythm and thoughtful articulation, both of which contributed to the precision and independence of voices in the music.
Romano recalls the energetic professor’s instructions regarding a particularly bubbly, manual-intensive piece: “Here, have fun with this!”
This rings true to the Professor’s teaching philosophy, which places emphasis on “bringing the music alive, attending to technical details, and sharing a love for the music!”
As Fanning says, one of his goals in teaching is to convey to his students “the core of the music as it was conceived and finding meaning beyond the notation, with attention to the historical styles,” as he seeks to do in his own playing.
Fanning’s rendition of the next two pieces by César Franck were arguably the high-points of the concert. The first piece, “Prelude, Fugue and Variation”, was a duo played by Fanning and his wife, pianist Diana Fanning, who has been an affiliate artist at Middlebury since 1975 and has toured extensively both in the US and abroad. Both have long been and continue to be integral members of the Middlebury community.
The Chorale No. 2 in B Minor that followed, Fanning’s “all-time favorite” piece, is widely considered to be the greatest organ work of the 19th century and conjures the majestic tolling of a great bell.
The inclusion of three expressive and stylistically diverse pieces by twentieth-century composers Herbert Howells, Norman Dello Joio and Percy Whitlock expanded the range and scope of the concert repertoire, leading up to the conclusion of the concert with Bach’s glorious three-part Fugue in E-flat Major in the tune of William Croft’s “St. Anne,” whose three contrasting sections are said to reflect the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
Regarding the programming of the concert, Fanning comments that the repertoire was chosen, “from music that [I have] played for a long time; that reflect contrasting compositional styles and historical periods; and that show off the wonderful characteristics of the organ, which allow the player a rich palette of sound.”
The effect of such an auditory palette was recognized by students present.
“I think what impressed me the most in Emory Fanning’s performance was the versatility of the organ and the different moods he was able to express with ease,” Miranda Seixas ’20 said. “From the deep, vibrating, feel-more-than-hear notes to the lilting and whimsical notes, I was able to hear more personalities within the organ than I had before.”
At the conclusion of the concert, members of the Middlebury community were so moved that some even took to stomping and slapping the pews to express their appreciation. As Professor Peter Hamlin aptly described in his opening remarks, Emory Fanning is not only a mentor and a friend, but also a musical hero for many in the Middlebury community and beyond.
The concert was followed by a reception at Crossroads Café, where many of Professor Fanning’s previous students and alumni of the college and choir were reunited.