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(04/29/15 6:05pm)
In the April 23 issue of the Campus, the editorial board of the paper chose to publish a political endorsement regarding the SGA elections. The paper put their support behind SGA presidential candidate Caroline Walters. The editorial outlined Walters’ various credentials, celebrated her non--SGA background and highlighted her platform points. As I read through the article, I learned a lot about Caroline Walters and her campaign...but I couldn’t help but wish I could read about the other candidates and their vision for Middlebury. The editorial board opened their endorsement by mentioning that every candidate had come to the Campus newsroom for an interview.
The paper, then, has a wealth of information about the various platforms, resumes and ambitions of those running. To my knowledge, no one else on campus has the resources or the influence to get every candidate into the same place for interviews and platform presentations. The Campus, as the only student-run paper at Middlebury, has a monopoly on this kind of access to interaction and information. Why, then, would they choose to pick a favorite and air an opinion, rather than use their valuable interviews to provide the student body with unbiased reporting on every candidate? Of course, the platforms and credentials of the candidates are accessible beyond the paper via the go links and posters each of them have used in campaigning, but that isn’t the point. The Campus is a student news source, making it inherently more trustworthy than campaign materials. The perception of the Campus as unbiased is what creates this trust between the students and the journalists. This trust is valuable to both parties, and the Campus should always strive to maintain it.
Long before the paper declares its loyalties, this forum should function as a source purely for information. The duty of journalists is to provide fact, with clarity and without adulteration, so that the public can think and act as fully informed citizens. Newspapers, of course, are also spaces for discourse, and I fully appreciate the tradition of opinionated writing in the news. My issue does not lie with the editorial boards’ decision to publish an endorsement- – newspapers around the nation have done so for centuries – --it lies with their failure to preface their opinion with thorough, unbiased reporting on all the candidates. The opinion of a newspaper is only valid when it comes along with all the information. To give us simply one perspective and expect us to be satisfied is unrealistic. I have no qualms with an editorial board expressing their own opinion, as long as they empower everyone else to judiciously craft their own. Credibility is what is at stake here, and unfortunately the Campus lost a little bit of it in my mind.
Katherine Brown '18 is from Dayton, Ohio.
(04/08/15 11:05pm)
I myself lost my father to suicide when I was 22 years old, as a senior in college, and I know how terribly painful this can be. I knew something was wrong in the days before his death, but I didn’t have the tools or understanding to make sense of what I was experiencing. Afterward, I felt not only grief and shock, but also confusion, anger and guilt. Was there something I missed? Was there something I could have done? These are very common, though excruciating, experiences that follow a death by suicide. Healing came slowly, but it did come – in the conversations I had with friends and family, and in our willingness to be open with each other about what had happened and how it affected us. Some sense of forgiveness and humility emerged in the realization that we are all human, and that we did all we knew how to do at the time.
Since then I have learned a lot more about the intense pain and loneliness associated with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The most important thing I have learned is this: in the vast majority of cases, suicide can be prevented. Maybe not in my dad’s case or in Nathan’s case, but in most situations we can do something to help.
The most important thing we can do is to ask those we are worried about if they are thinking about hurting themselves or taking their own life. Ask them compassionately but directly. Believe me, in almost every case, those we ask will experience our concern with a sense of relief. Asking does not increase the chance of suicide. Asking does not put the thought in their head. Those are myths. A person experiencing suicidal ideation is losing hope, and our concern offers the best antidote there is: a reason to risk hoping again.
Then, encourage, persuade, accompany that friend, family member or colleague to professionals or others who can help.
So pay attention to the warning signs listed in the Campus today, and if you are worried about someone, ask them directly if they are thinking of harming themselves. In almost every case they will answer you truthfully, and that moment of honest human connection is the beginning of healing.
If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts, know this: you are not alone. In the last year, about 7 percent of college students here and across the country thought seriously about suicide. Having such thoughts is not a crime; talking about such thoughts will not get you sent home from school. Suicidal thoughts are common. They are also painful and scary; but you do not have to struggle with them alone. Counselors work with students having such thoughts every day. So tell someone – a friend, a counselor, a dean or just the person who lives next door – tell someone what is happening.
Today, some of us are feeling intense grief; some anger; some guilt; some of us are numb, or frightened, or depressed, or lonely, or just tired or distracted or stressed by daily life. There is nothing I can do now for my father or for Nathan but grieve and remember. But we can do something now for each other. Healing and hope come in our connections. Healing is not magic; healing is not always quick; but healing does happen.
GUS JORDAN is the Executive Director of Health and Counseling Services
(03/19/15 12:00am)
Middlebury College tells anyone who will listen that the Honor Code is an essential part of student life. We all heard about it in info sessions and tours when we were prospective students. We signed the Honor Code agreement when we submitted our applications. We sat through long, hot meetings with our Commons during orientation while our FYCs told us stories about why the Honor Code was important to them. But for most of us, it only takes a few weeks on campus to feel like we have been misled.
Most Middlebury students do not cheat, and surveys show that we like the idea of the Honor Code, but it is also clear that we do not have much faith that the Code works. We think that our peers cheat but we do not think that anybody reports the cheaters. The Economics department has started proctoring tests because they do not believe that the Honor Code is working, and a number of students, faculty, and administrators think that the rest of the school should follow suit.
We on the SGA Honor Code Committee like the Code, but we think that a change needs to be made. We have proposed – and the Senate has passed a bill that will require – a biennial vote on whether to keep, amend, or eliminate the Honor Code. Later this spring, there will be an all student referendum on this amendment to the Honor Code. If two-thirds of the student body votes, and two-thirds of those voters approve of the amendment, then next year we will hold a vote on whether to keep the honor code.
We want to make clear that we as a committee are in favor of keeping the Honor Code – we just want to make it more effective. The point of the vote is not to eliminate the Code, but rather to get the student body to engage with it. Currently, we sign the Honor Code during orientation week and then basically do nothing with it for the rest of our time at Midd. Sure, we sign the pledge on papers and tests, but this becomes something that most of us do automatically without even thinking about it. That is not how Honor Codes are supposed to work, and we think that is why our Code is not working as well as we need it to. In order to succeed, the Honor Code needs to become deeply ingrained in campus culture – it needs to be something that we really believe in.
Fifty years ago, it was the students who created the Honor Code at Middlebury because they wanted to live in a community that valued integrity and academic honesty. Those values are not dead on Midd’s campus, but it’s hard to feel like the Honor Code belongs to us when it was our grandparents who created it. We think a vote will help students take ownership of the Code, and give it a legitimacy that can only make it stronger.
Some people might be worried that this proposal might result in drastic changes or even the elimination of the Honor Code. We think it is worth the risk. We think that the conversations and debates that this bill will raise will be good for the Honor Code and for the school as a whole. It is true that we are putting the Code at risk. However, we are of the opinion that the status quo is our worst available option. It does no one any good to have an Honor Code that no one believes in. If the student body is not willing to stand up and do what it takes to keep the Honor Code alive and well, then we are better off scrapping it altogether. We don’t want that to happen, and again, we really don’t think it’s going to happen. We hope and believe that we are just around the corner from a stronger Honor Code and a better Middlebury, but at this point it is out of our hands as a committee. It is up to all of us here in the community to support academic integrity at Middlebury by voting and by encouraging others to vote. It is time for all of us to own the Code.
Respectfully,
SGA Honor Code Committee
(03/18/15 11:56pm)
There is a perception amongst many people that the Civil Rights Movement was a wholly nonviolent effort. While there is indeed a rich history of nonviolence within the movement, largely attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., there is also legacy of self-determination and armed resistance. This legacy is often forgotten, but must be acknowledged in order to understand the state of racial affairs in the United States today. This article will provide a brief history of both the non-violence and Black Power movements within the larger Civil Rights Movement, before shifting to a discussion of the importance of both of these strategies in current affairs.
Nonviolence is a method of bringing about social or political change through peaceful means. In the U.S., Pacifist Quakers, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as well as those involved in the Civil Rights Movement have all implemented nonviolent tactics to accomplish their various goals. Morality is the foundation of nonviolence, as nonviolent protestors believe that their moral strength gives them physical strength to resist their oppressors.
According to Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolence provides a way to persons fight immoral systems without becoming immoral themselves. However, people and movements have historically struggled with nonviolence, as it lacks visible muscle. Despite this, the rise in support for integration in the during the Civil Rights Movement shows that nonviolence can nonetheless be effective.
As the Civil Rights Movement gained popularity in the early twentieth century, many leaders adopted nonviolence as their main weapon against discrimination. In 1941, James Farmer founded the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in Chicago with the intention of promoting better race relations and ending injustices. This group staged non-violent protests such as a sit-in in a Chicago coffee shop in 1943. CORE remained one of the first organized groups to practice nonviolence, and the strategy quickly expanded. In 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Martin Luther King, Jr. advertised nonviolence to large audiences, promoting its peaceful yet effective methods. In 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) continued the mission of the SCLC and CORE by founding its organization on the practice of nonviolence itself. Nonviolence quickly became a dominating feature of the Civil Rights Movement, guiding African-Americans on their fight for racial equality.
However, despite the popular draw towards nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement, it became clear by the mid-1960s that within the black freedom struggle there were different visions for the future. Stokely Carmichael (now known as Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton, authors of the impactful book Black Power, deemed the traditional Civil Rights Movement “integrationist,” and called for self-determination within the Black community. While the term self-determination embodied a number of directives, it was a notable departure from the values of nonviolence. Self-determination called for self-defense, more closely resembling an “an eye for an eye” policy. Other groups and individuals adopted similar approaches, such as Malcolm X, SNCC (somewhat ironically, given the group’s name and founding principles), and CORE. The SCLC and NAACP remained true to their nonviolent roots, and this created a rift between the once unified-in-mission civil rights advocacy groups.
Today, with the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the death of Eric Garner in New York, racist and targeted police brutality in the United States has made headlines all around the world. This police brutality we see today is essentially a reflection of the systematized violence that took place against African Americans in the 1940s to 1960s. The question we need to ask ourselves is what role nonviolence will take in today’s fight to end racial bias in the police force. Malcolm X preached that “self-preservation is the first law of nature” and that “tactics based solely on morality can only succeed when you are dealing with basically moral people or a moral system.” The issue at the center of the fight today is that the United States legal system and the people in it are immoral. The fight is no longer one of religious values, but rather of moral actions. Is nonviolence the best way to fight police brutality? Is there a choice against such superior firepower?
Nonviolence has always existed alongside its darker twin. No matter what names the philosophies bear, they almost never operate alone. The history of the Civil Rights Movement can give some clues about how to deal with today’s racial struggles, but the past can yield no perfect solution for the future. Only time will tell if the American people can find the right balance.
Written on behalf of Dramas of the Civil Rights Era.
(03/05/15 3:32am)
How many times in a single day do you hear or say the following phrases? “I need to go do work.” “I have so much work to do.” It seems that this is the Middlebury College anthem. But it should not be. It is like a broken record or a cacophony on repeat. I myself am guilty of contributing to this chorus, but I am trying to switch over to phrases like: “I am going to do some reading tonight,” or “I am planning on writing a paper.”
This may seem trivial. Why does word choice matter? It matters because the words we use for the things we do affect the things themselves, as well as our relationship to them. We spend much of our time at Middlebury studying. When we call this activity work, we generate deep dissatisfaction and existential confusion within ourselves.
The highest form of leisure was once thought to consist in contemplation of universal things. This activity was engaged in for its own sake. Living a life of leisure – of schole – was supposed to be the best life, the happiest life. If contemplation is the highest form of leisure, the idea of schoolwork creates a vicious opposition. What is our leisure supposed to consist of if school is work?
Leisure as it was originally conceived lies at the heart of liberal education. We came to Middlebury to study, to contemplate, to wonder, to imagine, to hypothesize.
Think about the nature of the things we study. They are liberal. This means that they are engaged in for their own sake. They are beautiful and they speak to our souls. Haven’t you ever read a sentence in a novel and felt awe at the author’s eloquence? Haven’t you ever looked under a microscope and been blown away at the sheer intricacy of the cell?
When we treat these things as work, we dislocate them. We force them into the everyday. Yet, the objects of our study are fundamentally different from the everyday. The activities we engage in during leisure, in our studies, are meant to transcend the workplace – it is against their nature to be thought of as a part of it. The act of referring to our study as work both corrupts the nature of the things we study and generates a looming anxiety as to what we may engage in for its own sake.
Going to a party is a brief respite from (what we call) work – a breath of bodily enjoyment in a cycle of mental labor. Hanging out with friends is enjoyable, but is often limited by time constraints due to impending deadlines.
We may listen to music for its own sake, or attend religious services, or look at the stars. But these things are all close in spirit to the study of the liberal arts. If we can find beauty and leisure in them, surely we may re-examine the time we spend studying and consider at least some of it as time spent in leisure.
This idea of school as work is especially important to consider in the midst of impending education reform. Universities around the world are becoming increasingly focused on specialization and vocational training. Whether we as Middlebury students like it or not, we currently attend a liberal arts college. It is our responsibility to maintain the freedom of the things we study, or in other words, to ensure that we study them for their own sake.
We have a responsibility to the thinkers, teachers and students of the past, who built up and preserved the intellectual tradition that we are now a part of. We also have responsibilities to those students in the future, who will be able to grasp for wisdom, contemplate beautiful things and realize their potential because of our devotion to the essence of our college.
Finally, we are responsible to ourselves and our souls. You came to Middlebury for a reason. There was something inside of you that gravitated toward the idea of the College as an interval in one’s life, apart from the outside world. You have a desire to search for wisdom, to find the answers, to define your truth or seek out a Truth, if there is one. This is precisely what you do when you study. Take pleasure in this and know that you are engaging in this journey for its own sake. Know that any activity of this nature cannot and should not be thought of as work.
Middlebury is meant to be a place of leisure. If we want to preserve the essence of this institution and understand it as it must be understood, we must first change the way we speak and think about our primary activity.
Jenna Lifhits ’15 is from Unionville, Conn.
(03/05/15 3:31am)
Driving down Route 30, you will pass one of the most beautiful facilities on our campus. Built for the benefit of all students, this facility is open all year long, contains some of the most valuable items the College owns and exists as a resource for students looking to enrich their Middlebury experience beyond the classroom.
No, I’m not talking about the brand-spanking-new Virtue Field House, though indeed, that is one gorgeous building. I’m talking about the Middlebury College Museum of Art, a small space densely packed with an incredible collection of paintings, sculptures and artifacts tucked at the back of the Mahaney Center for the Arts. Despite the richness of its collection and exhibitions, it is also one of the most underutilized and underappreciated spaces on campus.
If you haven’t taken an art history class here, chances are, the art museum seems like a world away from our daily dorm, dining hall and classroom routine.
Housed in the galleries is an incredible array of artworks, ranging from a sarcophagus from Antiquity to an early Italian Renaissance altarpiece to a 12th century Vishnu sculpture from India to a Chinese silk scroll. Behind the museum’s walls, there is an even larger number of works in storage, unable to be put on display due to space limitations. Many art history students, however, have the opportunity to work with these pieces
Aside from the museum’s permanent collection, it also hosts approximately half a dozen temporary exhibitions throughout the year. The two exhibitions currently on view – a group of Andy Warhol prints gifted to the museum from the Warhol Foundation and a show of street art – contain some of the biggest names in contemporary art.
The street art exhibition was even tailor-made for Middlebury, as famous British graffiti artist Ben Eine spent a week on campus in February painting a wall in the exhibition and for the museum’s exterior.
With such interesting and important works of art on view and free admission to not just students but the general public, you would expect a constant stream of visitors to be walking through the museum’s doors.
But that is far from the case. On an average weekday, or even weekend, you can often spend half an hour or more admiring the collection in complete solitude. If you are lucky enough to encounter another visitor, it is more likely that they are not even a Middlebury student.
Much of the athletes vs. NARPs debate that Hannah Bristol and Isaac Baker’s op-ed sparked at the end of J-Term focused on the allocation of resources on campus. Many students complained, rightly or wrongly, that varsity sports receive too much of the pie for their worth to this campus.
While I will not indulge you with yet another rant about that chewed-over topic one way or another, I want to challenge us as a community – students, faculty, staff and administration – to take advantage of the resources we overlook. The art museum, as I just described above, is one place we could start paying more attention to.
After all, we chose to attend a liberal arts institution because we wanted a breadth of academic and extracurricular experiences, not because we wanted to play divisive identity politics and fight with our peers for the shared resources of our community. Instead of making noise about who is more privileged or glorified for the activities they do, let’s focus on enriching our own Middlebury experiences and making the most of the resources we are all privileged to share.
Regardless of which side of the athletes vs. NARPs debate you are on, you have to admit that our non-athletic facilities are still pretty amazing here, the art museum among them. Instead of eyeing or envying its flashier next door neighbor, go and make the most out of what the museum has to offer. Take an art history class and write a paper about something in the galleries. Attend the “Off-the-Wall” talks delivered by students working in the museum and visiting lecturers. And buy a coffee from Rehearsals Café on your way out.
I promise you, even if you are a Non-Artistic Regular Person, you will be glad you made a visit down to the museum.
Danny Zhang ’15 is from Toronto, Canada.
(02/11/15 11:29pm)
I am Jake Nidenberg, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y. and a junior here at Middlebury College. I am a declared Mathematics and Economics double major and a member of the Men’s Varsity Basketball team. I am writing in response to “It’s Actually Just a Game,” the Notes from the Desk by Hannah Bristol ’14.5 and Isaac Baker ’14.5 that appeared in the Campus on Jan. 22.
I am here to offer an alternative view and, hopefully, cast some light on just how “privileged” we are as athletes. To compare our experiences as DIII athletes at an undersized college in New England to the NFL, or even to a large DI athletic powerhouse like Florida State, is comparing apples and oranges. I want to paint an accurate picture for the both of you and anyone else interested in what it feels like to be treated as “superiors” and to benefit from the funding you have so much to say about.
Just as you mentioned in your Op-Ed, the divide between ‘NARPs’ and athletes is indeed apparent from day one at orientation. Did having a sports team give me a leg up in finding a friend group early on? Yes. Were there times when I was nervous and unsure of solidifying not only the ‘right’ friends but true friends at all? Also, yes. Building friendships is often simply a product of bonding over similar interests. Just because my interest was basketball and I was able to find others equally as interested and dedicated to the sport so early on makes me fortunate but should not be held against me. Clubs and groups offer the same opportunity to meet people.
You say we rarely prove our worth. I feel as though I have “proven my worth” in the 14 years of serious commitment to playing basketball preceding my time at Middlebury. It takes a certain amount of exposure, talent, hard work, and luck, to get recruited over the vast sea of others so desperate to play in college. Middlebury has only so much money and can allocate it in only so many places if it wishes to have successful sports programs. Those who had an undying passion for, like you said, Fly Fishing or Crew or any other extracurricular should have put more consideration into what they wanted out of their college experience and maybe picked a place better suited to their interests and desires.
Moving on to our “bloated budget”: Yes, our budget covers Pepin Gymnasium, which is completely open to the public aside from the two hours a day we are practicing. Yes, it covers our locker room; which, by the way, we share with both the soccer and baseball teams. Yes, it covers travel (sometimes in buses or vans which are comically too small to fit my 6 foot 7 inch, 240 pound frame). Also, please tell me if $25 to feed myself for road trips spanning Friday through Sunday or if $100 to feed myself for the mandatory two weeks while I am at Middlebury during the holidays with no dining services seems “bloated” to you. The athletic “gear” you might see us wear around campus is created and purchased by yours truly with not even a discount provided for by the school. Lastly, yes, it covers coaching but not for two of the four on our staff who are simply volunteers. Head Coach Jeff Brown is one of the most respected and successful basketball coaches in the nation over the past decade. Having graduated 100 percent of his players in his 17 years of coaching at Middlebury, Coach Brown’s “pull” proves to be consistent with the College’s admissions standards.
Your second point left me nearly speechless. I would love to hear some elaboration on how we are “disproportionately valorized.” As active writers for the school newspaper, I would imagine you understand the implications of word choice and must have considered the weight of those two words before publishing the Op-Ed. So, please, I would love to hear some evidence in support of your claim as the rest of your piece does not seem to back it up.
The only person who can say “you can reap these benefits without dedicating most of your time” is someone who has clearly never experienced something comparable. You are under an impression that games and practices are given priority over class as something beneficial for us. Quite the contrary. We have less time to put toward our studies and as a result we must work harder to achieve our academic goals. We are faced with a massive disadvantage whether we have been given our professors’ blessing or not. Just because these professors understand doesn’t mean they bend the rules on our behalf; assignments are due on time and accommodations are rarely made. Any sort of accommodation I have experienced would have been extended to any non-athlete with a similar work ethic and conflict.
The point at which I picked up my pen and paper and began writing a response to your Op-Ed was when I read, “Some students start businesses, or volunteer or learn other valuable lessons that are honestly more applicable to the job market than the ability to chase a ball.” In your proceeding sentences, you act as though you are acting on our behalf. Anyone who sums up my now 16-year career playing basketball as time spent “chasing a ball” certainly doesn’t respect what we do or have any concern of our well-being as student-athletes. So, thanks for looking out for us. Thanks for begging for reform so that we can be freed from the shackles of playing the sport we love for just two hours a day...but no thanks. If your concern is discrepancies in funding, make your concern funding, but do not make efforts to ‘fix’ a situation you seem to know absolutely nothing about.
As for admissions: my captain freshman year was a thousand point scorer, graduated with the most wins that a Middlebury player has ever had, had the highest GPA on the team and last, but certainly not least, was an un-recruited, ‘walk-on’ to the team. There is a walk-on on our team currently, Liam Naughton, who happened to post a Facebook status which first drew my attention. As for those recruited, they still have to exhibit academic proficiency to get into a school like Middlebury.
The NCAA characterizes DIII athletes as follows: “Participants are integrated on campus and treated like all other members of the student body, keeping them focused on being a student first.” If you feel as though your sport or club should be recognized by a national organization, then you should make an effort to get it sanctioned and accredited, and maybe that will help convince Middlebury to grant you the budgets I am sure you are in need of and deserve. Most of the funding you believe we get through Middlebury is actually provided through alumni donations, which are not a “cop-out” but rather the reality. And further, many of these enormous donations are used towards facilities completely open to the general student body.
Though the world beyond the walls of Middlebury may be different, I find that here is exactly the place where the kid who loves chemistry is celebrated in the same way as the kid who loves hockey. In my opinion, you are misinformed about the “premium” we receive as athletes in both monetary aspects and elsewhere. You took a potentially interesting topic of debate—Middlebury’s allocation of financial resources or maybe a social dichotomy—as an opportunity to smear inaccurately and inconsiderately in black and white what sounds like your bitter distaste for sports. If only you had kept your concerns and comments to (what I hope was) the real focus of your Op-Ed, I would have gladly considered your position and possibly joined in support.
A version of this op-ed first appeared on middleburycampus.com on Jan. 24, 2015.
(02/11/15 11:25pm)
Dear Hannah and Isaac,
I read your piece, “It’s Actually Just a Game,” with more than a touch of bemusement. I am the straw man you address with a strange amount of earnestness, stereotyping and half-truths, your qualification that it is “less a reflection about individuals" or should I say, disqualification, notwithstanding. The argument you advance, as I understand it, goes as follows; in the fairest and best of all worlds all non-academic activities would be given the same treatment. There would be no undue emphasis on any one activity to the exclusion of others. Your reasons follow this premise – better socialization, less fetishization, et cetera, and the result would be the de-emphasis of athletic superiority.
My admission to Middlebury way back in 1970 was clearly gained on my athletic ability. During my high school years I was less than an indifferent student, didn’t give a damn about my grades and rarely studied for exams; but I was a very capable hockey player and at the time an alumnus of the school brought me to visit Middlebury. I loved what I saw.
I knew I gained admission before the letters were mailed to everyone else. The coach called me (I guess he thought I might choose another school) and told me to act surprised when the admissions office would call confirming my acceptance. I’m sure I had the lowest grades of anyone entering our class – by far.
In those years the hockey team played almost half its schedule against Division I schools. When I showed up in September the coach was not too happy. I didn’t look like the same kid who had graduated from the elite, all-boys private school, (where they also wanted a hockey player and overlooked my disdain for good grades.) My hair was down to my shoulders and before he would let me play he told me to get a haircut. I told him to f*** himself. He didn’t let me play.
Well, the team did poorly and my long hair became more of an issue. The team took a vote and I was accepted without a haircut. I remember the first game I played as a freshman on the varsity team against University of Vermont. We were supposed to get killed. I think I made about 56 saves that game and we won 4-2. It was a big deal. There were no uncontrolled breakouts of fetishistic behavior. The social fabric of college life wasn’t ripped apart; but there was a definite feeling of pride that Middlebury, which emphasized intellectual accomplishment, was the little college that could compete well against those who were geared towards competition on a higher level. And no one ever said anything again about longhaired hockey players.
I lived for hockey. When the hockey season was over my freshman year I quit school a few weeks later. I asked to return just before school began the next fall. They said yes. By my senior year I was named co-captain. My relationship with the coach was ok, but never great. When I graduated I actually wanted to be a professional hockey player. I had a tryout with a professional NHL team and played in an exhibition game, but decided it wasn’t for me.
But a strange thing happened in the course of my four years at Middlebury. I ended up with a double major in philosophy and religion. I went to rabbinical school and became a rabbi and then acquired a Ph.D. in Jewish philosophy. I have been a professor at three universities, which each had different characters. I have served a congregation with more than a thousand members and one with barely more than a hundred.
I learned two valuable things at Middlebury that I carry with me everywhere. The first is that knowledge and its pursuit is a wonderful privilege, but without character it is useless. This lesson began when I sat in the admissions office with Fred Neuberger, (the head of admissions) and he asked me questions that had little to do with academic achievement. It continued in my relationship with Professor Victor Nuovo who taught me philosophy and religion and so much more, as did others. Chaplain Charlie Scott encouraged me to think about a career caring for others. My four years of varsity hockey added an appreciation of teamwork and the value of competition that can’t be replicated.
My conclusion from all these influences is that there is an impertinence to character that doesn’t exist in knowledge. I don’t mean it in the cheap sense but in the sense of wonder whereby character can’t be forced into the confines of fairness and equality. Character must always reject – and this is its insolence and inappropriateness – the urge to be forced into a neutral, average way of leveling the world through knowledge or any other means. Character remains impertinent when we are actually amazed by what we see in ourselves and in others, whether they excel throwing footballs or prefer knitting circles or research cell biology.
The second thing I learned at Middlebury is that fairness and socialization are significant pursuits, but without integrity they are trivial. My understanding of integrity might surprise you. It begins with the integration of our mental and physical pursuits when we recognize the need to strive to refine and use to the best of our abilities these elemental aspects of our existence – both our body and our mind. Physical activity and mental acuity have important things in common. They both require dedication and practice that neither one can supply alone to make a whole human being. There is no exact formula for the admixture of intellectual and athletic pursuits, and fortunately there is no character in doing nothing.
In short that is why I am deeply committed to the education of student athletes – their intellectual and athletic superiority – in whichever pursuit. I still consider myself a student athlete at the age of 62. Yes, most athletics are actually games, but strangely they incorporate most of the aspirations and lessons that lead to a good life. We usually refer to that phenomenon as good sportsmanship.
I find other attitudes toward integrity are merely a kind of moralistic exercise in pedantry, which is beside the point, which sadly is the way I would characterize your essay. It leads to judgments about who attends class and under which circumstances. This kind of pettiness inadvertently reduces education to the lowest form of consumerism by depriving it of the freedom and spontaneity that engenders learning in a more profound depth.
Integrity is not merely a moral quality. It must be gained physically as well. Excellence in rock climbing is as valuable as fly-fishing or as stopping hockey pucks. There is no doubt in my mind that they require dedication, practice, skill, intellectual insight and physical attributes. And some colleges tend to value some of these activities more than others; it’s just that more people tend to like the excitement of watching hockey as entertainment rather than fly-fishing. And I don’t see the wisdom in making anyone conform to any type of entertainment and you would certainly realize that any physical activity could be fetishized. That includes the writing of polemical essays.
My experiences beyond Middlebury showed me that colleges, just as the people that inhabit them, have different characters. They emphasize different activities, ways of socializing and the pursuits they think lead to excellence. And when they do it without the burden of conformity and with the impertinence of character mixed with wisdom, they succeed. That was the Middlebury College from which I benefited. I hope that’s yours.
Your Straw Man,
Larry Perlman ’74
Larry Perlman '74 is an alumnus of Middlebury College
(01/24/15 8:14pm)
I am Jake Nidenberg, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y. and a junior here at Middlebury College. I am a declared Mathematics and Economics double major and a member of the Men’s Varsity Basketball team. I am writing in response to “It’s Actually Just a Game,” the Notes from the Desk by Hannah Bristol ’14.5 and Isaac Baker ’14.5 that appeared in the Campus on Jan. 22. In case you may think I fall into some sort of stereotype of yours, I would also like to inform you that I am currently taking Black & White photography for J-term, I am a class shy of a minor in Classics, and enjoy exploring the nature surrounding this wonderful town and state as much as the next Midd kid. There are few aspects of this small liberal arts college in Vermont that I have not taken full advantage of. That is who I am and that is the point of view from which this opinion is created in my first ever submission to a school newspaper.
Just as you mentioned in your Op-Ed, the divide between ‘NARPs’ and athletes is indeed apparent from day one at orientation. However, here is my first clarification: I went through orientation and I was able to fully commit to both my preseason ‘captain’s practice’ for basketball as well as all orientation events and activities. If there were instances where kids were not able to fully commit, it was specific to that individual’s own priorities and capabilities. Did having a sports team give me a leg up in finding a friend group early on? Yes. Were there times when I was nervous and unsure of solidifying not only the ‘right’ friends but friends at all outside the two kids in the class of 2016 that went to high school with me? Also, yes. Building friendships is often simply a product of bonding over similar interests; just because my interest was basketball and I was able to find others equally as interested and dedicated to the sport so early on makes me fortunate but should not be held against me. As you said, clubs of many kinds exist and serve the similar purpose of bringing together people of similar interests. Just because there might be a slight time delay in terms of access to these groups when compared with a varsity team does not make the two unequal.
I am here to cast some light on just how “privileged” we are as athletes. To compare our experiences as DIII athletes at an undersized college in New England to the NFL, or even to a large DI athletic powerhouse like Florida State, is comparing apples and oranges. Your first point about the allocation of financial resources is an area where I am poorly educated and a topic your piece may be able to reasonably draw attention to. But again, I will respond to the things you have said and also paint an accurate picture for both of you and anyone else interested in what it feels like to be treated like “superiors” and to benefit from the funding you have so much to say about.
You say we rarely prove our worth. I feel as though I have “proven my worth” in the 14 years of serious commitment to playing basketball preceding my time at Middlebury. A high school athlete must have had enough exposure and perceived talent to get recruited to come here amongst the vast sea of others so desperate to play in college. In contrast, though I am sure of some exceptions, I know of dozens Rugby and Crew members (I choose these two sports to mirror your examples) who began their career playing the sport here at Middlebury—what have they done to deserve funding? There is a reason some extracurriculars are funded as varsity programs and others are not. Middlebury has only so much money and can allocate it in only so many places if it wishes to have successful programs in nationally competitive sports. Those who had an undying passion for, like you said, Fly Fishing or Crew or any other extracurricular at which they have spent somewhere around 80% of their lives pursuing should have put more consideration into what they wanted out of their college experience and maybe picked a place better suited to their interests and desires. I made a calculated decision to come to Middlebury and the deciding factor was my decision to play basketball at a nationally competitive level. Middlebury was a place to pursue that level of competition, both on and off the court. If you disagree with Midd’s financial allocation, I think you should have spent more time interviewing someone who deals with such matters before publishing an Op-Ed with baseless facts.
Moving on to our “bloated budget:” Yes, our budget covers Pepin Gymnasium, which is completely open to the public aside from the two hours a day we are practicing. Yes, it covers our locker room; which, by the way, we share with both the soccer and baseball teams. We get let in to our locker after our season has already begun once soccer is finished and get kicked out of it early because the baseball season is starting up, right around the time we are competing in the NESCAC playoffs (and hopefully the NCAA tournament). Yes, it covers travel (sometimes in buses or vans which are comically too small to fit my 6 foot 7 inch, 240 pound frame); also, please tell me if $25 to feed myself for all but one or two provided meals for road trips spanning Friday through Sunday or if $100 to feed myself for the mandatory two weeks while I am at Middlebury during the holidays with no dining services seems “bloated” to you. If it weren’t for our parents’ dedication to (and financial subsidization of) us as passionate, young student-athletes we would not eat on road trips. By the way, the athletic “gear” you might see us wear around campus is created and purchased by yours truly with not even a discount provided for by the school. Lastly, yes, it covers coaching but not for two of the four on our staff who are simply volunteers. Head Coach Jeff Brown is one of the most respected and successful basketball coaches in the nation over the past decade. Having graduated 100% of his players in his 17 years of coaching at Middlebury, Coach Brown’s “pull” proves to be consistent with the College’s admissions standards.
Your second point left me nearly speechless. I would love to hear some elaboration on how we are “disproportionately valorized.” As active writers for the school newspaper, I would imagine you understand the implications of word choice and must have considered the weight of those two words before publishing the Op-Ed. So, please, I would love to hear some evidence in support of your claim as the rest of your piece does not seem to back it up.
The other half of your second point is about our tremendous time commitment. The only person who can say “you can reap these benefits without dedicating most of your time” is someone who has clearly never experienced something comparable. You are under an impression that games and practices are given priority over class as something beneficial for us. Quite the contrary. We have less time to put toward our studies and as a result we must work harder to achieve our academic goals. Given the time commitment you just can’t seem to wrap your head around, we have less time to study and may actually miss class which puts us at a massive disadvantage whether we have been given our professors’ blessing or not. Just because these professors are understanding doesn’t mean they are bending the rules on our behalf, but rather speaks to their compassion as humans. In other words, with or without approval, assignments are due on time and accommodations are rarely made. In my experience, the only accommodations that have been made for me as an athlete are because I am a hard-working, committed student dealing with a professor nice enough to hear me out. I believe such accommodations would have been extended to any non-athlete with a similar work ethic and conflict. There have been plenty of instances where I am dealing with teachers and people like the both of you who have no empathy for my situation, which is a type of adversity I must deal with in my pursuit of DIII athletics.
The point at which I picked up my pen and paper and began writing a response to your Op-Ed was when I read, “Some students start businesses, or volunteer or learn other valuable lessons that are honestly more applicable to the job market than the ability to chase a ball.” In your following sentences, you switch gears and begin to act like you are writing on our behalf, but that is not going to fool me. Anyone who sums up my now 16-year career playing basketball as time spent “chasing a ball” certainly doesn’t respect what we do or have any concern of our well-being as student-athletes. So, thanks for looking out for us. Thanks for begging for reform so that we can be freed from the shackles of playing the sport we love for just two hours a day...but no thanks. If your concern is discrepancies in funding, make your concern funding, but do not make efforts to ‘fix’ a situation you seem to know absolutely nothing about.
As for admissions, though this surely applies to every varsity team, I will speak about the team that I am a part of. My captain freshman year was a thousand point scorer, graduated with the most wins that a Middlebury player has ever had in the school’s history, had the highest GPA on the team and last, but certainly not least, was an un-recruited, walk-on to the team. There is a walk-on on our team currently, Liam Naughton, who happened to post a Facebook status with a link to your Op-Ed which first drew my attention. As for those recruited, they still have to exhibit academic proficiency to get into a school like Middlebury. Many of us are just as adorned—if not more—than many of our non-varsity classmates from an academic standpoint.
Our varsity sports at Middlebury are sanctioned by the NCAA. The NCAA characterizes DIII athletes as follows: “Participants are integrated on campus and treated like all other members of the student body, keeping them focused on being a student first.” If you feel as though your sport or club should be recognized by a national organization, then you should make an effort to get it recognized and accredited, and maybe that will help convince Middlebury to grant you the budgets I am sure you are in need of and deserve. Offer publicly held events that viewers can and will show up to for their own entertainment, get a team of voluntary Film and Media Culture majors to make an eight-part documentary on your program and its history, demonstrate success on a national platform six years in a row, offer community service as a group or team: I would imagine these are types of things that help draw attention to the programs and get them funding. Further, most of the funding you believe we get through Middlebury is actually provided through alumni donations, which are not a “cop-out” but rather the reality. Many of the enormous donations given to this school by alumni who played a sport during their time at Middlebury are used towards facilities completely open to the general student body.
Though the world beyond the walls of Middlebury may be different, I find that here is exactly the place where the kid who loves chemistry is certainly celebrated in the same way as the kid who loves hockey (I will disregard your use of hockey as it is Vermont’s favorite sport and attracts more local attention than all other varsity sports combined). In my opinion, you are misinformed about the “premium” we receive as athletes in both monetary aspects and elsewhere. You took a potentially interesting topic of debate—Middlebury’s allocation of financial resources or maybe a social dichotomy—as an opportunity to smear inaccurately and inconsiderately in black and white what sounds like your bitter distaste for sports. If only you had kept your concerns and comments to (what I hope was) the real focus of your Op-Ed, I would have gladly considered your position and possibly joined in support for all students’ benefit.
Jake Nidenberg '16 is from Brooklyn, N.Y
(01/22/15 1:15am)
To the Editor:
In the two weeks since Middlebury announced its new identity system, I’ve heard from several students and alumni who said they were confused at first about one important point: the status and future of the Middlebury seal. As we have said in every statement about the new system, in the FAQs on the website, and in the video we produced, the seal is not going away. We will continue to use it on diplomas and in formal and ceremonial settings, as we have for more than two centuries.
Bill Burger is the Vice President for Communications and Marketing
(01/22/15 1:14am)
We all know fossil fuels are contributing to Climate Change, but do you know how much power they hold in Washington?
Generally, our democratic system allows for voters to communicate with and affect those who represent them in Washington by writing letters, fundraising and voting. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel companies have rigged the system such that the normal pathways are blocked to the average citizen. Divesting our money from fossil fuel companies is the one route we have left to limiting their power and sway.
The government awards billions of dollars to fossil fuel companies every year in the forms of tax breaks, lower interest rates and price control incentives. These companies receive between $10 and $50 billion every year, much more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Rather than giving this money to companies contributing to climate change, it could be channeled into improving this problem or even alleviating the national debt. The president has, time and time again, brought this matter to the Congress but it has yet to change anything.
According to several polls, the majority of the general public agrees on cutting off fossil fuel subsidies. Nevertheless, our lawmakers continue to provide huge benefits to these companies. Why? Because of the large campaign contributions that fossil fuel companies provide.
Clean energy sources played a huge role in the discussion surrounding the 2008 elections. As a result of concern about dirty energy spending, environmentally friendly actors spent 1.5 times more on ads than fossil fuel companies. By 2012, the situation had completely reversed. This time around, fossil fuel companies spent four times as much as clean energy groups. The combination of drastically increased spending by fossil fuel companies and the stalling of climate change legislation in Congress left many people feeling powerless. The Climate Reality Project decided not to buy any ads in the 2012 election because they felt any money spent would only be a washed-out waste in comparison to the vast swaths of money fossil fuel companies poured in. Currently, coal, oil, and natural gas corporations are playing a huge role in Congressional decisions by supporting the campaigns of policy-makers aligned with their goals, lobbying in Washington, and running ads all over the country.
In 2014, the fossil fuel industry injected over $721 million into electoral races across the country. With so much money to throw around, it is not surprising that they have, more or less, gotten their way in the political realm. Even the engaged citizen cannot dream of swaying the government to the extent that the fossil fuel industry can.
How did this change come to pass, you might ask? Well, in 2010, the Citizens United v. FEC court case changed the rules on campaign finance. The Supreme Court ruled that, under citizens’ First Amendment right to free speech, corporations are now allowed to engage in the political process by spending exorbitant amounts of money and drowning out public opinion with misleading media content. Despite two previous Supreme Court rulings, which upheld citizens’ rights over those of corporations, the 5-4 decision opened the floodgates to the past six years of corporate rights. This ironically entitled shift has allowed for an increasingly corrupt political regime and a Citizenry that, even when United, remains disenfranchised in comparison to the pull that fossil fuel companies now possess.
Ads put out by the Natural Gas Alliance and Piedmont Natural Gas promote a heart-warming vision of American families benefiting from natural gas supplying cleaner energy throughout the country. What they neglect to mention is the harmful effects that fracking has on communities surrounding drill sites, and this obfuscation manipulates public perception.
With fossil fuels controlling the media and the government, and with common forms of political engagement largely unavailable to us, we turn to divestment as our last opportunity to speak. Many other divestment campaigns have come to the forefront in the past but none more powerful than Divest from South Africa of the late 1970s and 1980s. At that time, divestment grew to the point where corporations such as IBM and General Motors felt the impact on their business and withdrew their factories and contracts from South Africa. Eventually, with the added pressure of US legislation, the isolation of the apartheid regime resulted in its falling apart.
Keeping South Africa in our memory backpack, the environmental movement carries on, chugging away at our opposition. In just the past couple of years, 18 colleges, 64 religious institutions and a number of cities and other organizations have all taken the pledge to divest from fossil fuels. Oil, gas and coal are starting to feel the pressure, and every day we gain sway in their rigged system. Divestment signals to politicians the importance of climate change issues to the public, forcing them to act on these matters so vital to our lives. As Ghandi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Emma Ronai-Durning ’18 is from Salem, Ore., Kate Johnson ’18 is from Bedford, Mass. and Amosh Neupane ’18 is from Queens, N.Y.
(01/15/15 7:16pm)
This January is set to be a big month for the Middlebury Divestment from Fossil Fuels Campaign, otherwise known as DivestMidd, as we lay the groundwork for a presentation to the members of the Board of Trustees in the spring, when we will ask them to once again to consider and vote on divestment. In order to achieve success in the spring, the Middlebury community must unite in support of divestment to signal to the Board of Trustees the necessity of our ask.
We as DivestMidd realize, however, that in order to unite in support of divestment we must all understand the reasons for divestment, at least to the extent that one feels he or she can have an informed decision on the subject. Thus, in pursuit of an “educated electorate” on divestment, we are holding three “teach-ins,” or information and discus- sion sessions, each one focusing on a different pillar holding up the argument for divestment, which include financial, political and social justice reasons.
The subject of this article and of the first teach-in, which was held yesterday, is the financial argument for divestment. In many ways, this is a great place to start in launching Divestment 2.0, for the financial argument proves the surprising and well-substantiated reasons why we’re advocating for divestment. To those who think supporters of divestment are just ignorant tree-hugging environmentalists whose sole goal is to save the Earth, be warned: the financial argument for divestment is sound, even independent of environmental concerns. So listen up. We know our stuff, and we think you should too; we just might save the planet in the process.
For starters, one of the great myths surrounding divestment is that the elimination of investments in the top 200 fossil fuel companies from our endowment would necessarily result in lower returns and subsequent budget cuts in areas such as financial aid. In fact, the investment literature repeatedly shows that fossil free portfolios have higher risk-adjusted returns.
So, what does this mean? Essentially, fossil fuel companies generally have more risk due to their presence in often politically and economically volatile countries. Additionally, the increased costs fossil fuel companies would have to incur as a result of new legislation placing a price on carbon would prove substantial in adding costs to production. And, a price on carbon sometime in the near future is not farfetched considering recent advances in discussions related to climate change and international agreements on carbon emissions, not to mention the growing urgency due to climate impacts.
Yet we don’t even need a price on carbon for divestment to make financial sense. As a matter of fact, one of Blackrock’s numerous iShares ETFs (with the ticker DSI) is composed of 400 companies with positive environmental, social, and governance practices (compared to industry competitors), includes only one of the top 200 fossil fuel companies, tracks the S&P 500 Index, and, since inception in 2007 has outperformed the S&P 500 by over 3 percent. This is sub- stantial, as the S&P 500, which includes 14 of the top 200 fossil fuel companies, is considered to be one of the broadest benchmark indexes of large U.S. publicly traded companies. In this way, DSI has steadily demonstrated high returns in spite of, or rather because of, a lack of reliance on the most impactful fossil fuel companies.
Furthermore, we are not advocating divestment because of some antiquated obsession with peak oil. Of course, fossil fuels are a finite resource and thus a theoretically unsustainable resource, but we’re not kidding ourselves. We know that recent technological advances have shed light on enormous reserves of oil. Total reliance on this fact, however, may lead us into dangerous territory. Oil companies are valued by their proven or predicted reserves, which means that if these reserves cannot be burned or taken out of the ground for a variety of reasons, such as carbon pricing or water constraints, the value of these compa- nies would see a significant negative impact. For oil companies, reserves in the ground are future revenue streams, and if reserves cannot be drilled, refined, and sold, revenue will be hurt. Shocks to revenue would lead to changes in profit- ability, which impacts stock prices and returns to shareholders.
Just because oil companies have the knowledge that reserves are available, that doesn’t mean that they’re easily accessible or necessarily worth the cost of extraction. This could be due to a number of factors including the changing resource landscape to shale gas and phosphate or the falling costs of clean technology costs, especially for solar PVs and onshore wind. In this way, we may be grossly over-evaluating fossil fuel companies, an idea commonly known as stranded carbon asset theory, which essentially predicts the presence of a carbon bubble that when it breaks, could result in severe losses for owners of long positions in fossil fuel companies.
If that’s not reason enough to divest from fossil fuels, let’s consider the fact that fossil fuel companies are still vehemently spending enormous amounts of money on capital expenditures (CAPEX) to develop and discover new reserves that have the potential to become unburnable, a prospect which, according to a 2013 Carbon Tracker Initiative report, could result in up to $6.74 trillion in wasted capital investments by the top 200 fossil fuel companies over the next decade. Why, you ask, are fossil fuel companies not investing more into research and development of clean technologies? One would assume fossil fuel companies are rational actors and would obviously want to increase efforts at developing clean technology sources that, given our concerns above, are most likely to prove profitable in the energy market of the future. These companies, however, are also stuck in their ways and have a hard time imagining a world not dependent on fossil fuels. But we at Middlebury, on the other hand, should certainly have within our capacity the ability to imagine a world powered by clean technologies and should therefore have the foresight to divest from fossil fuels and reinvest in clean technologies.
Finally, if we were to divest, the process of selling off our holdings would not be done in a haphazard manner that could in any way endanger our financial performance. In all likelihood the process would take between two and five years, which proves even more reason to announce divestment from to top 200 fossil fuel companies as soon as possible.
In sum, it makes clear financial sense to divest from fossil fuels. If you agree please sign the petition at go/divestmidd and come to the next divestment teach-in on Wednesday, Jan. 21 at 4:30 p.m. in BiHall 438!
SOPHIE VAUGHAN ’17 is from Oakland, Calif.
NATE CLEVELAND ’16.5 is from Devon, Pa.
(01/15/15 3:53am)
If you happen to walk by the Middlebury Crew Team Sweatshop in the early afternoon, chances are you will see a former U.S. National Team rower plugging away on the ergometer with Middlebury students. Noel Wanner, the Head Coach of our crew team, is one of those coaches who believe that in order for their athletes to thrive, everyone needs to be fully committed to the task at hand, from rower to coxswain to coach. At the end of last semester, we received the sad news that Coach Wanner will be leaving us to become the Head Men’s Coach at Tufts University.
Coach Wanner began his rowing career as a novice walk-on at Wesleyan University in the late eighties. Although he came to Wesleyan expecting to play lacrosse, by the time spring season rolled around he was hooked on rowing. He rowed for his remaining years in the varsity men’s eight. After graduation, Coach Wanner stayed as the Novice Men’s Coach in addition to training for the pre-elite National Team selection camp. Beginning in 1992, he went on to row for several years with the U.S. National Team. He won national championships and raced internationally at the World Championships and the World Cup Series.
Middlebury Crew was founded in 1989, when two entrepreneurially spirited students sold off a laptop and a motorcycle to purchase the first wooden pair from Coach Harry Parker of Harvard University. The original team was in fact not the Middlebury Crew Team but rather the Polar Bear Rowing Club (the initials of the two founders were PB), as the college did not want to be held liable for any issues. Like most other club crew teams with limited funding and resources, Middlebury mainly raced fours. Coach Wanner joined the Middlebury Crew Team as the Novice Coach in 2007 and quickly transitioned to the Head Coach position. He has since been responsible for the growth and direction of our team, including the switch from rowing fours competitively to rowing eights. This transition required a big step up in commitment and competition, as we began racing against fully funded and established varsity programs. The first year that the women raced in the open eight event at the Dad Vail Regatta, they were destroyed. Last spring, the women’s eight won the Petite Finals.
To put it simply, Coach Wanner has had a tremendous impact on the Middlebury Crew Team. Under his direction, the team has grown from 20 athletes to over 70, and we are starting to see some of the team’s best results ever. Last spring, in addition to the win in the Petite Finals at the Dad Vail Regatta, the women’s varsity four won 2nd place. Both the first and second varsity boats made the Grand Final at the New England Rowing Championship. This past fall, the varsity women’s eight placed 9th in the Head of the Charles Regatta collegiate eight event. In addition, the women narrowly missed out on 2nd place to Williams College by .05 seconds at the Head of the Fish. These are the best fall results the women have ever seen. Our men’s team consistently places among the top ten eights programs in New England and wins in small boat events throughout the season. Last season, the novice men came in 4th at the New England Rowing Championship, and this fall the men’s varsity four came in 7th at the Head of the Charles.
When people ask us why we row, the answer usually revolves around competition, the thrill of success, a touch of masochism, a willingness to be in shape and the desire to participate in the ultimate team sport. Boats cannot cross the finish line without the dedication and passion of both the athletes and the coach, as crew requires a level of patience and teamwork not found in many other facets of life. Coach Wanner is responsible for a generation of student athletes who have learned to push through the wall and fight for the small successes, not only in rowing but also in life. Known for his inspirational speeches, particularly in moments of self-doubt and fear, Coach Wanner has had a knack for calming even the craziest of rowers.
Coach Wanner, thank you so much for all of the time, dedication, passion and love you have put into our crew team. If it weren’t for you, many of us would have given up a long time ago. While all of us are saddened by the news of your departure, this period represents an exciting transition for both you and us. We will sorely miss your life metaphors, your dog Daggoo and your pride in us as we cut the cake and toss the watermelon on every stroke. Your smile and congratulations at the end of races motivate us to work harder every day. We look forward to leaving it all on the line against your new team and wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors!
On behalf of THE MIDDLEBURY CREW TEAM
(01/15/15 3:36am)
Here I stand with a lit candle at this vigil along with 30 other Middlebury students, staff and faculty to remember and pray for the 132 innocent children and the eight teachers who lost their lives and 122 who received bullet injuries in a school attack by the Taliban in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan. Twelve thousand miles away, here at Middlebury College, we all come together to mourn and try to comprehend the carnage in Peshawar. We never met the dead children or their families; but we feel connected. We feel sorrow for those who lost their innocent lives, anger for the heartless savages for setting the worst example of brutality, confusion for what humanity has come to and worry for the coming generations who are witnessing the worst forms of terror in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, United States, France, Somalia and the list goes on.
The day of Dec. 16, 2014 was unlike any other normal school day for the children of the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan. Dressed in their green and white uniforms, with their books and friends, these children were going about their daily routine of attending classes. But these children were unaware of their fatal fate and that this may be the last day, or the last moments that they will share with their friends, teachers and parents.
In the morning at 10 a.m., seven terrorists disguised in the Pakistani paramilitary uniform entered the school building, headed to the big auditorium where lots of children were gathered to attend a school function and opened fire at them indiscriminately. The children tried to run out of the auditorium, but there were more than enough bullets fired to kill the majority of them. As if spilling the blood of these children was not enough, the terrorists then went to classrooms, dragged scared children from under the tables and did not hesitate before putting a bullet through their tiny bodies. Most children were shot in the head. The teachers, who were trying to evacuate the children out of the classrooms, were tied to chairs and burnt alive in front of their students. How can one eulogize for these teachers and sympathize with the parents who lost the children — the noor (light) of their eyes? Thinking of words, I have none.
The death of one person can impact a whole family and their memories remain forever in the minds of those who love them. Zeest Hassan ’17 shared, “My cousin’s 18 year old son, who was the only child, was shot thrice before he died. The mother was told to look through 50 dead bodies of children lying on the floor with cloth hiding their faces. She removed the cloth one by one from 49 children’s faces and the 50th one was her son. Life is not the same for the mother anymore and receiving justice won’t bring her son back.”
The Taliban said that they want Pakistan to feel pain as they felt pain due to the Pakistan Army’s operations against the terrorists in the tribal areas of the country that killed the families and children of Taliban fighters. Yes, Pakistan did feel the pain — it is a sorrow too large to bear. But the pain made Pakistan stronger; it made humanity more united against the barbarians.
Mariam Khan ’16 whose parents are from Peshawar shared her thoughts about the event.
“My memories of Peshawar are beautiful; it is a region that is simple and seemingly from a different era. The unfortunate reality is that it is also an area that is plagued by violence and conflict because of drones, drugs and warfare.” Khan further said, “I was completely shocked and heartbroken when I heard of the events that happened on December 16th. I feel so blessed to have such an intimate perception of the events and to have the support from members of the campus community and the Scott Center for Spiritual and religious life upon my arrival to campus.”
This flickering light of this candle at this vigil is not just the remembrance of the bloodshed, but it is a symbol of unity and support that the College shares with Pakistan, with all the parents in the world who lost their children and their loved ones due to terrorism. Children are children — whether they are civilians, children of the military, or the children of Taliban fighters — they deserve love and care, not bullets and life long trauma of witnessing inhumane violence. Rahman Baba, a famous poet from Peshawar said, “We are all one body. Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.”
Artwork by RUBI SAAVEDRA
NAINA QAYYUM '15 is from Chitral, Pakistan
(01/15/15 3:16am)
Je suis Charlie. These words echoed across France in cities across the country, and around the world, on Sunday Jan. 11, as people proudly protested Wednesday’s shocking terrorist attack on the headquarters of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
“Still no terrorist attacks in France? Wait — we’ve got until the end of January to present our best wishes,” says a gun-toting Islamic terrorist in a cartoon in Charlie Hebdo’s latest weekly issue. Tragically, this cartoon would predict the death of its artist, Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo, and nine of his staff when gunmen stormed the magazine’s weekly meeting shooting everyone inside. Among those killed included four veteran cartoonists regarded as “pillars of political satire in France,” according to The Guardian. Several people in the office were severely injured.
But the carnage wouldn’t stop there. Two police officers were killed as the gunmen exited the magazine offices, one shot at point-blank range. The next day, another police officer was killed in a Paris suburb and four hostages were killed in a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris on Friday. These deaths are also considered part of the attack.
The day of the initial attack, President François Hollande of France declared these shootings a certain act of terrorism, confirming the language of the Hebdo cartoon. And since that day, the French have shown the power of their own language: affirmations of “Je suis Charlie” pervading social media, storefronts and news outlets alike.
And on Sunday, “Je suis Charlie” was chanted the loudest when as many as 1.6 million people protested in cities across France, the largest demonstration in French modern history according to the Interior Ministry. Among the participants were President François Hollande of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain. These leaders joined hands in the march in Paris, demonstrating that solidarity against such acts of terrorism traverses international borders.
And in Bordeaux, the city where I have studied for the past six months, more than 100,000 people attended the protest, flooding the enormous plaza, Quinconces, and blocking up the surrounding city streets. There bearing signs and singing the Marseillaise were people from all walks of life and all ages: my host father even brought his five year old daughter to the event. My French friends all texted me to ask, “Are you going? Are you there?”
It was these signs, this mass exhibition of solidarity, that demonstrated to me that a momentous event was occurring. “Je suis Charlie” is more than a social media fad, more even than an outcry against terrorism. It is a defense of freedom of speech and a defense that, to me, seems to be producing incredible national unity in France across cultural borders.
Some American news outlets have critiqued that not everyone knows the type of satire — often provocative articles and cartoons targeting Islam — that Charlie Hebdo produced and if they did, there would be fewer declaring “Je suis Charlie.” I cannot speak to whether every French protester is well informed about Hebdo brand satire. But nevertheless, I believe their declaration deserves respect. No satire or political expression merits the response of terrorist attack. “Je suis Charlie” boldly argues that freedom of speech cannot and will not be silenced by such acts.
Watching the news in silence with my host family on Sunday evening, as images from the day’s protests blanketed every channel, I was further moved by this outpouring. I said nothing, but I looked at my host family with a new respect. They were a part of this people that was showing not fear but amazing strength in the face of terrorism. They had seized this moment of tragedy to defend one of their national values, the freedom of expression. As an editor of the Campus and a hopeful future journalist, this resonated with me.
One day later, I revisited Quinconces, the site of Bordeaux’s protest. On the central monument, a visual celebration of the Republic of France, remained several remnants of the previous day’s solidarity. One sign, a small black and white paper saying “Je suis Charlie,” held my eye. It was duct-taped high on the monument to a statue of a chicken spreading his wings. A call for freedom of speech taped to a symbol of the strength of France: I wished the sign would stay there for a long time to come.
Artwork by SARAH LAKE
EMILIE MUNSON '16 is from Cohasset, Mass.
(01/15/15 3:10am)
I first met Dean of the College Shirley Collado at an event about hardships low-income students face at Middlebury. I was moderating the event, and Dean Collado was getting grilled by students asking for more financial transparency. Dean Collado repeatedly reminded students that because Middlebury is a 501(c)(3), a great deal of information about the institution’s finances (executive compensation, for instance) can be found online.
As Dean of the College, Shirley Collado often finds herself defending Middlebury against the charges of uninformed, self-righteous students. Yet she never ignores them because, whether students knew it or not, she shares their concerns. A lesser Dean would not have even attended that Money at Middlebury event. Thus has she performed the difficult balancing act of both supporting students and unhesitatingly challenging us.
I have had the privilege of getting to know Dean Collado very well over these past few years. She was an early supporter of Middlebury Foods, and our team has had dinner with her several times. With each meal, we’d open up a bit more about our personal lives, and she would too. Through these and many other conversations, I have come to see that Shirley represents and fights for something that Middlebury sorely needs and often lacks.
Shirley is a Hispanic woman with a noticeable Brooklyn accent. Parents visiting her office occasionally assume she is the Dean’s secretary. In most administrative and Board meetings, she is the only woman of color in the room. For enduring this alone she deserves great credit. Changing the racial makeup of the College has always been Shirley’s priority, and she has spearheaded a number of diversity initiatives that many people have already called brave and impressive. But the contribution I wish to highlight is one that is less visible. In my interactions with Shirley, I have known her to be a fierce advocate for and practitioner of candid conversation. Such commitment to meaningful communication is, alas, too rare at Middlebury (and, to be sure, in the world outside). Too often, we look to administrators to take action for us and thus miss an opportunity for real intellectual growth. Social life is unsatisfactory? Tell Ron and Shirley to do something. Students or speakers are racist or homophobic? Demand that they be formally reprimanded or prohibited from speaking. When I went to Shirley with a concern about an anti-Semitic speaker, she heard me out, expressed sympathy, but refused to take action herself. Contact those bringing the speaker to campus, she told me.
When I argue that offensive statements should go unpunished at Middlebury, I’m often met with the retort, “That’s easy to say if you’re white and straight and male.” Fair enough. Shirley, I know, would agree; she has basically told me the same thing. But she has also taught me that administrative fixes are rarely the best responses to student complaints. We do much better when we call each other out, maybe in the pages of this very paper. Speaking up takes bravery, but it does much more good than hiding behind the Dean. Shirley never lets anyone hide behind her. As a community, we should hope that her successor will take a similar approach.
Middlebury was never the obvious home for Shirley Collado. It was brave for the College to hire her, and it was brave for her to take the job. Whether you agree with everything Shirley believes or not (as Shirley can tell you, I disagree with her plenty), we can all follow her example. MiddKids could afford to take some more risks.
HARRY ZIEVE-COHEN '15 is from Brooklyn, N.Y.
(01/15/15 3:08am)
As the student organizers of It Happens Here (IHH), we wanted to take time to further the conversation around triggering and advertising. It Happens Here is a student-run sexual violence awareness group. We invite Middlebury students to anonymously share stories that detail personal experiences with sexual violence. These stories are read during annual events because we believe that no voice is better able to foster prevention and education than that of a survivor.
There are many, many ways for survivors to process their trauma, and no one path is more “right” or “wrong.” Yet for some survivors on this campus, IHH continues to be a powerful resource, helping them regain their sense of autonomy and agency in the wake of tragedy.
It has always been our intention to create safe spaces for survivors. Many people involved in IHH have experienced PTSD and triggering in the wake of their own assaults, and these criticisms weigh heavily in our minds. Over the past few months, IHH has hosted conversations with the campus community in order to address these concerns. We look forward to continuing those conversations. We invite you to join us at Chellis House Monday, Jan. 19 at 9 p.m. for another such conversation. We welcome all input.
It Happens Here wants to sustain dialogue about how best to make the problems associated with sexual violence as present for the broader Middlebury community as it is for people who have lived these experiences.
One thing is clear: there must be spaces for survivors to share their stories if/when they’re ready. There are reminders of sexual violence all around us — look no further than to MiddSAFE’s bumper stickers and the posters on every bathroom door. We worry that at issue is not our form of advertising, but our organization’s activist bent.
To be certain, activism may very well be a form of self-care and healing for some survivors. At IHH, we continue to (re)assess how to incite meaningful change on this campus. If we are to continue to hold these events, we will continue to need to advertise. In our minds, relegating survivors’ experiences to the margins of this campus has never been and will never be an option. IHH has never been about performance; we’re in the business of providing survivors with a platform. We continue to believe in the power of stories. We raise consciousness that It Happens Here in the hope that one day, It won’t.
MICHELLE PENG '15
MADDIE ORCUTT '16
KATIE PRESTON '17
JINGYI WU '17
(12/03/14 11:20pm)
Divest-Middlebury invites you all to read our new mission statement:
Divest Middlebury believes Middlebury College has the potential to be a leader in social responsibility and sustainability. Middlebury College’s mission statement identifies environmental stewardship and global engagement as critical priorities of the institution; we must align our investments with these values. In the context of global environmental degradation and exploitation of vulnerable communities by the fossil fuel industry, it is not enough to focus solely on sustainability on our campus in Vermont.
The divestment movement has the potential to confront the power of the fossil fuel industry and bring about the kind of action necessary to end our reliance on fossil fuels. Fossil fuel divestment is financially achievable; academic institutions, cities, religious communities and pension funds have already made the commitment to divest.
Companies that engage in fossil fuel extraction have inherent risks, both financially and operationally, that threaten their performance now and in the long term. With opportunities to invest in high-performing, innovative, socially responsible and environmentally conscious companies, the choice is clear. We must harness our position as a privileged private academic institution to confront the gravest planetary emergency of our time. We ask that Middlebury College divest from the top 200 publicly-traded fossil fuel companies.
Daniel Adamek ’18
Zane Anthony ’16.5
Jeannie Bartlett ’15
Zach Berzolla ’18
Nathaniel Blackford ’16
Nate Cleveland ’16.5
Taylor Cook ’18
Tevan Goldberg ’18
Maeve Grady ’16.5
Sara Hodgkins ’17.5
Sophie Kapica ’17
Daniel Lo ’18
Hazel Millard ’18
Greta Neubauer ’14.5
Jennifer Ortega ’18
Trevor Quick ’15
Vignesh Ramachandran ’18
Emma Ronai-Durning ’18
Fernando Sandoval ’15
Teddy Smyth ’15
Sophie Vaughan ’17
Thomas Wentworth ’18
Virginia Wiltshire-Gordon ’16
Laura Xiao ’17
To learn more please visit go/divestmidd and sign the petition calling on Middlebury to divest from fossil fuels. In addition, we hope that you will stay engaged and participate in educational events and actions coming up in January and spring term!
Written on behalf of Divest Middlebury
(12/03/14 11:18pm)
After I saw Mockingjay Part 1, I was a bit of an emotional wreck. Not because I love Peeta and couldn’t stand to see him hurt and turned evil or because Jennifer Lawrence’s acting was so moving, but because a lot of the movie resonated with so much of what is going on in the world today.
The Hunger Games series is more than just a blockbuster movie to consume and forget. Every scene is a powerful statement on the state of our world today. The poverty and dangerous working conditions shown in all the films are facts of life for billions around the world. Katniss loses her father in a mining accident and their family loses their primary source of income, forcing Katniss to illegally hunt for food. Her mother is depressed, but there are no services for her. All Katniss and her sister can do is try to survive.
In this latest film, life in a collapsed or collapsing state is on display. When Katniss visits the remnants of her home district, she starts climbing a hill and we all know what she will see on the other side. But the field of charred human remains, skeletons twisted and fused together by the heat of the bombs, still shocks us. My first thought was how hauntingly similar that image was to pictures from the Holocaust or from the Rwandan genocide. Mass killing and ethnic cleansing have occurred and are ongoing in many places around the world.
Later, Katniss visits a hospital where those injured in bombing by the capitol are taking cover. The care center is chaotic and the camera shows with alarming detail and clarity the wounds these victims have suffered. There are no modern medical supplies and Katniss walks by rows of corpses to get to the hospital entrance — they don’t have the staff or supplies to even move the bodies, much less care for all of the patients. Billions of people around the world have inadequate access to healthcare and even those who can reach hospitals often meet long wait lines and die of preventable, curable diseases like malaria and tuberculosis before they can receive treatment.
In one scene, the citizens of District 13 huddle in an underground bunker, jumping at the sound of every bomb the Capitol drops. How similar is this to stories of Pakistani children cowering in fear of US drone strikes?
The movie even promotes environmental awareness in the scene where Katniss chooses not to shoot a moose because it doesn’t flee from her advance. “They’ve never been hunted before,” Gale says, suggesting that there is something noble and magical about preserving nature.
Mockingjay is not fiction. It shows the reality that people around the world face every day — lives of fear, coercion and abuse by failing states. So while we’re enjoying the incredible cinematography or Jennifer Lawrence’s amazingness (she really is awesome), we also need to realize how the movie reflects the conditions we accept in our world and to be inspired and terrified by the sacrifice the rebels accept in their fight for a free state. That fight is real, and there are real ways we can join the fight to improve lives around the world.
Artwork by RICO
HANNAH BLACKBURN '17 is from Carrboro, N.C.
(11/20/14 4:07am)
Founder of Project Resilience Emma Erwin ’15 shares her story and answer to “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?”
Two and a half years ago, I was several thousand feet in the air, flying home from Vermont after my freshman year of college, crying. I reached into my backpack to grab a tissue and pulled out a pen and a notebook. Instead of wiping my tears away for the thousandth time on that late night flight back home to Texas, I uncapped my pen, and wrote a letter.
I wrote down the things that no one else knew: I was not the happy girl that everyone seemed to think I was; I had a habit of taking a sharp blade to my skin, intentionally; I rarely wanted to be where I was, I often didn’t want to be anywhere at all; I had never planned on living past the age of twenty.
Five or six pages later, I closed my Moleskin, capped my pen, and looked out the window at the Houston skyline as we touched down on deceptively solid ground. A few hours later, well after midnight, I sat down on my bed after a long day of travel and an incredibly tiring year. I was exhausted, could have easily fallen asleep. Instead, I got up and shuffled through my backpack, grabbed my notebook, tore out the pages I had written on the plane. I walked downstairs, quietly stepped into my parent’s room, found them both sound asleep, and left the letter on the nightstand next to their bed. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
A few hours later, I woke up as my mom came into my room, crying, and in an instant, everything had changed. Instead of hopping on another plane the next day to leave for my summer job, I met with a therapist that day and for many, many days after.
A psychiatrist and an additional psychologist were soon added to the repertoire, and my summer days quickly became full of crying, talking, sobbing, and sometimes just sitting in silence, folding pieces of paper nervously between my hands, not sure what to say. But it helped. I was honest with others, and myself, and gradually I learned that although I had depression, it didn’t have to define me. Just because my uncle shot himself in the head when I was younger, it didn’t mean I was going to.
After several months of a whole lot of talking, running, yoga, and soaking up some Texas sun, I started smiling—and for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t faking it. I picked up the phone and called the dean of my college, told him I wouldn’t be back at school for fall semester: there were some things I needed to do first. I booked a flight to South America and in September I was in Chile, climbing mountains with a crew of strangers on a semester course for a leadership school in Patagonia, and I was truly happy—no pretending involved.
One night in November, I left a camp we had made while sea kayaking on the coast of southern Chile and walked alone for several hours down the beach. I stopped, looked up at the sky, dug my fingers and toes into the ground, and cried for the first time since I left home.
I thought about how good it felt to let tears fall down my face, without falling apart. It was okay to think of all the horrible things that happened in the world, to let it affect me, but that it didn’t need to inhibit me from being alive. There were some pretty good things in the world, too, like the grains of sand falling through my fingers, and the water splashing on my toes.
Back in Houston in December, I picked up the phone again, called Middlebury again, and told them I wouldn’t be back in the spring either—there was something else I still needed to do: I needed to go to Alaska.
Alaska. That was where I told my high school boyfriend I wanted to go, whenever he asked. For a long time, my favorite book was about a girl named Alaska, who dies. That’s the Alaska I had always been referring to—but he never quite picked up on that.
So instead, I went to the geographic Alaska, and stayed there for quite a while. I lived with strangers, I worked on farms, I biked a lot, read a lot, and learned a lot. And then I climbed the tallest mountain on the continent. And it felt so good to be alive.
In August of 2013, I came back to school: I was a happier person this time around; I had a better relationship with my family, my friends, and was excited for all the things to come. But what came was not so great: a couple months into school, my best friend raped me.
But I didn’t fall apart.
A few months later, I got a phone call on a Thursday morning: the person I cared about most in the whole wide world was in the hospital, because she wanted to kill herself.
But I didn’t fall apart.
A couple months later I stood on the border of Mexico and California, and then I walked all the way to Canada, at twenty-one years old.
I walked a lot of miles, for 102 days, in the heat, in the rain, under the beating sun and shining moon, largely alone. My feet bled a lot, and I still have scars on my hip from my pack. But that was not the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
The hardest thing I’ve ever done was to leave that letter on my parent’s nightstand, to ask for help.
This is my story. What’s yours?
EMMA ERWIN '15.5
Share your story at go/resilience or go/light
You can contact Emma Erwin at eerwin@middlebury.edu.